Human Factor Media With Zack Slingsby
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Storytelling is an effective way of getting people to buy into what you are selling. As long as you can harness the human factor in your story, you will always find someone interested in your brand. In this episode, John Livesay teams up with Zack Slingsby, the Founder of Human Factor Media. Zack discusses using literary techniques to gain attention and how to effectively leverage story-telling. Full of great insights, tune in and learn how to use story-telling to create the perfect pitch.
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Listen to the podcast here
Human Factor Media With Zack Slingsby
My guest on the show is Zack Slingsby, who created an agency that does amazing videos using storytelling. He said, “When you create wonder and awe with stories, you pull people in.” Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.
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My guest is Zack Slingsby, who is the Founder of Human Factor Media, focusing on redefining branded storytelling. Zack is a writer, Short Film Creator, and Founder of Human Factor Media, which is an award-winning branded storytelling company that has worked with leading brands and publishers to create videos people want to watch. He graduated from Fordham University, received his MFA from the New School, and published in over a dozen creative and industry publications. He believes the ingredient that makes a literary story great is the same that makes for a great video. Zack, welcome to the show.
John, how are you?
I’m great. It is nice to have someone so creative as you on the show. Let’s go back to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, college, wherever you want. Were you someone who loved to read? Obviously, you have a lot of books in your background here. I’m curious as to your own interest and passion for where storytelling got.
My love of reading came a little bit later like early college. Growing up, I loved shows. The emergence of basically TV shows had literary qualities, starting with the West Wing and Sopranos. Everything from the late ’90s through 2010. It was such a great time for television. That got me obsessed with storytelling. I would write the scripts for my favorite shows. Growing up, I would write my own versions of them alone for many hours while my friends were out doing more normal things at that time.
When I’ve got the MFA program after college, which is called the Master of Fine Arts, for those whose background may not be creative, I had been very obsessed with the traditional path for a creative, which is, do great work and try to find an avenue that already existed to push that work out there. In my case, it was literature. Everyone in the MFA is pretty sure that within a year or so, they will be Hemingway. They are pretty positive that it is common. You need to get discovered and write a perfect paragraph. You are side by side with these people. You build each other up and think, “It is not good. It is going to be me. It won’t be these other 30 guys. It will be me.”
Very quickly, that gets deflated. I had a good amount of early success. I finished a book, got an agent, and published some short stories. My book went out to press to be sold to a publisher. We went to all the big guys, and you have to get unanimous consent from an acquisitions board. With some of the big ones, Random House, Picador, and these guys, we had 9 out of 10 people say yes or it is 8 out of 12. It is short of where you want to be. At that time, it was in my early twenties and crushing. As I’ve got older, I went to Washington and started writing.
I saw the way branded content was going. It was a vehicle for storytelling. I thought that I would be very happy to have a career like that. Some friends and I started this thing where we tried to make creative and funny videos, and over time it evolved. We are this group of creatives who make story-driven videos for brands. I do not know if that was a longer answer than perhaps you intended.
[bctt tweet=”Fear kills creativity. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
Everyone’s story is not usually linear. You took your love of literature and created something that pulls people in. That is what a good story does, whether you are watching it as a video or listening to someone tell you a story. What are some of the mistakes that you see people making when they create branded videos these days? Is it that they are trying to make it like a commercial? Is it they are making it too long or they are trying to be funny, and they are not? What are some of the things that you see entrepreneurs do that aren’t working?
There are different tiers to this. There is a startup, a brand, and obviously, the established brands. We have gotten worked for both kinds and done a lot of work with nonprofits and startups. We have also gotten to work with some bigger brands like LG, Planet Fitness, and New York Post. Let’s say on the startup front. There is this need to focus on the product because you feel this is your one chance. You have this certain amount of money and are going to do a blast. You have to get home the differentiating features of your product or service very quickly.
I am totally sympathetic to that and understand how that could happen. It is not always the wrong strategy either. Maybe that is where you are but at a certain point, that brands have to ask themselves if they see value in being even tangentially entertaining and some scale going into the entertainment business. The age of the traditional ad, we all agree, is behind us. We need to find a way to access a wonder and awe in the people we want to reach.
Teaming up with actual storytellers to do this tends to be a strategy that is rewarded by the market. Laughter is older than language. Music is older than human speech. When you only appeal to the rational side of consumers, you are leaving all these other things on the table. The new trends are bearing this out more and more.
How did you come up with the name of your company, Human Factor Media?
I do not know. There is a novel by Graham Greene called The Human Factor, which is about spies. There was one passage in that where he said that he could empathize too much with both sides. He can empathize with the communist and the capitalist. It drove him crazy because he could see the human factor in both camps. More to the point is we are trying to find something resonating about a story that moves beyond the product. Those are the stories you could eventually find on a streaming platform.
Human Factor: We are this group of creatives who make story-driven videos for brands
We are trying to find something that relates to people as people. There is an old definition of commerce that you want to lower uncertainty about one another so that we can exchange value. I thought that is what great branded content does is lowers the scale. I know this is primarily an audience of entrepreneurs. I’m sure you know more than I do but the great salespeople I have met were not even doing sales anymore. They found something else to do that simulates the effect of sales. They are not saying over and over, “Can I have five minutes of your time?” They found some creative way to lower the skepticism of the prospect. Narrative video is simply a way to scale that strategy.
It is interesting because, in the core startup world around trying to get investors, the phrase is, “How do you mitigate the risk for an investment?” You are saying the same thing needs to happen even at the consumer level and the B2B level when you are selling a product. Are there certain things that you think a story needs to have so that it, in fact, resonates?
It has to be motivated the way the story is motivated, which is to say that it is not motivated to manipulate an end product. It has to be motivated by a genuine desire to tell that story or create that piece of art, for lack of a better word. That won’t be the priority of every brand out there and fair enough but it will have to be something where you say, “We are telling the story of this woman or this man on this journey.” That has to be all we are in this for and the whole point of this video. It can’t be that 2/3 of the way through, and we give you a list of the reasons why this razor is better than the razor that you are currently using.
Are there any rules about how long a video should be? Thirty seconds is too short. Ten minutes is too long. Anything like that?
I do not think so. I think that people say that maybe. When we do a campaign now, we do long videos, sometimes five minutes. We did a documentary that was 30 minutes. Sometimes they are long but we always break down tons of small content from that. You can take 15 to 30-second clips out of everything. We try to cover the scorcher of the content strategy. I do not know. It is a weird time. TikTok is 15 seconds but Joe Rogan’s got 4 hours and he is the most popular media figure out there. It is so bizarre. What do you think about that, John? Have you had any experiences?
A good story pulls you in and keeps your attention if there are open loops, hooks, and something unexpected. It depends on what platform the story is but in terms of businesses that have hired you, as you mentioned, Planet Fitness and LG, can you tell us a story of what the scope of work was or what problem they were trying to solve, and how were you able to use storytelling to solve that problem?
[bctt tweet=”Lower the risk so you can share value.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s say Planet Fitness was integrating a new product into several locations. That was more along the lines of traditional branded storytelling, and they had something they wanted to impart to an audience. It had something to do with the brand itself. It wasn’t a documentary or comedy series as we have done for other companies. In that case, in terms of content length, we did, once again, everything that was the long stuff, 3 to 4 minutes stuff. For the short content for LG, we were brought in similarly to do a product integration video. We’ve got to talk them into letting us do a 90-second to 2-minute vignette to go along with it.
A common pattern is we will start the conversation on the level of traditional branded videos and we will say, “Give us some percentage of the budget over here to do something that is a little more experimental, run that through your channels, and see if there is any value to this.” Oftentimes, the client is surprised and wants to experiment more.
We have case studies on a ride-hailing app that did a comedy music video side by side of a product video. We did this with a couple of nonprofits, a water company that we are doing a documentary for now, and a jewelry brand that did a series of funny videos. In some sense, this is a trend but also, by and large, most companies are still making ads. The market is wide open for these experiments.
Are these videos living on their website and their social media platforms, and that is it or where do they go?
It is everywhere. We are engaged now pretty much ends at the content creation. We do not oversee the distribution generally. Sometimes occasionally, we do, but they are ad assets, social videos, and sometimes website videos. Sometimes, they are sales videos. How weird is that? We are working with one company now in the tree-free paper product space, which is a very niche space. We want to use these to strengthen our prospects or leads because what is better a sales intro than some content that seeks to lower the guard. It is not coming in with five reasons why you should book a meeting with us.
That brings up the point. We briefly discussed the relationship between sales and marketing. That has been a theme that comes up a lot in our conversations lately. You have this strategy for creative content. You live in the clouds, which is fair enough as a lot of us do. How do we connect that to our actual sales strategy? I do not know. Have you experienced that at all?
The Human Factor
Yes. As a storytelling speaker, I often get brought in because they realize that they are not telling stories in the marketing materials or what is coming out of the salespeople’s mouths. Especially in medical tech sales, they love to get stuck into the percentages. This makes this surgery go 30% faster. Speeds and feeds, as I call it, in the tech world. When did you start to get them to tell a story of what is 30% faster means, and who cares about that? Is it strictly an ROI? In one case, I helped them tell a story of how it made a patient’s family not have to wait an extra hour to find out if somebody was going to have cancer or not.
You start going, “It never occurred to us to tell a story and let alone make the patient’s family a character in this story.” Part of what I do is take these facts and figures or even basic case studies and turn them into case stories, and then they start using that as their marketing material. As opposed to listing features, they start having little 2 or 3 sentence case stories about how happy the family was. The doctor, who was the hero of the story, came out an hour earlier than expected and put them out of their waiting misery.
You are doing the human factor the same way we are.
When I start to work with sales teams, sometimes they think, “If I’m going to tell a story, surely I’m the hero of the story.” I go, “No, the goal is to make a potential buyer.” If you are telling a story about a doctor, the doctor is the hero. Another doctor sees himself in the story and wants to go on the journey. People are like, “I thought I was a pretty good storyteller but I have never thought about how to make people see themselves in that story.” When that happens, we are all in.
My ad week about what Super Bowl commercials I think are the best, and it is fascinating to put it through the lens of, “Was it entertaining? Yes. Is it memorable? Yes. Do I remember the product? Whoops, no.” There are a lot of boxes to be checked off besides that was great content but I have no idea who or why that brand should be part of that content.
That is a common thing that we come up against, and it is a fair objection. What do you think is the difference, though, between storytelling on TV and digitally?
For certainly like the Super Bowl that is appointment viewing and what is fascinating about that is the commercials now are released before the Super Bowl. People are literally interested in watching your commercial and seeking it out. Not just the trades are covering it. The Today Show was revealing a new Super Bowl commercial every day before the countdown.
[bctt tweet=”The most coveted real estate now in media is the subscriber base on social channels.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Do you think we have a long time left to do that? Do you think that is dated or that it is going to expire? Do you think we will always do that?
Obviously, the award shows are struggling for viewers but in sports, when people get together, it is a whole experience and eating good foods. It is almost like an American tradition. There is still that window. I saw a brand using storytelling, and they weren’t paying to be on the Super Bowl yet. They were part of the Super Bowl buzz.
I would love your opinion on this. It is called Enfamil, and they work with babies that are premature. They started showing commercials, “This baby was due on February 13th, which is when the Super Bowl was airing but it came two weeks early. We are taking good care of it.” It was very clever marketing on a lot of different levels to get part of that buzz without having to pay the fee to run it on that.
Much of marketing is cleverness like that. I do not think that is our core competency. I wouldn’t have thought of that. I had to leverage what is going on in the country to get attention, for what you are working on is a special skillset. It is not ours. We have an ability to tell stories that will be as impactful as they will be in five years. They can transcend what we do. That is our goal for what we are making and to try to appeal to people the same way your favorite show would appeal to you.
Can you give an example of that jewelry one you said that had some humor in it?
In that case, what we were doing was how can you compete as a jewelry brand. You have Diamonds Are Forever. Kate Spade had a web series. I remember they brought in Tina Fey or Amy Poehler or somebody but products like that are CPG products or luxury products. They only can compete on the story that they are going to tell. The commodity itself is too ubiquitous. We are too used to it as consumers and too commonplace. To me, it is crazy that when you are in a highly competitive market like that, you are not figuring out ways to make the coolest web series.
Human Factor: It is crazy that when you are in a highly competitive market like that, you are not figuring out ways to make the coolest web series. That is the greatest tool you are not using if you are in that space.
That is the greatest tool that you are not using if you are in that space. We tried to do some very small versions of that. You could see how these things can be scaled up or down based on resources and the size of the brand. In that case, it was a smaller one. It is accessible to everyone. To try to use the power of entertainment, you do not have to be Prada or Kate Spade to do that. It is so strange what is happening when you touch on it with the television medium. Movie stars are trying to find television shows to go on or TV series. The TV stars are going to YouTube.
The YouTube stars do not care about anything. Those people who have 5 million to 10 million people do not care. They do not want anything else. They feel they are the kingpins of entertainment. They are right. The most coveted real estate now in media is the subscriber base on these social channels. It has happened very quickly and is bizarre but anybody can try to do that. They won’t all succeed but their barriers to entry are gone. You have to make a commitment to recurring storytelling and genuine entertainment value. We think that, in our humble way, literary style can have someplace in that.
Let’s say you have got this amazing web series you have created for this diamond company. If the salespeople at the retail stores are not aware of that and someone comes in and references it, all that creativity and momentum has gone. If, on the other hand, there are images in the store reminding people of it or maybe they didn’t see it and go to a QR code and download, or the salesperson brings it up, now that is when sales and marketing are working well together. That is what I love to see.
Your whole goal is to get someone to put something on their shortlist of things they are considering and break through the clutter. That is what you are doing. For me, as a speaker, there are some similarities in what you are doing as an agency because every agency I have ever worked with is usually asked to come in and pitch or present. It is between you and 2 or 3 other agencies or other people who do something similar to what you do. We all have to sell ourselves, our company, and what makes us unique.
I certainly have to do that as a speaker. We will tell a story about another talk I gave and the outcomes that happened that people say, “That is what we want.” Do you have any tips for someone? We are all in that. If we do not have stories, my whole line is we are drowning in a sea of sameness. I do not think it is good enough for anybody to go, “Let my work speak for myself.” I have had people hire me from watching my demo videos, my TEDx, which is lovely but we still need the skill to sell ourselves to get picked. People could watch your amazing videos and go, “We want that,” but I’m still guessing you might need to quote, pitch, interview, whatever you want to call it.
We do that every week. We generally get hired through making presentations on spec. We think that we haven’t been an idea. We want to present them and try to get the attention of a brand manager, a CMO or a business owner. I have an incredibly deep respect for salespeople after starting this business that I lacked beforehand. The answer is definitely, yes.
[bctt tweet=”Everything about the creative mindset is in opposition to the act of creation itself.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What is it that you say in those presentations without giving away any of your intellectual property secrets? My belief is that people buy your energy. I think because you are so likable and approachable, they think that this guy has the skills to do it. Probably another agency we are looking at might have the same skills.
At the end of the day, is he going to be easy to work with? Is he going to take our feedback? Is he accessible? Those are some skills and unique selling benefits that we sometimes might overlook. I have literally had given a presentation, an interview by a potential client to hire me, and knew they were looking at 1 or 2 other speakers.
My bureau agent calls me, “Congrats. They picked you. They liked your energy.” Rarely is it that spelled out. I spoke to the client later and said, “That was so nice of you to say shit.” I felt bad. I am better about myself. I felt energized about the possibilities of what you could do at our meeting. I figured, “If you make me feel like this, you will make the hundreds of people that are coming to the ballroom feel the same way.”
All that other stuff gets us to that interview. We have got a referral. They have seen your video. They did not see it at all or whatever it is, then we need to have storytelling. My latest book is The Sale Is in the Tale, which is a business fable. It is a story about storytelling. Your presentations are hiring us. We are going to tell you a story of why we are the best people to create your stories. It is very parallel.
We will have a couple of slides that our accolades, awards, and some brands that we have worked with him. We try to rush through that because it is important to say but it is not something we want to be overly self-conscious about or reference about. We get to a couple of slides on where content is going, how we move from the idea of commercials to the idea of the content, and the skip rate for, let’s say, traditional ads or the amount of money wasted every year on interruption marketing, which we become geniuses at obfuscating as consumers.
We get to the ideas themselves and usually have 2 or 3 ideas. To your point about the energy, I agree, and it is hard to articulate that and even talk about it because it is such a nebulous force. It doesn’t always work in your favor. You almost go through a prism of insincerity before you come out yourself again. You have to go through all these things to go back to who you normally are in your life. When that person comes through again, you are like, “Now I can talk to these people genuinely.” When we first started out, it was very hard for me to feel like I could be myself in those situations. That worked against us. I do not know if you have ever experienced that.
Human Factor: Creatives generally are hostile to routine and discipline. They do not want to be put in a category or a box.
I tell people the gateway to the Imposter syndrome is to start comparing yourself to other people. The minute when you start that, you are down that rabbit hole. If I start to find myself doing that, I go pull up like an airplane. We do not want to go down that path. It is a conscious decision, and it goes back to some core beliefs of who I am is enough. This is what I have to offer, and not needing it. It is like dating. Nobody wants to date anybody desperate and wants to work with somebody who’s desperate.
Sometimes when we pull back a little bit and say, “I may not be the right speaker for you but I probably know somebody who is.” Those kinds of comments as go back to mitigate the risk of working with you because we do not feel like you are being pushy. That goes full circle to why I love storytelling, and I like talking to people like you who make wonderful stories. Stories pull us in. We are not being pushed out a bunch of facts, figures, bells, and whistles to look at this price. “It is 20% off, this weekend only.” You are not creating that content.
That is self-consciousness that gets you into trouble. It is incredibly inherent to the creative mindset. It is a very weird and cruel trick of nature. Everything about the creative mindset is in opposition to the act of creation itself. Creatives generally are open to so many possibilities. It is hard to marry themselves to anyone. They become hyper-aware of cliché. They would rather die than repeat a cliché. They want to try new things but they think most of them won’t work. They generally are hostile to routine and discipline. They do not want to be put in a category or a box.
All these instincts could generally make you a good storyteller. They also can be paralyzing when it comes to something concrete and important like growing a business. It is like you try to convince someone that you have something to offer them. You have to go through that ring of fire to be able to come out of the other side and say, “I can help you here.”
What I heard you say is fear is the killer of creativity, and so you cannot be afraid of whether you get the business or not because then you can’t be creative at the moment. A friend of mine asked me to read the draft of something they are working on. He literally wrote, “That family made lemons out of lemonade.” Please do not say that. There’s got to be a better way to say that. We all need editors. Zack, if people want to find out more about the Human Factor Media, where should they go?
They can go to our website, HumanFactorMedia.co. We have got a portfolio on there as well as a form to contact us. You can also get in touch with me directly at [email protected].
Thanks so much for sharing your insights into what is going on that will continue to grow. I think you are in a good niche there. Congratulations.
Thank you. I appreciate this. It was good to talk to you.
Important Links
- Human Factor Media
- The Sale Is in the Tale
- [email protected]
- The Human Factor
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Restoring The Soul Of Business With Rishad Tobaccowala
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
The business world is changing, with AI and data-driven systems becoming more common. With these changes happening all around us, how do we keep the soul of business alive? John Livesay teams up with Rishad Tobaccowala, the author of Restoring the Soul of Business, to gain insight on how businesses can survive and thrive on these changes. Rishad discusses how to use storytelling to sell your services or products and why your vision can’t be captured using just numbers. Tune in for more on using your tools to capture the soul of your business.
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Listen to the podcast here
Restoring The Soul Of Business With Rishad Tobaccowala
This episode’s guest is Rishad Tobaccowala, the author of Restoring the Soul of Business. He talks about when you combine the spreadsheet with the story, you have success and how your vision cannot be captured in a number. Enjoy the episode.
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This episode’s guest is Rishad Tobaccowala, who is an author, speaker, teacher and advisor with decades of experience specializing in helping people, organizations and teams reinvent themselves to remain relevant in changing times. He specializes in unleashing talent and turbocharging productivity by delivering perspectives, points of view, provocations and plans of action, but no PowerPoints.
His bestselling book, Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data was published globally by HarperCollins and focuses on helping people think, feel and see differently about how to grow their companies, their teams and themselves in these transformative times. The Economist Magazine calls it perhaps the best book on stakeholder capitalism and Strategy Magazine named it among the five best business books and Marketing Book of the Year. His weekly Thought Letter, The Future Does Not Fit into the Container of the Past, is read by over 25,000 leaders every week. I’m one of them. Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. It’s great to be here.
You have such an impressive scope and understanding of data and generosity. I call it the toggling back and forth of soft and hard skills. I find it very rare that one person is an expert in both. That’s one of the reasons I was so excited to have you share these abilities to connect dots in a way that I haven’t heard anybody else do it before. Before we get into all the wisdom that you have and your wonderful book, let’s go back in time a little bit to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, school or wherever you want. How did you get into this concept that someday, you’re going to be a thought leader on the soul of business?
The good news or the bad news is I had no clue when I started this journey and where it would end up. If I had started saying, “I’m going to be a thought leader on the soul of business,” my sense is people would have put me in a crate and shipped me in an inhabited continent saying, “What a mad person.” I grew up in Bombay, India, which is now known as Mumbai, India. I got an undergraduate degree in Advanced Mathematics. I came to the University of Chicago to get an MBA in Finance and Marketing, which is a quad school. I joined Leo Burnett, which was an advertising agency.
I love that agency. I knew them well in Chicago. They would have apples in the lobby.
I joined them in 1982 and worked there under the Leo Burnett name until 1994, and then, for the first time in their history, I convinced them to take the name off the door to launch a new type of company which they own 75% of. I remained a Leo Burnett employee until it was called Giant Step. It was one of the first interactive agencies and then, based on that, I also helped spin-off their media company into a company called StarCom. We merged with a couple of other companies and then in 2002, we got bought by a publicist group.
For the next 15 or 17 years, I did a lot of different things inside various companies. We purchased big companies like Digitalis, Sapient and Razorfish. We merged different companies and ended up having at the end of this journey about 80,000 employees, the United States’ largest media buying and planning company.
Some of the most forward-looking digital assets include Epsilon, big creative brand names and in the last few years, I ran strategy globally or some combination of those two. I then started a second career where I had always wanted to be a writer when I was young, but my parents suggested that I needed to have something to say. They were not exactly sure a writer could make any money, so they said, “Go do something else.”
[bctt tweet=”Your vision can’t be captured in a number.” via=”no”]
I started a second career, which led to my book and I started this writing, speaking, educating and advising career. I’m fortunate that one of the companies I advise is my whole place of work, where I’m still very close to which is the Publicis Groupe. I work with a lot of other companies, a lot of startups, a lot of private equity, a lot of young entrepreneurs and now, a company of one. I’ve gone from a company of 80,000 to a company of one.
It’s exciting and interesting in its own way, but in many ways, what I’ve done is I’ve combined the two things. I’ve combined what I call the spreadsheet and the story. The spreadsheet is the digital, the data and the left brain. The story is, which you understand only too well, which is the sale is in the tale, is that you win people’s hearts and minds with stories and then you use the numbers to justify what they did.
Most people want to lead with the numbers and I think that’s a mistake. People buy emotionally and then back it up with logic.
It’s the only way to share your vision because your vision can never be captured in a number. If you think your vision is captured in the size of an addressable market, that’s not a vision. That’s numeric.
You’ve given us two great soundbite tweets already. Combine the spreadsheet and the story and your vision can’t be captured in a number. Every once in a while, I still have to convince people of the power of opening with a story. I would love your take on this. I was consulting with a group of architects who were pitching against three other firms to win this big renovation. They were only given 45 minutes and eight of them had to speak.
I recommended and worked with them on a 30 to 45-second story of origin like, “I was eleven years old. I played with Legos. That’s what got me into this.” One of the engineers who wasn’t even presenting in the room said, “We’re wasting time. We’re talking about ourselves.” I thought, “In order for us to get picked and to explain our vision, they have to know, trust and like us that we can all do the work or we wouldn’t be in the final four. Now, it’s about giving a little flavor of who we are. It’s not a waste of time at all.” The people who brought me in agreed. I stayed in, but I thought, “Wow.” I was so shocked that I still have to justify that sometimes.
The issue is this. Many of us are very proud of all the work we’ve done to create an answer and we often believe that the way we work is what is the differentiator. I believe it is not the way we work. It is who we are and what we do, but we are confused by thinking it is the way we work and what we have. It is the way we work and what we have.
Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data
Many companies talk about their history, not the individual’s history. They talk about the history of the company. They talk about their tools, methodologies and techniques. I remind people that it’s like trying to explain how your colon works. When people want to see cool stuff, don’t talk to them about how your colon works. Show them the cool stuff.
They always say, “You’ve got a few minutes to make a first impression.” I think it was Jerry Maguire in You Had Me at Hello. The reality of it is, in many cases, a pitch is won or lost in the first ten minutes. The first ten minutes have to set up an intrigue. Intrigue is also not something that mathematics can set up. You have to set up two things. You want to intrigue and you want a sense of inquiry. It’s a sense of like, “What is this?”
“Tell me more.” We have a Q&A session after that. I was doing the very same thing. I was using the concept of an open loop in a story. Plant the seed like, “Be sure to ask us about this in the Q&A for more details because you don’t have enough time to get into it all,” and they said that worked well. In the actual presentation and Q&A.
What you want to do is in the beginning, you want to set up with intrigue where they say, “Who are these people? What are they saying? Why are they saying what this is?” That’s intrigue about you and then inquiry from them. Those are what I call the two first Is. It’s intrigue and inquiry in the first ten minutes. They say, “That’s interesting.”
Then, you very quickly follow with three other Is, which are ideas, insights, and imagination. You provide them with insights about either their market or themselves. You provide them with the imagination of what is possible, and you provide them with specific ideas. That eventually ends you with the last two Is, which is they get inspired and you ask for an invitation.
Those are my seven I processes. You start with the two Is. The whole stuff is like, “These people are intriguing. Therefore, I would like to inquire more.” That’s getting you at hello. Very quickly, you’re starting to show your cool stuff, which is ideas, insights and imagination. You end with inspiring them so that you can get invited back.
Many times, especially when you’re pitching for funding, it’s about the second date or getting back. In this particular situation, they had already made all the final cuts, so this was the last chance. The invitation’s going to be, “We picked you.”
What happens is you simply say, “What exactly do we want to be invited to?” Sometimes it’s, “I want to be invited to the next meeting.” Sometimes it’s, “To win the pitch.” Once you do that, you notice this is all about storytelling, but along the way, you’re bringing in the math and the numbers to support the facts that you are stating. To me, the math is like the spinal cord of what you’re doing and nobody gets attracted to spinal cords unless you’re a dinosaur where a spinal cord is all that’s left of you.
How did you come up with the title of your book? I know as an author myself, that’s a lot of ideas and also what the image is going to be, especially from you coming from a media buying agency and working with so many big clients, Staying Human in the Age of Data is so strong.
What happened is I did not come up with the combination of a title. When I wrote my book, I wrote my book under the working title of The Story and the Spreadsheet, but when I wrote my book proposal and everything else, I was fortunate that I got myself an agent. My agent got HarperCollins as well as Penguin Random House interested. I talked to them. HarperCollins said, “We think this is a great idea. We are going to give you an advance, but we would like to tell you that we do not buy the title at the current time, so we are going to work with you to brainstorm titles.”
[bctt tweet=”Too much math creates too little meaning.” via=”no”]
What we did were brainstorm titles. They ended up with a title, which had Restoring the Soul of Business. I had something about human and data somewhere. They combined it and a few other titles, which included my own, which was The Story and the Spreadsheet. Because they’re a big company, they did research. They put out the titles with different people. What came back strong was this combination of Restoring the Soul of Business and Staying Human in the Age of Data.
There’s an unspoken fear for most people, and some people have spoken about the fear of AI taking over.
At that time, there was all that AI taking over, etc. For me, it was like, “It’s not anti-data. It’s not that the world isn’t becoming data-driven, but how do we include the human into looking at an extracted meaning from the math.”
A lot of people may have a great title, and then sometimes, the chapters are not intriguing. I can see why your book has gotten such rave reviews because, as someone who loves this topic of integrating soft skills and hard skills, Too Much Math, Too Little Meaning is one of the best sound bites I’ve ever heard. I have to give you so much kudos.
Thank you. In fact, there were two other things that we did which were very unusual. When someone reads my book and they start with the opening, they say, “It’s very interesting,” where I say why should you read this book. It’s because you are going to be spending the most amazingly valuable asset you have, which is time. I make the case, but then I say, “I’m going to make this easier for you. The book is not a book of essays because there’s a connecting spine as such, which is the story and the spreadsheet, the math and the meaning, but you can read any chapter in any order you want because they’re all freestanding.”
People love that.
You can go to what you want to read, and then, each chapter stands out with titles. Like Too Much Math, Too Little Meaning, there’s a chapter called Have More Meetings.
I was going to ask you about that because it’s so counterintuitive. The last thing people want is another meeting.
There’s also a chapter called How to Upgrade Your Mental Operating System or another chapter that is everyone’s favorite is The Turn on the Table.
It goes back to what you were saying about don’t talk about your colon. Let’s talk about the schedule more meetings. I’m so intrigued because again, this is such a great takeaway for everyone reading this. When you say something, write something and present something, your brain goes, “Wait a minute. I thought the opposite was true.” For example, as a sales keynote speaker, I often find myself saying, “Whoever tells the best story gets the sale and not who has the best product or the best price.” Most people go, “What are you talking about? That can’t be right.”
Soul Of Business: You win people’s hearts and minds with stories, and then you use the numbers to justify what they just did.
It’s the reverse. This book was written before COVID. My belief is I say the reason we don’t like meetings is that most of the meetings are not meetings. They’re stereothons. What we do is we go to a room and we look at a big screen with a PDF or an Excel spreadsheet while also then looking at a laptop or a tablet on our desk while we are surreptitiously looking at the other one, which is our phone on our knees. We have that as a meeting, which is I’m in a room staring at screens. My basic belief is a meeting is when you look at somebody and you have no technology involved. You have a sheet of paper if you need numbers and you talk to each other and interact. That’s a meeting.
You have four wonderful workshops. There’s more than that, but the four that grabbed me, I’m guessing those are also the subject of a keynote if someone wants to hire you just to talk and not a workshop.
You hear something about words and selling, which I think your audience will find particularly intriguing and why you’re right that the sale is in the tale. I first created four things where I could help people learn. My original four were simply called, The Future Doesn’t Fit in the Containers of the Past, which is how to think about the future, How to Manage Change, so it Sucks Less, How to Upgrade Your Mental Operating System and How to Lead with Soul. Those are things that came from my book. I call that learning and that was the tab on my website.
One fine day, I changed it. Instead of calling it learning, I call it workshops. I then ran counter to all these masterclasses and I said, “This is live, interactive, customized and not taped one way and completely non-customized.” This is much better than any masterclass, especially now when people do not want to watch. They need something live and interactive when they’re sitting at home or spread out wherever they are.
It took off like a rocket by changing that, the workshop and reframing it. The next four became much more about doing versus even thinking. One was simply called and as we’re talking about selling, it’s How to Sell Better. That’s about writing presentations in different ways. I also had one, which is how do you manage talent and how do you motivate talent in this particular area that we live in? Those became very popular.
I want to double click on the selling one and the other one about managing change, so it sucks less. Coming back from the talking workshop I gave, it was the first time these people have been in a room since COVID. Nobody has been in the office. There were people in a conference room, which used to be the norm, but now, everyone’s like, “My behavior of sitting this long in a conference room, brainstorming and practicing something is out of whack.”
Even the simplest things like, “Where’s the whiteboard and the easel? The markers have run out of ink. They’ve dried up over years.” There is also all this dusting stuff off. Regardless of where you are on the whole concept of vaccines, there’s still a lot of anxiety about coming back to the office. I would think that this managing change workshop would be so huge because it’s a big change to come back.
I’ll give you an idea and it’s very odd. I’m starting to travel again, which I was doing in October, November, December 2021. There were less of it and it’s back again, but I’m doing two presentations and they’re more or less on the same topic. I have 1,000 to 2,000 people in an organization on How To Manage Change So It Sucks Less and then across the continent of Africa to 3,000 people on How To Look Ahead and Not Look Behind.
I know you have four questions about how things change. Is there a little snippet you can give us or a little hint of one of the takeaways from this workshop for people who are reading and don’t have the privilege of hearing you talk about it in detail?
Absolutely. Here’s a very simple thing. The big thing coming out of How To Manage Change So It Sucks Less is to recognize that there are six things that everybody has to do in order for their company to succeed in changing, but most of us only do three of them and because we don’t do the other three, we have a problem. The three we do is put together a strategy for change. We then either go buy a company or hire additional talent to fill in things we don’t have. The third is we reorganize around either that company or the talent we purchased or got. That’s what I call the strategy reorganization in M&A/acqui-hire parts.
[bctt tweet=”Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” via=”no”]
At that particular stage, we put out a press release, “Make balloons and have a party.” It doesn’t work because I remind people like Michael Tyson supposed to have said, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face,” I believe that every leader and every board has a plan until people get in the way. I have 4, 5 and 6 are these questions. Number four is why it is good for the people. Don’t say, “Why it’s good for the company?” Number five is how will you change their incentive plan so they will change their behavior. The last one is how will you provide them with training so they can learn how to do the new things you’re claiming they need to do.
We forget. We don’t invest in training, changing incentive plans or communicating why it’s good for them and then we’re surprised when these things don’t happen. That’s fundamentally there. I then go deeper down into including solutions on how people can solve what is called the biggest disease of all, which is IDD. IDD is Inner Dinosaur Disease. Each of us has this inner dinosaur disease inside us and how to approach it. That is what that presentation is about.
You got so much good stuff here, but let me jump to the other one because this is my wheelhouse. I happen to be an amateur photographer and collect it as art. When I saw that you’re helping salespeople solve problems by leveraging photography, I thought, “I have hit the lottery,” because I’ve never seen anybody do that.
I love the concept of lenses, how you’re zooming out or jumping in and all that good stuff. What are we focusing on? The world that you’ve taken us into this concept of filtering things with quality control. I remember when I took Photo Journalism in college many years ago, the professor said, “Photography is painting with light.” “I can’t paint, but if I can paint with light with pictures, I’m in.” Give us a little snapshot of how the photography analogy can help salespeople.
The reason I use the photography analogy is that now, every one of us is a photographer because of our smartphones. Therefore, I’m using terminology that every one of us does. The reality of it is regardless of what equipment you use, I’m an amateur photographer but I’ve done a lot of it. Over time, what happens is there are three key things that matter and everything else doesn’t or matters very little.
The three things that matter is how do you frame and what do you look at. That’s the B to C in framing a picture. The way you frame makes a very big difference. The second, as your professor said, it’s about light, which is how do you illuminate and expose. You framed and you’ve taken the picture with the right light. The third one is about how you edit the solution, which is cropping, filtering and all of those kinds of things. In effect, I remind people that if you’re going to sell, what you’re selling is a solution. People don’t buy products and services. They buy solutions. If you are selling a solution, wouldn’t it be great if you could help someone frame the problem?
Framing is important. You frame the problem and that’s by focusing on what the problem is and making sure that the problem is discreet enough that your product or service can solve it. That becomes framing. The second is how do you illuminate and expose and that is everything from how do you bring in data because data is a form of light.
That becomes the second part of it. The final thing is how do you edit the solution. How do you make sure you don’t say too much in a meeting and say what’s necessary? You customize it. How do you filter it? How do you display it? One of the displays is how you do the seven Is to display what you did.
I remember one of the things when taking photography class was changing the angle whether you’re shooting down on something and standing on a table or you’re crouching down if you’re shooting animals like a dog running and you get down to their level.
In each of these, I mentioned three things that everybody can understand. You have to focus on the right problem. What you mentioned is my second one, which is points of view are incorporated. Points of view mean looking at things from a different point of view like you did from up and below as well as getting different people to look at the problem.
Soul Of Business: We often believe that the way we work is the differentiator. It is not. It is who we are and what we do.
My whole premise is, “Whoever describes the problem the best and shows empathy and can describe that, then people think, ‘You get us. You expressed our problems in a way that’s even clearer than we do internally, so you must have our solution if you understand our problems that well.’”
Most of the people who are reading this being successful as they are will recognize they have done this one particular thing, but they may not know that they did it, so I will tell them what they did. Often, all I do is reveal to people their own brilliance, and as a result, they think I’m smart, because, in effect, they say, “That’s what I did. You must be smart,” which is what they’re saying is, “I’m smarter. You figured it out, but because you told me, I think you’re smart too.”
It goes full circle to your expertise in advertising and marketing. When a marketer can put a headline or a commercial that says what people are thinking and they feel like, “You’re in my head, so this must be the right fit for me.”
Why that happens is even now, when I do some advisory work, a lot of people will call me and say, “Do you think you can help me with this problem?” I remind people, one, I’m limited in time and I’m not going to try to solve problems that I have no clue on how to solve. In some particular cases, they say, “Can you learn how to solve it? We would rather have you learn how to solve it and share how you’re learning how to solve it than get somebody who claims they have the answer.”
I’m not putting it as a pause on the future of the internet, so I know how to describe what’s going on with Web 3.0, metaverse and crypto better than most people because big companies asked me to study it for them and explain it to them how I was studying so they could understand what was going on versus me coming like a huckster and saying, “Buy an NFT. Do this. Do that.” As a result, they said, “Show us what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.” I was paid to learn to teach.
It’s like, “I can give you a fish, or I can teach you how to fish.” They were like, “We’re going to pay you to teach us how to fish.”
They’re also like, “We like the fact that you’re learning how to be a fisherman.” I told them, “I’m not even a fisherman and you’re asking me to teach you how to fish.” They’re like, “Go learn how to be a fisherman because nobody knows, and then teach us what you’re learning, including who else we should go and learn from.”
You’re curating everything for them. They trust you.
They trust me, so it allows me to say, “I don’t know.” It allows me to go to lots of world-class people and bring them in. I’m not competing with anybody, so I’m saying, “I’m trying to work on this project.” In effect, what many of your audience will find is often a client may ask and say, “Can you help me solve this problem?”
I sometimes say, “I’m going to turn your question around like this,” and often, I’ve been hired because I changed the question. I said, “I don’t think you’re asking the right question. I think this is what you’re really asking.” I have a piece that turned the opposite part, which is the problem of asking the wrong questions. I wrote a piece called The Problems of Asking the Wrong Question.
[bctt tweet=”People don’t buy products and services; they buy solutions.” via=”no”]
There’s so much good content. Thank you for sharing this incredible framework of the Is, the concept of photography and framing things from a sales perspective and combining the spreadsheet with the story is the way to get through all the noise that’s out there or, as I say, get out of drowning in a sea of sameness. If someone wants to find out more about you and hire you as a consultant, workshop or keynote speaker, the best place to send them is to your website, which is your name.
It’s RishadTobaccowala.com and there, you will find pretty much everything, including what my workshops are. If you click on where it says Thought Letter, you’ll find a lot of the stuff that I’ve talked about. As any good salesperson does, I give away the crack for free, so hopefully, people will buy the cocaine.
My Sunday Thought Letter, which is what you read and which is now read by 25,000 people, including entrepreneurs and CEOs, is completely free. That’s Rishad.SubStack.com. A lot of that content is on my website under Thought Letter, but instead of you having to go there every Sunday, it can come to you and it’s completely free. Not only is it free of no charge and no upcharge, but it’s also free of advertising, affiliate marketing and data harvesting. It’s a gift because, as I wrote, you build goodwill through generosity.
There are visuals that go with it, so you’re not just reading the text.
Also, each Sunday, I introduce a new artist, new sculptor or new photographer. There’s a new artist, sculptor, and photographer every Sunday. It’s a read that shouldn’t take more than five minutes of your time and the idea is that at the end of that five minutes, you will see, think and feel differently about the topic.
Especially generosity, that’s one of my favorites. The book again is called Restoring the Soul of Business. We certainly need that now more than ever. Thank you so much for writing the book and for putting out all of your knowledge and for inspiring all of us to be a little more human in our interactions with each other in the business world. Thanks again.
Thank you very much and thanks to everybody who read this.
Important Links
- Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data
- RishadTobaccowala.com
- Thought Letter
- Rishad.SubStack.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Life Lessons From The Oldest And Wisest with David Romanelli
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
There’s always a pearl of wisdom to learn from the elders. This is something that most of us tend to discount, but not for David Romanelli. Best-selling author of Life Lessons from the Oldest and Wisest, David talks about combining meditation and storytelling as the key to finding joy in your life. Creator of an ongoing series of events called Drinks With Your Elders, he uncovers what’s inside his book as he shares the healing power of a great story, how to find more time, what cures loneliness, and how to screw, laugh, and celebrate at funerals – all of which he learned from interviewing elderly people. On the side, discover how David combines meditation and storytelling, the conditions we attach to our happiness, and the reality behind social comparison.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Life Lessons From The Oldest And Wisest with David Romanelli
Our guest is David Romanelli, who’s a best-selling author and international speaker. He’s your guide to bringing old wisdom and ancient healing practices to your modern life. David initiates connection and conversation between the old and the young. Our elders in their 80s, 90s and 100s fought in World War II, survived the Holocaust and marched for civil rights. He believes they are our most precious resource of wisdom and history. Most elders lack a voice in popular culture and live out their final years in isolation. He believes we can and have to do better. He’s created an ongoing series of events called Drinks with Your Elders, bringing the old together with the young. This inspired his third book, Life Lessons from the Oldest & Wisest, which shares elders’ advice on parenting, marriage, loyalty, the all-important resilience, and having a sense of humor through all the ups and downs. David, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, John. It’s great to be here.
I’m always curious to know how did someone get into what they’re doing, your own story of origin. You can go back as far as childhood, high school and college. How did you get into this whole mindset of, “There’s some wisdom to be learned here from the elders?”
I was deep in the yoga world. Some friends and I opened the first chain of boutique yoga studios in the ’90s. We were deep in yoga, the wisdom of the yoga tradition and studying with the yoga gurus. My last surviving grandparent was in a senior living facility in Los Angeles. It was a nice senior living facility. I saw how depressed she was and how it felt like everybody in that senior living facility was put out to pasture, not connected or integrated into the surrounding community. It wasn’t right because here you have these 37-year-old yoga gurus spouting wisdom on Instagram and the 89-year-old Holocaust survivor in the old age who’s dying a lonely death. Something seems out of whack. I shifted from yoga into the wisdom of the elders. I’ve been embracing that for several years.
[bctt tweet=”Let the joy in.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Tell us a little bit about what caused you to want to write this book.
I was finding that older people were not even on people’s radar. Nobody considers that they might have the wisdom or the missing piece to their puzzle. They weren’t relevant to business and growing their business. What could they possibly have to learn from an old person? You can find it on the internet. I found that when you engage with them, the wisdom is so profound. It’s deeply healing and incredibly relevant to every part of your life. I was like, “I’ve got to spread this.” I figured a book was one of many ways to get this message out there.
Do you have a story from your book or your research on the book of some wisdom you learned from a senior person that people could apply for their business?
First of all, the greatest story was from my previous book called Happy Is the New Healthy, which is a lady I met. I was working with this charity in New York City that helps old people in need. Their oldest client was 111. They call that a supercentenarian. There are about seven billion people on the planet. There are only about 60 people we know about who are 110 or older. A part of that is genetics. The part of that is the attitude. When you get to be well over a hundred, chances are you’ve lost it. You’ve probably lost a child at that point. You’ve outlived your own children. There’s a lot of pain. It takes certain strength for somebody to turn the corner on 100, even 105 and keep going. A lot of people are cashing their chips and they’re done. To live to be that old, you have to be able to have a certain strength.
[bctt tweet=”Stories allow us to pass on wisdom.” username=”John_Livesay”]
This 111-year-old lady, I asked her like, “What are your tips on health and longevity? How are you managing to get to be this old?” Her three tips were sex, vodka and spicy food. She had this joie de vivre that I have found is common amongst the oldest and wisest. Through the pain and the madness of life, we all have to take a moment to push back from our computer and loosen our grip and let the joy in, let the magic in. Everybody in business is grinding so hard. There are so much stress and such an excess of stimulation and information. The entire days go by where we don’t remember a single thing that happened. Do you want to live like that? Push back, take a breath, loosen your grip. Live in this moment.
Many of us are either rehashing the past or worried about the future. There’s no joy there. It’s anxiety or fear happening for the most part. One of the chapters in your book is The Healing Power of a Great Story. Can you tell us about that?
My guru’s name is Dr. Carl Hammerschlag. He was a medical doctor on the Indian Reservation for many years. He thought he was this highly certified and educated doctor. He would go into the hospitals to work with the Native Americans. Healing for them was much than art. I asked him questions like, “You know how to give me medicines, but do you know how to dance?” At first, it didn’t register. You have to be in touch with the rhythm of life to be a healer. It’s not just about the mind and the medicines. It’s how do you touch the spirit. Dr. H has these sweat lodges, which I’ve gotten a bad rap on the news because people have had dangerous experiences.
When they’re done correctly in Native American tradition, the idea of a sweat lodge is to go into this hot teepee. It’s so hot that you have to stop thinking and breathe. It’s almost like you remove your head from your body and let your spirit breathe. He says that the thing that’s missing from our culture is that we have to be telling better stories. You can’t pass along wisdom and teach our children how to live a good life if we’re not telling them good stories. He said, “We have to be telling better stories.” Whenever I learn from Dr. H something about heartbreak, resilience and what it means to heal my own anxiety, he always wraps it in a story and in a ceremony. He doesn’t just give me the information. That’s missing from our culture.
Life Lessons: Through the pain and the madness of life, we all have to take a moment to push back from our computer, loosen our grip, and let the joy and the magic in.
Another chapter in this great book, Life Lessons from the Oldest & Wisest, is How to Find More Time. Everybody of every age is looking for that, except maybe if you’re a kid and you want to get older faster. Most of us are looking for ways to find more time. What’s the story there?
There was a lady who’s 93 years old. At the end of our conversation, I asked if she could send me a picture. She said she’d put it in the mail. I said, “That’ll take a week. Can you just email it to me?” She didn’t have an email. She had to write down my email address to give it to her granddaughter to send me the email of the picture. It took five minutes for me to spell out my email and for her to write it down. At first, I was so frustrated. Who has five minutes in their day to give your email? Who wouldn’t get frustrated? At a certain point, I started realizing, “This is ridiculous, that I don’t have five minutes in my day for this lady to have this conversation. What better am I going to do those five minutes?” I started laughing. We had this great moment. She said she was an old fart. I realized that she had this spirit of a much younger person. The joke was on me, not on her. It’s ridiculous that we’re so efficient with our time that you give up a minute or two in your day that you didn’t expect. That should be a chance to laugh and loosen your day.
One of the other chapters that stand out for me is A Cure for Loneliness. We might assume that people get lonely as they get older and isolated, but there’s a lot of research that a lot of entrepreneurs feel isolated and can feel lonely at the top. What cures for loneliness did you learn in interviewing these elderly people?
Everybody’s lonely. We spend ten hours a day looking at screens. Everything is on a screen. Everybody’s longing for human experiences. We call it the matrix. You get sucked into. You can look at screens all day. You can go from your tablet to your television, laptop, iPhone and to your desktop. There’s no shortage of screens. I found this lady in New York City, who was the guest at one of my intergenerational events. She lives in a high rise in New York City. She said people don’t even see her. Her neighbors don’t even see her. She feels invisible. She’s had horrible health problems. She was bankrupted by the medical system. She’s got a bleak existence.
[bctt tweet=”You have to be in touch with the rhythm of life to be a healer.” username=”John_Livesay”]
She came and she spoke. People in the audience were crying because everybody realizes that they would probably not have seen this lady. We walk right by her on the street. We’re looking at our phone. If you have an elderly neighbor, a lot of people would not take the time to engage with them or are too busy. You come together and it felt so good to hear her story, hear her pain and give her a chance to share. People are living lives of quiet desperation. That’s true for everybody. To come to an experience where you can sit in a circle and say, “Here’s what hurts,” and listen to one another is an incredible experience. It’s not something that can happen on technology.
That’s the secret. Don’t be looking in the wrong place for your answers to feel connected. You would think, “I’ll hop on social media and feel better.” Research has shown that the more time you spend on social media, the more likely you are to be depressed because you keep comparing yourself to the best moments in everyone else’s life and thinking, “I do not have that much fun.” You also talk about how to feel instantly successful. I’m curious to know how to do that.
This guy in the book said he was a 90. He didn’t make more than $27,000 his whole life, but he found the value in being engaged, purposeful in his work and passionate about living and his faith. He is a widower, but he goes to old age homes and plays country music. He has a little country music band. There are a lot of people who’d be like, “I didn’t make any money my whole life. It’s been hard. It’s been a grind. I worked my ass off. What do I have to show for it?” Here’s a guy who put his emphasis on the intangibles. He was working in the fields on the tractors in the blazing heat. He cranks the country music, loved, found a way to his heart first and love what he did. He has lived a great life. Your accomplishments in older age are not what you have to show for yourself, but who are showing up for you. The investments that you make in people, love and relationships.
Nobody wants to hold up their plaques or awards at a memorial service. In fact, you talk about how to screw, laugh and celebrate at funerals. Everyone fantasizes, “What will people say about me at my funeral?” What’s going on in that chapter?
Life Lessons: Laugh about your challenges; don’t take life so seriously.
There’s this lady Lorena who is in her 80s. She spoke at one of my intergenerational events in Dallas. She told a story. Her first husband died of ALS. It was brutal. She got married again and had this incredibly blissful life. Her second husband died of a heart attack. She’d been through so much pain and loss. She was at the funeral for her second husband. She tripped, fell over one of the grandkids and broke her femur bones. Everybody was listening to her story. People stopped drinking their wines. You could pierce the silence in the room, which is sadness. She had to get rod and screws inserted in her leg to heal the break. She says to everyone, “I got screwed by Rod and I did not like it.” It was so funny. It was such comic relief that this lady could come to the pain in her life and find some humor. If she can do it, then so can you and so can I. Find a way to loosen our grip and laugh about our challenges, not take life so seriously.
You are combining meditation and storytelling together. Can you explain how that works?
I like to tell stories about the elders that I speak with. They are a great resource for great stories and life lessons. I lead these guided meditations and have these meditation programs. Meditation is something that we silo, that separates us from life so that we can find our peace, quiet, go off in a corner and listen to a guided meditation. I found that meditation is better in my experience when it integrates everything that’s going on in life, instead of separates from everything going on in my life. I lead these meditation programs. I share stories from the elders and stories about what’s going on in the pop culture. Every moment offers us an opportunity to meditate. Every moment throughout our today, stuck in traffic, screaming kids, running into someone that stole your fiancé. Every moment if we can resist and push back against it, life becomes exhausting or we can embrace, find the lessons and move deeply into the emotional experience of life moment by moment. I try to make my meditations integrating, everything that’s going on around us and within us so it feels more whole.
You have gotten some interest from Netflix on what you’re doing, and possibly turning that into a show. How did that come about? How are you pitching what you’re doing?
[bctt tweet=”Everything is on a screen and everybody’s longing for human experiences. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
The work I’m doing with the elders is interesting because 10,000 people are turning 65 every single day. We’re segregated by age. I don’t think businesses are recognizing how important it is that we learn to engage the aging population. There was this article I saw in Fast Company Magazine. The headline was, “It’s time to pay attention to the $15 trillion business of growing old.” It said it’s the most significant demographic shift in recent history. America has always been about being sexy, young and glamorous. We’re getting older. There’re going to be more old people than young people. It’s going to be much more about being seasoned and wise as much as it is about youthful and glamorous. I’m coming up with different ideas on how you can show the relevance of the elder population. How you can take them out of social isolation and bring them back into the mix. That’s an idea that I’m working on.
Congratulations on that. Tell us a little bit about the keynote talks you’ve given. Who hires you to give them?
I’ve been giving a lot of talks. My second book was called Happy Is the New Healthy. It shares the message of joie de vivre and the ways that we can loosen our grip. My new book, Life Lessons from the Oldest & Wisest takes the joie de vivre and the message of happiness. It also talks in depth about how it’s hard to see the future and the future trends if we’re not rooted in the past. It’s important for companies to be able to honor and share everything that they’ve learned from their past. The mistakes that they’ve made. When you talk to somebody who’s 80, 90, 100 years old, they weigh in on their regrets and the things that they didn’t do right, that’s almost as meaningful as the things that they did do right.
You don’t have to make the same mistakes over and over through every generation. We can learn from people. For instance, this one guy told me his wife passed away from Alzheimer’s. He was married to her for many years. He sat by her bedside and held her hand as she lay dying. He relived with her all the moments that he enjoyed in their life. He was grieving. He was sad. Hearing him tell a story was like a wake-up call because we all take our partner for granted. You wake up next to the same person every day and the same stories, issues and challenges. One day, we’re going to have to say goodbye or they’re going to have to say goodbye to us. There comes the point where you wake up and wish that you appreciated them more than we do, especially in the prime of our life when we can go places, travel and we’re not old yet.
Life Lessons: There comes the point where you wake up and wish that you appreciated your loved ones more than you do, especially in the prime of your life.
It’s important for people to hear that message. You don’t want to look back and wish that you were more grateful for somebody you love deeply. It’s not a pleasant regret to have. That’s why it’s important to recognize and listen to the regrets that people have, and for companies to realize, “These are the mistakes that we’ve made. Let’s honor these mistakes and grow from these mistakes.” When you have a lot of history, you’ve been around for a while and you’re able to share from that place of vulnerability that speaks highly to our ability to nurture great relationships.
You talk about people being so focused in the future that, “As soon as I fall in love, as soon as I have this much money, as soon as my career takes off, whatever it is, then I’ll be happy,” as opposed to, “I can’t possibly be happy now because I don’t have everything I need in order to be happy.” You have a lot to say on that.
There are all these conditions that we attach to our happiness. I had a great trip to Alaska with a friend. We were in rural Alaska. We had to get a taxi to take us back to our car. It was such an awesome trip. My friend said, “I bet you this taxi driver has a message for us.” Sure enough, we got in the car and the taxi driver tells us he just left hospice and his father passed away. We said, “I’m so sorry to hear that.” He said, “Don’t be sorry. I got to spend every day with my dad for the last six months of his life.” We caught up on so much. We did so many deep, rich conversations. He said, “What was I thinking? Why did I wait for the last six months in my dad’s life to get this close to him? What was I waiting for?” When he says goodbye, he always tells people, “Enjoy your journey.”
That was so true. We’re always waiting for something in order for us to allow ourselves to be happy. Most old people that I meet, they’re not like that in 111 years old. There are a lot of old people who are worried. There are a lot of old people who are resentful. Those conditions follow them into old age. If you’re a little bit worried when you’re 42, you’ll be a lot more worried when you’re 52. You’ll be really worried when you’re 82. If you’re a little bit resentful when you’re 37, you’ll be quite resentful when you’re 47 and resentful when you’re 67. There comes a point where you have to make a decision to set yourself loose from these conditions that we place upon our lives and free ourselves. There’s something you can do to be happy. I talk about in my books, especially in my speeches, the simple things that you can do right this second to turn up the volume on your level of joy, presence and quality of life.
[bctt tweet=”There comes a point where you have to make a decision to set yourself loose from the conditions we place upon our lives and free ourselves.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That is what meditation is all about, being in the moment, letting go of everything else, being comfortable with the silence, and not comparing yourself to other people is a key path for being happy. Whatever the journey is, you’re in it, as opposed to being so frustrated, especially in the entrepreneur world or business in general, “We have to hit this milestone.” There’s always another milestone to hit. Nobody ever gets to be in the joy and celebrate what they’ve accomplished. What you’re doing is so important to everyone of all ages, but also to remind us of the importance of spending time with people who aren’t going to be here forever.
I appreciate you saying that.
Is there any last thought you want to leave us with, David?
One more story about what you said about comparing ourselves. I interviewed this lady, Linda Jones, an elder. She’s in her 80s. Her dad was this iconic Chuck Jones, who created the Looney Tunes, Bugs Bunny, etc. Linda told a great story. When she was young, she felt bad that she wasn’t living up to her dad’s legend. She wasn’t as successful as she thought her father was. She felt bad about herself. We’ve all been there in some way. She wrote her dad a letter. Back then, people wrote letters. They didn’t type. They didn’t email. She said, “Dad, I want to share with you that I feel lousy about myself. You’re so successful and I’m not. I’m in the dumps.” Her dad wrote back. He said, “Linda, get off my mountain. You have your mountain to climb. I have mine.” She said it snapped her in a place. She recognized that she does have a lot to be proud of. Her dad wasn’t looking to her to compare and to hold up to his height. She has her own life to live.
[bctt tweet=”You got to be proud of the mountain that you’re climbing and the life that you’re living.” username=”John_Livesay”]
How can you avoid looking through social media and feeling bad about all the likes this guy gets? 100,000 downloads that my friend said she posted about her podcast or the place that this couple is traveling. It inherently makes you feel bad. At a certain point, the whole thing with social media, it’s not sustainable. Nobody feels good using social media and something’s not in the long run is going to give there. You’ve got to be proud of the mountain that you’re climbing and the life that you’re living. I saw this great quote that I want to end with. It’s a quote by Lao Tzu. He says, “Because one believes in oneself, one does not try to convince others. Because one is content with oneself, one does not need others’ approval. Because one accepts oneself, the whole world accepts her.”
I can’t thank you enough for being a guest on the show. If people want to find out more about you, what’s the best website?
David, thanks so much for being with us and sharing your joy and wisdom.
Thank you so much, John.
Links Mentioned:
- David Romanelli
- Drinks with Your Elders
- Life Lessons from the Oldest & Wisest
- Happy Is the New Healthy
- Dr. Carl Hammerschlag
- It’s time to pay attention to the $15 trillion business of growing old – article on Fast Company Magazine
- http://DavidRomanelli.com
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