Transcript
hey hey hey what is up everyone it’s Friday i am Stuart Pete Turner and this is the Flow State podcast uh welcome back if you’ve joined me before and welcome for the first time if this is your first time listening it’s a pleasure to have you join me for today’s show. So what I thought I would do today is yeah something a little bit different um dig back through or dig back through uh I suppose explain more a more recent update on why the brand flow state itself exists its connections to the flow state itself the concept which I will explain if you have not heard of it before.
And answer a question that people have been asking me for many years what do you actually do with your degree st and I’m very pleased to say that it’s once again become quite top of mind for everybody so um not really directly work rellated but in some ways very directly workrelated so let’s let’s get into it so um let me let me share something with you that I uh that I saw recently which is why I wanted to talk about this stuff today.
I’m going to attempt to uh talk and do stuff at the same time which is not always my core skill set but here we go so I saw this article recently on the independent um which was very interesting so it’s a well the article is not interesting it’s a short summary of a discussion that’s very interesting so um have a watch of this discussion i’ll drop the links um below the episode as usual.
The gist of the discussion is that one of the top AI scientists from Google um has told us all what he thinks the next generation’s most needed skill is. So he didn’t just say that obviously it doesn’t take an hour just to say one thing but the conversation is very interesting held as it was in a uh a Roman theater in Athens which once was the heart of democratized knowledge back in the day in what some might describe as the glory days of uh democracy and government in um in ancient Rome ancient Greece you know the classical era i mean there was a lot there w as a lot of fighting there let’s not let’s not beat around the bush but they also did a lot of declaiming and discussing and you know public sharing of of great knowledge.
But look the short version is I’ll skip to the end of the discussion for you this this AI guy from Google right basically says look we need to once again learn how to learn. And the reason that he says that is as I’m sure you are aware we are living in relatively unprecedented times in terms of the volume of information that is available at your fingertips right. So you know going back to what I was saying about our old mates you know our towering friends back in the the ancient times explaining and debating publicly in amphitheaters across ancient Greece and the Roman Empire right you might have a few thousand people who might turn up every day there you know a decent proportion of pe maybe be even more decent proportion of people for the time right and that would be where the the sort of discussion w as happening or it was written in books and or letters and sent to people so the scale of the conversation and the sort of zeitgeist of where knowledge was being pushed forward was small by comparison to today skip ahead to now and we have tools to share knowledge faster and in much more you know sort of extreme volumes I guess you would say than ever before however I would suggest that the quality of that information and the provenence of the knowledge contained therein has uh descended pretty dramatically as well almost in direct proportion to our ability to share.
So the challenge we now have is how do you understand or how do you even begin to know what is credible what is actually accurate i don’t want to I barely dare even use the word what is true because anyone can say anything about anything almost anywhere now so the challenge we all have which is where you know if you’re familiar with the sort of slow descent of Facebook from a fun place to stalk up your old girlf riends or boyfriends or whatever to a you know polarized hell hole of fake knowledge is that people just just read stuff and just assume that it’s true which is incredibly dangerous which I’m going to come on to.
And one of the reasons that I’m still a big fan of parts of you know what’s now the mainstream media which I know we don’t like do we today but if you follow proper journalists a part of their job is to source things check their sources verify sources establish that the information that they are sharing is credible before they publish it and that you know back in the olden days before the internet was why people respect journalists and journalism now I’m not saying that everyone in that industry deserves that level of respect because some people who call themselves journalists are a far cry from that you know sort of ideal state but look that’s the idea that you know and look I do my best to do the same thing i try and check what I am telling you in these shows and jus t make sure that I’m not spouting off garbage like so many people who can do what I’m doing right now because I think it’s very important that you know that what we share is not just what you believe to be true but is you know objectively sort of verified somewhere because otherwise we’re just having an interesting discussion about our opinions which is fine but not when they’re characterized as facts.
And if you’ve ever seen Inside Out there’s you know a very amusing little aside about the mixing of facts and opinions in there i won’t spoil anything about the film if you haven’t watched it but you know g it gave me a little dry chuckle when I saw that very amusing anyway slightly beside the point so look this conversation is super interesting highly recommend that you you jump on and watch it because it’s really interesting whether you agree or not with with what everyone says.
So I know what you’re thinking you’re like Ste this is all quite fascinating but what does this have to do with uh with flow state your you know shameless pursuit of money through the company that you’ve built and why we should care about flow state and why we should care about philosophy so let me let me tell you why you should care so as I said I am not a marketer by trade i’m not a salesperson by trade i used to think that both of those industries were somewhat dirty and wouldn’t ever dream of of entering them in my younger and more pretentious days when I was at uni.
Because what I studied at uni was philosophy and the reason that I did that was because I found the idea of the study of how you study and the pursuit of knowledge in its purest academic form quite fascinating and I still do that’s what attracted me to the digital industry and the digital industry is what’s led me to now being immersed in two worlds that I previously would have held my nose at and wandered past so you know little did I know at the time that this is where where this would take me bu t it has.
And following on from that interview the reason that philosophy is important and you know I’m going to explain why most people misunderstand what philosophy is is because philosophy in in and of itself is obviously the pursuit of knowledge so like translated most directly it translates as the love of wisdom and most people misuse the term to describe a philosophy like a way of thinking or you know something has a philosophy which doesn’t really make any sense. And also think that it’s just like a load of waffling about nonsense you know like people being like why does this do why why is this what is this which you know on the one hand it kind of is right at its most I guess obtuse academic level that sort of is what it is.
However the exercise of thinking through things purely you know by thinking them is quite valuable because going through that process is what teaches you how to learn how to think critically how to assess whether something is sensible o r just a crazy stupid idea how how to even go about taking a you know mad concept that you’ve just come up with and then starting to attach it to the real world the real world I’ll say that in very loose terms. And also you know verify or not that theory and that’s obviously the foundation of the scientific method right where you need to take an idea or a concept or a hypothesis and then you need to test that hypothesis and basically you are looking for failure you know like the science is like how do we make this not work in order by a process of elimination to find something that does work and therefore prove our theory or our hypothesis.
But look it’s important to note going back to the philosophical roots that everything’s changing all the time and there’s a bit of an assumption that once we’ve proved something it’s you know ineffably true forever and that is false but that idea scares a lot of people right so you know science is constantly trying to prove things false everythi ng changes all the time right and just because something’s repeatable and provable or provable and repeatable now doesn’t mean it will be forever because we might come up with a different or better theory or we might discover something new so I’m getting to a point about how all this relates to to marketing and work but the important thing here is you know we are going through a period of pretty crazy change at the moment you know everyone’s still obsessing over AI digital technology is advancing faster than ever. This is all cool stuff like I love the idea of where we can go with with the internet with digital technology with the tools that we have to hand that’s all very exciting but as with any period of great change there is a dangerous and significant undertoe of just you know general everybody doing everything people not really thinking before they do stuff driven typically by you know merchants such as myself if you want to put it into old school terms and also the ha rdcore capitalist you know some might call them bastards i wouldn’t necessarily say that who drive a large part of the digital industry right like they just rush to do stuff because it will make them money.
And sometimes rushing to do things is not necessarily the best way like you can have haste without the speed. So in answer to the question now of what people people when people loads of my people in my teams and my colleagues have been like gee what do you do with your degree and I used to somewhat flippantly you know have an array of responses like I use it to be your boss i use it to you know just be better than you in certain thing critical thinking and I suppose the application of what I’d learned when I was doing my degree is how I’ve arrived here and how I’ve gone from basically messing around on the internet to having a now look I would say relatively successful career in digital despite having no real formal training in any kind of data science you know any kind of re al like I can code a bit but I’m not like a developer by any means.
But I you know the the degree that I did in my prior education allows me to understand those things quite quickly at relatively sort of detail detailedish level without needing to do them and then work with a load of other people who can do them and you know bring people together to do the stuff that I’ve done so you know I guess in answer to that question what I do with my degree it’s like well everything everything that I’m doing now but I’ve now been you know very much uh sort of you know validated by neuroscientists chess masters this is just the one guy Google people uh and everyone else now who’s suddenly like “Oh my god I’ve been chatting to an AI and it’s just made up a ton of stuff.” And you’re like “Yeah of course it has.” Because you don’t understand how they work and you’re just assuming that everything that they tell you is true whereas the default philosophical position or the default scientific positio n if you want to take a take a different tack is to immediately assume that everything’s false and then try and prove that it’s true. So that position is powerful and that is one of the most powerful sort of mindsets that you could be in when you’re addressing you know the many challenges that we now face so how does that relate to to flow state the brand and you know what I kind of wanted to get into today.
Well the importance I guess of flow state the concept i just want to explain that what that is first before I get into like why you know I built a brand around it and what we’re doing with flow state the business is flow state itself is basically being in the zone that’s what it’s known as colloquially. It means being in deep concentration to the point where you know all distractions are you know out of your mind you don’t really sort of you know an hour two hours can pass because you’re so deeply focused on what you’re doing and in a kind of state of positive enjoyment of do ing the task that everything else just you know is pushed out of your brain and that’s a provable concept which was first first I want to say discovered it was first posited or coined by um Mihile I’m going to probably totally butcher his surname uh Chicken Mihi Mihayi um I’m sorry i’m sorry about that he’s a Hungarian who came up with this concept.
And the idea of flow the secret to happiness now there is a TED talk on it from 2004 again I’ll share the link for this where he explains what it is and how it works but it’s a provable state of mind that everybody can get into where you get into that deep positive flow of concentration to the um exclusion of everything else now if you want a more contemporary sort of uh encapsulation or version of that you can watch the Pixar movie Soul which has a great sort of well series of different ways that they conceptualize what that’s like but everybody to an extent has experienced being in the zone it just means you’re like yo u know really enjoying something you’re like “Oh my god I didn’t even realize that it’s now lunchtime and I’m super hungry.”
The reason that I like this concept is because obviously it’s directly tied to like stuff that I was doing in my degree you know that sort of hardcore pursuit of something that you really enjoy. I’m a musician as well i think when you get in the zone of just being creative and doing stuff it’s it’s awesome that’s when you really feel like things are just happening and it’s like a really cool kind of mindset to be in and that’s when you do like your your best work or you can kind of bring the best out of yourself I think where you’re just really in tune with like doing something the the sort of you know the the knowledge of doing it and the theory of what you’re doing is seamlessly merged with the act of doing as well which is uh almost similar to the kind of you know Buddhist concepts of um you know submerging or or destroying the ego and just being directly sort of attuned to to what you’re doing which is a conversation for another time.
But look the modern world is essentially constantly trying to chip away at your ability to get into that zone and you’ll have seen this with the you know the number of or the increasing number of people getting diagnosed with like ADHD or related conditions for example you know people struggling to concentrate there was that whole concept across social media of people’s attention spans shortening but I think the the idea of someone’s attention span getting shorter is actually a symptom of the fact that you can’t concentrate properly because of all this constant like noise and stimulus and devices that are constantly pinging at you and like you know to a degree these behaviors that the digital industry have trained us on and this is where you know the people at the top of companies like Facebook have a lot to answer for because they actively developed their product to train p eople to respond and spend more time on their on the network right and like all the big social networks have done that and this was quite widely publicized probably about 10 or 15 years ago and then just disappeared I assume because they don’t want anyone really knowing about it right but a lot of developers came out from Facebook book in particular and were saying that they were you know they were actively developing for those what I would suggest are pretty horrible negative behaviors like how do we notify people to get them to log back in how do we keep them scrolling through stuff like all those changes to the feed that we all hate were all based around that behavioral control and you know without getting all tinfall hat about it like that’s how they make all their money they just want to keep your attention on their platform and like we I don’t even know if we’re still in the the attention economy anymore but that was a concept that was getting thrown around a few year s ago but that was where the battleground was and to an extent still is right like the our attention is what gets monetized.
And going back to what I was saying before about you know the the sort of concept of flow state and like why I’ve been building a company around it is like being in flow state or trying to build your abilities concentrate on things in a really deep way pulls that control back to you as an individual and away from all these absolute like scummy people who are trying to literally capture your attention and like there is a real innocent use of that phrase you know capturing your attention it’s nice you some you’ve noticed something fun you know you walk past a an attractive flower you know you see at the moment see a whale on the horizon that’s cool that’s capturing my attention in a nice way but what these people are trying to do is capture attention because they can make money from your attention which is a much more grubby and personally damaging to yo u way of capturing attention so there’s a real like sort of um subversive negative idea about that to me.
And this is where I think you know why we’re seeing a lot of the resurgence and interest of like positive psychology stuff like the flow state right and like meditation and all these like you know new apps emerging like headsp space has been around for ages like your your ability to control how you behave and react to things and how you think has never been more important than it is right now like I know that’s a cliche that gets bandied around a lot but the challenge that we all have at the moment is that a lot of people because they don’t you know they’re not as deeply immersed in the the digital industry as as maybe some of us are is that they don’t realize even what they’re giving away and like you you know you will have heard the phrase like you know if you if something’s free you’re the product basically right but we’ve been so you know just chucked onto Facebook chuc ked onto Instagram you know you’re on what was Twitter now X you know Blue Sky whatever networks you use they’ve just become a daily habit and you don’t even you’re giving you’re giving yourself away to these companies right and they make money from you like your time that you give them this is like really serious stuff that takes away from your ability to actually relate to other people properly to concentrate on things to like have control of how you’re thinking.
And this is what draws me back to you know the degree the idea of like philosophy and like mental control is not some sort of nebulous concept it’s in the the small decisions that we all make every day about how we spend our time. So look like this is where you know this is the sort of foundational thinking all around flow state itself and the company and what I want to kind of like lead onto and why why I want to draw these this link is like I’m not just trying to shamelessly leap off the back of what I would suggest is much more you know valuable work um in some respects than what we do at flow state but like the core concepts around the company like are very deeply tied to you know going back now quite quite a long time to when I was at uni going way back to the even to you know the end of when I was doing my A levels before I even went to uni like this this idea of like being in control very actively of how you think and I want to throw around this quite a Victorian concept right of the uh the differentiation between the material or the physical animal body and uh the soul as they used to characterize it or the intellectual side of personalities and what they used to think around the sort of 18th the 19th century and into the start of the 20th was that those those two sides of people were kind of at war right you had your animal passions as they used to call them that were trying to very reactive you know you react to the world around you and that’s all driven by the the physical stuff an d they thought at the time you could that you could tame those passions using the intellect or the soul at the time and say “Look no the you know the war between the uh the intellectual and the animal if you like was was at all the rage back in the day.”.
And we have a different version of that now because we have the you know the kind of war between people who are attempting to usurp your control over your mental state and you as an individual and your ability to I guess retain control over over how you react so that war as they would have characterized it a few hundred years ago between the uh you know the material and the the sort of you know metaphysical plane has now moved into the metaphysical plane and like we almost don’t really don’t really care about the physical side anymore almost which is a bit depressing but I think again that’s quite an interesting way of a way of thinking about this because what’s becoming more and more dangerous now you know in the age of AI as we’re probably in right is is where that I don’t like to characterize things in the in terms of a war for you know for anything because it’s just you know I’m not really I’m not a war guy i’m quite a pacifist really.
But I think it is one I think it’s uh you know it’s moved into a space that is harder to control because we I mean some of us find it hard to control our like physical reactions as well right like but I think that that challenge if you don’t know how or why you’re doing things then you will just do things and then you will struggle to undo the consequences of the actions that you took because you didn’t know why you were taking them which is Not the most eloquent way I’ve ever described something but that’s going back to what I was saying that’s what people are doing now that’s what they’re all struggling with they’re struggling to undo behaviors that have been taught to them by people whose only motivation is to make as much money as possible and again I’m goi ng to use Facebook as in as an example of this because you know I was there at the launch of Facebook and I’ve seen the history of Facebook and how it’s evolved. And they were one of the first they were one of the pioneers of this kind of behavioral engineering to make money from your mental energy and attention and that is pretty disgusting to the degree that they’ve done it.
So how does all this relate to what I’m doing right now and what you should be thinking about both at work and in life right so why asking why now love him or hate him Simon Synynk if you haven’t heard of him was the man who sort of popularized I guess the why for business. But obviously the you know the philosophers of of all the many years going back 4,000 years or so have been asking why for much longer it’s just Simon Synynics a more more recent example of this. And the way that he characterizes this is obviously pretty businessy it’s like how to how to really get down to your purpose right but the power of asking why is that it is a directly sort of challenging question that children ask everywhere and a lot of adults seem to forget to ask just about what you’re doing you like challenge yourself be like why am I doing things why do I think this why do I behave this way and you might not like the answers that you get and you don’t have to tell anyone right.
But if you’ve ever been to you know any kind of therapy or any done done any kind of like meditation or been any any sort of you know self-help type of an environment the question of why always comes up at some point because that is the only way that you can start to really uncover your base motivations or or as far as you can get to them. And I think it was Simon Synynic who originally came up with like the seven levels of why but you’ve got to keep asking like like little kids do right because the reason that they ask stuff is they want to like get down to the you know the core of something and again going back to my philosophical training this is one of the core principles of how we discover things and how we attain new knowledge is like you have to question everything and be like why why do we do stuff why am I doing what I’m doing right now.
So look it’s an interesting exercise if you haven’t read this book it’s really interesting like I would highly recommend reading it even if you’re just like well that was a load of crap like it’s it’s just great to to think about things in different ways and so much of work is a routine that we all just stick to because because of reasons because that’s the way work structured without considering the wise of why we’re doing it and that’s just pretty depressing right i mean you know like it’s if you just want to go to work and just do work that’s totally fine because you you understand why you’re doing it right you’re like I just need money i’m gonna go and do this stuff and just get money and I’m gonna ignore it like you’ve got a bit of a why there right but a lot of people come to work and they have this sort of vague idea of why they’re doing it but it’s very you know undefined and it can be quite challenging or as my uh you know my Australian uh friends would say confronting but I think that’s a good thing right it’s fine to be uncomfortable occasionally and be challenged even if you’re just challenging yourself so look that’s I mean you know I don’t want to big up Simon beyond that but asking why very important.
And the I guess the reason that this you know sort of relates to what I’m doing with Flow State and the reason that I wanted to make this a bit more of a you know sort of a little sort of biographical rundown of where we’re at with the company is all these discussions I’ve been having with with everyone who’s come on the show even going back to 2023 about like you know the explosion of AI itself the evolution of the digital industry like where we’re at with our relationship with technology and a nd obviously centering those things around the disciplines of marketing and sales are that marketing and sales are very human ccentric jobs and disciplines right like there is no way that you can replace the human stuff there you can replace a lot of the machinery and the foundational boring crap behind the scenes with process automation whatever but ultimately the decision to engage with a brand or with a product or buy something or not is an emotionally driven decision and there is no way while people are still involved in that process it’s always going to be made ultimately by emotion whether you trust somebody or you love a thing or like you know it’s triggered something in you that is why you do stuff and you can deny it as much as you like but if you are really honest with yourself you know no amount of logic and sort of you know dry reasoning is going to justify the purchase decision without some form of emotional engagement with that thing so I I’m happy to die on that hi ll i’m going to go out there with that one.
And look the reason that that’s related to what I’m talking about now and flow and look I would also recommend reading Mihal’s book on the psychology of happiness so he’s been talking about this for like four years I think now but this is another great book just really interesting super sort of inspiring read. And I found this really interesting because a lot of the time like the way that I arrive at things is sort of by a process of elimination and going back to what I was saying earlier you know I’m not necessarily the most positively minded person I would say and it’s not to say that I’m all you know sad all the time and just you know sort of doom and gloom but I often have to sort of start to arrive at what I want to do by thinking about things that I don’t want to do.
And the reason that’s related to sort of the the lameness of work and the routine is that like many people I think that the 9-to-f5 sort of structur e of work is quite stupid and outdated let me qualify that for the kind of work that I do right so like many of you I work on a computer the internet is essentially my work i can do work on or off the internet i can do that work from anywhere at any time that I like right i have to be online when I want to talk to my clients and when they want to talk to me but the kind the people I’ve been working with are all of a very similar mindset right we all want to be in control of when we’re working and the whole point of working on the internet or working with the internet or if you’re in marketing or sales is most people want to meet when they’re in you know at their best right and they’ve got something to say and it’s worthwhile spending some time together however the entire you know Victorian era industrial revolutionary structure of work is not engineered around that that is engineered around a time when we were producing physical things and the amount of value that could be derived from the economy was very directly tied to the amount of things that you could produce and how much you could sell those things for now we no longer world work in that world do we like we there is a part of it sure people are still producing stuff that’s fine but even the production of stuff can happen at any time now so the idea that we’re still working on this like ridiculous Monday to Friday you know 9 to5 routine is just completely like not only redundant but just ridiculous and it’s one of those stupid concepts that’s just been enforced on everyone because that’s the way we’ve always done it and people are too scared to make big changes right.
And like without going off on too much of a tangent one of my advisers in the UK was a part of the 4-day week trial that ran there I think it was either a year or two or two ago and there’s been some limited trials of that here and the majority of the companies that were in that trial right so the trial was that you would still have all the same benefits of working five days a week but you would just work four. Most of the companies carried it on after the trial was done and there was no material difference in the output from the companies that were in that trial when people worked four days instead of five however there was a reported material improvement in everyone’s state of mind and general feelings of you know positivity around how they were working because they’re not forced to squeeze their lives into two days when nothing’s fucking open and nothing’s happening so you know without drifting off too much into a huge rant about the general structure of society like we’ve all experienced that right i’ve done my fair share of crap jobs before I started doing what I do now when I was in the 9 to5 you can’t go to the bank you’ve got to go on your lunchtime you can’t go to the doctors you got to take half a day off you know you can’t like live your life well you can but it’s just crap because it’s all dictated by someone else which is going back to what I was saying before is is frustrating that sets us in the wrong state of mind about how we’re all trying to live our lives in you know in general so again one of the core reasons that I with particular reference to flow state when I started doing this and the reason that I started kind of contracting and running my own businesses is like yes there’s some boring sides of it and yes not all of it’s you know just running around doing whatever you like all the time but I like to be in control of what I’m doing when and the people that I’ve managed to work with over the course of the last 10 or 15 years when I’ve either been contracting or working in startups or running my own businesses when you know we’re building a product business now and flow state it is stealth is part sort of service part product.
Is that I want to be able to work when I know that I’m doing my best work and I want to empower the people that I work with to know that they can do the same thing with me so within the context of our relationships we can both be at our best whenever we’re talking to each other you know we deliver whatever value we’re engaged to deliver that’s the basic table stakes right of what we’re doing but the important part to me of the relationships that I’m trying to build in people that I want to work with is that we’re solving you know for big problems that’s why I’ve shifted to moving to B2B like you know had fun doing B TOC stuff and it was great working with some really awesome brands in that space but it’s kind of more fun to be working with some much bigger thornier businesses that are like supporting bigger bigger stuff basically infrastructure stuff you know healthcare stuff like massively impactful technology- based sort of solutions is exciting right.
But the challenge with those is that often you’re working with people across different time zones you know in different countries different cultures and like I find that r eally interesting but I think the way to make that work is like I was saying you want to you know don’t have meetings that could have been emails you know that’s why Slack and stuff’s great asynchronous working is awesome if everyone can get into a good routine of being online and doing their their deep work when they want to be doing it and you only connect when it’s really valuable and purposeful to connect and be like look when do we really need to engage each other for the human work that’s when you can collectively sort of try to approach getting into something like you know a sort of team version of flow state and like that you know that’s stretching the concepts because it doesn’t really work in that way in that sense but that’s what to me makes me feel like I’m doing something that’s more valuable and meaningful and I know that that’s what makes everyone else feel like they’re doing something like valuable and meaningful right because then you can concentrate on the core of you r job hopefully the stuff you enjoy and you can just push away all the extraneous bullshit parts right like nobody likes sitting in boring meetings all day nobody likes being told like a child that you have to be at a desk at 900 a.m exactly because otherwise you know what like you’re going to be in trouble for being a minute late or 5 minutes late or whatever you know it’s just not very it’s not very empowering or very rewarding to be treated like that and there’s no reason why we should be so you know part of flow state is in a small way I guess like my I’m I’m trying to bring that to the people I work with right like you know I don’t care when I get emails i don’t care when people are messaging me i just try and make it clear when I’m online and when I’m going to be doing stuff and if we need to connect we can connect whenever like it’s simple powerful stuff to me and I hope the people I work with and the solutions that we’re building that’s why Flow State itself can be challe nging to sell because it’s not an agency although I have to describe it as one to sort of sometimes get the concept across like it is a hybrid business that combines consulting and service delivery with technology in a way that just delivers the goods i think like it’s not one thing or the other it’s a blend of all of them but the whole core concept behind the business and everything that we pull together is to remove as much of the crap as we can and just do the really valuable parts and just minimize the you know the admin and the nonsense because that’s what makes us all do our best work I guess so.
That I guess is how I you know I’m kind of getting around slowly to to where we’re at as a business and like what we’ve been working on a lot recently which is uh which is challenging is nailing that sort of positioning effectively and just being able to to pull that together and that’s where you know coming around to some of the the creative side the um the reason that there’s jellyfish everywhere is like it’s like one of the most zen creatures ever right they just float around having an awesome time unless um they’re near some turtles or some whales or you know the many things that might eat them and maybe maybe they’re not having an awesome time i don’t know they’re they’re pretty alien in terms of the way they live but the fun thing about them is that you know there’s some jellyfish that that are in fact immortal like they can actually go back and regress to a baby like state and then regrow to adult life again they just float around taking things as they come that was kind of where that came from.
And as we’re saying here look like we what we’re hanging our hat around at the moment in the business is moving brands from awareness to opportunity by pulling together all those things that I was just talking about you know flow positive psychology and getting into that kind of flow of working with everybody thinking really hard about why we are d oing things before we do them like we don’t just rush to execute stuff which is where you know the consulting pieces come in we help everyone really work out what is most valuable to the people that we’re working with how can we like enable our contacts and the people we work with directly to just be awesome at their jobs like that’s why you engage people like me as an external partner to come in and help you be awesome at what you’re doing. My old friend Mihi like why the secret to actually being a bit happier at work how do we just make everything a bit more fun and a bit more meaningful that’s what everybody wants.
And then winding all the way back to the very start how do we help everybody out learn more fun stuff like the reason that I’m still in the digital industry despite sounding quite a lot like I complain about it sometimes is it is one of the fastest moving industries still at the moment there is so much to learn in digital and if you push aside the agendas of other people coming way back to uh where we started with the why of why I’m doing everything and the philosophical mindset right the digital industry the establishment digital industry would like to tell you that there are certain ways that everything should be done now because the industry’s been around long enough right to have certain rules being established and certain agendas are kind of getting set down right but I would say that those are the ones that should be immediately challenged by the agendas of companies that are trying to tell you how to spend your money companies that are trying to tell you how to spend your time and attention those are the people that you should be immediately suspicious of and that is one of the core ways that we have pulled together all of our solutions and like just to conclude this the reason that I still focus so heavily on the organic side of digital is is exactly that like the advertising side the spend your money side is a mix of easy effec tive stuff semi-harder expensive stuff and then people trying to tell you how to spend money because it makes them money.
The organic side of how do you take your message to people in a manner and a medium that allows you to control everything about how that message goes out is much more interesting and much more powerful and contains much more long range value to you and your business than any of the other moneybased instant activity stuff you can do so that is the is the end of that so I I hope you found that interesting i just wanted to see you take some time this week just to explain a bit more about like the actual business and the thinking around the business because I think all this stuff is really important and for me it’s really important because that is why I’m doing what I’m doing. And if I have spoken to you recently and we’ve just met I hope that you found this informative and if you have known me for a long time then hopefully this has been a nice refreshe r in amongst our usual connecting doing the business and possibly just generally winging about the uh the state of you know work and life.
So look I still don’t have a great um ending to the show I’m afraid so once again that is the end of the podcast thanks for joining me and hopefully you will rejoin again if you’d like to talk to me about any of this stuff as you can tell I love to talk about all of it if you were like “Steu I don’t agree with any of that.” Great come on and disagree i would love to talk to you about what you think and we can have a proper discussion about it and hopefully there was something useful in there for you definitely get one of those books get both have a read uh enjoy the long weekend if you are in one of the East Coast states um WA I think you maybe already had yours and I’ll chat to you all soon.