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Speaking Human-First with Mary Knox Miller

EP 3.1 Jay Acunzo

Jay Acunzo: Eat the Humble Pie, Tell Better Stories

Original Air Date

December 4, 2024



What does it take to create content that truly stands out? Jay Acunzo, celebrated writer, speaker, and host of the "How Stories Happen" podcast, joins us to unpack the art of meaningful storytelling—in all its messy, frustrating, and euphoric parts.


Jay shares why asking better questions can lead to more impactful content and explains how challenging assumptions opens the door to creative breakthroughs. He also introduces his concept of the IP Pyramid, a framework for developing and refining your intellectual property to create truly unique and resonant stories that serve your audience and yourself.


Listen to the full episode to hear:

  • How to reach deeper truths that lead to more meaningful content

  • Why developing your IP is less about following templates and more about creative risk taking

  • The pitfalls of following best practices too closely—and how to trust your intuition instead

  • How to identify the gaps in your storytelling by identifying what truly matters to your audience

  • Why embracing constraints can spark creativity and lead to breakthroughs


Learn more about Jay Acunzo


Learn more about Mary Knox Miller:


GUEST

EP 3.1 Jay Acunzo

Keynote Speaker, Podcast Host, Thought partner helping experts become storytellers

TRANSCRIPT

Jay Acunzo

You might be smart enough, might be expert enough, but the real question is, is your IP and your storytelling strong enough to resonate? And most of us aren't willing to entertain that question because it really hurts the ego. And I am here to tell you with all the bumps and bruises of creating lots of stuff on the internet to nobody who cared for many, many years, like just eat the humble pie, get it over with. Better to get it out of the way now and admit like I have to develop my thinking to resonates rather than go through the agony of disseminating it for years and years without any results.


Mary Knox Miller

Welcome to Speaking Human First, the podcast that explores the art and science of communicating world changing ideas. I'm your host, Mary Knox Miller. And in today's episode, Jay Acunzo, a renowned keynote speaker, podcaster and writer known for challenging conventional thinking and content creation and marketing, explains why following best practices too rigidly can lead to a race to average.


Now Jay is savvy in strategy and you're going to hear how he trusts his creative intuition and embraces the urge to get thoughts out quickly and raw. That's what's worked for him and it's led to an authentic communication style that sparks curiosity. But more important than any one strategy, Jay also pulls back the curtain and shares the inevitable struggles that come with building a body of thought leadership. The questions he's still wrestling with and the humble pie he's had to eat along the way.


What's more, you'll hear Jay talk about the need to define your intellectual property or IP, the core ideas and frameworks that form the foundation of your work. And he shares his concept of the IP pyramid, a practical framework for transforming those ideas into a scalable body of thought leadership that grows over time.


Whether you're a seasoned marketer or thought leader or someone just starting out on your journey to influence decision makers, Jay's perspectives will inspire you to strengthen your communication strategy in a way that truly resonates with your audience. Let's get to it.


Miller

Jay, I am so excited that you're here and that we get a chance to speak about all things communications and how to show up in this world to make your message sing. Thank you so much for being here.


Acunzo

Thanks, Mary Knox. And I got to say to any Bostonians who dislike the cliche that Boston is not super creative or a storytelling town, we are two people who are here to set the record straight. So it's nice to meet a fellow local.


Miller

Absolutely. So Jay, I always like to start asking my guests where this fire in your belly comes from. And it depends on what you're doing in this world. For you, it is helping entrepreneurs and creators develop their IP.


So when I say fire in your belly, I mean like this, can't stop, won't stop, won't let go. I have to do this even if it doesn't make sense. I can't let it go. So tell me, where does this fire in your belly come from?


Acunzo

I can describe what it feels like, where it comes from probably a whole slew of things. What it feels like is breathing. What it feels like is when I have an idea for a written piece, for a new show, for a video, for anything, if I don't get it out somewhere, even if it's just on the page, you know, in my own notebook, it feels like I'm suffocating. And I've said that before to some people and gotten some weird looks, which I didn't expect. Some people who go like, no, like I need to massage this and make sure it's perfect or whatever. And I'm like, I need to get it out of me and out somewhere publicly. And then you start to marry that with this notion that you can use your words. You can use the musicality of those words, the stories conveyed in those words, whether it's written or spoken you know, I'm kind of medium agnostic with where I show up. You can use your words to help others think and feel like that's what kind of sorcery is that? So yeah, I just like to make stuff. And if I'm not making stuff, I'm very unhappy.


Miller

I absolutely love that because you it's literally coming from inside of you and having to get out and all of this creativity has spurred you. This is a great segue to the next question I wanted to ask you because you've held so many identities. You've done so many different things.


First you were an intern, right? ESPN days, then you were a staffer, business owner, book author, keynote speaker, co-founder of a membership community, podcaster, and newsletter writer. And I'm sure 500,000 other ideas that are currently in your mind, things you want to do. Sounds exhausting. I would love for you to tell me, not necessarily the sequence of things you did, but why you did what you did and what you've learned about yourself and how you show up in each of those roles and what's worked best for you to communicate.


Acunzo

Yeah. You can understand me through a simple premise, like an assertion that I make everywhere I go, which is that you should care more about resonance than reach to grow your business. And there's a lot of people out there who got here on their intellect, on their, you know, earning insight over time. And unfortunately,


Just generalized expertise being shared publicly. That's now commodified. It's not useless. It's not valueless, but I can get it anywhere. And I guess you're anywhere. And so what causes someone to pick you, stick with you, refer you, care about you, take an action that benefits you and them. know, essentially the punchline of all that is what makes someone care is not just that stuff, right? Expertise is foundational and found everywhere at the very same time. it's, it's something deeper. And to me, that is your ability to convey an insight in a way that feels personal. So can you be more insightful and more personal? And so like these ideas that you're hearing me articulate right now, that all represents my premise and the surrounding IP. So all the projects that you lined up to me sounds like different ways. I'll be it. Sometimes I am very tired at all the things that I do for life purposes. I don't want to be like, I have no problem doing all those things. No, it can be tiring. But for me, it feels like I'm exploring one thing in different places or different ways.


I'm exploring resonance over reach. I'm exploring like, do I equip people with substance with the tools and techniques necessary to be greater storytellers and advocates for their ideas on a stage, virtually or in person, right? These are things that I'm like confused by frustrated by curious about, and I'm just on the journey to explore. so like the podcast is where I explore how others do it. It's called how stories happen every episode, an expert dissects one story piece by piece, like exceptional business communicators and experts going really in the weeds of one thing they made. Cause that's, think how stories actually happen. need other perspectives. need to ask great people questions. That's the podcast.


Then I need to aerate my own thinking. That's like LinkedIn. I'm just trying to make sense of things, not distribute things I'm already aware. Totally makes sense. You know, my newsletter is me thinking about what pieces of my IP are missing. I don't know how to address the measurement component of the whole resonance thing. How do you measure resonance? I got to explore that in my news. I got to write it out because writing is thinking. So if you look at all these things, I'm building this platform of projects and offerings to me, it looks like I'm really just exploring one thing that I'm endlessly curious about, or I'm looking at the status quo and how people usually approach it. And I'm deeply frustrated by it. And I think the combination of experience, curiosity, and frustration leads to this roaring creative fire that to you feels logical. And maybe to others, you're like, wow, you do a lot of stuff.


Miller

Makes complete sense to me. But I want to keep digging in here. you've done all these different things. You've pursued all these different paths. You continue to maintain lots of different identities as well. Was there ever a time where you took a step towards, I don't know, keynote speaking, and then you were like, nope, that's not it. But I know it was because now you teach it. Or is there, maybe it was like working on big projects, consulting projects. I think that there's so many messages out there about do this do that or if you want to be a thought leader or if you want your ideas to shine, if you want to rise above the pack, then you should start a video, you know, YouTube channel or podcast, all the shoulds, right? So if you don't mind kind of pull back the curtain a little bit and tell me, you know, how you've learned about yourself in this process.


Acunzo

That is, that's the story of all of us. But certainly for me, you know, at first I thought after the sports journalism days were gone, there was this emerging field of content marketing and I thought, okay, I'll, I'll be exceptional at content marketing because I like to write. like to create. like to tell stories. The business world needs that. Let me get into content marketing.


And so I led content at a couple of different startups, including here in town HubSpot worked for a venture capital firm in Boston as well as their head of content. And I was like all in on that. Okay. Well, we're missing the mark here a little bit. It's, not the marketing of content. It's the creating of meaningful things that ensure people care. Then you market those things and people got that backwards - called it content marketing, but a lot of people interpret it as marketing of content. Okay, so that's not filling my cup all the way. Let me pursue this independent work. And at the end of my tenure at the VC firm, which I loved and I left it while loving it, I found myself moving towards public speaking, as you pointed out. And I was like, great, I'm all in. I'm gonna be a public speaker. I found traction on the road. I was on the road way too much to build a family, but I knew that was down the road. Okay, I can scale it down later when I have kids.


Lo and behold, in 2020, the world had other plans, right? It wasn't a scaled down period. was ripped away from me, but I was on the road as a keynote speaker and on the side, I was developing shows for brands. People would come inbound to me having heard my show and or read my newsletter and they're like, Hey, can you do this for us? And I was just reactive. I was just like, sure. This sounds fun. So I would build documentaries or host podcasts or things like that for brands. And to your point, I went all the way into being a keynote speaker, being a front-facing like personality in the business world. And I, you know, did really fun things, but ultimately realized this is not conducive. This is not a sustainable business for the life I want to lead. I have two little kids now, five and three. I had one at the time that the pandemic hit and I was planning on having a second and we were like, well, I got to scale back this speaking business, but gone are my ramen days where I can just like stomach writing down a business to zero and then build up something brand new. If I'm replacing speaking, I got to replace it with something that is equally as large and lucrative right away. How do you do that? And so that was a struggle. I would probably paint the last 40 years as a period of reinvention until today. I'm much more like executive producer, coach, advisor, teacher of these skills, that I am just front-facing deliverer or storyteller on a stage.


Miller

I love this because over the course of your many decades and even in the last three, four, five years, you've gone through so many different iterations and it sounds lovely in retrospect. I'm sure it wasn't in the moment.


Acunzo

No, no, no, no, that was the last four years have been brutal. You know, multiple times looking for an in-house job thinking, is that what I want to do now? Multiple times sort of debating my identity as a professional. Cause so much of my identity was caught up in the fact that like, I'm trying to be capital J Acunzo written in bright lights in the business world. And I was sort of starting down that path of like, what do you do? you're like known for a living. And it, it sort of hollowed me out this like journey to just be J ink and not find my source of identity elsewhere. And then you have children and you're like, I'm not the star anymore, nor do I want to be. I want to build a sustainable business, but also stay true to my creative desires, my desire to teach, to use my expertise and earned insight to help people in a way that feels substantive and not just like bait and switchy like a lot of experts out there today. I still wanna make things that matter and still feel like I am, but it had to evolve, it had to change.


Miller

Yeah. And listening to, clearly you have a really strong, maybe like an inner voice or something that's just telling you, yes, I'm going the right direction or no, this is, we're going way off topic or whatever it might be. I want to ask this question, which I wasn't even planning on asking, but it's kind of coming up naturally. There's lots of us who want to do good in the world. There's lots of us who want to have our ideas and make a difference, move a needle, whatever said expression you want to use. And sometimes we struggle with this idea of making a living with our ideas, making an impact and an income. And you have just so eloquently explained why over different phases of your life, different amounts are necessary different things are necessary. Is there like, you know, again, just pick based off of what's in your rear view mirror. Is there like a map that you could explain or show to folks like, okay, if it's just you and you're in your ramen days, this is it, you know, you can do essentially anything you want. When you start thinking about, okay, kids pull back and now this is what you really need to be taking. Cause I don't think people talk enough about that mix. Right? It's just go out there and do your thing and, it's not, how are you going to sustain yourself?


Acunzo

Yeah. I mean, there's, probably two avenues we can poke down and I'll put it to you, Mary Knox, which one you think that your audience would prefer on the one hand, what I finally can see is like the things that sustain and build your business don't look like the project by project offer by offer work. does look like what an author knows, which is I have IP and into the book goes my IP.


But it's not just into the book, it's into the newsletter, it's onto social media, it's on guest appearances like this. It's your offers that you develop and sell. So the one major lesson that I had was these skills I worked so hard to develop of how do you craft an idea and a story to resonate? How do you develop IP like intellectual property? That's your big idea and all the thinking behind it that lets you keep developing future ideas, distributing those ideas to own them publicly, monetizing that stuff, like your IP supersedes any one thing, but it informs everything. That's a huge lesson I learned where what I sort of dropped was the things I'd learned as a speaker. I could have ripped out of speaking sooner and applied and changed and explored differently elsewhere to earn a living slightly differently instead of saying, well, that worked for speaking. I'm not going to translate it or that day is over. What else can I do?


So that on the one hand, that's a huge moment. don't think it's singular moment, but a huge lesson of like, I'm in the business of not developing a newsletter or one-on-one client services. I'm in the business of developing and owning my IP. And the way you access that stuff is my content is consulting is a membership is a speech, right? So that's like one huge boulder on the journey that I encountered and kind of ignored for a time, even though I teach it now, really ignored it myself.


And then the second really briefly is just how much social media has messed up the expert, the service provider. Absolutely, absolutely. And I want to keep going.


Miller

The second part being about social media because you recently pulled a 180, I'd say, on changing how you show up in terms of marketing and you wrote about it. So tell me about the shift that has recently happened. And then I got a couple of follow up questions.


Acunzo

Yeah, I think what you're referring to is I wrote a piece how to basically like, I screwed up my marketing and I was like, unscrewing it up. I don't want to swear on the show, but like I was, I really had messed up what I was doing. And, because I was used to promoting a software company, like I worked in tech for many years, or I was merely selling keynote speaking, which mostly happens in the room. When you give a speech, you get leads to give more speeches, or you want to disseminate and distribute big ideas that inspire people that that's not always the best recourse. That's a, it's a portfolio approach. It's a percent of it. And building an audience online, mean, followers have never been a concept that's further from actual influence. Those two things are very far apart from each other today. Followers and influence. I don't know how many marketers I know, for example, that share copywriting tips, which are like catnip for entry level marketers. They have no influence despite a hundred thousand followers because no discerning buyer, no executive, no decision maker, no person with experience who's been burned several times before by the hucksters, by the way, would really care to trust that person. Or they would refer that person perhaps to other entry level people who have no buying power. So there's a lot of people that are like, here's how to grow followers. And I'm much more concerned with how to increase your influence. Not in a look at me way, but in a helpful way. You know, the analogy being if there's a room full of people you'd love to work with and you're not there.


What would it take for your ideas to cause them to go, yeah, Mary Knox. It's like, it's like Jay always says, you're not there, but in a way you're there. Like that's, that's influence. So for many, many years, I was just publishing a lot of things on social media to do the audience thing. And it was misaligned with my business because of what I realized is a lot of people who need, who buy what I sell, which is services, it's a non-trivial amount of money and you need a non-trivial amount of trust.


What ends up happening is you're building a traffic-based marketing model when what you need is a relationship-based marketing model, because you sell relationship-based offerings. So I'll give you a quick example. I could post whatever, 18 times this week to LinkedIn. And by the way, I still do, because it's me getting out of my head to you're there. Yeah, you're there. all over it. But that stuff is really for me, and occasionally I'm promoting something that I'm selling. But the vast majority of me is I'm showing up to teach cause I like it. I'm it's, it's selfish, right? It's, but I can't rely on it. My LinkedIn. I could do all that content or far better for my own business would be to go out to densities of my audience off of social media, trade publications, community groups, guesting on podcasts, giving webinars, either that I organize or that other people invite me to, or I pitch myself to finding groups of people where they trust the leaders of those groups.


And then you get to know the leaders of those groups and perform what's called a trust transfer. That's what's taking place right now. If anybody listening to this point is like, I'm kind of picking up what Jay's putting down. Well, the only reason they gave me that benefit of the doubt in time is because they trust you, Mary Knox. So like this is a trust transfer. And this is terminology I borrowed from a friend named Michelle Warner, helps people. She's unbelievable. She helps people adopt like relationship style marketing because you sell services. So she is also on the march to like get people out of screwing up their marketing and not act like you sell $50 courses, because most of us do not. And so it's many, many years of me misaligning my marketing with what I actually sell. So now I need to go out to densities. And by the way, when you have stronger IP and stories and sharper ideas and all that stuff, your pitch to those gatekeepers becomes much stronger. Yeah. Yeah. And people also come to you and invite you to come on their show or come speak to their group.


You know, most of my business, for example, comes through referrals, but not how we typically think. We think of it as like, I worked with that person. They referred me the next person. And that does happen. Most of when I say referrals, it is a person who owns and runs say, I don't know, an event series for executives. And that person brings me into speak. They see me speak and then they want to continue the relationship. And by the way, I can't just say, great, you're ready to buy. I have to say.


You have the option of subscribing to my newsletter for free, or I'll do these free roundtables or webinars. Like you still need me to move from just evangelizing my ideas at you to like applying these ideas to you or people like you. So there's this missing gap in a lot of how people market where they're trying to show up everywhere. Also in the wrong places like social, then they just assume good things will happen. But actually, if you go out to densities, and meet the people who already have the trust and influence of small groups of the folks you'd like to serve. That's far better than blasting out on social media. And the call to action is not buy from me. The call to action is I have other things where I, can see me applying these ideas to people like you, or even free instances of me helping customize these ideas to you directly. That's where you really earn enough trust. Cause that's what we're in the business of. We're in the business of trust and social media ain't it.


Miller

So we've got our beautiful pyramid of IP. We have this rock, this gorgeous thing that we can sink our teeth into over and over again. Then we are showing up in places where our, essentially where our audiences already are that have established trust with leaders of said event or group or whatever it might be, newsletter, podcast. Then we've got this trust transfer happening. So then after this trust transfer happens and we can show up, how do we know it's working? Like how are you measuring impact? how, because if it's not the vanity metrics of likes and followers and things that are easily, you know, calculated, then what are we supposed to be looking at?


Acunzo

Right. I like the question is how do you measure resonance? Right. So coming out of marketing as I have, there's a lot of acronyms representing the metrics that people try to should you to death to adopt, right? I'm not saying they're wrong, but if you're gonna play in that world, you need to come up with acronyms for metrics, I suppose, to be taken seriously. So I came up with one. URR stands for unsolicited response rate. A lot of people today, and we can just make it small, let's make it your, I don't know, newsletter. You're sending a newsletter to a list of people that you feel are qualified to work with you in some capacity, or you just wanna continue to serve them with your thinking. Okay, great. What most people in marketing would tell you to do is to find some trivia question that you can add to the end of your newsletter. Like you write something that teaches them, hopefully not just a link roundup, because I think those days are gone for newsletters. It's about, as my friend Ann Handley loves to say, it's about the letter. So the newsletter.


Is something you feel is valuable to your business and you're able to distribute your thinking and teach most marketers would advise at the very end that you say kind of what a YouTuber would do at the end of a video. But what do you think? Drop a comment, right? Or here's a trivia question or here's a question about this news that reply in response. Now, not saying that that isn't a vacuum bad, but it does muddy your data because what I want to know is I wrote this newsletter teaching we'll use the easy example of the pyramid I just created. That was also my newsletter this week. Ironically, I wrote about the IP pyramid. okay. I just want to know, is this strong enough to compel people to respond to me unsolicited? I wasn't saying those who respond get 10 % off of working with me. I wasn't saying like, you know, if you respond, I'll feature you in the next newsletter. None of that. I just want to know, is this idea strong enough to come?


What about compel people to respond? A lot of calls to action. What about compel to action? Is your idea strong enough? Same on social, same on anywhere you show up. I want to just hear from people because I think that the idea, the story, the substance of it was good enough to trigger a response. Okay, great. Now I know what to do with that. Now I know I should be taking this on a road show. Whatever the idea was, like the debut of the visual pyramid, I should publish that publicly as a blog post. I should tell Mary Knox about this cool new framework that I just developed on a podcast because people seem excited about it. I should put that into my signature speech or my next webinar or whatever, right? A lot of us are muddying our data because we're so focused on getting a big top line number that the depth of connection and signals of that connection are something that just we completely ignore. And that's just where I want to live. I want to know, can I trigger a small number of people reacting in big ways, not as final success but as a signal that the material that I put in front of you could lead to greater success for me and my business.


Miller

I love it. It's your pulse checking, right? You're essentially without the ask as part of it. I often tell people, you know, it's not the vanity metrics you should be after. It is the mindsets that have shifted. It is the questions people are now asking. is, you know, opinions that have changed or eyes that have opened. And that's what you get with those unsolicited responses.


Acunzo

Yeah, we want to do things that have an impact, that stand out, that are innovative, that just feel, I don't know, creative in my world, at least. And yet, then when we measure it, we're just like, what software tool did I happen to purchase or post on? What metrics did they happen to show their users? I guess that's how I'm measuring success. No, you have a hypothesis here. If you're going to be creative in the work part, you also have to be creative in the measurement part.


You know, my, friend Susan Bowles, who's a, like a fractional CFO and COO, her business is called beyond margins. She's a CFO beyond margins. Are you kidding? Yeah. She wants you to make calm the new KPI. And so she is saying like, actually, if you want a business that's different, you have to solve for something different. That's her premise. And she helps people measure different things. Like you can't solve for the same things that everyone else is solving for and expect not to look like everyone else because back to LinkedIn as a simple example, if you optimize for the metrics they give you over time, you extrapolate that out. If you're pursuing those, you end up looking like all the people that were probably all here to be like, I dislike that stuff. I don't want to be that stuff. I have more experience than them. I have deeper ideas than them. So it's this race to the average essentially that all of these default metrics actually leads you towards.


So if you want to be creative in the work, you also have to be creative in how you measure it. And that doesn't make it any less valid in measuring it that way. Like I love you said, do I get better questions from my audience? That's great. If you're annoyed at it, like, God, another person asking this question, A, go create something. You can send them in a link, maybe even an offer to solve that problem. And B, maybe that's not their problem.


Miller

Yeah. Maybe you're not in the right spot. Yeah. And I, and I just, just a quick side to say, and yet I also completely understand the allure and the attraction of the data of the numbers because it's giving you what is a false sense of security you realize, but it's still, get it.


Acunzo

I get the draw. I too love sugar, right? I too love look, 32 comments and five reposts. it's, yeah, it's tasty stuff. I don't want to build a business if I'm running a restaurant selling, you know, mounds of over sugared crap, want, I'm more in the fine dining to like small plates territory than the fast food territory.


Miller

Absolutely. All right. We're going switch really quickly to a lightning round of questions. So I don't want you to think, I just want you to respond. Cool. If at all possible. Okay. What are two to three things that you don't do to help your thinking be stronger?


Acunzo

Two or three things that I don't do. You don't do. wow. Okay. I don't ask others what they think I should create. So that's one thing. I don't consume business advice content for like coming up with my ideas or how to build my business. That's two things. And I don't, gosh, I don't take enough breaks. I should, I should walk more. should, because every time I do, like, I have good ideas, look at this. And I'm not doing, I'm stuffing full every moment of gap time with stimuli as we all are. I don't do that enough. So that's a little twist. The third one is something I should try.


Miller

I love the honesty. Love it. Who is someone past or present who's currently inspiring you?


Acunzo

I mean, you can't follow me around the internet without me mentioning the name Anthony Bourdain. I mean, that storytelling style, the wading into the gray areas, the trusting of the audience, respecting of the audience, respecting of the subject, the way he made you think and feel at the same time. Like you roll it all together, like he's able to reach through the screen and sort of tap you on the chest without being like a kind of a brute about it without like the tactics that feel, I don't know, grimy or sensationalized. Man, yeah, Bourdain 10 out of 10.


Miller

Awesome. What do you wish someone had told you before you became a public figure?


Acunzo

It's fine that people know who you are. It's fine that people like your work. You need an actual business model, you dummy. You said lightning round, I'll leave it at that.


Miller

I love it, I love it. Last one, what is a question that you're currently wrestling with?


Acunzo

Is it time for me to go full on all the way as hard as I can towards helping people with their public speaking? And the reason I'm wrestling with that is I'm really good at it. I came from that world. I have insight and technology or terminology, methodology. I have IP in that domain, but I'm not sure about the market yet. I'm still testing it with boot camps that I'm rolling out, I think that's a good front door. I think behind that you learn, I need to develop my premise and my IP and there's more to this, my messaging, my thought leadership, but speaking might be a good first handshake to a new student, new client. So we'll see, that's something I'm thinking about.


Miller

Is there something that's just been like nipping at you for a really, really long time that you're like, I don't quite know yet how to talk about it or there's just something here that I know and I'm still going to keep thinking about it. I mean, you were talking about how on LinkedIn you think out loud and process your ideas that way. But is there a question or something that you just that it's got there? It's got its teeth in you that you're trying to wrestle with?


Acunzo

I, for the longest time, and I'm holding this like beautiful handcrafted mug. So let's use that as an example here for the longest time. went, look, I made this. It's this thing. And people would go, you're awesome. And I'd go, no, no, no, no. No, thank you. But no.


Like I made this thing. It's not about me. Like I made a thing. I'm here to present the thing. I might be a feature of it. You might see my fingerprints on it. It's about the thing. And then increasingly people shove that aside and go, can I hire you? And I've always had a problem with that. I've always been, cause I there's, I'm, my BS detector is so sensitive that I think sometimes it causes me to play smaller. Cause I'm like, well, those people are famous, but they're not worth the fame or like, well, those people are, you know, self-aggrandizing on their website or whatever. One of the things I'm trying to wrestle with now is.


I had a friend and author, Charlie Gilkey, say this to me once. First, they come for your content. They don't know who you are. They come for the headline. They click on it on a search result page as an example. They come for your content. Then they come for you. It's like, Mary Knox is back in my inbox. I'll open that newsletter no matter what the subject line says. Then they come for what you represent, which is like there is a possibility I could do it that way. There is a methodology. I could actually achieve a podcast, an agency, a platform like Mary Knox has, like Jay has.


They come for what you represent. I'm deeply uncomfortable with that last part. And it's starting to happen to me. And I know there's advantages, but I've seen so many people, especially people who look like me, white straight men in business turn into just grimy hucksters. And I'm like, how do I use my person and personality as a feature in my business without making it about me? It's, it's boggling the mind. And a person I think who does that really well, by the way, folks should check out Neil Ford.


I think it's F O A R D. So he tells wonderful stories in just like a bat, like a black little void of a room with like one big headline next to his head. And he tells these awesome stories. And then he points you to his storytelling course. That's a graceful way to do something like that. I want to be graceful about this and never be accused of making my business about me, despite the fact that I am kind of building me.


So welcome to my therapy session,


Miller

I love it though, because, know, it's just so brutally honest, because when you're out there trying to change the world with your ideas, that means, as you said, in the lightning round, you have to build a business around it, which means then your identity becomes looped into this business.


Then it becomes, okay, how am going to show up in the world publicly versus who I am, who I am personally? And then how can essentially the end goal at the epitome, the peak, what, however you define success is you just being you on a larger scale.


Acunzo

I'm fine with that on a project basis. I can give a speech to thousands and thousands of people. And before going up there in my head, ramp myself up.


Almost like I'm looking at a peer who's next to me and go, Hey, watch this and go up and do well as a speaker, kill it. But then it, cause that's a project, right? And to me, so to me, it's not about that. It's about like a musician who knows how to perform their tracks really well and master the craft of playing guitar or singing. That's what it feels like to me. But when that's everywhere you go, it's, can mess with you. And I've met a lot of people who are no longer humble. That is something to your question earlier that I've always been wrestling with.


What is the role of me in a business that is me ink and again, that's therapy territory Yeah, there's some the other something there about the one-on-one relationships or one-on-one working or you're being intimidated by What you perceive as their expertise when what they're coming to you is your expertise Yeah, and I think the only thing I'm left with I have a really good friend His name is Kevin Masarella. He's a Grammy nominated music educator and he's my like oldest friend we


knew each other since we were like two years old. And so it's fun because the, relationship has evolved to where we can bond over creativity in a way we never did like in school. Cause he's a musician and I do whatever the heck it is I do. And so whenever we talk, we always have the similar soundbites that we know each other needs. And his to me is like, play the game in your own way. Right. That's the thing he's been saying. And I think that's true of all of us where if you come through this, this sort of like grindstone of


have the right answer, get the good grades, go to the good school, join the clubs, be president of the clubs, join the team, be captain of the team, go work for a reputable brand, go be an expert, which I know a lot of people listening to this feel like that's who they are, right? We're the honors student. Now all of sudden you see people who aren't that and you're like, I'm better than them or they don't have the expertise I have, right? Or their work is not founded in original research. Yes, exactly.


know, interviews that you spent hours doing. Right. My wife's a PhD. And so I'll share, I don't know, a long essay by somebody whose job it is to just get you acquainted with and introduced to a concept in the sciences. And I can see my wife and all her friends scoffing at it. I'm like, all right, PhDs, come down. It's like, that's not the role of that person. They're not trying to give you the PhD. They're talking to the lay person. And isn't it great that they are now interested in what you studied for years and years? So anyways, what I'm trying to say, poorly, is I think there's a role now.


for us to stand up and say, I am not going to resort to the hype filled gimmicks that got so many of these people I dislike a platform. I'm going to find a way to better articulate and develop the ideas and expertise that I have. Like what I know matters, but what I say and how it makes others feel also matters. And that part is what determines whether or not they care.


And you, so you can unhook from reality and say whatever the hell you think you need to say to get attention, or you can decide what are the right combinations of turns of phrases and stories and positioning copy and all these things. So I meet others where they're at and walk them every step of the way to where they want to be.


Miller

Absolutely. Cause selling ideas is not the same thing as selling products, right? And I feel like I say a lot of the times that we're all working with a playbook that's only half written for the ideas, right? It's like you were talking about in your early days of working for a SaaS company, that you're not trying to sell SaaS products. It's a completely different ball game, completely different and trust being one of the main fundamental, absolutely necessary yet so hard to learn how to build, but gotta have it thing.


Acunzo

And as a creative, a lifelong tinkerer on the side, before side hustles were a thing, we used to have beautiful things called side projects on the internet. That's what built me is side projects, blogs, community meetups, random weird things that didn't go anywhere, little designs and videos and just tinkering on the side. That stuff. It really did help me see that I wanted to be a professional creative, but what it didn't do is show me how to make anyone else care about what I've created.


And cause what we're so eager to do as experts or creatives is to share our ideas. And I love that, but others don't care. And so instead of sharing your idea, you have to learn to share why your idea should exist. How your idea can help them. there's a wonderful quote by author Kazuo Ishiguro, which I cite everywhere. It's my favorite quote on storytelling when he won the Nobel prize for literature in 2017. He said, among other very many awesome things, stories are like one person saying to another.


This is how it feels to me. Can you understand what I'm saying? Does it also feel this way to you? Clarity connection. And we as teachers, educators, and experts are much better at the clarity part than the connection part. And that to me, that is where I'm trying to help people shine. That to me is why people care.


Miller

I often tell people you don't have a marketing problem. You have a connection problem. Yes. This is what you need. You need somebody to help you connect.


Acunzo

Well said. Yeah. Everyone thinks it's about reach.


It's about resonance. That's my premise, the one I led with. Like, we can all reach somebody right now. This is the weirdest thing in marketing to me. I can put my work in front of five people who already know, and trust me. Maybe they're on an email list. Maybe they follow me on social. Maybe they're just like industry peers. I can really easily reach a few people who deeply trust me already as a professional, not as a friend, but as a professional. And then if they don't respond, we get upset. We're like, I gotta reach more people. I'm like, hold on.


You just put your work in front of folks that already give you the benefit of the doubt and they didn't care. Why do you go, huh, that's interesting. They don't care. I better put this in front of more people. It's a big giant piece of humble pie with no whipped cream when we really want it. We got to eat this humble pie, which is the ideas we're putting out aren't delivered in a way that is strong enough to resonate. Like you might be smart enough, you might be expert enough, but the real question is, is your IP and your storytelling strong enough to resonate. And most of us aren't willing to entertain that question because it really hurts the ego. And I am here to tell you with all the bumps and bruises of creating lots of stuff on the internet to nobody who cared for many, many years, like just eat the humble pie, get it over with, wash it down with whatever drink you prefer. Better to get it out of the way now and admit like I have to develop my thinking to resonates rather than go through the agony of disseminating it for years and years without any results.


Miller

Jay, thank you so much for being here. I can't think of a better note to end on for this conversation. I am so grateful for you telling your story, for sharing your story and telling us about all those bumps and bruises along the way. Thank you so much for your time and for being here with us.


Acunzo

Thank you and thank you for the service you do for others.


Miller

Jay reminds all of us that making meaningful content often starts with asking better questions. Questions that challenge the status quo and dig deeper into what your audience truly needs and how you are uniquely positioned to make a difference for them. As you reflect on this conversation, consider how you can experiment with your own content. What ideas have you been holding back because they don't fit a standard mold? What is your helping of humble pie? And are you ready to take a big bite?


Your path to impactful content and communications shouldn't look like everyone else's. So embrace your voice wholeheartedly, ask your burning questions out loud, and dive into the process of defining your IP and developing your own IP pyramid. Until next time, keep leading with purpose and speaking human first.

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