September 20, 2022

Chris Do and the Value of Involvement — 1/4

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Episode Highlights

When we can barely catch our breath, we really appreciate quick solutions and easy answers. But when a state of emergency becomes the norm we have to ask, are these easy answers the solution, or part of the problem? In this series, we'll introduce you to a self-described loud introvert who has used his passion for helping others to overcome personal obstacles. His story illustrates the value of involvement in education, business, and life. We’ll also speak with Professor Andrea Goldin about the neuroscience of good questions.

Topics Discussed

  • Introduction to Chris Do [01:00]
  • Chris Do on why teaching is important to him [02:29]
  • Chris Do on his father's use of reasoning [03:29]
  • Chris Do on impactful public school teachers [05:46]
  • Chris Do on brains aversion to thinking [07:31]
  • Introduction to Andrea Goldin, PhD [09:00]
  • Andrea Goldin on The Cognitive Neuroscience of the Teacher-Student Interaction [09:48]
  • Andrea Goldin on discovering that subjects with the correct answer used brain less [15:30]
  • Andrea Goldin on takeaways from experiment [19:13]
  • Chris Do on delayed gratification [21:35]
  • Chris Do on burn out [23:00]
  • Chris Do on first experience teaching [24:20]
  • Chris Do on messiness of innovation [27:51]
  • Chris Do on invitation to make YouTube videos [29:00]
  • Concluding comments [31:06]

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Hiromi: When we can barely catch our breath, we really appreciate quick solutions and easy answers. But when a state of emergency becomes the norm, we have to ask, are these easy answers the solution or part of the problem? In this series, we'll introduce you to a self-described loud introvert, who's used his passion for helping others to overcome his personal obstacles. His story illustrates the value of involvement in education, in business, and in life. This is a podcast about communication, marketing, and the account-based mindset. This is Reach.

[00:00:42] Well, thanks so much for joining us today for the first episode in this series on value and involvement. My name is Hiromi and I have to admit, I have admired all of our guest, they've all been fantastic, but I don't think I've ever aspired to be one of them as much as I have this next one. We're both, you know, middle aged Asian designers-

[00:01:03] Chris Do: [laughs]

[00:01:03] Hiromi: ... with similar design influences, there's a lot of overlap, but he's just undeniably cooler. So-

[00:01:12] Chris Do: [laughs]

[00:01:12] Hiromi: ... Chris, would you mind introducing yourself for our guests?

[00:01:16] Chris Do: Well, I appreciate that. My name is Chris Do. I'm a self-described loud introvert and recovering graphic designer. And in former life, uh, I made commercials and music videos for a living. Now, I try and teach the world to help them m-make a living doing what they love.

[00:01:30] Hiromi: So if you Google Chris Do, you're gonna find videos of him coaching teams of creatives and entrepreneurs on a, on a wide range of topics in business and personal development.

[00:01:39] Chris Do: Okay. So what's the difference between just happened right there, you guys?

[00:01:42] Speaker 4: There's no negotiation.

[00:01:43] Speaker 5: Christian was only thinking about himself.

[00:01:45] Hiromi: And one thing you're gonna notice immediately is his calm command of a room. He's engaging his audience. See, these aren't lectures, they're, they're conversations.

[00:01:54] Chris Do: The way you demonstrate your value is by the quality of the questions you ask. Generally speaking, if you do your job, they're gonna say, "Gosh, you, you're just like really knowledgeable. You know all the right questions to ask. You made me think about things I've never thought about before."

[00:02:06] Hiromi: And while I'm watching him, I find myself wondering like, how does this guy do it? You know, if, if you've ever done any public speaking, you know that you can prepare for a talk, but when the audience is involved, it's much more difficult to know what to prepare for. So, Chris, I wanna ask you, what is your secret? How did you get so good at involving and engaging with your audience?

[00:02:29] Chris Do: Okay, well, I'll tell you, Hiromi, there's a story that's linked to my own personal development that I wanna express and share with you and you'll understand why teaching is so important to me. Well, first of all, the way I look at my life is, I would not literally be here if it weren't for the people that I consider my teachers or mentors throughout my entire development from adolescent through college.

[00:02:52] Teachers have played a big part. When I was full of self doubt, a teacher showed me kindness, a teacher gave me some grace in something or pointed me in the right direction, or believed in me before I could believe in myself. And so, I think if my life was devoid of that person and if they didn't say that thing and they didn't open this door, I'm not sure I'd be here talking to you right now. I've been a beneficiary of amazing teachers in public school and private school. And I think the best thing I have to do as an obligation is to pay it forward by becoming a teacher myself.

[00:03:29] I grew up in California mostly, in San Jose, you know, the valley. My dad is a very traditional Asian man, but he's non-traditional in that whenever we got in trouble, he wouldn't smack us, you know, which was pretty much how everybody else dealt with misbehaving kids. He would sit me down and we would just talk-

[00:03:49] Speaker 6: ... I know you were probably-

[00:03:49] Chris Do: ... for hour and a half.

[00:03:50] Speaker 6: ... but you can't even whisper-

[00:03:51] Chris Do: I'm not saying that I'm a big troublemaker, but I fought with my younger brother all the time. There was always something. When he came home from work, after working 10, 12 hours, my brother and I would be fighting about something stupid. We were starting to figure out like our own way in the world and we think, "Oh, you know, you're an old-fashioned man from the old country, what do you know about modern American culture?" Right? And so there is probably a little tinge of disrespect and self importance and arrogance and all that kind of stuff. He was mostly even keeled, very stoic. He wouldn't yell at you and say, "You're the biggest dummy, you're a loser, why would you ever do that kind of thing?" He would ask me questions to help me figure things out.

[00:04:35] I didn't understand it at the time. I was like, "Oh my God, I just want you to smack me so I can go back to do whatever it is I was doing." Put me outta my misery, right? But what I didn't realize was he was training me in a way of looking at problems and problem solving, playing part therapist, part life coach, and consultant and advisor. He would just say simply, "I'm a little disappointed. I wanna take us back to the decisions that you're making, and I wanna understand what your perspective is." And as you speak the words like, "Oh, my friend did this and I thought it would be a good idea." Like, when you hear it, you hear your own idiotic nature, that's a really dumb idea.

[00:05:17] So he doesn't even have to tell you, you're dumb, you know you're dumb when you say it. And he could just ask a question like, "So did you think that was a good idea?" "No." "So, what would you do in the future?" He would use Socratic questions to lead me to a logical conclusion so that when we started out, we are on different ends of the conversation, and when we finished we're on the same end of the conversation. He, he was doing this nonstop.

[00:05:46] I also saw that there were these brilliant people in public school, nonetheless, in the valley, growing up in the San Jose, that had different pedagogical models that would impact me moving forward.

[00:05:58] Speaker 7: Okay. Alright.

[00:05:59] Chris Do: In junior high, my teacher was Mr. Janice, and he just was like this short stocky man with round glasses, curly hair. And Mr. Janice, as he would describe was an old Jew from The Bronx. That was his personal brand. I think the message was without explicitly saying, "I come from the old school, I grew up in the tough streets, so we're gonna teach you the tough way." And he was aggressive as they come as a teacher.

[00:06:28] He taught math in a way that I've never been taught before. He would put us in the spotlight and ask this questions and have us solve them without even telling us what to do. It was nuts to me. He would say, "What is a whole number? Let's write a theorem." And they would throw out random guesses and he would guide us to the process, what is an even number and what's the theorem? Telling us, we have an idea and we need test it, and if it doesn't work, we come up with a new theorem. And the way that the theorem becomes a law is if we can't break it anymore.

[00:07:04] You know, every time he would ask a question, he's like, "Who has the answer to this, to this equation?" And, and someone would say, "34?" And he would bark back, "Are you asking me or are you telling me?" And you're like, "34." He goes, "Well, you're wrong."

[00:07:19] [laughs]

[00:07:19] So we were always on edge with Mr. Janice. And it was sitting on pins and needles because at any one point, he would yell at you and be like, put you on the spot, so you better be ready to learn.

[00:07:31] You know, I think we want easy answers. We wanna be told what to do, we don't wanna think for ourselves because it uses calories. I mean, plain simple, thinking hurts. Thinking is consuming energy that you may or may not want to so your brain is designed to preserve you from non-life threatening things. If you look at culture, everything is getting shorter and shorter. Our attention span is getting shorter, tweets are getting shorter, li- like videos, everything is getting shorter because we want to not spend time thinking.

[00:08:06] Hiromi: We definitely live in a TLDR world and people probably have their own opinions about how okay or not okay that is. But I think one thing that we all agree on is that good teachers, like the ones that Chris is talking about, challenge us to really reason or to really internalize difficult concepts. This was also the plot of a 1973 film called The Paper Chase about a challenging Harvard law professor.

[00:08:31] Speaker 8: We use the Socratic method here. I call on you, ask you a question and you answer it. Why don't I just give you a lecture? Because through my questions, you learn to teach yourselves. We do brain surgery here. You teach yourselves the law, but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.

[00:08:59] Andrea Goldin: [laughs].

[00:09:00] Hiromi: So, on the topic of skulls full of mush, I've invited another professor to join the conversation. Professor Andrea Goldin is a full time researcher for the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina, CONICET, and works at Di Tella University. She's also a learning sciences exchange fellow. Professor Goldin, thanks so much for taking a moment to speak with us today.

[00:09:21] Andrea Goldin: Yes, absolutely.

[00:09:22] Hiromi: So, you know, you're not talking to all neuroscientists here.

[00:09:26] Andrea Goldin: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:26] Hiromi: Could you describe for us a little bit, what it is that you study?

[00:09:30] Andrea Goldin: Okay [laughs] okay. Neuroscience is actually, they are like a bunch of, uh, uh, different disciplines. And I specifically work on cognitive neuroscience, which is a branch of neuroscience that studies how cognition, the thinking, uh, works.

[00:09:48] Hiromi: Amazing. Yeah, I reached out to Professor Goldin because she had released a paper a while back on a related topic. It was titled, The Cognitive Neuroscience of the Teacher-Student Interaction. Um, maybe Professor Goldin, could you tell us a little bit about the research?

[00:10:02] Andrea Goldin: Yeah, yeah, it's a line of research. So, wha- what we did, we, we took the first educational dialogue that was written in history. It's, it's a dialogue that actually took place between Socrates and a slave, and we tried to recreate it with today's citizens.

[00:10:22] Hiromi: So for context, we're talking about a well-known recorded conversation that took place maybe thousands of years ago between Socrates, the philosopher Socrates, and another man's illiterate slave. And if I got this right, Socrates uses a series of questions to help this uneducated individual come up with the solution to a math problem without explicitly giving him the answer, right? He's just using questions.

[00:10:48] Andrea Goldin: Exactly. It's, uh, it was the idea of my former director, Mariano Sigman, and Antonio Battro, who is an educator, a very, very known educator. And so they had this idea that, "Hey, everybody's talking about the Socratic dialogue, we just wanna see if today very educated people, uh, behaves the same or are different than the slave 2,400 years ago." I loved the idea first.

[00:11:16] I mean, remember the dialogue took place between Socrates and an illiterate slave. And so we, we really tried to recreate the original dialogue. And so Socrates, or the researcher let's say, got to stick to their script, and the slave, or actually the experimental subject would answer whatever he and she wanted to. The original dialogue is 50 questions. And after doing that, we found that our 21st century participants answered pretty much the same as the slave 21st centuries ago.

[00:11:53] Hiromi: Really?

[00:11:53] Andrea Goldin: And that was really shocking because we didn't expect that.

[00:11:57] Hiromi: Yeah. So basically what you're saying is that, after 2,400 years of human development and education and cultural evolution, when people were asked those same questions, people performed just about the same as the slave did in Socrates day?

[00:12:14] Andrea Goldin: Yeah. And I said, "Okay, but Socrates is trying to teach something to the slave, so at least we should see if people learn." And actually that turned out to be the most interesting part of the research. So, the original dialogue goes around 50 questions, and at the end, the slave in a way, understands by Pythagoras' theorem and understand what a diagonal means. But the questions all were around one specific square, any square. So, we added a l- a last question that was just, "Okay, so here is a different square. So, can you now apply what you have just learned and show me in this square, everything you learned." And almost one third of the very illiterate adults and about half of the illiterate adolescents failed to do that.

[00:13:15] Hiromi: Oh, so you're saying that all of these subjects passed the test with help, but they couldn't necessarily pass a very similar test a second time on, on their own?

[00:13:26] Andrea Goldin: Exactly. And actually we replicated that a lot in different scenarios with different researchers, with different setups, and, and always we find the same. And so one, I don't know, sympathetic, let's say conclusion is that the slave actually didn't learn at all.

[00:13:45] Hiromi: Huh?

[00:13:46] Andrea Goldin: The slave could follow the dialogue, the slave could answer what Socrates was expecting the slave to answer, but the slave didn't understand.

[00:13:54] Hiromi: Interesting.

[00:13:54] Andrea Goldin: And so, what is learning? How do you know that you learn something? You know that you learn something just because you can answer a test, you have the illusion that many times it's working. You have, have the illusion as a teacher and you have the illusion as a student, and that's dangerous.

[00:14:16] To follow a line of reasoning for sure might be useful for you to learn something, but you also need the time for that learning to settle. And in Spanish we say that [foreign language 00:14:29] clicks, that something reaccumulates physically inside your brain when you learn something.

[00:14:36] I-if you have problems of math or physics, you struggle and you do one exercise and you do it well, and there is another one, and then you go to another one, and at some point you realize that all problems are exactly the same problem, just a number change. And when you realize that, your brain is, is wired differently.

[00:15:00] At the very beginning, you really couldn't identify, your brain couldn't identify that those were the same because the surface was so important to you, that you couldn't go deeper to start to recognize patterns. And, and only when you deeply and personally understand something, uh, and then you can apply that knowledge.

[00:15:18] Hiromi: So there's a physiological change that takes place in the brain when you reach that level of cognition, right? Something clicks, so to speak.

[00:15:25] Andrea Goldin: Yes.

[00:15:26] Hiromi: What does that click look like inside the brain?

[00:15:30] Andrea Goldin: Well, we perform, in some way, all of our behaviors rely on changes in our brain. But you don't need to see the brain to watch the brain change. I mean, you could just watch the behavior change. And basically, when you use your brain like any organ actually, that organ need more oxygen, and the oxygen goes with blood, say that organ needs more blood.

[00:15:56] And so by measuring blood, you can indirectly measure how that organ is working. And so, we used an emerging technique that it's called functional near-infrared spectroscopy that measures blood flow. It's just a tiny Bluetooth wireless thing that you just put on the top of your skull and it can measure the blood flow underneath.

[00:16:21] And so we put it in front of the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that is more needed to follow this type of reasoning.

[00:16:32] Hiromi: Mm-hmm.

[00:16:32] Andrea Goldin: And we measured what happened within the teachers and in the student during the whole dialogue, and we analyzed after that. And so at the end, we knew if the student did learn or not. And we found out those students that did learn had a more efficient use of their neural resources than the student that couldn't transfer what they learned.

[00:16:58] Hiromi: Wait, so you're saying there was less activity in the brains of students that got question 51, correct?

[00:17:05] Andrea Goldin: Exactly. So, at the very beginning we were studying what we really didn't understand and we didn't expect that. We, we expected that those participants that could transfer would have a higher blood flow and that we would measure higher prefrontal cortex activity compared to the group that couldn't transfer what they had just learned. But we found the other way around.

[00:17:29] Hiromi: Why would that be? And why, why would someone who's using more of their brain be more likely to get the wrong answer?

[00:17:37] Andrea Goldin: Basically, it's because when you learn something, you start to make a better use of your neural resource. You are more efficient. Like, when you build a puzzle, you don't know where to start. You can start with borders and you can start by color, but you really don't know. And you could add almost any piece in any place and it might work. But if you already have the puzzle almost built and you have, I don't know, 10 pieces left, then it's much easier. You need less resources to understand where each of those 10 pieces go.

[00:18:20] Hiromi: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:21] Andrea Goldin: And so, to learn something in a way is to have the puzzle built in your brain.

[00:18:26] Hiromi: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:26] Andrea Goldin: And see, if you already know the things and you can build on those to continue learning new things, then it's like, you have the puzzle, you know where to put this little piece. You can put it here, or here, or here, and it might be hard but not that hard. But if you don't have the puzzle, and see, you have to start the puzzle all over again and again and again, it's really, really hard. You are not going to end with a very good puzzle made, and it would also be very hard to add new pieces.

[00:18:57] Hiromi: That's an excellent analogy. And Chris was observing a moment ago that maybe because our brains use more resources during learning, we can subconsciously develop ways of fooling ourselves into thinking we understand situations when we really don't. And I think your study confirms this, right?

[00:19:12] Andrea Goldin: Yes.

[00:19:13] Hiromi: How has this impacted the way that you interact with your students, let's say?

[00:19:19] Andrea Goldin: Yeah. Um, well, first, we have to be careful that many times it seems that the students are understanding, and they really believe that they are understanding, but actually the changes in their brain are not happening. And so, we should be more skeptical as teachers and also as a students, until we are sure that everybody understood.

[00:19:46] And naturally after this line of research, I changed the way I test my students, because now I don't ask for definitions or for explanations, or even for problem solving. Now, I'm always asking for them to explain in their own words. I request them to find an application of this in your life, in your personal life. It's harder for me as a teacher to grade those tests instead of just, "Okay, so tell me the definition of this and that, or solve this problem."

[00:20:24] But I see tests as an opportunity to continue building that puzzle, not only to check whether the puzzle is built or not, but to continue building the puzzle. And I understand that we are learning when you, you go to school, when you attend a class, you learn what they are teaching you, but you also learned in your life. What happened with the bus and what is happening with your partner or with your family or whatever? So, everything is being learned at the same time. And so, you might have built a different puzzle because of that.

[00:21:01] And so, I try to take into account those individual and personal puzzles to see whether they are really understanding what they learned or not.

[00:21:17] Hiromi: So, Chris, coming back to you, I thought that was interesting, that even though it takes some effort to really understand a concept and expend that energy, it seems like once that pattern is developed, you really expend less effort in the long run. Like almost kinda like a, it's almost like a form of resource investment, you know?

[00:21:35] Chris Do: Yeah. Well, another lesson my dad taught me is delayed gratification. You know, one of the things he would say to me all the time is, "Your life is long. Your ability to make it in this life, short. If you're willing to pay upfront the work and delay your gratification, the rest of your life will be easy." So he's like, "Go to school, get good marks, go out into the world and be productive, and then you can coast and enjoy the resting for life."

[00:22:08] Now as a young person, you're like, "No, I wanna enjoy my life now, that's what the youth is for, is to enjoy your life. I don't wanna do the work. I don't wanna study. I don't wanna prepare for the exam." And then later on I started to realize what the heck he was saying. So when I went to school at art center, I kind of lived like a design monk. I didn't date anybody, I was celibate for three and a half years. All my free time, you're gonna find me in two spots, the library, the computer lab, or trying to take like little power naps in my car or sleeping under the table. Now, what works for you might be very different in what worked for me, because I did nearly push myself to the point of total burnout.

[00:22:48] When I got outta school from 1995 to 2000, I worked for five years straight. And I don't work like a normal person 'cause I'm hyper efficient, extremely clear about what it is I wanna do. So when I worked for five years, I'm doing like 10 years of work here. Today, I'm not for working these crazy hours because it's unsustainable. Right around 2000, I was feeling burnt out. I'd been outta school for five years, and I had worked the entire time, no vacation, no holidays. I was in that first five-year startup mindset, "I need to build this business. I need to prove that what we're doing is valuable to someone and we're hitting certain strides."

[00:23:28] But simultaneously, I was also hiring new graduates who were trained in motion design, which I was not. And I felt a heavy sense of imposter syndrome. These young people that were coming outta school were better educated, had more skills, knew the tools better than I did. So I was starting to think, "My time is up. I'm a dinosaur compared to these young kids who have all these ideas." And it, it didn't help that I hired the hot shots, right? You wanna hire the best. So you're inviting the very best and sharpest minds to come work for you, and they're gonna start to run rings around you. Any old person in design knows what I'm talking about. The kids know so much.

[00:24:13] And so I'm thinking, "This is it, I'm done." At that time I decided, "You know what, I need to take a break from work. I have enough systems and protocols in place that it can run without me for a while." I took a three months sabbatical. My first real break from work. Coincidentally, I got an opportunity to teach at Otis. I'm like, "Okay, I'm not doing anything, I'll go teach at Otis." Of course, I was nervous. I had all the anxiety, but you gain clarity through articulation.

[00:24:39] And something that I got from that experience was finding my own self-worth. When a student asked me a question, I discovered that I actually knew something that somebody else wanted to know. We all walk around knowing tremendous amount of things, but because we do it so naturally it's second nature to us we think everybody must do the same thing and know the same thing. So we don't think there's any value there.

[00:25:07] So when these young students asked me questions about running a business, "How did I come up with that idea? What do you do when a client says this?" All of a sudden, I could feel myself coming alive, and they're helping to rebuild me, unbeknownst to them. Pebble by pebble, piece by piece, I'm going to be a new person.

[00:25:26] So that semester I came back full of energy, not because I needed three months off, but because the gift the students gave me. And so that's why I love teaching so much. One, I've been the beneficiary of it. Two, in orders of magnitude more, I found my self-confidence, my voice, my self-worth through teaching.

[00:25:53] So I was deep into this. I love teaching. If teaching actually paid you what it's supposed to pay you, I probably would never have become a designer or anything else. Sad fact in Americas that it doesn't pay very well. And so, I was running my business and I would teach at art center and Otis.

[00:26:10] That's my belief, that that's what makes you really valuable too. Okay? 'Cause a lot of us just pursue this, neglect these things, and we might make money, but we ruin our relationships and it's really boring 'cause we're missing.

[00:26:23] There was one point when we had two offices, one in New York and one it Santa Monica, a little over 20 people, a home base in Los Angeles, and mostly working with advertising agencies at making commercials. That's pretty much how we made our money. And during that time, a bad year for us would be four million dollars, a good year would be about six million. And so I'm running a multimillion dollar company, and Wednesday morning is my teaching day, so my calendar's just blocked off. I would drive from Santa Monica at two Pasadena, teach in the morning from let's say 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM.

[00:26:59] I would eat lunch, catch my breath, get in my car, drive back in traffic, swing by the office, check in with anybody, catch my breath, and then drive to Otis, which is right by the airport at LAX in massive traffic, and then teach from say 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM. And then on Thursday, especially, they would schedule me very lightly. Like no big pitches, no big company meetings 'cause my brain was fried, my energy was gone.

[00:27:30] And I did that for years. But as it happened over time, my recovery period got shorter and shorter, and I chose then to stop commuting to two schools quite literally across town and chose to either teach at Otis or at art center, but not both at the same time 'cause it was just too much for me.

[00:27:51] So many of us probably rightfully so are very careful about how we manage our time, so much so that we edit out everything that could possibly lead to a new adventure and to a new discovery. We all wanna be innovative. Well, we don't understand that innovation is inherently messy and wasteful. So it goes against our idea of being very prudent with how we spend our time.

[00:28:16] Now, if you are sitting around doing things purely because it gives you joy, th- there's nothing wrong with that, but that's not exactly the path towards innovation. Innovation is much more intentional and deliberate, where we know going in we have certain things that we're going to risk, but the reward it's worth it. And if we have setbacks or failures, we get ourselves back up and we say, "What do we learn from this? How do we evolve from this? And what is the next iteration of this idea? Or is this just not a good idea worth exploring?" At least we got that off our chest.

[00:28:49] The biggest thing is making that critical decision to step into unknown, to go to the edges of the spaces in which you're comfortable with and to step into a void with no assurance that anything's ever gonna work out. And for me that was when my friend Jose Cabeller asked me to make YouTube videos with him. I thought that was silly, there's no business model here, and I'm only gonna expose myself in ways that don't work. This is not good for my business. And why would anybody want to do this? And professional people don't do these kinds of things.

[00:29:21] We don't go out and make content, we don't tweet, we don't do the Grammy Graham, we don't do any of that stuff because we're busy being successful, hopefully captains of industry. That's what I was thinking. However, look at the world through this kind of lens, which is, it's not gonna kill me. Well, it's upside to us, I'm not even sure, but it seems like it could be good.

[00:29:42] So, I had to set aside my prejudice, my limited thinking around opportunity and not looking at it as threat, as work or as a chore, to be able to explore in a sandbox without fear of what it's gonna look like, without understanding and without receiving a business model there, I'm willing to throw myself into it and see it through. 'Cause it took years for it to actually become a business.

[00:30:05] Well, we had a stage, we have a lot of camera, and we have cinematographers and editors because we were in the business of making commercials and music videos. We have the space and the means in which you do it, that was the least challenging part. Now, do we have the motivation? That's the question, and what is the content?

[00:30:25] Jose was motivated because he knew that in order for us to launch an educational product, nobody knows us from Adam, so we need to make something so that they become aware of us, and then therefore we can talk about our products. He looked at it as a way of building top-of-funnel awareness, ToFu, right? And that's what he was trying to do.

[00:30:46] For me, being a socially awkward introverted person, not used to being in the spotlight, uh, that was a really big ask. And the other ask was time. Like, I'm supposed to be working on client-paying projects, what am I doing over here? And the last part is, what the heck am I going to say? What are we gonna do?

[00:31:06] Hiromi: I have some of those same questions every week. And if you're a content marketer, you probably do too. You know, especially if you're an introvert, how do we take that leap into creating meaningful content when we hate speaking? In our next episode, Chris shares his personal journey in overcoming his inhibitions as a teacher and a public speaker. We'll also hear from a PhD and bestselling author on the subject of introversion. How can we improve ourselves while focusing on others? Subscribe to find out. Thanks to Chris Do for sharing, and thanks to Professor Goldin for those insights, and of course, thanks to you for joining us on Reach.

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Reach - A B2B Marketing Podcast Presented By UviaUs