Everything I know– packaged up into the 1,036 pages below.
Not counting the 2,149 videos, 2,000 articles, and 750 speaking engagements.
22 years of digital marketing as a practitioner and educator.
You spend the first decade of your career LEARNING. You spend the second decade of your career DOING. And you spend the third decade of your career TEACHING.
That’s what Jack Ma said and what my mentors, far older and wiser, have taught me.
Don’t boast about your 6 figures and 7 figures or about your flashy lifestyle.
Boast about the successes of your mentees– cheer them on and do everything you can to help them win, in the same way your mentors did for you.
Even if you are not a Karen Freberg, you can still teach others from right where you are, to lift where you stand.
Formal educators must work with private sector professionals like us to bridge the training gap that students face when they graduate- so we can help them get great jobs and be awesome employees in our companies.
Karen not only is an incredible professor, but somehow finds the time to train up professors who want to teach social media to their students, write textbooks, speak at conferences, and be a practitioner herself.
We are all teachers, even if not formally, and can learn from her example.
But if you don’t have a mentor, how do you convince someone super successful to take you on?
Here’s the “secret”:
Study their materials and know it by heart– that will place you ahead of 99% of the random people that hit them up for free consulting, money, introductions to Mark Zuckerberg, or whatever.
Write articles and make videos about what you’ve learned from them, demonstrating mastery of the material– not blowing faint praise.
Boost your top posts for a dollar a day, building up your personal brand and getting exposure of what you’ve said to this person and their peers.
They will see it and maybe even reach out, like your tweets, etc…
As you’re doing this, you’ll see the alignment between what’s important to them versus what matters to you– your 3×3 grid and their 3×3 grid intersecting.
Hint: don’t make it about money or the external trappings of wealth. That means you must have a solid mission and demonstrated competency.
After you’ve done this for a couple months, only then reach out to them. And instead of asking for favors at your first encounter, ask what you can do for them.
The reason I know this works is because this is what I do– at scale.
And it’s what our young adults do to build their network.
And it’s what our clients do to build their personal brands systematically.
I spent the first 10 years of my career learning. I spent the last 10 years of my career doing. The next 10 years of my career, I’m focusing on teaching.
Find people like me who are wanting to give back. I’ve had 50,000 hours of digital marketing experience and there’s nothing that makes me happier than seeing other young leaders get the same opportunity that I got 20 years ago.
