Wanna be free? Practice audacity
Fear doesn't have to own you.
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We invited folks we know have different perspectives from us and who aren’t afraid to say what they really think. Our goal: enrich your experience by sharing new takes on each week’s topic.
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The Freeing Life of an Audacious Person
Robbie Abed, Author of Fire Me I Beg You, founder/CEO of No Middle, a global creative brand & marketing consultancy. Former Deloitte, SAP, DELL. Featured in the New York Times, Business Insider, Forbes, CBS News and Lifehacker. Interesting facts:
Recently moved to Dubai to expand No Middle and help companies participate in the UAE & Saudi Arabian economy.
Founded No Middle after one of his freelance clients refused to listen to his advice.
“The CEO of Deloitte Consulting loved my resignation letter so much he sent it to the entire company. He is now the CEO of Deloitte Global.”
Audacity leads to the freedom you’re really seeking
Devin is free. In this episode, when she talks about being free because of cancer—that is the realization we all need to get to.
If we want to be audacious, we have to be free. In order to do that, we can't be afraid of the outcomes.
When we don't put ourselves out there because we're afraid of the outcomes, that means we are not free. That means we are not audacious.
And if you listen to people like Rick Rubin, for example, he talks about the art of creating and how good movies and good artists create for themselves. They don't create based on what they think the audience would want because that's how we get mediocre content. So, you have to be audacious to believe in yourself.
[DSC Note: This is an excerpt of an interview with Rubin on NPR where he describes creating for oneself and seeing the creation process as a devotional act:
Rachel Martin: Are you always right?
Rubin: No. I'm right for me. That's all. And that's all I'm trying to do. My job is to be true to myself. When you present a piece of work to me, I can reflect back what's going on in me. With as little noise involved. Without worrying about, "Oh, but there's a release date. Oh, but how's the radio gonna react?"
Forgetting all of the external baggage that weighs down the artistic process. And getting to a pure thing. You could almost think of it as a devotional act.
We're making something with our hearts and souls, and then we're sharing it with the world. And if people like it, it's great, and if they don't, we wouldn't change it, because we've made it with our hearts and souls, and it's true. It's a true thing we're doing.]
These are the types of people we admire and follow online. We admire them because they're audacious. We admire them because they are free. And we all pursue that freedom, but often, we don't have the guts to act because we're afraid of the outcomes.
In this episode’s opening story, Devin and Margaret mentioned a man who was fired from Okta and published a LinkedIn post criticizing, in great detail, Okta’s culture and other issues with the company and tagged the CEO of Okta in his post.
Now listen to me, I've been on record plenty of times advising folks to be a “Positive Pam” on their way out of a company. Never lead with negativity, and especially don't put it online. You know, don’t burn bridges. I am hardcore about that.
But there's one thing I can't deny about that LinkedIn post: He had the audacity to do it.
And what audacity means is that he's free from the outcomes because he’s not afraid of them. Is that going to hurt his career? Absolutely. Will it prevent him from getting other jobs? If they're smart, they wouldn't hire him. But I can't knock his audacity to do it.
You can also tell from his posts that he's not meant for a corporate career. He'll probably start his own company. If you zoom out for him, the question you have to ask yourself is, in five years, will he regret that post or will it be the spark of something new?
My guess is the latter because he had the audacity to post it even though he knows it is not good for his long-term career. I think he recognized that this was an opportunity to practice audacity, to be free, and he seized it in the post within his critiques and then included a pitch to future employers right after.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, this is where most of us would love to be. But you can’t do it until you're free. And to be free of the outcomes means you believe this is the right decision.
The moral of the story: get to Devin’s state of mind as soon as you can (hopefully, you don’t need a near-death experience to achieve it!) because she is free now, and the world is open to her because she’s not afraid of what will happen when she believes in herself.
❤️ Love you bunches ❤️
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Tools are table stakes, creativity is your competitive advantage
Marketers have become tool masters and not creative geniuses. And that's probably the biggest epidemic we have in marketing.
Becoming a tool master is just the bare minimum at this point. Because the market is growing, it's continuing to globalize, which means tools are accessible to anyone and everyone—from India to South America to California to Canada to the Middle East. These tools are globally available and they're getting smarter every day.
The only differentiator left is creativity. The creative marketer will win.
(There are a lot of marketers who still don't understand the tools. They will not survive this. They're the first ones figuring out why they're not being employed, or why they're not getting raises, or why demand for their skills isn’t abundant; it’s because they don't understand the tools.)
So, with marketers across the globe serving as tool masters, we are experiencing a sea of sameness driven by those tools. It’s why everything looks and feels the same: it’s all driven by the tools. One example is the mood board. Almost every creative project begins with the same thing: a mood board.
What do other sites look like?
What does this look like?
What do they say?
Here’s a better question: how do we make this unique, trustworthy, and valuable?
Tool-driven playbooks like this lead companies to look and feel the same. As Margaret said in the episode, everything looks the same because companies are all looking at the same thing.
There are a lot of marketers who say they're creative, but when you give them a basic creative brief and the creative freedom to execute, many come back with something that looks like everything else.
We've lost our creativity. We've lost our industry knowledge. And we’ve replaced them with the same set of questions and sources instead of thinking for ourselves and being audacious.
If you want to be different and you want to advance, you have to be truly creative. To be creative, you need to be audacious. Being a tool master marketer alone won’t get you there.
Creativity is the number one factor to succeed in your career after you master the tools.
Story: Robbie’s lesson in audacity
“You were such a pussy during your salary negotiation. I owned you.”
This is what the VP who hired me told me six months after he hired me.
At first, I was upset. He took advantage of me during the salary negotiation for my new director-level job—what an asshole! He just had to make sure I lost money my first year employed with his firm. This f*cking guy knew he was underpaying me the entire time.
But what started out as maddening turned out to be a milestone conversation for me. And this asshole VP? He became a mentor of mine. He liked my work. He believed in me. He guided me in the right direction.
Most of all, he helped me see my worth. The day he told me I could have asked for more, what he was really trying to say was, “Do you know how much you’re worth?”
He wasn’t trying to screw me over. He expected a negotiation. Instead, I took the “honorable” route and said something like, “I respect you and the person who referred me, and out of respect, I’ll take the job and compensation. I’m not going to negotiate.”
Idiot. Big. Idiot. Sandwich.
It wasn’t up to him to make sure I got paid what I was worth. It was up to me.
I needed to have the audacity to stand up for myself.
If I did—not only would I have had more money, but ironically, the VP would have had more respect for me.
A few years later, I quit to go out on my own. He tried to raise my pay so I wouldn’t leave.
I declined. Not because I didn’t want to negotiate or because I didn’t have the bravery to do it. It was because I finally understood my worth and what I wanted, so whatever he countered with wasn’t going to be enough.
I declined the offer because I had the audacity to want more
and believed I could get it.
His respect for me was now 10x higher. Eventually, my pay got 10x higher, too—though I had to go broke first. (But that’s another story about the importance of bravery after you’ve exercised your audaciousness:)
What mattered to me most was living for and choosing the best for myself, which left me with no need for approval from others.
My audacity to believe in myself and advocate for what I wanted with determined confidence is what made all the difference.