E250 | Chris Do: Reinventing Yourself & Doing What You Love

“You need to be able to communicate your ideas to other people, because whoever is the most effective [at] doing that wins the game.” (47:00)

When it comes to setting yourself apart in any field- whether that be art or finance, education or entrepreneurship- the skills of thinking critically, communicating effectively and learning continuously rise to the top.

And yet, these skills are seldom taught in traditional education or schooling. 

Chris Do is trying to change that.

Chris Do is a self described “loud introvert”, recovering graphic designer, middle child, serial entrepreneur, Emmy award-winning director, educator and founder of The Futur.  He has served as a chairman and advisor to several high level organizations, and has taught Sequential Design for over 15 years.

In today’s episode, Chris shares some valuable insights from his experiences, including:

• Specific tips for creating great content on a budget (19:00)
• Why you can’t afford to NOT take risks (32:00)
• How to overcome a career change (37:15)
• The 3 critical skills necessary to be successful in the 21st century (45:00)

How to connect with Chris:

All Social Media: @theChrisDo

Website: thefutur.com

YouTube (800+ videos)

Futur Podcast (Top 10 ranked for Marketing)

How Art of Coaching can help you:

If you are in a situation where you feel extraordinarily frustrated at work, maybe there’s power dynamics or agendas getting in the way of the stuff you’re trying to accomplish.

Or maybe you’ve just lost your spark because it seems like the organization doesn’t want to change or is sterile. 

Or maybe you’re just looking for more feedback as a leader and you feel like you’re not growing as much as you would like to.

If any of this sounds familiar, then make sure to check out our Live Events for 2023. We offer a wide variety of workshops that are all dedicated to helping people with these real-life situations. 

Real Life happens in the gray area, there’s no getting around that. And real leadership often requires a tremendous amount of improvisation or being able to think on the spot. This is exactly why tactical improv is a huge part of our clinics at art of coaching.

If you want to learn, you have to get hands on, you have to be able to explore the full range of your decision-making, your communication skills, your behaviors under pressure, and your ability to think laterally.

So don’t wait – find the right workshop for your needs HERE. 

If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, please consider joining our newsletter as well. This is your door to exclusive discounts, more tips, a combination of rants, reflections and research strategies we come across and utilize on a daily basis.

Lastly, we cannot forget to thank our sponsor Dynamic Fitness & Strength for their support.

 Dynamic Fitness & Strength is our go-to equipment partner. Fully customizable and manufactured in the heartland of America- whether you’re looking to outfit your home gym or entire weight room, visit mydynamicfitness.com to get started. Tell them Brett and the Art of Coaching Team sent you!

Brett Bartholomew  0:14  

Real life happens in the gray area, there’s no getting around that. And real leadership often requires a tremendous amount of improvisation or being able to think on the spot. This is exactly why tactical improv is a huge part of our clinics at Art of Coaching. If you want to learn, you have to get hands on, you have to be able to explore the full range of your decision making your communication skills, your behaviors under pressure, and your ability to think laterally. 

 

Now, that sounds intense, don’t worry, we make all of our stuff fun, yet practical. It is research backed, but also real life approved. So if you want to get better at this space, go to artofcoaching.com/events. That’s artofcoaching.com/events right now and check out current dates and locations. All of our workshops, and I can’t emphasize this enough, are open to all professions. And they’re going to help you with your creative problem solving your communication skills, your self awareness and your ability to navigate power dynamics, which I’d argue is one of the most important abilities you can train in the workplace and the realities of today. 

 

Our workshops are two days, they’re small group oriented, which means you’re gonna get a ton of individualized attention. And we always offer early bird discounts, and payment plans. So go to artofcoaching.com/events. Right now, that’s artofcoaching.com/events right now,  

 

A quick note thing in today’s premium sponsor Dynamic Fitness and Strength. At Art of Coaching, we serve a wide range of leadership oriented audiences from first responders, tech, finance and corporate America. But we still also proudly serve our initial base of strength and conditioning coaches across high school collegiate private and professional sectors. So regardless of whether you’re a high school strength coach or a member of a fortune, 500 organization, Dynamic Fitness and Strength is your go to for facility design 

 

Their team will take you step by step through the process of planning the perfect facility, and manufacturing the best equipment for your organization and your budget. They go through amazing 3D renders so that you can perfectly visualize your room before any building begins. They have a team with real coaching experience that actually understands and respects your goals, and your program. Unparalleled customization options, they can do things with their layered technology that I’ve never seen another company be able to do that helps showcase your brand and enliven team spirit, and they have excellent customer service. 

 

So whether you want or need racks, plate loaded equipment, selectorized equipment, barbells bumpers, storage platforms, the only thing they will not get you is a date or a job. And they can help make sure that you are better prepared for both. And better yet, in all seriousness, they will help make sure your team has everything it needs to perform its best. 

 

So go to mydynamicfitness.com Right now, or give them a call their numbers on their website and tell them you’re a listener of the Art of Coaching podcast to get a special rate That is mydynamicfitness.com or give them a call their numbers on their website and tell them you’re a listener to the Art of Coaching podcast to get a special rate. 

 

One more personal note here before we get started every year as a family. And now as a staff, we try to do something special to give back. And we donate a portion of proceeds from my first book conscious coaching to the Leukemia Lymphoma Foundation. And also the Alzheimer’s Association is something we do every year because we all know somebody affected by one of those two diseases. And what we do is we sell signed copies of my book, this is not coming from a place where Oh, I think I’m so cool. Everybody should find over my autograph or anything like that. It’s just because a poor attribute of our business is conveying Midwest warmth, and appreciation. 

 

So it’s a chance for me to say thank you, personalize these things and send them to you. So if you want to donate to a good cause, and he knows somebody that maybe would appreciate the book, or maybe you want to buy a bunch of them for your institution as other organizations have, or you want to give one to another whatever it is. Go to brettbartholomew.net/signedcopy. That’s Brett Bartholomew dotnet slash signed copy, and you can get one sent to you. And yes, we ship all over the world. 

 

The book is available out this website cheaper than it is on Amazon, though don’t get it twisted, we’d very much appreciate all Amazon purchases. We just can’t personalize those since Amazon ships those. So if you buy here, all you have to do is buy this cover shipping and we will sign it and personalize it and send it out to you. Now if that URL is too much of a mouthful, please just go to the show notes. We’ll make it very easy. for you to just click on the link in the show notes. 

 

But if you do have a pen and paper handy, it’s just brettbartholomew.net/signedcopy. And again, every single year, we donate a portion of proceeds to the Alzheimer’s Association and live Leukemia Lymphoma Foundation. Thank you so much for your support. I look forward to writing your name and sending you a message in the book

 

Welcome to the Art of coaching Podcast. I’m Brett Bartholomew, and at a young age poor communication nearly cost me my life. Now, I help others navigate the gray area of social interaction, power dynamics and communication so they can become more adaptable leaders, regardless of their profession, age or situation. This podcast is for everybody who is fascinated with solving people problems. So if you’re in the no nonsense type, who appreciates frank conversations, advice you can put to use immediately and learning how others navigate the messy realities of leadership. You’re in the right place. I’m glad that you’re joining us. Let’s dive in.

 

Today, I’m joined on the podcast by Chris Do. Now, this was one of the most difficult podcasts I’ve ever recorded. Why I’ll simple we try to keep these to an hour, maybe an hour and some change at the longest. But I essentially could have had a four to five hour conversation with Chris, because he’s got such very interest and expertise and things related to marketing, education, business, pricing, strategies, negotiations, all things that really sit under that umbrella of leadership of coaching of being able to get your point across and connect with more people. 

 

And I’ll admit, because we also try to keep this podcast conversational. There are some times where, you know, I wanted to geek out on a topic, but I had to stop, rein it in and come back to a focus question. So we could provide you guys with more value. So give me some grace there in those moments, because I nerd out just the same as many of you do as well. Now, not only is Chris giving a ton of talks and provided a ton of useful content, on negotiations, pricing, strategy, branding communication, he has also taught sequential design for over 15 years. 

 

And he has done this all over the world. He served as a chairman of the board and advisors for numerous companies. Let’s just put it this way. This is an incredibly humble man who has had a lot of dense and diverse experiences. And I’m excited to bring the insights of some of those experiences to you today. So enjoy

 

Everybody, thanks for sitting down with me once again and joining me and today’s guest, Chris Do. Chris, welcome to the show.

 

Chris Do  8:09  

Thanks for having me Brett.

 

Brett Bartholomew  8:09  

Hey, I want to ask you something just relatively obvious, but weird, maybe off the bat as we warm this up. You and I had no prior relationship. You’re one of the few people with a profile quite like yours who actually read a DM responded to it. And then was like, Yeah, I’ll get on the show. Our audience has an interest in all things influence psychology, power dynamics, communication, what made you trust us enough to jump on the show today?

 

Chris Do  8:36  

You know, I usually just go with my gut. I think the way that you phrase your message and how you come across on social gives me a good feeling. And oftentimes, people just they either don’t ask in the right way, or they don’t ask at all or they ask too aggressively. And that turns me off. And so I checked out your profile a little bit me seems like a decent guy seems like an interesting place to go. I just said yes, 

 

Brett Bartholomew  9:00  

Yeah, I appreciate that’s simple, concise and straight to the point. But it is always fascinating. And it’s some of what we’ll get into today. what makes people tick, you have a rich reservoir of content online. If anybody did not listen to the bio guys go back and listen to it. And of course, we’re gonna put all of his resources below. But I wonder just Chris Do as a person what got you interested in this domain, right, whether you want to call it marketing, I know there’s a teaching aspect to what you do business, all things, providing value to people and helping others get those resources into the hands of other folks like what made this interesting to you. What’s some of your story regarding that?

 

Chris Do  9:39  

My journey is a pretty typical in terms of like what somebody does, you go to school, you acquire a skill set and you go apply that into the marketplace to see if the theory matches with reality, and that’s what I did for 15 plus years. In that time, I mostly made commercials and music videos. I was teaching about five years out of school And I got a lot of fulfillment. But it wasn’t what you may or may not know me for today. And so in 2014, something really critical happened. It was like a freight train crash into my life not so dramatic in terms of its actual thing. But on a psychological level, it felt like that. 

 

A former classmate of mine, his name is Jose Cabella. Yeah, he’s Puerto Rican, he just he describes himself as an obnoxious Puerto Rican. And he’s the guy who could walk into a room full of strangers, totally unaware, wearing sandals in a T shirt into a room full of suits, and feel completely comfortable, somebody who’s super comfortable in his own skin, make a conversation and start a friendship with someone. This is the exact opposite personality type as I am. So when I saw him in school, like I knew of him, but we kept our distance, because I’m an extreme introvert, I’m super shy. And I have social anxiety, all those kinds of issues. 

 

But he comes into my life. And he says, you’re really interested and passionate about education. So am I, why don’t we join forces and do something much bigger than what we could do individually. I have the systems and frameworks. And I’ve been doing this for some time. He says to me, you have the business acumen, the reputation and the support services, it seems like a match made in heaven in terms of content production. And that’s the moment in which my life starts to change. I reluctantly said yes to him. And I went on this multi year journey of finding out that I have something to say that I can be comfortable in front of the camera, and still learning and struggling with being in social situations.

 

Brett Bartholomew  11:31  

So there’s a lot of things I want to touch on there, we’re going to start we’re going to continue just to hone in on you as an individual. And I appreciate the transparency, that just you talking about being introverted. Having social anxiety, I remember in one of your videos, you had mentioned that you had mentioned, man, I just hate the sound of my own voice. And I know this is something I can relate to. But there’s this dissonance on my end, and I just asked this to establish kind of a relatability or see if there’s a differentiation here, of no matter how I feel about my voice or even seeing myself like I can’t just ignore this call that there’s other folks that want that information 

 

Even if I devalue it, which I think we all inherently have a little imposter phenomenon or just, you know, your familiarity breeds contempt. So when you hear yourself, that’s a heck of a lot of familiarity. Was that ever the case with you, where you just are what helps you get over that? No matter how you feel about your voice, or seeing yourself on camera? What is something that helps you just bridge that gap and say, Hey, I’m going to do it regardless,

 

Chris Do  12:30  

I have a theory there. I think everybody, people who are really good looking like people who are models and actors and actresses, and people radio personalities, I think there was a point in their life somewhere where they had that moment of hesitation. And it’s because when we hear on voice filter through our ear, it sounds different than when we hear playback and recorded. And I think it’s about just becoming familiar with that and getting used to it. So there’s a little bit of cognitive dissonance that happens when you think you sound cooler than you really do. 

 

And you think you look better than you really do. And then there’s a photograph that’s objectively recording some version of you and Oh, I just don’t look that good. I don’t sound that good. So it was just a realignment. And at the very beginning, it’s very difficult for me to hear my own voice. It’s something I could not even stand. And through repeated exposure a little bit of time, you start to get used to it. Now, I feel really weird when I speak into this microphone, and I can’t hear myself back. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  13:27  

Yeah, no, that’s perfect in terms of and you’re right, I mean, just the the physiology of the human body, right, what we hear and what other people hear through that transmission. So odd and interesting. Now, within that, not only are you incredibly astute from a business marketing standpoint, and you have an inherent interest in psychology, so gives the listeners an idea of where we’re gonna go with this. You also, I mean, you’ve taught a long time both in formal and informal settings for the audience, can you give a little bit more insight around your formal teaching background, and then how you found that translated into the online domain?

 

Chris Do  14:03  

Sure, about five years after I graduated from art school, I was invited to come and teach. And so that is in 2000. And I taught at Art Center and private art schools in California in Southern California for about 15 years. And towards the end of that I was transitioning out of teaching at a formal art school towards teaching online and their vast differences between these two worlds, teaching with a group that’s an EMIC that is signed up that is heavily invested in learning. As opposed to this now more asymmetrical asynchronous way of teaching, you’d speak into a piece of glass you speak into a microphone and you pretend someone is on the other side listening in having a dialogue back and forth with you. 

 

So you have to anticipate some of that conversation. Now, as odd as this might sound, as a teacher is one who wants to give value to others. It’s really It feels very dysregulated to speak to someone and not know anything and get zero feedback. So I find that recording videos is extremely draining for me. Whereas when I’m working with small groups of people who are signed up for a very specific thing, that’s when I really come alive. And recently had travel restrictions being lifted and all being able to be around people again, to pull out a piece of paper and a marker and just go through ideas and answer questions in that dynamic way. And getting that feedback, the push and pull. They make fun of you, you make fun of them. I’m in my happy place now.

 

Brett Bartholomew  15:29  

Yeah, well, and I love that you mentioned that. And this is something I just learned about you as well. So you just teaching in front of small groups, that’s a big part of our business model is the past industry I came out of I mean, you would have these 300 person nondescript conference rooms, you know, it’s all kind of just PowerPoint heavy teaching people what to think instead of teaching them how to think. And I love this small groups as well, we just decided to do that. And that’s something that I know our audience can relate to. And I can in the sense that that’s why video I love, like, yeah, you’re talking to a piece of glass, some of the stuff that makes that difficult as well as, when you are putting stuff online. 

 

It’s hard to go as deep as you’d like, right, compared to those small groups. And I think that that’s something that’s tricky, too. We’ve created this society that they want to give information. But man, I have 15 seconds or 30 seconds, or how long is the algorithm going to let me talk, you know, from being somebody like yourself, who values true teaching, teaching people to think deeply? Like, how do you balance that knowing that the internet of things sometimes does require you to overly simplify, not necessarily always dumb it down, but you, you can’t go in as much depth as you’d like, is that something that you have to balance, you’re just kind of say, hey, it is what it is, you just got to keep doing it. And you know, get over that.

 

Chris Do  16:48  

We may be an anomaly here, because we’re used to producing long format content, and then shorts, and reels and TikToks of the world come about and change the whole nature of how we consume. And we see that it’s responsive to a shrinking attention span, I totally understand that. If you’re very intentional in what you do, and you you’re tightly scripted and edited, you can get out a powerful message that’s deep, and that’s complex within a minute, how do I know I used to make commercials that were 30 seconds long. And they can convey a lot of emotion, energy, big ideas, even little ideas in 30 seconds. 

 

So minute was a generous amount of time, and then comes along YouTube, when there’s no limitation as to what you can upload, you can upload a 10 hour video if you wanted to. And then that same discipline and the rigor and the thought process that would go into crafting something much shorter, gets thrown out the window. It’s a hard lesson we learned in the beginning, in that we didn’t take our audience seriously. We didn’t respect their time. So we didn’t organize the content the way we should have. And I learned from that. 

 

So now we do structured keynote presentations, there’s exercises and things like that. And the way that I get that dynamic feeling of working with people again, is I invite a small group of people, usually between three to 10 people to come into the studio. So I’m actually teaching somebody again in my element. And it’s being recorded with multiple cameras. I’m moving around, I’m not constrained by sitting in a chair and a microphone and not worrying about focus and things like that. So those things have been taken care of. 

 

What we found out is that people watch more of our longer content than they do the shorter content, maybe because we haven’t mastered it, but also because I like to structure, a conversation, a story, some big rhetorical questions, get people start to think and then give them some exercises to work on so that I can respond. As you know, if you teach, it’s not about what you say it’s about what’s retained and understood and applied from the other person. Who really difficult to do when you’re in a room of one.

 

Brett Bartholomew  18:43  

Yeah, no, absolutely. And while we’re on that topic, you know, you mentioned the term we a lot, I think, you know, one just to address. Yes, you do do a tremendous job with your long form content of keeping people engaged. It’s tasteful. It’s sharp, it’s clean, it’s clear. What about and take this as you know, more of an adversarial simulation, right? Just being devil’s advocate. 

 

Chris Do  19:02  

Sure. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  19:03  

There are people out there that agree wholeheartedly. Yep, want to script it want to keep it tight here, my talking points. But they look around and they don’t have access to a creative team. Or I know something that we, we dealt with is now I live in a rural part of Georgia, we want to get outside of the main city, we had lived in LA we want to get away from noise. It was really hard to find somebody who did have those skill sets that we could outsource to, you know, that didn’t need to be coached along the way. Right. 

 

There’s this gap of like, of course, outsourcing is part of the answer if you’re a busy human, but they’re on one end, you can have folks that you know, it’s it might be out of their budget. Now we can have the argument of like, oh, yeah, well, what’s your time really worth? What’s this really worth? I get that and then there’s other end where there’s just people that are like, you know, they’re not pros, the reality there. 

 

My question to you is, how does the average person find great creative support aside from Fiverr Upwork. And then where, you know, like if like, How do they manage that struggle? Because it’s just it is tough Chris, right. Like, the tools built in inherently, whether it’s TikTok or Instagram, even though they try to make it simple for the average person working at a shit ton, and the average person that doesn’t have knowledge of those skill sets, any tips for them to make it a little bit more easy, organic, accessible?

 

Chris Do  20:21  

Yeah. Is this a question for content creators. So how to get over the technical hurdles and things like that 

 

Brett Bartholomew  20:27  

Subject matter experts who are trying to find help via content creators, if that makes sense. Is that clear? 

 

Chris Do  20:32  

Oh, I see. Yeah. So what do they need help with? 

 

Brett Bartholomew  20:35  

Yeah, there’s certain subject matter experts agree, hey, we have content that we know, like, we’ve got to put it out into the world, we have our talking points, they need to be crisp, concise, but we need somebody else that can help us chop that edit that visualize it so that they do stay engage. So they don’t have to dumb it down. Because that’s an issue a lot of our audience has is, I don’t want to have to dumb it down. I’d like my message out there. To your point. If you have the right creative team and the right approach, you don’t have to, then they say, how do I find the right creative team without having to go through freelancer? Hell, you know, trying to find the right fit.

 

Chris Do  21:10  

Right. Okay, I get it. Now, I love this question, because you’re teeing me up to answer this in there. Like there’s so many different strategies I can share with you. So let’s start here. All thinking starts with words. And when those words are formed, oftentimes, they’re written on a blog post or something like that. And if you’re a subject matter expert, and you’ve written blogs, long form articles, if you’ve written multiple books, this is a great starting point 

 

What you do is you would have someone that you bring on on a remote working level, to scrape this content, and then to translate this into more appropriate formats for where your audience is going to be. Now you have to ask yourself this question. First of all, who is my audience? Who am I speaking to? And you want to be as specific as possible? And you have to imagine, and ask yourself this question, where are they hanging out to get their entertainment and their news from?

 

Brett Bartholomew  22:03  

Hey, if you are in a situation where you feel extraordinarily frustrated at work, maybe there’s power dynamics, or agendas, getting in the way of the stuff you’re trying to accomplish, maybe it’s just you’ve lost your spark, because it seems like the organization doesn’t want to change or is sterile. Or maybe you’re just looking for more feedback as a leader and you feel like you’re not growing as much as you would like to, then make sure to go to artofcoaching.com/events right now 

 

We offer a wide variety of workshops that are all dedicated to helping people with these situations, it was pretty simple. There are a lot of areas in my life, I felt like man, I wish I would have had this information sooner, I wish I would have had this guidance sooner. And we wanted to create those things for you. So it doesn’t matter the field you’re in, it doesn’t matter, your age, your expertise, anything like that. We host workshops all around the country, all around the world. And we make them as affordable as possible. We have early bird discounts. Payment Plans, just don’t forget, the best way to learn is to be hands on. 

 

I understand that people have families, I have one too. But you’re also going to connect with some tremendous people, you’re going to get first hand experience, and there is no way shape or form you are going to leave being worse, if you actually apply yourself, come with an open mind. Get engaged, have some fun, and grow artofcoaching.com/events. 

 

If you’ve enjoyed the podcast, please consider joining our newsletter as well. If you go to artofcoaching.com/begin, you are going to be able to sign up for our newsletter, which is going to give you exclusive discounts, more tips, a combination of rants, reflections, research strategies, we try to mix it up, we try to keep it fun. The last thing we want is you to be stressed out when you open your inbox. So sometimes our emails are just simply a monthly roundup of helpful resources. 

 

Sometimes it’s reflections of things that I’ve learned or thought about that week. And I talked about it in a very frank straightforward way. Other times, we might just share a couple other points or considerations that we’ve learned from other leaders that you’re going to be able to use in your daily practice. Regardless, we are dedicated and determined to bring you value, we won’t hit it out of the park every time. We’re real people, we make mistakes, but we make them full on and with the right intention. So go to artofcoaching.com/begin and sign up now.

 

Chris Do  24:33  

Now you have to ask yourself this question. First of all, who is my audience? Who am I speaking to? And you want to be as specific as possible. And you have to imagine and ask yourself this question, where are they hanging out to get their entertainment and their news from? So it could be podcasts, it could be some format just like this. And so then what you would do is you would work with someone who would either send you the equipment that you need and you have to make some investment, you know. 

 

Scare money, don’t make money, you got to spend some money right It’s not a lot you can get set up for under 100 bucks or you can spend $10,000 Depends on your appetite for the quality of the work that you want to create. Thankfully, with the advancements in technology, things are getting smaller and cheaper. So you get really high quality at a certain point for a fairly affordable price, you’ll record yourself and you can record yourself speaking into the mic. Some some really like cheap tips to get started. If you have a laptop with a USB mic, get yourself under a heavy blanket, drape this over right at your talking points and speak right into that. And you get the best sound quality ever, right.

 

You can go into a closet full of clothes do the same thing. Or you have a luxury car, getting the luxury car, set up your laptop and recording there. The acoustics are pretty good. So this is the easiest way to translate your words into other kinds of words. So spoken word and then transmit that and scale that up infinitely in an asynchronous way. That’s easy. Level two is to do the exact same thing, except for now speak to a camera, a little bit more equipment involved. But again, there’s a lot of people people that I know, if you need resources, later, I’ll share with you that they’ll set up your equipment, they’ll have someone show up your house, wherever you are, with the equipment that you that they’ve purchased with you for you set it up so that everything’s go. So you just turn two buttons on, and you’re ready to create content. 

 

The technical stuff should not be the barrier to you creating content, it’s about your ideas. And if you have a lot of ideas, there’s many more formats, which you can translate to, I’ll give you one more thing. You can take those articles, those blog posts, the books that you’ve written, and you could translate them into information graphics, you can translate them into carousels, which are 10 slide images that you can share on Instagram, and LinkedIn the same thing, you could share literally the exact same posts, from Instagram to LinkedIn. And then now you’re getting massive reach, you’re becoming an omni channel creator. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  26:54  

Yeah, those are perfect tips. And I appreciate you know, these are things that you cover a lot. But I don’t think that it’s stuff that people can hear enough, right? Because we do create these barriers for ourselves. And people just have these self limiting beliefs about it. Now, I especially love the idea. And I remember telling my wife about this, there does need to be more accessible situations where like you said, people come and they set it up and you purchase because I’ve told her, Hey, I’m the type of person that I would like to go into the office. I don’t care if it’s midnight, or 3am. 

 

If I have an idea hit a couple buttons. I’m not worried about box lighting. I’m not worried, because there is a point to where it gets a little bit. You can’t worry about perfection, so much right? Like, or would you disagree with the advice that sometimes early on even if you have to capture this stuff, guerilla style raw with your phone, even if it’s not the perfect angle, the perfect audio, it’s just better to get started and get it out there isn’t it 

 

Chris Do  27:46  

It is and there is something that has happened within I guess the last five to 10 years is that we equate highly polished videos and productions as being inauthentic and overly produce. So it gets in the way of someone connecting with you. Now, that doesn’t mean that you should go out into the wild on a windy day and hold up your mic. Because that’s going to be so hard to listen to because some people are very sensitive to hearing like myself, or to sound. You want to avoid those mistakes. But the technology that you carry every single day in your pocket is already good enough and far superior to what we were using back in the early 2000s. Yeah, so just keep that in mind.

 

Brett Bartholomew  28:26  

No question. I think you know, another thing that really attracted me to you is the way that you understand that teaching and entrepreneurship and in our view, we you know, we use the term coaching is synonymous with leading teaching guiding all those things. There are a lot of tie ins here. Now just to contextualize this, since we’re still getting to know one another and to set the question up for success. You know, coming from an industry that typically did not look fondly on entrepreneurship, right? You can almost equate it to like, the clergy. 

 

Like if you went out and you created a brand for yourself all this is bad. And I think a lot of this comes from leadership Tomes, too, that, you know, you’re talking about servant based leadership. And this idea that if you’re building something that also benefits you like it can’t you know, like, we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. But in reality, great entrepreneurship and great teaching are synonymous. It’s about problem solving, making things accessible, but I’d rather hear your point of view, why is entrepreneur, Why is there a tie in in your mind between entrepreneurialship entrepreneurial type thinking and effective teaching? 

 

Chris Do  29:31  

I think they’re the same. I really do. The byproduct of what you do is different, but they’re essentially the same skill set. I think being an entrepreneur is about being a good teacher. I’ll explain it so that people aren’t thinking like you just grasping at straws and trying to tie to things that don’t fit. When you start out, especially for me as in the creative service space. I do something artistic, I’m able to sell to someone. 

 

The only way I can grow my business is if I’m able to teach someone else to do some version of what it is that I do. So I can build my business up beyond what I can build myself, this is really important. So what typically happens is you bring in some junior, a junior salesperson, a junior creative person, and you train them up. Now, they might be able to achieve 80% of what you do. And so you’re getting tremendous return on investment there. Because what you pay them is a lot less than what you’re able to charge a client, right. And then within that 20% gap, the difference between what they’re able to produce, and what you expect of your own team and yourself the standards in which you said, you then work on that part, or you aren’t direct or coach that person up to get to that final 100% or so. 

 

So that’s, I really believe that and the people who are really poor teachers, their business will suffer, they hold on to too much work. They’re micromanagers. They’re the people that creatives hate, where you put your hand on someone else’s hand and said, move it like this. And so what you’re doing effectively, is you’re turning off the thinking switch, and someone’s praying, and saying, I’ll just wait for the boss to tell me what to do. Because every time I try something, they kill it. And then I get reprimanded, so I’m not going to try anymore, I’m just going to show up to look busy to feel like I’m earning my salary until they tell me what to do. And ultimately, they’re just going to do it themselves.

 

Brett Bartholomew  31:18  

Yeah, no, that’s an excellent point where virtue can become vise, right? You want to have great attention to detail. Of course, you want to hone in on on specifics of things. But just like anything, if you try to control it too tightly, like you said, you’re killing that creative kind of drive, and then just nothing gets done. Right? Like did you find and is it something, Obviously, you’re very well practice, you’ve had a tremendous amount of experience, you’re in a much more mature part of your career. But are there still some what you would kind of consider basic demons and struggles that you have to battle with constantly that inner voice? Or just be like, Hey, Chris, you’ve been down this path before? Let this go? If so, I’d love to know a few of them. 

 

Chris Do  31:56  

Yeah, I think the big one for me is there’s trust. And I don’t mean trust, like to write the content to produce the content or edit it, we have well oiled machine people to do that kind of stuff. I’m talking about trust, and in terms of like someone managing my own personal information going back and forth. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have an assistant, I don’t have a virtual assistant. Because as things are moving back and forth throughout my emails, I just don’t want people to look at that stuff. I’ve maybe taken out of context, I’m just like, that’s strange, and saves it and then later on when they quit or fired, are you going to just open that up to the world? 

 

And so there’s heavy issues of trust there where I’m a private person. And there’s certain things I still want to keep just for me. But outside of that most of it is just about thinking about new ways of being able to spend money and taking bigger risks. Because I know that with those risks, you get the windfall of profit and innovation. And so we’re willing to throw the dice at things that we think may or may not work, and throw at nine out of 10 times and fail, but that one out of 10 times when it works. That’s like where we move into a whole new space and enter a new category.

 

Brett Bartholomew  33:03  

Yeah, one that mentioned of you know, just having a healthy risk appetite, and not being scared to put things out there with consistency are congruent. Because I think, you know, just so often we get people that don’t want to take risks or invest in themselves, because they just don’t know if they’ll actually implement it or do it. They have too many safety nets. And this lends itself to another question I had, you know, one of the best videos I saw from yours, and there’s many, so don’t take that offensively if there’s one that you have a darling is just reinventing yourself. 

 

I mean, this was a no brainer when it came to this episode. Because reinventing yourself we all should adapt, we all have to change. We can’t say stuck in the same career our whole life. But that in itself requires an appetite of risk and a willingness to remove some safety nets. Talk to me about what inspired you to create that video and just why you have a passion for the topic of reinventing yourself in general.

 

Chris Do  33:55  

Yeah, I really did enjoy that vehicle. Thanks for acknowledging that. I look at my own career. And I think in any space, you can coast for a few years. But if you Coast too long, you start to enter into a place of entropy. And you stop growing. I heard Alex Hermoza speak about this recently, he said something like the stock market grows at 9% a year. And if you put your money in the market, you don’t think about it’s going to grow at 9%. So if your business isn’t growing by 9%, then you’re really far behind. And don’t get complacent if it’s growing at 9%. Because you’re just staying at even like at par with what’s going on. 

 

So you should be thinking about ideas that push you to 10 20 40 50% growth. And that’s how you start to expand your thinking expand your team’s capabilities and look for new opportunities. So within the creative space, I noticed that every once in a while, like it felt like always, like about five years, we will start to stagnate a little bit. And that meant that we weren’t trying hard enough to challenge ourselves to push ourselves into new space. And only by doing that constantly reinventing herself could we stay relevant 

 

So before we close down our service design business, it was 23 years running from a single owner, I believe it’s probably one of the longest running companies in the motion industry space with a single owner with the same name. And it’s because of that ability to see, okay, here comes a new challenge. Are we going to run towards it? Are we going to run away from it? And we keep evolving. So eventually, we leave motion design, and we start doing brand strategy. I’m enjoying that work. We’re hitting our stride. But then now it’s like a year, two years into it, I think, what is the next thing? How else did we grow? 

 

I knew exactly how else we’re gonna grow. But that didn’t excite me anymore. And that’s when I shifted, and started a whole new journey, which was in 2014, into this educational space. Now, I want to share a couple of things. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  35:43  

Pelase 

 

Chris Do  35:44  

If every single person was given like a telegram or like a gift and said, you know, the next challenge that comes into your life, it’s actually gift. And you’re going to grow in ways that you can’t imagine you’re gonna make 10 times as much money in half amount of time, and you’re gonna live, like you’re gonna live a life of joy and love and generosity, take that opportunity, take that obstacle. But in the real world, no one sends you that Telegram, no one gives you this gift wrapped present to tell you what it is. 

 

And so what happens is when these obstacles, these challenges, hit us face on, we just see them at surface level and say, this is super painful. I’m going to do everything I can to avoid this, again, we don’t recognize the opportunity that exists with an obstacle. And I want to be one of those people to tell you, Yes, bad things happen. They’re not always lined with silver. But if you look for the good from the bad, you should, you will be able to grow in ways that you cannot imagine at least that’s been my experience.

 

Brett Bartholomew  36:44  

Yeah. Well, I mean, no question. I think one of the key elements that I wrote down twice there is, the real idea there is you have to ask yourself, how else can I grow? Whenever I’ve encountered any of our clients and say, Well, I’m nervous, if you know, I built up so much credibility in what I’m doing. Now, if I jump weather, maybe they’re miserable with it, maybe they’re not miserable, they just want a new challenge, you know, whatever. Like, they’re worried that they’re going to lose all that. 

 

And that applies to a close friend of mine who wants to leave education right now in the formal sense, right? He’s a principle that includes people, friends of mine that have worked, they worked their whole life to get to pro sport, then they realize, Okay, I’ve been here 10 years now, I’m kind of I need to learn how to grow. But they’re so scared to the point where it becomes almost golden handcuffs to leave, because they’re terrified that their credibility goes with that. Any thoughts on that? I know it’s broad. But you have a lot of wisdom and a lot of areas, I want to invite that discussion.

 

Chris Do  37:43  

I think that’s a pretty normal human reaction like this is working. And I probably should stay here. And if I go over there, it’s super difficult to look like a fool. I’m going to be an amateur in this space, there’s going to be a lot of people, we’re going to question, What the heck are you doing? And when you fail, they’re going to come out of the woodwork and say, See, I told you you couldn’t do it. I told you that was a dumb idea. And so if I trace it back, like where does this belief come from? I think it comes from the way we’re educated. 

 

So in class, I don’t know about you, if you raise your hand and you said the wrong thing. The other kids laugh. And you know, score points. And so we create a system for at least 18 years, sometimes longer than that, where the person with the right answer wins, they get the best scores. In Europe, they sit at the front of the class, and the dummies sit in the back. And that’s how it works, you know, so it’s kind of pretty brutal. So now we’ve been conditioned for at least 18 years, our most formative years, to not want to take on risks not to put our hand up. 

 

And Seth Godin said this, he was speaking to a roomful of elec teenagers. And he said, everybody, I want you to reach your hand up as high as possible. As you guys, everybody. Okay, now put your hand down. Now, I want you to do that, again, I want you to try to reach a little higher. And what happens is everybody’s able to reach higher, it goes. So why is that? It’s because we’ve learned that whenever we volunteer to do something, when we try our best that people are going to ask more of us. So we’re kind of self conditioned to not give it our best. It’s the same thinking, right? 

 

So it’s safe to stay here because at least no one can fault us. But when we try something new, everyone can say You’re such an idiot. Who do you think you are? The the Moxie, you know, getting too tall for or too big for your boots kind of situation. And so, for me, here’s here’s what I know. People are able to innovate and create new market spaces to create customers and do things that we then later on admire, go against this instinct go against this conditioning. And they just try stuff because and I think this I think this is where the word visionary comes from, is to be able to see things that have yet to materialize in reality, like you are chronologically speaking a year to five years ahead of where you are physically. 

 

And so when I stepped away from my company, and allowed the senior management people to run it The way they want to, I was on the side building an education company. And at the very beginning, it was doing nothing in terms of revenue in terms of reach. And we worked. I think for a year making, I don’t know how many videos to get, like 10,000 subscribers, a horrific number by today’s like, metric in terms of like where we’re at, we get those numbers in a month. Right? And so this is the challenge then. And I have to tell you, it’s like, not everybody in your circle is going to get behind you. 

 

You might be married to one of them. Your children might say, like, Dad, or Mom, What are you doing? Are you having a midlife crisis, because they don’t understand this vision that you have in your head. But no matter what, you must persist, and you must resist that’s like a Ryan Holiday expression there persist in the pursuit of what it is you want to do, because it gets ugly, and it gets nasty, and there’s just not a lot of reward for what it is you do until it gets really, really good. You have to persist beyond that slump. And then you have to resist all the distractions and the naysayers and everyone in everything that’s coming at you to try and tear you down to tell you it’s not possible.

 

Brett Bartholomew  41:06  

Yeah, no question. I mean, and that’s what I think complements that idea of, alright, where else do I need to grow? But also what kind of people do you want to be around? Right? Because your point if you’re more worried about and it’s natural, right? For anybody listening, that’s just part of human psychology, perceived threats. It’s natural to worry about naysayers and critics, but like those people are just telling you, hey, we’re not for you, which is even more of a favor. But you want to get around high level thinkers, high level thinkers have a healthy risk appetite, they’re going to adapt, they understand that reinventing yourself as the key to survival. 

 

The last thing I’d put there and feel free to jump onto this if you’d like is, that was just as people hey, you know, when it comes to commitment, understand what this really means. If you’re staying in a relationship or a work situation, you want to say, Am I doing it because I have to, I feel like I ought to, or because I want to, there’s a lot of people that don’t reinvent themselves. Because they either feel like they ought to stay where they’re at, maybe you know, that organization gave them their start or something like that, or they have to because of a familial situation, or they have to because of perceived credibility. But really, you know, you only want to stay somewhere if you if you want to, you know, you have to be able to kind of understand that there comes a time to evolve and grow. Any anything you wanted to share on that before we move on. 

 

Chris Do  42:19  

I really liked that. And I would like to just add maybe one more notch above that I want to, which is I get to, and I’ll talk about that a little bit because I want to say as it comes from for me, but I get to makes you aware of the privilege that you have, that you’re in a place where you get to decide these things. Now my son, he’s tasked with very few things. I have two boys. And I’m like, You got to take out the trash. He goes Dad, do I have to I said no, you don’t have to, you get to it should be your privilege to do that. 

 

Look at how everybody else in this house contributes to the running of this family. You go to your room, you play video games, you talk to your friends, and you just make a mess, right most of the times. And I guess we don’t have to have you do the garbage. Because well, we’re in a place where we can afford to buy things. And we’re able to eat what we want. So we’re producing trash that you get to take out. Now if we were in a different more dire social economic situation, you’d be grateful to have things to consume that then you get to throw away do you want to do this? Or do you get to do this? 

 

Yes. All right, Dad, I got you. And so from that point forward, he stopped giving me that sour face. I think this is about not playing. And living in a victim mindset, a scarcity mindset, living in a an abundance mindset and saying, You know what, I have accountability, I have agency over my life, I get to decide what it is I want to do. And if I don’t like something, I get to change, I get to choose a different life. 

 

So if I’m not exactly where I want in the company, if I’m not, if I don’t have the teaching opportunities, or no publisher is going to invite me to write the books that I want to write. Well, you get to make that decision as to what it is that you want to change about your life to attract those opportunities, and those publishers and those teaching opportunities to come to you.

 

Brett Bartholomew  44:05  

Yeah, no question there. You know, we’ve talked a couple times about education. We’ve talked about, you know, how even if people feel like, I want to reinvent myself, but I’m scared to take that risk. We mentioned how that’s, you know, that initial fear can have to do with the education model. We’ve talked about how to navigate education in the content creation world a little bit, we’re gonna get into that more. 

 

But aside from just knowing what’s wrong with that education model, how do you think it can be improved? And I know this is broad as well. So take it where you’d like and we can engage in that. But how can we improve education in such a fast pace society like today where we’ve got to kind of get back to improving people’s fundamentals of critical thinking, application iteration and so on and so forth.

 

Chris Do  44:49  

Yeah, this is a hot topic for me. I’m very passionate about education. Of course, this is what I do now. And I had this discussion with my wife when our children are much younger. We went to an art school, which is barely a school to begin with, you learn how to do things, you learn how to compose and make and paint. But in terms of the humanities, philosophy, critical thinking, in the traditional sense, pretty low, relatively speaking. So I said, I don’t care if our children go to school or if they graduate. But what I do care about them having is three critical skills to survive in the 21st century creative and knowledge economy. 

 

Number one, you already said it to be able to think critically. And what does that mean? A lot of people think thinking critically, is just throwing out your opinions to the world and having going against the grain. But that’s not what, I don’t think that’s what it means. It means to examine your own thinking, and search for truth at all costs. So when you hold an idea, and you believe in it, and a superior idea comes in tomorrow, despite having held on to this idea for 20 years, if a better idea comes along, you need to let go of the old idea and grab the new one. 

 

Benedict Carey writes, in his book, The surprising thing about how we learn, he writes that the act of forgetting is as important and critical to the act of learning, we have to learn to let go of things and create space for new ideas, because the brain is finite in terms of like what we can take on at one point in time. And the same is true about many different things. So being able to think critically, means examine your thoughts, have an internal rigorous debate with yourself, and never fall in love, subjectively, with the things that you think to be true. 

 

Number two, is the ability to articulate your thinking. This could be in the form of spoken word, it can be written, it could be interpretive dance, it can be a combination of multimedia things that you do. But you need to be able to communicate your ideas to other people, because wherever is the most effective doing that wins the game. And oftentimes, communication comes through story, learning how to be great storytellers. Now, I’m starting this new book about the Science of Storytelling. And it took me in a different direction than I thought the book was going to be about. 

 

But it talks about learning and memory, and that almost every memory that you have, every idea that you have, is only there and exists because of a story. So there’s some deep science behind this, right. So you need to learn about how to tell stories and be able to articulate your ideas to others. Because if you can persuade and influence others to do things to clean up the beach, or to improve the situation for people who have last in the world, that’s a big thing, a big responsibility, whoever can hold that responsibility will have an important position in life. And number three, is to be able to continue to learn how to learn. 

 

And I think the old system is about memorization, the new system is about adaptive and reacting to what’s going on. Because so much new information is happening, that the books and the teachers and the pedagogical models that exist, cannot keep pace with what’s going on, give you an example. artificial intelligence, machine learning is going to be one of the greatest disruptive forces that’s going to impact humanity as big or if bigger than the internet was to society. And as it’s happening, the schools are like what is going on? First, they’re scared. And then they become curious. And they try and tear it down, and then eventually, to develop curriculum around this. 

 

But now we’re years behind already. And this stuff is moving fast. So the ability for you, your children, anyone you care about to open up the internet, and be able to ask a thoughtful question, and pursue that and to be able to do some topical reading, which is to compare different subjects, or I’m sorry, to compare to the same subject from different authors to compare and contrast and to develop those critical thinking skills. Now, I think we have the foundation of what the New School for the 21st century should look like.

 

Brett Bartholomew  48:48  

Yeah, I mean, you’re right. And especially about that piece that you mentioned at the end there it is that old quote, right? First, they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they join you. I mean, we are incredibly slow, to react to change. Something else that I appreciate is just everything is hands on and practical with you. And you know, when we started, think about how many times you mentioned communication at its core, you know, our company trains people on being effective communicators, but nobody wakes up and says, Hey, I want to be a better communicator. 

 

On the other hand, people do say I want more efficiency, I want better relationships, right? It’s not the thing. It’s what it represents, or I’m getting at is so we started teaching workshops on more social agility. Let’s call it that. And we knew if we were going to teach it, we needed to have something that we lean on what’s called Kolb’s experiential learning. So we knew at this workshop, it couldn’t just be PowerPoint or information. That’s part of what’s wrong with education, right? People needed to have a concrete experience, then they needed to have reflective observation on like, what happened, how can I break that down? 

 

Then they needed to have some aspects of critical thinking. We’re like, okay, let’s have some conceptualization of what could I have done differently? And then let’s begin the cycle again. So and I know from listening to your podcast catching you had somebody on at one point that talked about improv. We knew that if we wanted to make people more critical thinkers, more adaptable, more open minded, more socially agile, we had to utilize elements of improv because life is improv role playing film review. And then we had to make this small, we had to make it hands on. So people were faced with this because another thing you address on was memory? 

 

Well, it’s been quoted that we forget half of what we hear immediately after hearing it and for anybody interested, this is Owen Harkey, 2011 we recall only 35% after eight hours, and then less than 25% After a day. So how can people have these things? If it’s not experiential? My question to you then like, Chris, is, because these things aren’t inherently convenient, right? People like to complain, they want to be catered to in terms of, well, this is how I want to learn, this is how I want to do it. You know, aside from just Hey, Brett, you got to make it more compelling, you got to make it more visually appealing, visually appealing. How do we get certain people to be more open minded to realize I’ve got to have skin in the game? If I want to be a part of improving education? I mean, that’s, that’s hard enough to get people to want to sometimes think and do the hard things. Any thoughts on that?

 

Chris Do  51:12  

Can you reframe the question? I thought you were taking me somewhere else? And then I think there’s a twist

 

Brett Bartholomew  51:17  

There’s a couple of things here, right? Part of it is just conversational. And you can latch on to anything that you want there. Because I know I’m not Dan Rather when it comes to just one specific question. I guess if there was a question there, you could take it two ways. One, were there any thoughts in that incoherent rambling, I just said that you attach to because the point is, it’s experiential, I was just trying to tie on to everything you mentioned, has to be experiential, it has to be encoded into memory. These are the things that help learning, or how do we get an audience the greater like, just let’s a planet are people that are used to now the old way to embrace the new way? Because the fact is, Chris, like that inertia is gonna be hard to change.

 

Chris Do  51:59  

Yeah, okay. So there’s a bunch of things there. So let me just respond, and then maybe you can redirect me, okay, I’m right there with you. The old way of teaching is there’s a single source of information, the professor, the teacher, the lecturer, whoever it is, they’re the authority figure, we as students are less than, and there was a power structure there. And that’s fine, the way it’s structured. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to share with you all their observations, and you’re gonna take notes furiously, and then you’re going to try to retain some of that. 

 

But earlier, I kind of made a kind of an offhand comment about how I barely went to school. And but what art school is, and it’s so different than traditional school is, there’s nothing for you to read, there’s nothing for you to memorize, we’re gonna present a problem with a minimal amount of instructions. And every single week, you’re gonna take a stab at this thing, and you’re gonna suffer mightily. And each time you’re gonna go back to your cave, wishing that you could just cry and solve your problems that way. And then you present your work, and then the instructor that critiques the work, and helps to start to you to see the world through their eyes. 

 

So it’s a transference, like they’re quite figuratively, I guess, downloading their information, and you’re uploading it to your brain. And the way that you’re measured is at the end of the semester, how much of this were you able to download? How much can you walk away and design and think and solve problems like your instructor, some close approximation of that would get you the best score possible. And there’s room for people leaving the reservation, if you will, where the parameters are so tight, but every once in a while there’s a student was like, Yeah, I understood the parameters, but I want to go this way. 

 

And they find a way to make that work. And so they stretch the problem to meet their solution. And the instructor gets us a fair point. And so we start to learn as students, the rules of the game aren’t as rigid as you think. And I think Dave Epstein talks about this. He wrote, the book Range is, as you know, in school, it’s called, like a nice environment or nice system, where we know what the rules are. There’s a playbook. We know what done looks like, and we know how to score and evaluate ourself. But the real world doesn’t work like that. It’s a wicked situation, where there are no rules and what we think there are rules, we’re just deluding ourselves. 

 

I’m like, Oh my gosh, right. So in a wicked system, there are no rules. There’s no grading, and we have to solve problems. And so we’re taking in an old system of thinking and problem solving. And we’re throwing people out into the world to solve these bigger problems. And there’s continuing to follow the same set of rules. Now, my former business coach, he recently passed away, he would say something to me like this. He says, almost all of life’s great innovations come from someone who has expertise in our field, but it’s so new to it, that they don’t understand that it can’t be done, or they come from a completely different field. They have a ton of experience and they move laterally. They’re divergent thinkers in solving this other problem, and they look we’re no one’s looking. So that should probably give you a really big clue as to how You in 21st century can solve these wicked problems working in Wicked environment. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  55:04  

Yeah, no, I think that’s a great point. I mean, and we just look at that as the gray area. Right. I love the terminology, though much more marketable, the wicked problems, like people still want black and white answers, even though we live in a complex, chaotic context of a world. You know, I think the other thing there that I have to remind myself that was part of the ignorance of my last question is, so I asked you what is a demon you continue to fight 

 

One that I continue to fight is still thinking I can help everybody, right? So I want Oh, my God, how do we change education? Well, there’s all these reasons people don’t change. And even the best marketing in the world isn’t gonna get everybody. Well, it comes back to Brett, know, your audience, your stuff isn’t for everybody, just like the way that we should engage in education, as you’ve alluded to, not everybody is going to take two. But whether they do or not, that is the way the world we are going to live in an increasingly gray world. And it’s up to them to answer that call to a degree, is it not? 

 

Chris Do  56:01  

Yeah, I think there are people who already think what you think they don’t need to be helped. There are people who are diametrically opposed to the way that you think, and they don’t want to be helped. But there’s this large group in the middle, that are still figuring things out and those that are in there’s too many of those people to begin with. So if you just serve the people in the middle who are kind of undecided, still working through the problem, and they’re going to slowly inch towards what it is that you want to teach. I think that’s fantastic. I think one of the great things about social media and the ability for us all to publish great content is we can afford to be very patient. 

 

So I’ll give you the example. Right? I was recently at a conference, and this guy walks up to me, along with one of my friends. They’re buddies, but I’m not friends with this person. He said, Chris, I got to tell you something. And he’s been friendly to me the whole time. Because I don’t like you, man. You said this thing. And it really bothered me. It wounded me in my soul. And I was really offended. And I was really angry at you. And it took me a couple of years to get over it. I’m like, Okay, I’m all smiles, because I don’t know about your hatred. I don’t know about your anger towards me. And that’s an another life lesson there. 

 

If you hate something like drinking the poison, hoping someone else will die. Yeah, right. Yeah. But then he said, I rewatched the video, I listened to the things that you’re saying. And by applying what you taught me, I was able to double the amount of money I made. So I’m really grateful for you. I said, well, welcome. I’m glad to hear that. Thanks for sharing that. And thanks for being mature enough  to admit that to me, but also to invest in yourself, because it takes a lot for person to say, I don’t like you, I don’t believe what you’re saying. And you’ve hurt me to stick in it to give it another 2 3 4 or 5 10 tries before you say hmm maybe he’s onto something. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  57:44  

Yep, no. And this ties into something else I wanted to ask you and being mindful of time, but there are a couple other things when you mentioned the types of people, right, there are some people that just they’re locked in, they want to be helped others that are going to oppose and then this one in the middle? Well, that’s even That’s why even more today, we have to be mindful of sharing content. And you say something along the lines of hey, all companies and I want to make sure you guys listening understand that you don’t have to be a business owner, you can be an educator, you can be a coach in any term, right? 

 

I know some of you work for other organizations, right? But you mentioned all companies need to be media. Oh, no. Do all companies need to be media companies in the 21st century. Now, the way I took that is, hey, you’re responsible for your message, the knowledge you want to share, getting it out there, like people aren’t going to be helped by you. If they can’t find you. Like, can you elaborate more on what you mean by Hey, are all companies, media companies in the 21st century? And does this tie into what people might be missing about content creation?

 

Chris Do  58:46  

 Absolutely. So I believe this, I believe that all companies are media companies or content creators in the 21st century, some of them just don’t know it yet. And you can see the ones who have figured it out or playing the game really well, their market cap is probably 10x. Their mind shares probably 100x of what the other company isn’t doing. Some people argue that Red Bull is not a soft, or like an energy drink company. They’re a media company. So they create a story that we want to buy into, and we vote with our dollars for the kind of world we want to live in. And so they’re excited by individuals who pushed the limitations of what human beings can do. 

 

And they get excited by that because they can choose 100 other energy drinks, but they don’t. They choose Red Bull. And I have to imagine the only reason why I’m speaking to you right now, Brett, is because I’ve embraced the fact that we’re a media company, and we’re creating content to educate you and other people like you. So somewhere down the line, this message, this story, this thread reaches you and either connects with you or doesn’t. And we’ll keep sending it until you receive it and you’re like, Okay, and now we have some kind of relationship. 

 

It’s asymmetrical in our relationship because I’m broadcasting you’re receiving and until we have a conversation then it becomes more symmetrical. Oh, but I think this is what people don’t understand. Does Apple make superior products to other companies? I don’t think so. Are they price competitively, they don’t have to be, because they’ve done a great job of telling you a story about them, which is a story about yourself, because we don’t buy things anymore. We’re looking for meaning and identity. So we’re joining tribes of people to feel safe and to feel connected. And so if you’re not broadcasting and sharing your story, whether you are a company of one or a company of 1000, then you’re missing out on a really great opportunity.

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:00:33  

 Yeah, I mean, you’re speaking to just the core concept of differentiation. And differentiation isn’t about, hey, why am I different? It’s why are you uniquely relevant? You know, like I mentioned something to my staff the other day, and it ties into exactly what you mentioned, you know, because like Steve Jobs was like, I’m rereading his biography. And one of the things he said is like, A, it’s not about the computers, we want people to understand what creative people can do with computers. So that I asked my staff, I said, What do you think, if somebody has this self completion theory, hey, if I buy something from art of coaching, what does that say about me? 

 

Like to me, since we talk a lot about interpersonal dynamics, we talk a lot about, you know, the psychology of change and behavior. somebody buys our stuff and says, Hey, I’m an adaptable individual who values people, and I’m not scared to do the hard stuff. But to your point, I don’t think a lot of people can answer that question. What does it mean? If somebody consumes your content? What does that saying about them? Now? You know, what story? Are you telling them that they will now tell themselves as they utilize your stuff, your content, whatever format it comes in, or your product or your service? Going forward? I mean, am I hearing you right? Like, there has to be this identification with a brand, its story, its purpose and, and how it helps complete that person. 

 

Chris Do  1:01:52  

And it has to be true. So you may have said this in the introduction. But our mission is to teach a billion people how to make a living doing what they love. And so when people ask me, what is the future, I say to them, think about private art school without the crippling debt. It’s saying a lot already in those two sentences, right. And so there are people who believe what we believe that there must be a better way that there are people out there trying to make a difference in the world. And what they do is they support us emotionally. And then they support us monetarily. 

 

So it begins with the heart, because we’re emotional buyers, before we’re logical buyers, we post rationalize with logic. And so when people watch our channel, or consume our content, and their feel the impact that we’re trying to create the genuineness of our message, and the generosity in which we give to people, and then that connects with them. And I gotta tell you, one of the most amazing things that I get the pleasure of doing every single day is reading the messages when they come back to me, it’s like we sent a message out like a boomerang. 

 

And eventually, a year, five years later, it comes back and you catch it, it’s like, wow, this impacted you this way, this is incredible. And so people are finding that they don’t have to go to traditional means, through educational systems that are too expensive, too bloated, and just take too long and are totally irrelevant. They can find different ways of solving their problem. One of the episodes that we created was, here’s the entire curriculum, from the art school that I went to cutting out all the stuff that didn’t think was relevant, and things that you might want to do. 

 

So here’s a clue, just by the names of the classes and the brief descriptions, you can start to be a self educated person if you’re not on Didact. And you could do it in less time for a lot less money. And so they feel that, right. So Patagonia recently said, planet Earth is our shareholder. Now, we only have one shareholder, and it’s planet Earth. And so there’s a lot of people who are very concerned about where we’re going as a species. And if you hear that, and that resonates with you, then you’re going to feel more emotionally connected to Patagonia as a company, and I think that’s what people do with us. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:03:48  

Yeah, no, I think that’s I can tell you this. And there’s a lot to tie into there. One just a brief point. One thing that I’m still navigating is a lot of people that brought a lot of people that came to Art of Coaching did so because of a story about me being hospitalized as a kid and sometimes I’ll I feel like I’ve told that story so much, I just want to be done with it, especially because I don’t want my company just to be about me. But sometimes I’ve had to accept the onus that, hey, there are people out there that identify with that story. You can’t shirk that even if you want to pass the baton

 

So you got to embrace your story. And you also have to find a way that it ties into a bigger message. And you mentioned that I love how you did that, hey, here’s everything we you could learn. But here’s how we can siphon that down. You’ve simplified everything. There’s an emotional tie in, there’s a logical time you’ve hit a lot of different influence tactics. I mean, Chris, one of the things that made me attracted to you is you didn’t try too hard. On Instagram, you treat it like the medium it is and I’ll elaborate on what I mean by that. But you still over deliver.

 

And what I meant is anybody that goes your Instagram and guys, we tagged us all below. It’s beautiful. It’s very seamless. It’s very consistent, but you weren’t trying to do too much. And then that was a lesson that I had to have to is when we teach people about communication and power. are dynamic, there’s certain parts of that, that even if I have a full content creation crew, that’s not going to show well, on IG. That’s just not that we have other contexts, rich mediums that are better for that. But you still have to be present there. So I just wanted to give you that compliment. And also, hopefully, it’s encouragement to anybody, not all of your platforms have to be the most amazing thing ever. They don’t have to have, like, you just have to consistently share that story in that message. Anything you want to touch on there. Before I move into a new question. 

 

Chris Do  1:04:44  

Yeah, I believe it’s really important for you to understand the context in which your content is being consumed. This is the critical part. When someone’s on Instagram, think about yourself, you have a few minutes at a time, you might be waiting for the waiter to come to your table, you might be in a bathroom, who knows what you’re doing. So you have think about it, like three to 15 minutes, this is the window. So when you’re creating content, I made this mistake to brown, I’m not telling you that guy figured it out without trying. I tried to over teach and over deliver in 10 slides. And so what I was asking people to do is to sit there, pause and focus on a screen, when all they want to do is swipe through something. 

 

So I learned that by lightening the lesson in each carousel, it was much easier, much more swipeable. And that kind of feeling of accomplishment amongst life forms on slide five feels good, it feels rewarding. And so it also forces you to write in very concise and clear ways. And to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff. And people still make this mistake every single day. They’ll send me a carousel and say, Chris, what do you think? And every once awhile, I’ll say, How can I even get past slide one, it’s so dense slide one should be made into 10 slides, but then you have to figure out how to say this in a different way. Because that’s not gonna be interesting to anybody. 

 

And that’s a challenge. So everywhere that you create and publish content on, you have to think about the context. When somebody picks up a book, it’s a different relationship, a different commitment, and level of engagement that you’re gonna get. So if you write just two words on a page, they’re gonna think this is a really weird and awful use of paper. So think about that, when you’re creating content. 

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:07:04  

Yeah, a big learning point of that, for me is, you know, the things that when, before Instagram moved to the whole kind of real model, some of the things that we used to do from an informational standpoint on my content, on my personal page, didn’t show as well, but the one thing that’s always been evergreen is people seeing a snapshot and a shoebox of who I really am as a person. Right? And for some that would look they’d look at my profile and be like, this is awful. This students all over the place, he’s too personal. 

 

Well, what I had found is we had to adapt, you know, when they change your model, right? People didn’t just want information they wanted like, who are you as a person? Can you show me some things? And I probably overcorrected. Because I’m no longer just a strength and conditioning coach, I didn’t post any of that stuff anymore. But then I post I’m going to be working out in the garage on a Sunday, people would lose their mind. So you know, it’s just like, your brand, right? 

 

It’s important, like you are a part of your brand, your brand is your promise and everything. But what we started doing is just separating, hey, if you want more information, whether it is carousel posts, or whatever, here’s the company posts. I’m Brett Bartholomew, here are some things about me. And you just have to keep experimenting, because that may not be right for everybody. But you have to listen to that you have to adapt. But man, I can only think of what you must have thought when you looked at my profile, you probably thought this dude is all over the place with this.

 

Chris Do  1:08:16  

I didn’t think that by the way,

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:08:17  

I appreciate that context. All right. I want to honor your time, you’ve been more than gracious, this is a 1,000% Selfish question, please help. You have a team, you’ve mentioned we a lot. managing a team is something that is relevant to all of our audience members. It never in my opinion gets easier. I would love to know one just simply how many folks are on your team, two are you mainly remote? Are you in the same, you know? Are you under the same roof, building what have you. And then just any tips that you found, as you’ve grown as a manager of a team, and it can be one tip? Chris, it can be three. But so many folks are just like I have, like they want strategies on how to manage a team, especially in a fast moving world. So fire away.

 

Chris Do  1:09:04  

Yes, I think we’re about 18 people full time. And I want to tell you the exact number but I don’t even manage the team. So I didn’t even know. And then there were more people working for us on a part time freelance basis, pre pandemic, we had an office and everybody came to the office and we would work together. And we were starting to move away from that model. And thankfully, because the infrastructure and the systems were set up in place, so that that could happen, so that we’re only asking people to come in the office when necessary. 

 

When you feel like connecting with people, pandemic happens, we send everyone home, and then two weeks into it, we’re going to make this permanent. So come back to the office, get your gear, go wherever you want to go. And people went people up the country moved out of state. And so now we’re almost 100% remote. There’s one or two people go to the office still, who helped to receive packages and do things and fulfillment and whatever it is that we need to do. But other than that we’re mostly remote. Now, what else Did you want to know because I’ll tell you anything you want to know?

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:10:01  

Well, just something that you just mentioned that you don’t manage the team, but like you still have to manage that aspect of being. Talk to me about something that you’ve learned from a communication standpoint of being more effective within that team, because that’s essentially the job to be done. And what I’m asking is, everybody’s trying to figure out whether they’re a part of a team or managing a team, how to manage that infer or that the communication piece, so everybody stays on the same page and elevates it, just any tips or things that you’ve learned of this, how to be a part of a more effective team.

 

Chris Do  1:10:32  

Okay, just so people don’t think I live in some utopian society, I’m going to draw contrasts to the way that things were to the way things are now. So back, when I ran a service design company, we did anywhere between four and a half to $5 million a year, every single year, sometimes more, sometimes less. And it required very complex systems in place office manager, there was like tight, tight constraints on everyone’s time and productivity. That’s because despite doing $5 million a year, there was a relatively low profit margin. 

 

I mean, a lot compared to some industries. But there’s not so many ways that we can screw up a job and then still be profitable that year. And so we had to manage people’s time, when we moved into the future as a content creation education company. We have knowledge products that we sell, we have some coaching programs that we sell as well, the ratio of revenue to people totally changed. So now we bring in a lot more money, while requiring less day to day effort. There’s a lot of work that goes into crafting a course, or product. But once it’s created, the team is free to do whatever. 

 

So now, we’re a much more innovative company in that we’re much more wasteful with how we spend our time, innovation and wastefulness are tied together. You cannot be innovative without being wasteful and messy. And so now I no longer have to answer to any specific client. There are no more deadlines, except for the deadlines we assigned to ourselves. And every single day and every single way. Money comes in the door. Sometimes it’s a few $1,000 a day, sometimes it’s 10s of 1000s of dollars a day 

 

We used to play this game with Ben like whenever we would do a $3,000 day, we would go and have sushi, we just go out. And the team got too big that we’re eating literally all our profits. So we’re like, no more sushi guys. We’re not doing that anymore. We got to change it right. But the ceiling on that single day highest revenue kept changing. It was wonderful to see because Ben would keep it on the wall. He’s goes, Chris new record. today. We did $8,000 Wow, we did $8,000 a day. And it would just keep going up and up. I think our highest is like 85 or $87,000 in a day. It’s pretty cool.

 

Now without running ads without having to do me just like or gear a little. Yeah, very little. Because that’s pretty cool. 

 

I’ll talk about that. Yeah, yeah. So I’ve been mentioned his person, his name is Ben. And he’s my chief operation Chief Operating Officer. Basically Ben runs the team. But he runs it the way that he’s built for but also in a very light way we have a light touch. There can be weeks ago by died literally talked to almost no team members, and admin zero meetings. I try and my team knows is do not pull me into a meeting. If at all possible. A quick call a DM. But that’s it. Because people wonder how can you do so much all the time? Because you’re this constant like content machine, you’re consistently out there answering questions, creating content, like I can’t keep up with you. 

 

How is it possible? Because I’ve delegated everything else away? That is not essential. And so you might be thinking to yourself? Well, Chris, what is essential? Well, no one can read for me. Currently, no one can write in my voice as me they can write in the futures voice but not as me. And so my time has spent learning, reflecting and sharing that. And that’s where 80 to 90% of my time is spent. And it doesn’t sound like this. But actually having conversations, answering questions, and engaging with their audience is me learning about how I’m not an effective communicator. 

 

Because when they have more questions that says, You were not explaining it clear enough now, or there’s another segment in our audience that doesn’t understand this concept, explained it again, explain it differently. And this allows me to create better models and frameworks to be able to teach and share with people which is contributing to my overall value to the world. 

 

Brett Bartholomew 1:14:22  

Man, can I relate? I mean this like I said, it goes back to the rabbit hole when I tried to force some of my stuff into context, whether it’s social media or whatever, that just wasn’t a fit. I was like, instead of coming across as the communicator and teacher I know I am. It was as fast paced rambling madman because you’re trying to fit it all in because at the time I didn’t have that creative support. So I appreciate that deeply. I also appreciate the point you made about waste. You know, Nobel Prize winner Amos Tversky said people will waste yours because they won’t waste hours. 

 

You know, and so I just I love that you mentioned that. You know it is a good point like you have to be able to do the things that only you can do. You know? And that’s a very simple answer to what is essential, well, what are the things you just can’t replicate? And it’s that, like, you can’t write for me in a certain way you can’t read for me in a certain way, nobody can do this podcast for me. So write that down, folks, make sure you’re you’re learning about that. And you’re locking that in? 

 

Well, Chris, listen, I struggle. This has been one of the hardest podcast interviews I’ve ever done, mainly because I feel like I could have done an hour with you about Principles of Psychology of what makes people tick, and how we tie into that. I could have done another hour on education, another hour on business another hour on just, you know, these aspects of communication. And so it’s been a real struggle to figure out like, I’ve had to eat a lot of the things that I selfishly want to ask you. 

 

But I hope, you know, my hope is that people continue, and I know they will, the journey with you. And I want you to stay wherever is the easiest way folks can find you. Obviously, we’ll plaster this in our show notes. We’ll share it in our newsletter. But if people want to continue to learn from you, what is the way that they can do that most efficiently.

 

Chris Do  1:16:06  

Thanks for teeing me up for that Brett. So I try to make it as easy as possible for people to find me on social media. And so if you look for @thechrisdo, Do is spelled D O on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Tik Tok, pretty much every platform that you can think of, I’m on there, and I’m publishing and creating content. It’s not the same content. We also have a podcast, which you’ve mentioned a couple of times. So I would love it. If you want to have a conversation with me. Just reach out to me in the DMS. Keep it short, and I’ll do my best to answer it. And the company is called The Futur  and The Future spelt without an E. So it’s fu t u r. And somebody kept asking me like, where did the e go like why did you lose the E? Is it? Well, we dropped the ego that’s why it’s just f u t u r

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:16:51  

I had to smile to I saw you’re in clubhouse man, I wish that would have taken off more because I know the future is still video. But I’d like to think that somewhere there. So this plays for folks that maybe aren’t video centric, especially if we want to get off of our screens. That’s something for just this audio other than podcast, right? I like to think something like that. It’s going to still come about what are your thoughts on that?

 

Chris Do  1:17:12  

I still believe in the social audio format. I just don’t know who’s going to emerge as the replacement for clubhouse. And I’m sad because I’ve made some really good getting continuing relationships and friendships with people that I’ve met on clubhouse. It’s just the platform is seeming like loss and adrift at sea. So I’m still creating content on LinkedIn audio, I’m doing on Twitter spaces, and from time to time I’ll dip my head in clubhouse, but it’s not the place that I frequent as as I used to.

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:17:38  

Yeah, and it’s sad because that’s an easy way for people to show up. Talk about all the things that we talked about in the barriers, whoever creates that. I mean, there’s a huge space there. Well, Chris, thank you again for being so generous for tolerating stranger and doing this the day after Thanksgiving, you are very much appreciated. And I hope we continue to keep in touch.

 

Chris Do  1:17:57  

Thanks very much Brett Real pleasure. It was real fun conversation.

 

Brett Bartholomew  1:18:00  

Alright guys, until next time, Brett Bartholomew Chris Do, the Art of Coaching podcast talk to you soon.