“I spend every day from five to nine in the morning reading, researching and writing. And I have been improving that process from 2008 to today “- Jeff Bullas.
I want to share this gift with you, the opportunity to interview one of the first people, together with Chris Brogan, that I started to follow in 2008 when I entered the world of social media and digital marketing, Jeff Bullas.
Jeff Bullas: The work in digital marketing that works
Jeff has an endless list of recognitions, mentions, appearances and reaches as one of the most prominent figures in digital marketing, social media, content marketing, and blogging. Entrepreneur, and writer of several books, among them the eight secrets to Mastering the Art of Blogging. His mission is to help companies and professionals win in life, business, and the digital world. The purpose is carried out through his blog, workshops, and consultancies mainly, and also his social networks, especially on Twitter. You can read Jeff’s full bio here.
Disrupt Everything presents, Jeff Bullas
This episode is an interview of almost an hour in which I talk in-depth with Jeff Bullas on some of the essential issues to excel today in digital marketing. In addition to speaking and discussing other issues that make it possible to lead a great life, a great business, and a great job.
“Never be satisfied” – Jeff Bullas.
>>> Listen here <<<
Index of contents
- Key milestones.
- Changes and evolution of the digital landscape.
- What companies and professionals, should focus on digital marketing?
- Effective multi-channel tactics.
- The critical guidelines of content marketing.
- The pillars of SEO.
- How to create a blog that remains very popular after more than eight years.
- Keys on blogging.
- The day-to-day of Jeff Bullas.
- The most determining ability.
- The critical process for reinvention.
- The most decisive habit.
- Current and future projects.
- Where to learn and get inspiration from.
- His favourite podcast.
- Favourite blogs.
- People to learn from.
- Personal facet and lifestyle.
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Interview Transcript
[00:00:01] Welcome to Disrupt Everything. Podcast series by Isra Garcia.
[00:00:07] Reinvent yourself and change what’s most important to you.
[00:00:14] Hello. This time it’s not in Spanish as usual. Hello everyone. Welcome to disrupt everything podcast series. This time I have an international guest, like one of the bloggers and influencers and professionals that I started to follow when I entered the digital landscape. For me, it’s an amazing pleasure to introduce you to Jeff Bullas. Jeff thank you for being here on the podcast.
[00:00:52] You’re welcome. It’s great to be on it. Thank you very much for inviting me.
[00:00:56] I remember I started following Jeff Bullas as early as 2009 I guess. Yeah, and it was crazy because when you started to look for something on how to do a Facebook strategy nothing appeared unless it was from people like Jeff Bullas, Chris Brogan Brian Solis and a few. From that. From that moment on I’m still a subscriber of his blog. He has like a six hundred thousand social media followers and millions of visitors a year on his site Jeffbullas.com, check it out.
[00:01:42] And his journey started in 2008 I guess jumping between jobs.
[00:01:53] How did you start Jeff Bullas? I mean because nowadays you’re a big influencer featured in Entrepreneur magazine and listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 influencers, a global digital marketing influencer ranked number one, a world-first business blogger I mean the list goes on and on and on and on and on. And it was only from 2008 until 2018. I mean it’s been 10 years.
[00:02:29] Jeff Bullas, what have you been or what has been the key milestones since an early age, not since 2008, since you started, since you were born until getting here?
[00:02:50] I suppose the initial inspiration came from a lady I was going out with the time and she invited me to be on Facebook in middle of 2008 and I got registered for Facebook and noticed all these people I hadn’t seen in 20 30 years. I used to go to college with and do my teaching degree with.
[00:03:13] They just popped up and all around the world looking a bit older and greyer and some with a lot less hair. So I went Wow! this is very cool. So it’s like this global platform, this global network just unfolded before me. And I noticed people’s behaviour was quite obsessive. And this was essentially before the mobile phone, Steve Jobs, I think the iPhone had just come out the year before hadn’t reached any critical mass yet. So my boss was still for the executives who had the crackberries you know the blackberries. And then I leaped on to Twitter and noticed the same obsessive behavior and at the time I was actually between jobs that were code for unemployed. So I was reading a couple of books, one was Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week which sort of opened my eyes to the possibilities of creating a lifestyle business that gave me the flexibility to be anywhere in the world and still have a business. So that sort of intrigued me. And my answer to that possibility and then there was a book by David Meerman Scott called the new rules of marketing and PR. And that book opened suggested that if you create content online you would attract an audience rather than have to chase an audience. So there’s a great quote I’ve got from a friend of mine Jeremy Epstein at the bottom of his blog that I noticed the other day and said you know sales- you call them and marketing- they call you and what
[00:04:52] Basically David’s book suggested was the power of actually creating the best content you could online to attract an audience and because I’ve been involved in a lot of cold calling and building businesses by getting on the phone and calling people. It really resonated me, I said wow! if you could do this, this would be pretty cool to actually attract an audience. Rather than chasing them. Yeah. And so then I came across a blog by HubSpot which said if you have an inkling of what you want to write about or start a business on just start a blog. So I went ok, I don’t even think I knew what a blog was at the time, so I went Ok, blogs are actually just an online publishing machine platform. So we’re going to the WordPress site in March 2009. We started writing and then publishing online and it started from there. So that was really a little passion project that eventually escaped the lab and part of my curiosity was would this tactic actually attract an audience and would I then be able to make money out of it. Was it a fad or was it an ongoing trend with social media here to stay because ten years ago social media was just at its embryonic stages. Facebook had taken over MySpace’s position as the premier network which was only about 50 to 60 million people on Facebook which today about two point one billion Twitter had four or five million users.
[00:06:25] So it was just a passion project and I just started publishing online and Twitter was one of my main networks I found that I could actually grow my followers and had more followers. So there are two parts of the equation number one was creating the best content at the time and I wasn’t a good writer then I was just learning and I discovered that I love writing. So you’ve got to be able to create good content the best you can. And as you get better at it you’ll create better content. The other part I realized I needed to do was build distributions. So that was the other part of the equation. And essentially I was a content marketer. And then the world started showing up I got invited to run a workshop in New Zealand. And that led to me being involved in a startup that’s really starting to grow fast that company is called Shuttle Rock and I’m on the board, so that came out of that just by creating content. I got contacted by a CEO, an entrepreneur that just started another business in New Zealand he said when do you want to come on the board, do you want to be part of the business. I said absolutely. And then I got invited to speak in Italy and I went and they were willing to pay me as well. I went there’s something going on here. So I really really ramped up the activities so for the next four years.
[00:07:51] I used to write late at night, the next four years I got up at 4:30 am 3 am and wrote and published and marketed my blog posts until 9 am. 4 to 9. Yep yep. And I didn’t realize at the time that I was doing something that Cal Newport’s and his book Deep Work describes which is sitting down every day and actually investing time by both reading, researching, creating, publishing and then sharing it with the world because creating is one thing but I think the real magic happens when you share it with the world and the platforms the Facebooks and Twitters give us the means to actually reach a global audience. So while I had good timing I suppose I was there at the start of a social media revolution and then also along the way the Apple iPhone basically became ubiquitous right around the world and smartphones. So that was the perfect intersection, these two obsessive technologies of social media and smartphones just became this perfect storm for the democratization of publishing marketing and even business. So today we have apps that are just businesses you know Uber is a perfect example. So that’s what started to happen and it came from just a passionate curiosity about a topic that I started writing on. So I still am fascinated today by what shows up in my email inbox.
[00:09:25] Ten years ago. Yeah.
[00:09:29] And it’s great to hear that you’ve been following since 2009. That’s amazing you must be one of a few. Because there wasn’t many back in 2009.
[00:09:39] I started getting interested because I discovered it in 2008 when Facebook was closed. Thanks to Andrew Grant who introduced me to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Then how do you learn? I mean there is nothing online you can learn off. So learn from it. So you have to do by yourself.
[00:10:04] And then by looking looking looking and looking for answers some people start to pop up. You were one of them so it’s great to know what you just explained. I mean how you started because I saw it from the other side of the page. It’s crazy. It’s great to know how it happened and what are your views from yourself on how you made this change happen. For me, one of the key lessons is what you said about just sitting down four hours or five hours in this case and creating and investing in yourself and doing the work. I mean this is self-discipline. This is what I guess got you to where you are right now. Inside of these challenges, what changes surprised you the most in this digital landscape? What change has been the most surprising for you and made you say wow?
[00:11:15] So the question is that you’re saying is what are some of the things that have happened along the way that surprised me?
[00:11:19] Yes.
[00:11:20] What change in the digital landscape has surprised you the most exactly. There’s a range of things so I suppose one of the biggest changes was the imposition or the application of algorithms to organic Facebook and social media reach that was removed when I started out it was very organic. You could get a lot of traction from social media organically. In other words, you had a Facebook page you had a million followers. A lot of people would see your posts. And in 2013 2014 Facebook started winding up its algorithms so that became pay to play. That was one of the biggest changes that I suppose both threaten my perspective and also one of the joys that attracted me to social media was its ability to reach the world without paying the gatekeepers and without begging for attention. Now that’s getting a little harder to do because we’re ending up with new gatekeepers and the gatekeepers before were the media moguls the newspapers the TV stations. They were the gatekeepers and the book publishers. Today the gatekeeper’s are not only them. It’s also Facebook itself. So yeah. And on the other hand, there are two algorithms applied to Twitter. Twitter’s reach has been reduced but nothing like Facebook. So I’m glad I invested a fair bit of time in Twitter but I’m optimistically paranoid that I’m assuming that social media is going to continue to go that way. So it’s all about learning different tactics that help you still reach an audience without paying for it. I’m sort of resistant to paying for attention after working so hard for years. And I understand that Facebook is going to charge money because they’ve got to turn on the lights and pay 10000 employees. I get that. But I think what are the other things that I’m worried about recently was that I think Facebook has become too greedy it’s wound its organic reach down to almost zero. Yet with Google, you could actually earn authority when you create content, with Facebook you don’t earn any authority by giving them content. Any.
[00:13:44] So even on YouTube, Google owns YouTube.
[00:13:48] But YouTube actually shares revenue with the people that create content on YouTube.
[00:13:56] So you can earn. So like for me today 65 percent of my traffic comes from earned Google search. And when they do invest in different tactics to continue to evolve as the landscape involved and even email is becoming less effective an algorithm is applied to that. So that was one of the biggest changes that we’ve had to adapt to. So we’ve been experimenting with tactics such as using Flipboard to publish to medium. We’ve experimented with push crew which is the pop-ups that people subscribe to that whenever you do an RSS detection it detects a new blog post and it pushes that to pop up for your web. That’s building very nicely. One thing we just actually started today that a few people are doing already is Facebook bots in terms of messenger because messenger gets such high open rates compared to email. So the challenge is that each type of channels getting hard to get free organic earned attention. Sure you can get targeted Facebook advertising and that’s good if you want to accelerate your discovery and drive traffic quickly but you’ve got to have deep pockets to do that. You’ve got to really know what you’re doing and Facebook advertising is becoming very very complex. So that is one. What’s the other surprise that turned up along the way was the power of the mobile phone. Basically, it’s put a publishing machine in everyone’s pockets and purses. And the other thing that we’re in the middle of, the third thing that I’m watching very closely on how we continue to play is essentially the rise of AI and automation and that’s the other part, two big A’s I call them. So artificial intelligence is going to have some huge implications and also add to that. Blockchain which we’re watching the best startup that we’re involved which is now six years down the track but we’re doing that.
[00:16:01] So we’re experimenting a lot of different tactics that actually allow us to generate traffic and growth hacking to actually get traffic and earn it. So yeah there’s some of the different changes that I think have been challenging and also sometimes surprising. Talking about tactics and techniques for businesses and for getting an organic-rich what do you think that companies should focus on digital marketing You’ve got to go multi-channel. There’s no other way. So you’ve got to work on missing key ones that you really need to focus on. Email is not going to go away anytime soon. It is becoming less effective. Facebook Messenger I think is another channel that you’ve got to really work on. So that’s what we implemented a Facebook bot for people to actually get information from us and free content that way but they become messenger subscribers then so the other one is you need to understand how to continue to earn authority with Google so you need to be working on your SEO, your Search Engine Optimization, you need to be doing two parts of the equation. Number one you need to make sure you’re doing the technical part well and then creating great content that sits with that. Those are the two key pillars of good SEO strategy. Social also is another tactic that you really need to get to do well like we experiment all the time with different tactics such as how to get blog posts to actually not blog post articles to actually go semi-viral on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is actually become a very interesting platform. And I’ll be an experiment with more storytelling actually on LinkedIn posts.
[00:17:56] It works better when you put the content in the platform rather than posting the link they give you more.
[00:18:06] So essentially tell a story, a very emotional story a pain point. Start with that and then actually have a conversation and tell a story and don’t put the link actually in the main body actually put it in the first comment. So when people show up they see your comment and they see click on the link to get the rest of the article so that 1300 character posts are actually great. Long form articles used to work very very well but it used to push it out to all your followers and connections initially but that has been removed over the last couple of days. So yes it’s a lot of experimentation what you need to do and try different things and keep learning so it’s really about continuous learning, testing things, breaking things, testing and seeing what works and what doesn’t. And you’ll be surprised and I think nothing’s Big Bang now it’s just incremented by doing a range of different multi-channel tactics that add up to lead to discovering, to clicks too. And yeah it’s fascinating.
[00:19:12] We’ve really decided that we’re going to double down on publishing this year. So we’ve got some good projects happening there. We invested a fair bit in SEO over the last 12 months and that’s really starting to show some big dividends. So we 1 technically cleaned up the site and made sure we were technically good so optimized for mobile. We actually made sure we had site maps and had the descriptions right. When we got rid of bad links, toxic links, did a lot of technical cleanups and the restructuring of the site which is a big job because we’ve got about 3 million words on the site and maybe 2000 articles. So we get about four to five million visitors a year. So it’s an asset I didn’t want to let just sit there. So we’ve been doing a lot of optimization tactics over the last 12 months. So SEO is 65 percent of our traffic now and social is only 5 percent.
[00:20:10] Occasionally we get some really good viral traffic out of Flipboard but that tends to be more like success stories and personal development.
[00:20:20] You have built a blog that remains so popular over the years, and would you say that this is from investing in the blog all the time and investing in as you said like optimizing the blog? What is the key to this, of your blog that is remaining popular and growing over the years?
[00:20:46] What you’ve got to do is you’ve actually got to keep investing in it. So for me for a couple of years I really didn’t invest back in my digital asset. I think you’ve got to think of your website and blog as a digital asset. That’s not something that you set and forget you maybe get away with that a few years ago but today that is not a good idea.
[00:21:09] So I realize that it’s a digital asset that I love working in and within and sharing.
[00:21:19] So I keep investing in the blog. So we actually did a major work last year on SEO technically, we’re moving forward with pillar content which is four or five thousand word blog posts. We’re working on content upgrades. We’re building our email list. We’re also continuing to invest back in things, like I noticed our site speed had dropped a bit. So we needed to work on image optimization so the Website when people land on the home page is not too big in other words downloads slowly because of the file size.
[00:21:50] So I had my SEO guru actually go in and do an audit again after six months another and go back in and he said these are the seven key things we need to do and I said there we go we need to do this. So it’s investing back you know it can’t have a house and not keep looking after it painting and painting the place every now and then making sure your taps aren’t dripping, make sure that windows don’t leak. Make sure your roof is kept maintained, you’re gutters are clean it’s the same deal. You’ve got to look after your digital asset. And for me it’s very important. It’s become part of me, it’s my creation.
[00:22:31] How much do you think we can invest or how much do you invest in your blog regularly and how much should we invest in our blogs?
[00:22:52] There’s no true right or wrong to that. We all have different tactics, we all have different media so, for example, you’re more a podcaster.
[00:23:02] Other people are video bloggers so it would be optimizing video for search engines, podcasts would be optimizing for actual downloads. So it depends on what you’re actually concentrating on. And so I invest in great content also technically we invest as well and spend time and resources to actually continue to evolve what we do. So for example we continue to work on our marketing funds, we continue to work on implementing Facebook bots to actually make us more efficient. Also, fish where the fish are, there’s a lot of people on Facebook that love messenger rather than email to get their information. So I don’t, I actually get very little information from Facebook, but the rest of the world does. So I’m a little old school maybe after nine or 10 years so I’m not a big Snapchat user I’m not one that goes and chases shiny new toys a little bit more on the B2B space I suppose so but I’m still communicating with humans.
[00:24:03] Yeah. So you’ve still got to keep investing in both the resources by people and tactics and but the one for the last twelve months that’s been a big focus has been a SEO investment and it’s really really paying off. I think we’ve increased our SEO traffic by 60 or 70 percent. But the reality with that is that you don’t see quick results. And so if you had someone who didn’t understand technically and now with the idea of a business again Hey Jeff you’ve been doing this for six months I’ve been investing in this I’ve been doing that, traffic still the same or it’s dropping again, trust me it’s going to work. So it’s fascinating because being in digital business is actually a mindset as well. It’s a different way of working it’s a different mindset. You’ve got to be continuously learning and understand that the platforms and the social networks are not going to look after you they’re only looking after one thing themselves, they’re all about increasing their revenue. So if you happen to be collateral in their algorithm change, they don’t care.
[00:25:20] So you’ve got to understand that.
[00:25:25] You were talking about the mindset Jeff. What would you say is the mindset of a digital marketer or a person that is working in the digital economy today?
[00:25:37] Number one you’ve got to have an open mind. You’ve got to be committed to continuous learning. A lot of people get their degree you know, go and start a job and never really learn much again. They read books, magazines and watch TV. But the reality is that in a fast changing world continuous learning and education is absolutely necessary because you’re gonna be irrelevant if you don’t do something even within one to two years. So investing in yourself in continuous learning is a mindset.
[00:26:04] Lucky for me I actually love reading so that’s really important. If you don’t like reading well and you like listening, listen to podcasts. If you don’t want to listen to a podcast we love watching videos, go to Youtube. So if you don’t want to read a Kindle e-book download the audio book. So there’s a bunch of different ways to learn and we’ve all got our different ways of learning.
[00:26:36] So some of us have our own preferences of how we consume content.
[00:26:53] Jeff, you have written an ebook called 8 Key Steps to blogging Mastery. Can you elaborate on that? I mean, what are the key tweaks on blogging? what would you say?
[00:26:58] Okay I guess blogging you got to think like a publisher. So that’s actually another digital mindset. A lot of companies don’t get that they’ve got to become publishers. Number one you need to create great content structured content that distills the complex into easily understood bite sized information. Number two you need to build an email list is still very very important. Most revenue is still generated from your email list in most cases, you also need to continue to invest in your blog as we’ve been talking before. You need to be working on a distribution code that is never ending.
[00:27:44] And the challenge with that is that the battle of the algorithms continues every day, it changes there’s s a tweak here is a tweak there like Linkedin change the way content was shared when they move from remove moving and updating people in your list and connections when you were doing long form articles. Now they’re going post more information which is more like a stream of consciousness now on LinkedIn.
[00:28:10] So and we’ve got the rise of different distribution systems and tactics. So like I mentioned our push crew and Facebook bot. So it’s this continuous evolution.
[00:28:24] And it’s not big bang theory it’s actually just it’s just a tweak a day.
[00:28:33] Yeah. So when you do a tweak a day at the end of the year you’ve created something grand. So it’s how do you write a book. One word at a time.
[00:28:44] So this is self-discipline. I mean every day counts as you say. And you mentioned before and you mentioned it now also you mentioned it at the the beginning of the interview, like experimenting, trying, failing, trying different, experimenting again that’s the key and I love it because it’s what I believe and I wake up every day and I say I’m going to experiment I don’t know what is going to happen but if I don’t try I don’t know.
[00:29:13] If not I’m not going to move from the place I am.
[00:29:16] Yeah It’s a great quote, nothing happens until you stop.
[00:29:21] So exactly. That’s the reality.
[00:29:23] As you define yourself as a content marketer, what’s the number one task you must do to start delivering results in content marketing? Because a lot of people talk about content marketing, but when you get to the point where you have to develop a strategy, a plan in content marketing, it’s just content. What is the number one task for you to deliver these results?
[00:29:57] Content marketing is two words.
[00:29:59] All right, content and marketing. Okay.
[00:30:03] So you have to build it, and they will come.
[00:30:05] So you’ve actually got to work on those two core tactics and then when you’ve done that you need to work on the last piece of that equation which is to convert that attention and trust in traffic that you get from that into leads in sales. So they’re the three pillars content traffic and conversion. So unless you are pressing on that if you don’t have conversion you don’t have a business. If you don’t have content you don’t have a foundation you won’t build credibly in trust and if you don’t have traffic no one can see you. So there are three core things as a content market and you’ve really got to focus on and that’s distilling it down to the simplest level. But for me, I also need to learn to write. I think a lot of people say: “well I’m just gonna be a video blogger and I’m not going to craft anything, and I just show up when I do a Facebook Live, and that’s it”. That was pretty ordinary because I hadn’t been strategic about the way they’re creating content. You’ve got to learn how to craft words because the words are what are behind videos, words are behind podcast, words are behind blog posts. So the power of words is really important to understand the art of communication whether its standing on stage or whether it’s running a webinar so learn the power.
[00:31:29] Jeff, well let me tell you if you are listening to this podcast when we were starting the interview Jeff had a Fenix watch like and he just told me that he was a cycling around 100km this weekend, so this brings me a question, what’s the day to day routine for Jeff Bullas?
[00:32:03] We get up about 5:30 am. We used to get up at four thirty but that was when I had a day job so I get up. I will meditate. Then I will do some reading and then I will do some writing and then that’s my deep work. So I have that habit and routine. And then I go and start doing the work of answering emails from about 10 or 11 and then the afternoon I concentrate and work on bigger projects. So putting together a digital marketing workshop at the moment. So that’s the bigger project. We’re looking at creating a big piece of content later in the year. So that’s another project. So afternoons I try and leave to that and in the middle of the day typically I will go for a quick 35 – 40 minute bike ride about 10 kilometres just so I get the buzz. So that’s essentially my routine and will work till about 6:00. We might catch up with some business connections in the evening or around five depending. That’s not done every day. Sometimes you just got to get work done but for me it’s still important to catch up with people that you know whether they’re friends whether they’re family whether they’re business colleagues.
[00:33:18] It’s nothing like surrounding yourself with good people. I really get invested in meditation.
[00:33:27] For how long have you been meditating?
[00:33:29] I started meditating back in the 1980s. So I went and did a meditation course. I haven’t done it every day since then but I’ve done it on and off.
[00:33:42] So but I find it really centering. And if I’ve got a few tough things out at the time you don’t feel like you’ve got time. I think it’s too important too actually. It’s more important than to do meditation to get that centering. So we’ve got to stop our minds from thinking and worrying and that’s it becomes a challenge sometimes in a stressful changing world.
[00:34:06] And when something else pops up when you are meditating like four or five days in a row you know that you have something you have to sort out. Yes for me it’s like intuition is like I got for times, four days in a row and I need to solve this, if not it’s going to be popping out or if you solve it. Another thing is going to come again.
[00:34:36] I’m going to get ready for rapid fire questions. Jeff, what’s the ability that’s helped you the most to get you here? The ability to write. And if you have to name one habit, what would it be? The habit of doing deep work every day.
[00:34:54] In other words sitting down researching, writing, creating and then sharing. I’m going to put this recommendation of the deep work book that Jeff did because I’ve read just a few pages but it’s been recommended from a lot of people so it has to be a good recommendation so it has to be to shown for people that want to read it. So it’ll be in the description.
[00:35:20] Jeff what are your current projects up until now?
[00:35:27] We’re working on a big content project that I won’t reveal exactly what it is but it’s a big piece of content which we’ll be doing later in the year. Then we’re doing putting together a fairly extensive digital marketing workshop for businesses that want to transform their marketing and their businesses. So that’s a big project at the moment. That’s going to be finished. So and then we’re going to double down more on I think AI and automation this year and Facebook Messenger. So we’ve got a few tech. So we’ve just done started some simple stuff on that. But we’re starting to have some fun on that.
[00:36:08] Now, what would you like to do next?
[00:36:11] When you’re finished what you’re doing? I don’t see myself finishing what I’m doing. I love what I’m doing. This is Jeffbullas.com is an extension of me. It’s become really an extension of who I am. And. Yeah it’s quite interesting this digital world where we amplify each other with humanity now. I want to write more books I really want to be out. I need to devote more time to writing deep deep work which is a lot longer for a book or books. So we’re gonna do that. But yeah I don’t see myself as actually stopping what I’m doing because it’s just something doesn’t feel like work.
[00:37:03] What would be the title, the headline of the book you’d love to write? The working title at the moment is freedom code.
[00:37:15] So, it’s going to be about essentially how to create a life and business today.
[00:37:19] Yeah yeah yeah that’s right.
[00:37:23] Wow, do you have a date?
[00:37:27] I’ve already written most of it. End of the year is when I hope to get it out. So I’m just pulling it apart a bit because I just needed to actually add more of an expected to it and I’ve needed to work on some different parts of this of the framework that the freedom code is actually going to have so. We’ll wait expectantly for the book.
[00:37:53] Yeah. What what other places do you go to learn Jeff? What are your favorite resources apart from books? Books are my big one; Ted Talks is where I get a lot of inspiration. So sometimes when I’m eating my lunch I will actually go and watch a 10 – 15 minute, 20 minute TED talk while I’m eating lunch. So that’s it. That’s that’s a great source of inspiration for me. Other forms of inspiration are some of the people around me. So what they’re doing and those who I admire the industry. I think what Ryan Deiss is doing with digital marketing is pretty amazing. There’s other people out there creating fantastic things. I think Andrew Warner at Mixergy what he’s done that’s been pretty cool. He’s now doing bot Academy which is training people how to actually build bots which we helped him launched a week or so ago. So I get inspiration from a lot of places and I typically use my phone to capture pieces of inspiration I typically if I’m having a conversation with a friend over coffee or a glass of wine and we come up with something and I say you know what you need to write that down I’ll put my phone out and I’ll write notes I’m actually ending up more writing I’m experimenting with what I call prose which is like very short sentence flowing writing it’s almost poetry slash you know it’s got a lot more rhythm.
[00:39:31] So I’ve been experimenting with that which has been fun. So it’s just still experimenting with my writing voice. Good for your creativity too. Yeah. Yeah exactly. So I’m willing to experiment and people tell me off just using one word sentences or using short sentences not proper paragraphs but writings about creativity. I don’t care. It’s really having fun with the English language because that’s what I do. I don’t speak any other language so. But yeah I think the line by Stephen King and his book on writing which is a book anyone who wants to create great content should read. He says if you want to write a lot you need to read a lot. There is no other way. So that is the truth.
[00:40:20] What’s the podcast that you like the most?
[00:40:23] Or you listen to the most? I don’t listen to many podcasts, Tim Ferriss I’ve listened to some of his. But I can tell a little secret about why I’m not a big podcast listener. Number one I don’t do any commuting so I’m not or I don’t like to have earbuds in when I’ve got a gym. I just want to be at the gym being in the now, number two I’m actually quite a fast reader so I could actually read a transcript of a podcast in about three minutes whereas listening to it would take me 30 minutes okay. So that’s why I just find that reading for me is much more efficient. The other thing I like about reading too especially in Kindle net is I can actually highlight notes when I want to go back. In a podcast you can’t do that. So there’s a few reasons why I’m not a big podcast listener it’s not because I don’t like podcasts it’s just because I’m wired differently so that’s fine.
[00:41:25] What’s the blog you think it’s most useful for you or the community apart from yours? For sure.
[00:41:35] Oh there’s just so many around, if you a little bit of inspiration and pithy insight. Seth Godin never disappoints. Tim Ferriss still amazes me today. And his take on life is pretty fascinating. So he’s the what we call a modern day stoic he said that star system is his life operating system.
[00:42:02] And I sort of get that in about two years ago I wrote a blog post called is pain your path to success. And the reality is that you don’t learn from comfort you learn from pain. So essentially you’ve got to change your attitude to life in terms of not treat pain as a problem but even though it’s not fun at the time it’s actually an opportunity to grow and maybe happiness is overrated.
[00:42:30] It is easy sometimes, I mean would you define yourself as a stoic?
[00:42:38] I suppose that I have that leaning so I wouldn’t call myself highly stoic but I’d say mostly stoic, yeah.
[00:42:46] Can you give me the name of the person that you learn from? The person you learned from the most.
[00:43:01] Seth Godin initially. David Meerman Scott the new Rules of Marketing and PR and David and I have become friends and it’s been pretty cool to call him and have him as a friend. We don’t see each other very often because it was in Boston I live in Sydney but we’ve only met once physically. But David was one of the original source of inspiration. The other source of inspiration for a long time that I just consumed was HubSpot’s blog, they were huge. So and now I collaborate with HubSpot on different projects sort of funds and so on.People I admired. I’d like to make Tim Ferriss one. I think the way he operates is sort of it’s you know. It’s just fascinating. So there’s some people that just inspire you in the way they live their lives in the way they create in the way they actually do things. So yeah there’s a few pieces of inspiration people. If you were to work in a different industry, which would it be? Different industry? I work in an industry that I enjoy. I don’t think of any other industry I want to be in love being in the tech industry. It’s never boring. So I don’t see any time soon that I’m going to go out and become a pharmaceutical entrepreneur. Technology in digital business fascinates me, so this is the pond we’re going to keep playing in.
[00:44:52] Jeff what’s your dream, so it out loud, what would be your dream?
[00:45:00] I’m living it.
[00:45:01] So I don’t see a destination. I just see a place and a journey that I enjoy doing. I want to continue to grow. I suppose one dream I have would be to write a New York Times bestseller. There you go. So that’s one dream.
[00:45:19] So yeah there you go.
[00:45:23] You just discovered what my dream was and I just discovered that today.
[00:45:26] So thats one that I’d like to do. Anyone that’s listening to this podcast, anyone who’s from Spain, from Latin America, from Europe what would be your non requested advice for them?
[00:45:46] What would you say?
[00:45:53] Well for that particular market segment? Yeah, for anyone who is listening to this podcast. From your life lessons or work lessons.
[00:46:09] I suppose life lessons. There’s just so many of them go under personal development read my blog post and go and read it, there’s a lot of life lessons like paying your pathway to success that’s certainly your attitude to pain is what would define you. And I think never ever settled for an ordinary life. So be prepared to actually hang in there. Keep searching. Keep looking. Keep doing, strapping yourself in doing the work if you haven’t found your passion and keep looking.
[00:46:44] Never settle. Here you go ladies and gentlemen.
[00:46:49] Jeff Bullas thank you so much Jeff for being such an inspiration for sharing with us this 46 minutes of magic, knowledge and experience, deep work, digital mindset, lifestyle mindset. Thank you for everything.
[00:47:10] Thank you for you, for your blog and Jeff for the time you gave us. So we can learn from you more closely. And I can learn from you more closely too so, thank you Jeff Bullas.
[00:47:26] It’s been a pleasure. Great to chat.
[00:47:28] And I hope you can catch up soon with a road bike through Sydney or maybe Valencia or Barcelona or wherever. We’re about to go on the tour de France, a little tour.
[00:47:41] So not the actual tour but we will be doing a tour as part of the Tour de France, in France in a few months times so I’m really looking forward to that so I’m gonna be sort of in your neighborhood, Europe, in the next few months. Let me tell you it’s gonna be an amazing experience for sure. It will be.
[00:47:58] I’ve gotta keep training! Yeah you got it for sure. Thank you Jeff Bullas, you just listened to Jeff Bullas on Disrupt Everything podcast series. Episode number thirty-one, can you believe it. It was started one year ago and last but not least.
[00:48:21] You don’t need to share this.
[00:48:23] I mean, you don’t need to share it with another person but rather if you have something that you have learned from here apply it. If you think something was actionable that it was, do it do it do it do it do it and make it happen and if you think of just one person you can share this with just share it.
[00:48:47] But mostly do something. Thank you.
[00:48:53] I’m Isra Garcia. This is Disrupt Everything podcast series with the great Jeff Bullas. See ya.