How to (try to) Generate Meaningful Content in 2018

A year ago I was invited by Professor Andrew Lubin to speak at Rosemont College about supply chain management to an undergraduate class focused on various business topics. I walked into the room and immediately realized I was speaking with teenagers for the first time in my professional capacity. I asked myself if the deck of slides and presentation of Capacity’s (my company) services would have interested me at their age, and put aside my computer. You’re always better off speaking or writing about what you know, of course, but critically you need to consider your audience. I know my company, but the story sounds different when told conversationally than with a deck of slides, especially when speaking to a pre-professional crowd. Starting a conversation is the first step to generating something by which your audience will be enriched. It is sharing something you know or have thought about a lot with people in a way that reaches them as individuals which seems to me over time to be the most compelling way to connect.

“If I were sitting in your seat right now, and someone who had started a company and helped run it for more than a decade and a half was in front of me, I would want to pick their brain, not look at slides. So that’s what we’re going to do for the next hour or so: you are going to ask me any questions you want, or raise discussion points I might know something about, or not. I’m going to do the best I can to answer and engage with you.”

Getting the audience engaged is key to most successful talks or writing. Right away we had an excellent range of questions on what kind of advice was most helpful, how to get a company started, and some off-topic items like collegiate lacrosse (I can be easily distracted). Before I knew it Professor Lubin was wrapping it up. It was well-received enough that students forwarded resumes and one of the graduate students was hired and remains a highly-valued member of the Capacity team. So it worked well that time.

How might that experience help inform the effort to create meaningful written content? People consistently encourage job seekers to find ‘work they have a passion for’ and that’s great advice, if you can find the work that meets that high bar. But the thing I would most want to read if I stumbled upon this piece is twofold: how do you manage to have a successful company for so many years and what actually goes on inside it? What does it take to get there from here?

When I look for guidance and brain food from outside media and content sources, I have my go-to sources. There is Shane Parrish’s incredibly insightful Farnham Street, with interviews with fascinating business leaders like Ray Dalio regarding building an ‘idea meritocracy’ and Naval Ravikant of AngelList on how to live a happy and meaningful life. There is Marketplace, and their spinoff podcasts Corner Office and Make Me Smart. I like to check in with the national security policy wonks at Bombshell, Stay Tuned with Preet (Bharara), and listen to interviews with artists at Brian Alfred’s thoughtful Sound and Vision podcast, to hear how professional creatives generate ideas at such a prodigious rate (hint: it takes practice and lots of it).

I can write about what it is like to work with incredible partners and team mates to work together to grow a company over 17+ years. So that’s what I’m going to do, and if it’s of interest to you, please stay tuned.