Leading in the Age of AI: Why Great Leaders Don't Run Out of Ideas | Ep. 350

Speaker A: Hey, friends. So today's episode, it's a little different than what I normally share. A couple months ago, I had the opportunity to deliver a keynote speech called Leading in the Age of AI How Leaders Stand Out Today. And I'm going to share that with you today. It's different than our usual conversation format. I want to bring you the audio from that talk because the core idea, I think, is something a lot of people are missing right now. AI is making it easier than ever to create content, generate ideas and sound smart, but at the same time, it's making it harder to actually stand out. And what I shared in this session, which you'll see is a simple but powerful shift that, uh, your brand isn't built on how much you post. Right? It's not about social media. It's about quality of ideas and how consistently you develop those and share those. So in this talk, which you're about to hear, I walk through a practical system for doing that. From where great ideas actually come from to how to capture them, organize them, and turn them into something that builds your reputation over time. And yes, it starts with something that might surprise you. Reading a boring book.

Speaker B: So if you ever felt like you're

Speaker A: creating content but not really building anything meaningful or you're trying to stand out in a world where everyone has access to these same tools, this one's for you. Here's my talk, Leading in the Age of AI.

Speaker B: So I've been in brand strategy and marketing for the past 20 years. The past seven spent specifically focused on personal branding. And I've learned something about building a personal brand. And it's this. If you want to build a personal brand that's interesting, start by reading a boring book. Now, I know that's not what comes to mind when you think personal brand. Usually you're thinking selfies, followers, likes. And I'm, um, here to tell you that that's not what a personal brand is really about. Personal brands start with good ideas. By definition, a personal brand is just your reputation and how you intentionally shape that over time. And what better way to shape it than around a good idea? I hate to tell you this, but some of the best ideas out there are inside of boring books. When I got started in advertising, they had me reading a lot of books to get up to speed. Books about media planning and psychology, communication, persuasion, and even a book about purple cows. But, uh, in those books, in that reading, even though some of them were easier to get through than others, I found the foundation of the work that I was doing and Some of those ideas led me to understand my craft better, but also started to give me my own ideas, give me ways to form my own perspective, my own opinions. And now they weren't all easy. There were times I remember specifically I had jury duty. And uh, I brought with me, you guys might have heard of this book by Dale Carnegie. It's called how to Win Friends and Influence People. Great book. And I had it on audiobook to give me an easier way to get through it. And even at two times speed, sorry to say, the book for me, pretty boring, pretty hard to get through and I was at jury duty. Compared to jury Duty, Jury duty was less boring than that book. No offense. If you really like that book, it's just a little hard for me to get through. But the lessons from that book, when I started my business and had to get out there and start meeting people and networking, the lessons from that book are still foundational to what I do today. And those ideas are still prevalent. So what I ask for you is where could you go to find great ideas and craft how you're thinking, how you are acting and the opinions that you can develop so that as you are building your reputation, it starts with ideas. So the thing about ideas is they tend to be fleeting. If you look at my desk today, there's going to be lots of little post it notes scattered across, some of them from a couple of years ago that have some dust on them. Also lots of whiteboards, lots of different notes in my apps that I've taken when I'm out and about and they're all over the place. These ideas that uh, tend to be coming to us at different times. We need a way to organize them. So if you want to build a personal brand, you don't just need great ideas, you need a way to keep track of them. So step two is start a personal journal. Simple, right? Create a place where you can keep track of all these great ideas that you have. Some of the greatest thinkers and influencers in our time had personal journals. If you go way back to da Vinci, you immediately think of the drawings and the things he'd written down that you've seen in your textbooks. He'd wrote, written about all kinds of things, engineering, design, architecture. He did it with pictures, he had to do lists in his notebook and poems. So however these ideas strike, you have a place to write them down. Other famous journalists, people like Marie Curie, had a notebook that's still in the museum in France that is encased in lead because it's literally radioactive and she won two Nobel prizes for her work in radiology. But these journals we keep are a way to track our ideas and keep pace with the things that we're thinking of every day. Thomas Edison, famous for having literally 5 million pages of notes. The thing was, they weren't all over the place like mine. They are organized. They had staff and secretaries that would come and organize those thoughts into ways that they could refer to them later. So a, uh, journal is a great place to start to keep track of that. And guess what? We're in the age of AI so we get to pull out our phones, start a voice journal and say, hey, hey, Siri, start a note. Or hey, Siri, open chatgpt, take a note. I actually keep my notes now in a journal in ChatGPT. I have three types of notes that I keep. One is a morning intention. So I start by saying, here's what I want to do today. And I talk like a Star Trek ship captain. Today's log, star date November 14, 2025. Here's my daily intention. Because I know I'm talking to a computer. I want to talk and give it all the information, but I basically tell it. Here's what I want to accomplish. Here's what I want to focus on. Here's what a good day looks like. The second type of note that I keep is a daily reflection on what happened in the day. So at the end of the day, here's what I am proud of. Here's maybe an interesting thing that happened. Here's a story story so that we capture these stories. We have so many of them throughout our lives, but we're not often keeping track of them. And then when we need them, we can't seem to find those good stories. And a personal brand, again, is built on ideas and how we tell those ideas in the form of story. Third thing I love in terms of keeping a note for yourself. And we can do this throughout the day. This is my favorite one is a daily idea. Anytime something strikes, you open that phone up and say, today's date. Here's my idea. In fact, I had one for today. When I was preparing for this, I looked up 15 cold starts to a TED Talk. And, uh, I looked at every single one of them. I thought to myself, you know what? This would be a good post for other people that are curious about the same thing. And I opened up my app and I said, hey, today's the idea review the 14 types of ways to start a speech and share them with other people. Now imagine the power of that, because now we have AI to process this information. We don't have to hire a team of people to help us format those notes. It can be processed for us. So at the end of every week, I ask ChatGPT for a weekly summary highlight for me the themes of the week, the things that got accomplished, and come up with 10 content ideas, 10 things that I could share with the world that fit my personal brand. So the tools are there, and we need less help than ever to take all these ideas we have in the day, because even ChatGPT can come up with ideas, but it can't come up with ideas that are based on your experiences and they're based on your stories and your history. So have a way to capture it. Start a journal. Third thing you can do after you have this journal started is, I want to say hire a secretary, but we just talked about that. What you can actually do is start to optimize how you get those notes out into the world. Figure out, okay, where am I going to put these things? Am I going to share it as a post? Is it just going to be a conversation with a friend? But as you start to share the ideas with other people, those ideas start to come together as brand interaction with your audience, with your tribe, with the people in your network. So where can you start to take those ideas, turn them into content and share them? Could be anything. It could be, uh, a LinkedIn post, it could be an article, it could be a blog, it could be a podcast, it could be a YouTube video, it could be a live stream from somewhere interesting. How do you get those ideas out into the public and just the ones that have been processed? Not every random thought, right? And as you start to do that every week, you can look back at the end of the year. And I'm not saying post every day, but if just once per week you shared an idea, at the end of the year, you'd have 52 ideas that were your perspective, your opinions, your stories, and those 52 ideas. When someone looks for you and they find those ideas, they start to form what your personal brand could be. Next step, don't forget this one. This is important. If m you want to build a personal brand, work with other people, find collaborators, find partners. When you start to share ideas with other people, it's not just you talking into an echo chamber with no feedback. The best part about sharing something is in person or online is when someone comments back and starts the dialogue. I do this through my podcast all the time. I actually invite people on my show to have a conversation, and I get to ask them questions. If I go on someone else's show, they ask me questions, and we form new ideas from our original thoughts. That challenges us to grow individually, but also starts to create new content. And there's association there, there's relationship there. So your personal brand isn't just these ideas. It's how these ideas intermingle with other people. So if you want to build a personal brand, start to share that and collaborate and build partnership and friendships with other people. Now, easier said than done, I know. But if even today you can go out and find one other person to follow up with and have a conversation, that conversation could lead to your next opportunity. So I'll leave you with this. I want you to imagine what it would be like if after you left here today, you took one note, one idea of something you had been inspired by that you heard today. And if you did that every week, how many ideas would you have to draw from to drive your own personal growth? Or meet one person, shake one hand, start one relationship at the end of a year? If you did that every month, that's 12 new people, 20 new people, 30 new people. That could be the thing you need. That's the reference, the referral, or the partnership. What if after the end of the year, you shared one idea every week? What would that look like when someone looked for you online? What would your personal brand story be? And imagine that when you left here today, you went and found one pouring book. You found something that inspired you, that you were curious about, that childhood curiosity when you couldn't help but grab everything in front of you and consume it, could you find that curiosity again and find one thing to read that might give you some inspiration to the next idea, the next piece of your personal brand? So, yes, get out there, read a boring book, start a personal journal, track those ideas, process them, share them with other people. A personal brand isn't something that lives in your subscribers and your likes. It's something that lives in your ideas and how you share them with the world. So if you want to build a personal brand that's interesting, start by reading a boring book. Thank you.

Speaker A: All right, friends, that's it for today. That was our pseudo TED Talk, if you will. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please leave a review. Subscribe, make sure that you are following the show so you get, uh, it every week. And tune in and we'll talk to you next time. Thanks.

Speaker B: Brands on brand.