[00:00:00] Ben: So the average American spends about 13 hours a day consuming some form of media. That's a lot of time, 13 hours a day. There's not much left actually once you take out sleeping, it's the main thing we do. And there are thousands and thousands of messages that hit your brain during those 13 hours.
And so how do you do something noticeable that is different? Well, I argue that the best way to do that is by playing by different rules than what everybody plays by. So I argue that constraints are the most important thing in terms of us being creative and in terms of us be in unlocking something salient that is different.
[00:00:41] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breadth depth, and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention. Gratitude and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to the Live The Width of Your Life podcast. If this is your first time listening, thank you so much for listening in today. And if you have listened to other episodes, I'm so grateful that you are here. It means the world to me. This week. My guest is Ben Guttmann, and he's a marketing and communications expert and the author of "Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win And How to Design Them."
Ben is a former co-founder and managing director at Digital natives group, an award-winning agency that worked with the NFL, I love New York, Comcast, NBC Universal, the nature of conservancies, and other major clients. He currently teaches digital marketing at Baruch College in New York City and consults with a range of thought leaders, venture-backed startups, and other brands.
I enjoyed my conversation with Ben. I brought to the podcast episode, my copy of the book, which I read cover to cover earmarked under a line that had post-its on all the pages. It is such a great book. Communication is so critical for all of us. And he did an amazing job talking about the tenants of great communication.
His mission is to help good people and great brands tell the world why they matter. And we talked about why it's so hard to get messages right. Why he wrote the book. What the process was like. What he learned about himself during the process. And then we even talked about attributes of really good communication, the difference between complexity.
And why some messages could be complex, but still are simple in the way that we describe them. And, we just talked about a lot of other things like why it's important sometimes to employ the art of subtraction to take things out to make messages more simple. And we also just talked about the shift from his brand to teaching.
Building and selling a business, how he's worked with top brands and so many other things. It was such a great conversation. And I think that's relevant for anybody, whether you are in corporate, you are an entrepreneur, you are trying to sell something, or just want to improve your communication skills. I had such a great time talking to Ben and I hope you enjoy it as well. Take a listen.
Hi, Ben. Thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:03:36] Ben: Hi, Aneta. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:03:38] Aneta: Of course. I was so looking forward to our conversation. Because for people who are just listening, I'm holding up a copy of your book with tattered little Post-its.
Because I ripped them cause I had so many, I didn't want to just do one per page. And your book is called Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them. And so even on the front cover the title and the tagline, you are demonstrating the goodness that we can find inside of your book. So just for those that maybe haven't read the book or aren't that familiar with you tell me just a little bit about you and sort of how you came to be an author of this book.
[00:04:15] Ben: Yeah, it's funny you mentioned the cover and the title and the subtitle. I joke that nobody's ever written this book again because you are kind of backed into a corner a little bit where everything you do has to be perfect in terms of messaging and communications. And so this is a book you should judge by its cover.
If I didn't get it right in terms of the cover, the back, the back blurb, and all this other stuff then why should you believe me otherwise? So I appreciate that. But my background is I ran a marketing agency for 10 years. I started it more or less right out of college, actually in my old professor's basement, he ran a marketing agency.
I was the student government nerd and didn't do a lot of internships and one day he came up to me and said, you kind of want to maybe start your own business. We need some help with digital. Maybe we can figure something out. And so we set up shop in his basement.
And it was just north of New York City, so I drove my old 94 Accord up to their office every day and would slap their logo on the wall. And then bit by bit we began working with bigger clients. We worked with a local ice cream shop, then eventually slightly bigger clients and slightly more money is like a bigger contract.
Eventually, we moved out of their office into our own space here in Queens, we hired employees, we worked a slightly bigger projects, and lo and behold, 10 years later, we had a portfolio with the NFL and Comcast and I love New York and all these wonderful, awesome brands.
And then we sold it. We sold that business about a year ago and almost two years ago at this point. And it was a ton of fun. And I'm super happy for that ride and I love all the people I got to work with on that. But it's funny I've been joking about this and kind of the boy out of the marketing agency, but you can't take the marketing out of the boy.
And so still in the past two years, as I've been doing my independent work as a consultant, as I've been teaching, which I teach at Baruch College here in New York, I would have kind of the same questions about what makes something work and what doesn't work. What are, why are some messages effective when others fall flat?
And your brain would keep kind of working on that. And as I began thinking about those problems, those challenges, that's how the book kind of came to be just to answer that question in the form of a book. And I also joke about the book. I say this in kind of page one, which is the answer to that question.
About why things, some things work and other things don't is that, well, the things that work are simple and the things that don't often aren't and if that's enough, then have to read the other 207 pages of the book. That should be, but what was interesting was the why of that scenario and the how. How you get there was surprisingly deep and surprisingly hard. And so that's what I tried to explore simply put.
[00:06:54] Aneta: I love it so much. And I love that you say your message also your mission, which is clear. I think I found this maybe on your website. You said I help good people in great brands tell the world why they matter. And so sometimes I feel like I'm always looking to improve processes around me. Do you walk around and just see messages constantly and go, I know how I could fix this.
[00:07:18] Ben: All the time. My functional background is in design. And so nothing is probably more annoying than being married to a designer. As my wife would probably attest, because you can walk around and both you get kind of the messaging marketing piece, but also you're like, well, that's the typeface that they use. And like, that's the reason why they're doing this or that. So yeah, it's very hard to turn that PCU off.
[00:07:36] Aneta: I can see that. So I want to talk a little bit about the process first of writing the book, and then I want to dive into some of these passages that I've earmarked. So what you decided to create to write this book, and it's clear that you've got a mission of really wanting to help people.
You want to help individuals. You want to help brands, companies, and solopreneurs, probably like me. So when I read this book, I'm like, okay, I need to come back to this and use it like a manual too, for my website, for all the content that I create, et cetera. But what was the process where you now have this idea that you wanted to teach people how to write and create clear messages?
So what was the process? Did you do an outline for the book first, or were there certain chapters that you already had in your mind because you've been dying to write it for some time?
[00:08:20] Ben: Yeah, the book process. So I'm published by Barrett Kohler Publishers. So it's a traditional publisher where you do, I had an agent, you do the book proposal, and then eventually you submit a first draft, second draft, and they have editors, all those different pieces.
How you get to it is you kind of have this, fuzzy idea in the beginning of saying, this is the thesis that I want to write, and this is part of the value of editing, which does say part of the material itself, as I talk about how important editing is, is that in the beginning, my thesis was was pretty broad actually.
I talked about messaging in the book, but I also had other pieces that were about public policy and this and that, because some interesting bits of research came across. As I started to develop the idea of more, I appropriately said, well, I have to focus on this to be something that's going to be applicable and actionable and be a better book.
So you start with a thesis, then you start to say, okay, well, here's the general argument to it. And my book is divided with kind of the why and the first half of it and the how and the second piece and okay, so then you have the two sections and then each section has this many chapters in it and then each one of the chapters you kind of have the individual pieces. And so writing a book, I mean my book, it's a medium length book it's 40 some odd thousand words. You don't sit down and write 40,000 words at a time.
You don't sit down and write a book you sit down and write a paragraph or a page or a section. So whenever somebody comes to me, I don't know if I could start, I could write a book. And I said, it's the same thing as how you eat a whale, it's one bite at a time. You don't do the whole thing at once.
You have the outline and that's very fuzzy and it gets clearer and clearer as you go on. And it's funny that the process of writing the book also emulated some of the content that was in the book too, as well.
[00:09:56] Aneta: I appreciate you walking us through that process and some of the things I would love for maybe you to share a little bit about some of the things that stood out to me.
So the first is you talked about five attributes of clear communication, they're beneficial, focused, salient, empathetic, and minimal, and you did such a nice job of going through and explaining each of these, but I also love the real-life examples. Those were funny. You had some really good real-life examples, especially like the New York City parking signs that were up before during 1 administration versus Adcox versus like afterward.
So could you mind just maybe walking through why are these attributes so important for clear communication?
[00:10:36] Ben: Yeah. I love that example that you mentioned, by the way. It was important for me in the examples that I was selecting, was that I didn't want them to just be marketing examples because this is a book, my background's marketing. I teach it.
This is going to live on the marketing bookshelf at Barnes and Noble or the library, wherever. But I argue that everybody's a marketer. If you are tasked in some way with getting people to do something, understand something, to vote for somebody, to donate somewhere, to wash the dishes.
All of these things are, are marketing tasks in many ways. So I tried to make it as broadly applicable and include things like parking signs that would show the expansiveness of these pieces. So I'll answer your question by going back to like, what is the foundational why, of why simplicity works?
And what's the mechanism behind it? It comes down to the idea of this word fluency. And you've heard the word fluency, we know we're fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin, but we're fluent in a certain TV show or cheese.
We can be fluent in a lot of different areas. The Latin root of the word fluence means flowing. And so that's kind of what it feels like when something's flowing. But if you ask a cognitive scientist about the word fluency, well, what that means to them is basically how easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your head, and make sense of it.
And the things that don't take that much work to do that, well, they're more fluent. If they're easier to perceive, to understand, well, we're more likely to like them. We're more likely to trust them. We're more likely to buy them all the things that you want when you're in the communications perspective.
And the opposite is also true. If you make somebody sweat and take a lot of mental cycles to understand something, they don't like it. They don't trust it. They don't buy it. All the things you don't want. So that's kind of the fundamental truth behind what the efficacy of simplicity is that it's more fluent and loads of science across different domains points to that being the case.
But then when we're on the other end of the communications equation when we're somebody who is a sender who has to communicate and advertise to whatever it is, we are pulled in this opposite direction, we're pulled towards complicated because internally we have these additive biases.
We have this complexity bias thing that we're more likely to add than subtract to seek more difficult solutions and externally. We're also incentivized by the demands of a resume or a PR cycle or whatever it is to kind of do more and more. So that's the gulf there is how do we bridge the gap between them?
Where people want to be as receivers and where people are currently able to be as senders. And that's what the whole book is trying to solve how do we bring the senders closer to the receivers?
[00:13:28] Aneta: Yeah. And I love that you even talk about how when we write simple messages. That the receiver can understand we're being kind and we're compassionate. So really it's a service to be able to create easily understandable messages. And yet we still, you just mentioned have this, need or this belief that somehow we have to make things more complicated, take up all the space, use more words, more language. So talk a little bit about maybe if someone suffers from this and has a hard time being concise, how can we start subtracting and what are some of the things that we can do if we want to just become more mindful of our communications?
[00:14:09] Ben: Yeah. So what I've identified is there are five design principles I call it, that help us bring those two sides together. As I mentioned before, my background is in design design is about arranging things in the world to solve a problem. So how do we look at this problem and systematically address it?
This is not a rubric, it's not a step-by-step plan, but these five principles, the better we can activate upon them, the better we are in terms of getting our goals in terms of communicating effectively, getting a sender and receiver to match. Again, it's not a step-by-step plan, but the first one is beneficial and this I do think is probably the most important one which is what does it matter to the receiver?
Are you kind of features versus benefits? A lot of what we're talking about in sales and marketing, that's number one. Number two is focused. Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once? Is it kind of one idea or three ideas in a trench coat? The third one is salient.
Does your message stand out from the crowd in a busy, noisy world? Is it noticeable? Is it contrast? Does it come to your attention? The fourth one is empathy are you speaking in the language that your audience understands are you meeting them where they are in terms of both the words themselves but also their emotions their motivations and then finally the last one is minimal you don't have your cut out everything that isn't important it kept only what is and the more you can activate on these the better you're going to be positioned to have a message that lands and does what you want and need from it.
[00:15:43] Aneta: It's so true. And I love the examples that you had, especially when we were talking about benefits and you talked about features or benefits. And I think you use the example of a drill and you're like, nobody cares about the drill. They need a drill because they are making holes and so they need something that does that no one cares about the drill or horsepower or whatever else about it.
So I thought that was really interesting and super important for people, anybody who's selling a service or a product or anything, or to capture someone's attention. Also, it reminds us of the fact that you said, we're super distracted, like our brains, we have a low focus. We have so much data that is coming at us that we remember.
I know even as a consumer of podcasts and books and everything. I'll remember sometimes something that I heard or that I read, but I won't be able to attribute it to whom so being able to stand out is so important too. So how can someone who is a solopreneur or a small business, how can they stand out amongst their competition in terms of ensuring that people know, can understand what it is?
They're selling or what they're trying to convey and then two, so that they're memorable and you just go say, wow, that's great. But I can't remember where I saw that.
[00:17:01] Ben: Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned the drill in the hole before. So that's in that beneficial category. The quote, and it's from Theodore Leavitt, who's a Harper professor from the sixties.
And by the way, I tell this to my students every year and I say if you don't remember anything else from the entire course, from your entire degree if you internalize this, you're going to be a better marketer than most people that I know professionally and so it goes people don't want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.
They don't want the thing. They want what the thing does for them. They want how their life is better because of it. Nobody wants the extra battery or the comfort grip or the extra horsepower, all that stuff. They want to be able to get the hole faster and more accurate and better, whatever it's going to be.
And I can go on about benefits kind of forever because I think that is the one that unlocks a lot of the other pieces. But what you're getting at a little bit was the salient piece. How does it stand out? How do you do something? That contrast against the background noise and there's lots of background noise.
So the average American spends about 13 hours a day consuming some form of media. That's a lot of time, 13 hours a day. There's not much left actually once you take out sleeping, it's the main thing we do. And there are thousands and thousands of messages that hit your brain during those 13 hours.
And so how do you do something noticeable that is different? Well, I argue that the best way to do that is by playing by different rules than what everybody plays by. So I argue that constraints are the most important thing in terms of us being creative and in terms of us be in unlocking something salient that is different.
Constraints can come in a lot of different ways they can come in terms of space or time or the tools that you're using but by the kind of pushing and pulling these levers of maybe we have to do it in black and white or maybe we only have 10 minutes to come up with this idea or maybe we only can use 140 characters in a tweet or something by putting those type of constraints on ourselves, we kind of shake ourselves out of this creative rut, which is the groove formed by doing the same thing over and over again.
If we're able to push ourselves. Some form of kind of limitation is used as a kind of shock to the system, we're able to get the interesting territory that we wouldn't otherwise be able to explore. The result of that ends up oftentimes being something novel and different and unique in a way that stands out from everything else that your competitors might be doing.
[00:19:31] Aneta: Thank you. I love that example. And so if we have some listeners and they're thinking, I need to think about whether say they're in a corporate setting, like how they can improve their communication, say they're in a corporate setting and right now we're seeing a lot of information overload.
You've got so many technology tools. And probably very little etiquette around what to use when. So how can people start to create more clear communications in a corporate setting first, through email or anything else that they need to capture the attention I think everybody would benefit from shorter communications. And easy to understand and you know exactly what you need to do with it. Just so we have some practical tools for folks too.
[00:20:16] Ben: Yeah. And it's funny if I had one little regret about the book, it's that I probably learned, at least at the beginning of it, a little more about the advertising slogans and tagline piece of it.
And it's a double-edged sword because that is a very important piece and it's a very recognizable thing that people immediately, they understand, they hear just do it or something like that. And they're able to immediately kind of put two and two together because it's a pretty notable example, but I think that kind of obscures a little bit of where this stuff is really useful for most people because you only coming up with a tagline once in a blue moon you're working and even if you're working in a branding agency, that's not your day to day activity.
But we all are writing emails all the time. We're all putting proposals together. We're all putting reports and presentations out there. And I think that that's where these skills and these tools are going to be optimally useful. Now, the more you can think about it, again, it's a beneficial focus, salient, empathetic, minimal in the context of an internal memo or an email. That's the much larger volume of communication. And I think that's where this is going to be useful. There are kind of tools up and down these five attributes, which I lay out.
I'll kind of give you one real quick, that it's like a little tiny actionable one that in some ways permeates a few of these. And that is speaking to one person, the kind of one-to-many, the speaking to a crowd that doesn't work well because crowds don't exist. Every time that you're buying something, voting for somebody, donating, whatever it is, you kind of made it in your head and while that commercial at the Super Bowl might be going out to millions of people in your head, you're the only person making that decision is the one sender to the one receiver, while if somebody up at a campaign rally speaking to 5, 000 people, they're only speaking to kind of one person internally in your head, so that is a very useful tool to kind of put yourself in that business, speak to one person.
If you're writing an email that's going out to 100, 000 people, it's not going out to 100, 000 people. It's going out to one person over and over again, a hundred thousand times. And you have to shape your copy in that way. And even just kind of putting yourself in that headspace, subconsciously, like subtly put you in a position where you're going to be able to write that a lot easier because often we get scared a lot of times when we're sending these big broadcast things. We think we have to be a megaphone voice, but in reality, it just has to be kind of this type of conversation, like me to you as part of it.
I was going to say, that the best person in the world is this right now, it's Taylor Swift. So I'm not a huge Swifty. My wife likes her a lot. I like Taylor Swift, but not to the same level, but she is so incredibly talented, I mean, she's both a great songwriter and stuff, but as a performer, if you saw The Heiress tour, like a movie that they did,
I went through space in time. Several months after it was recorded and through thousands of movie screens across the world, she still makes you feel that every song lyric and every bit of banter on the stage, kind of her directly communicating with you in the same way that she directly communicates with 70, 000 people in the stadium and famously also Bill Clinton was like this. He was very good about this. So this type of skill is something that does scale to that extreme level, but it's still so effective.
[00:23:41] Aneta: I love it you said that because that is so important when people can make that connection. And I don't know if this is relevant, but I just saw the movie air this weekend. Did you see the air? Do you remember Matt Damon's speech to Michael Jordan? When it was so directly to him he'd like to switch gears because whatever they had planned wasn't very helpful and he was making this direct communication and talking about these are your shoes.
It was with his design. It was going to be his silhouette on the shoe. It was going to be all about him. The name was Air Jordan. And it was interesting in that got him, of course, not to go to Adidas or to go to Converse, which had other messages, but by tailoring the shoe and the entire line for Michael Jordan, it still became the biggest opportunity for Nike.
And it completely changed them. So I was just thinking about, in that case, it was a person at the other end of the table, but in your example of Taylor Swift and even how we communicate on that one-to-one. If we did the same thing and we pictured our client's avatar or the person that we're communicating with, it does have that resonance.
It has some electric charge that seems more personal. So anyway, that just came to mind and as another example, but what you were saying about the communications also works for both advertising. And as you said, even in the corporate setting for one-on-one communications. And it ties into another thing you talk about, which is talking like a human.
So do you want to expand a little bit about that? Because I think we've lost the ability to do that sometimes.
[00:25:18] Ben: Yeah. And a lot of that goes hand in hand. So I tell this story sometime a few years ago, a friend of mine was working for a company that was unfortunately splashed all over the news. They had some product recall. It was a whole big mess.
And we all sit down to dinner. And of course, the first question somebody asks is, Hey, how's it going over at company X, Y, Z. And my friend goes, well, it's unfortunate that these events occurred. And they couldn't finish the sentence because we all just burst out laughing.
We all were like what are you talking about? It's unfortunate. Exactly. It sucks. That's not how a human would speak. That's how legal in HR and the PR people want you to speak because that covers your ass. And that ends up being something that's not opening up to liability or whatever it's going to be, but that's not how people speak and you immediately notice it in that type of scenario.
You wouldn't notice it right off the bat if you read it in a news article somewhere or even in an email, but you would recognize that once all of a sudden you are talking to other humans that, yeah, that's not actually how people speak. And when you're able to kind of put, you know, develop that muscle for speaking to one person, as I mentioned before, that also helps really kind of shake you out of that mode of using kind of the writing words for talking. It's really easy if you use the speaking words for writing, you end up much more effective in terms of your communication than when you do it kind of the other way around.
And that also goes to this other example where there's a little tidbit that I like to drop in here. So Seth Godin, kind of the author and blogger and big kind of marketing thought leader. An article he wrote years ago, which probably is one of those influential pieces says that nobody ever gets speaker block or talker block people get writer’s block because they're writing muscle isn't as well formed as they're talking muscle.
We talk all the time. We talk tens of thousands of words a day, oftentimes, but we don't necessarily always write, we don't write to that quantity so if you ever feel like you're in writer's block we'll try to talk it out and that's more kind of about the production sense but in terms of how you frame it, if you ever think that something's not coming across try to say it out loud right as you're writing something and he's feeling like it's clunky and it doesn't work say it out loud.
Say it aloud to yourself, say it aloud to your coworker, the desk next to you, call up your grandmother and talk to her, and say it out loud to her and see if she gets it. Or best yet go find somebody who resonates with your audience and who resembles your audience. It can be their avatar and use them as an example for talking.
[00:27:54] Aneta: I like that example. I do that a lot. It's very helpful. Sometimes I'll just voice memo when things come to mind or like dictated that way. And it's interesting because you could hear your voice and that.
And so tell me what your thoughts are and you didn't talk about this. I don't think in the book, but in terms of talking like a human, what do you think the impact of AI is going to be for people who tend to use it a lot? Because I'll tell you when I've used it and there are some wonderful ways to use it. It does not sound like a human. It doesn't sound like me.
And when I tell it to adjust to more real-life speak, it then says things that I would never say, just strange expressions. So what are your thoughts about it?
[00:28:38] Ben: Oh, I have lots of kind of complicated and conflicting thoughts about AI. I did mention it a tiny bit in the book because I kind of saw the writing on the wall as I was writing the book, it was the fall of 2022 and that's when chat GPT came out. And so I didn't use it for any of the production of my book. But I did remember being like I need an extra citation for something here.
Maybe you can help me with that. And I went and I asked her a question and it spits back a couple of studies and I go and I look up those studies and little in the academic database and they don't exist. They sound plausible. The authors are people who have written studies in that domain, but they've never written one together.
That study didn't exist. It hallucinated them. And it's gotten a little bit better in the past year since then, but that's still fundamentally the problem, which is that AI doesn't so much as is currently built, the large language models, they don't so much know the thing. They know what words about the thing look like, and that's the fundamental difference is that you can't write anything insightful from AI at this moment, but if you need help editing something, it could be effective at that.
If you need help using it as almost a talking-to-the-mirror type of thing, that's actually like an editing buddy or someone to bounce ideas off of that isn't going to get annoyed with you. That ends up being a pretty good tool for it, but to use it whole cloth to produce stuff, you're right.
You just kind of get this artificial feeling. Like mumbo jumbo that comes out of it that doesn't have to say much in my industry and marketing, it's probably the interest is at the forefront of AI stuff. Because right now everybody's kind of looking at it and they're a little bit scared here and there.
They're optimistic about something, but marketing is one where there are direct economic incentives, there's a huge demand for content and it often to be perfectly frank. A lot of content doesn't need to be that insightful. This is not necessarily biology research where we're going to have it write something for that.
It's a, hey, we need some good copy for the sweater on our e-commerce page. That's probably the most accessible thing right now for AI to do. So I've seen a lot of it firsthand. I think that as it's currently built, it has a lot of use cases. It's not the panacea for everything. It's also not as evil as some people are making it out to be, and it's not as exciting. It's not as much of a magic pill as other people are making it out to be.
[00:31:06] Aneta: Thank you for sharing that. And for me, I think sometimes it's helpful to use it to subtract things to say, how would make this more concise or summarize something if I felt like maybe it was too long? I do want to ask maybe one more thing about the book. I love this idea of complicated versus complex. So can you explain the difference between the two?
[00:31:29] Ben: Yeah. So this is something that I think we often look at those two words and they seem to be synonyms. Like they mean the same thing. I argue to craft messaging and communicate that they are related, but they're slightly different. Complexity exists. Complexity is a neutral state of things. It's when there are lots of pieces. And their interactions are intricate and numerous. That is the case with international diplomacy.
This is the case with the biology of the human eye. It's the case with how you make a computer chip? Those things are complex. Complicated is when something is complex, but could be simple. Something that was artificially created in terms of the complexity. And the reason why we put up with complex things.
We don't want to put up with complicated things because we feel this uneasiness that complicated things could be simpler, we happily, people go out and learn how to play the piano and they read war and peace and they do these complex things because they are motivated to do them.
And there is a reward in and of itself, oftentimes from them. We won't put up with the same thing though, when things are complicated, like a bad memo about your PTO policy or the bad check-in instructions to an Airbnb. Those are complicated. Those are things that could be simpler and that's really what the enemy is.
Complexity is neutral. Complicated is the problem.
[00:32:59] Aneta: So I wanted to just shift gears and talk a little bit about your shift from a digital native group to teaching digital courses at Baruch College. So you have this amazing career.
You're an author as well. And now you're teaching courses. So tell me a little bit about that. What was that like from building and selling your business and then deciding to move into this new space?
[00:33:19] Ben: Yeah. So I ran my business for 10 years. I loved it. It was a ton of fun. But, me and my partner, I woke up one day and we said, well, do you want to do this for the next 10 years? And the answer was, I loved it, but you want to explore different things. So we went out, we hired a broker, we found some partners, did a lawyer stuff.
And we found a couple of suitors that were perfect fits for our company. We signed on the dotted line and it achieved the goals we wanted, which every client had a home, and every employee had a job. That was very important for us. But after I did that I didn't fully know what I wanted to do next.
I still in many ways, don't know what I want to do next. And I think I kind of embrace that in many ways. Right now I do a lot of consulting work. I just was speaking about work but also you mentioned the teaching piece, is that something I've done for a long time? I've been doing that for about 10 years.
So I'm I think I have my 20th semester coming up in the spring here at Baruch College here in New York. I love it. That's been a ton of fun. I'm an adjunct, I teach one night a week. It's not a full-time faculty position, but I have had so much fun teaching in the classroom. And even when it was remote during COVID and everything, it was still fun, not as fun, but when you're in the classroom, it's such a cliche to say, but like, keeps me fresh in a way.
I learned something from it by being around folks who, as each year goes by, I'm one year older than them. And I end up a little bit further and further away from what they're current media and technology trends are, they're embracing but teaching is one of those things that I tell people, if you've ever thought about doing it, give it a try.
It is so much fun. It is so rewarding. I call it my favorite hobby in many ways. And it's also professionally beneficial. To put like the slightly kind of selfish spin on it. Again, I learn a lot from it. I have this endless supply in many ways of great interns or people that I can recommend for jobs or those types of things.
I get access to things like these academic databases. I have a platform to invite interesting people to come share their stories in my class. And so there are lots of selfishly beneficial reasons to do it if you need that extra piece. But the best thing I enjoy about it is being there at this moment when they're about to graduate because my students are mostly seniors.
And so they're about to graduate and they're about to do this transition from student to professional. And it's so fascinating to see people at that moment. And it's a very weird responsibility and honor to be there kind of that moment and to hopefully push them in the right direction or help them in whatever they're doing next.
[00:35:51] Aneta: That's amazing. So what's next for you, anything that you are willing to share, are there any more books coming up or any other projects?
[00:36:00] Ben: I enjoyed writing this book. Some people like to write the book. Some people like to have written the book, I liked both of them. I enjoyed it. There's a world where if somebody would want to have me write another one, I'd be more than happy to do that at some point. There are a few ideas that kind of are percolating around for that, but there are no immediate plans for that at this point.
I do a few other projects to get some consulting pieces and I have my next semester coming up here. I like to keep this open mind in a way. I say, what do I want to be when I grow up? And right now this is what I'm doing and I'm enjoying it.
And I've been lucky to help some wonderful companies in my consulting practice. But who knows what's going to happen in the next six months, twelve months, five years, whatever it's going to be.
[00:36:40] Aneta: Yeah, I love that. You said that you're open. So Ben, tell me, how can we best support you for the audience? I'm going to recommend everyone get a copy of simply put. But what else can we do to follow you to connect with you? What's the best way people can do that?
[00:36:56] Ben: I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me on, by the way, this has been a ton of fun. So go to benguttmann.com. It's a bad name for radio. It's two T's and two N's. So G U T T M A N N. And if you go there, you can grab a free copy of the first chapter of the book, a PDF of it. You can order the book and sign up for my newsletter. I send that out every Tuesday or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear how this has been helpful.
And if there's anything I can do to help anybody too.
[00:37:21] Aneta: Thank you so much. I loved our conversation and I learned so much as a result of reading the book and also chatting with you. And I do have a final question for you, which is tied to the title of the podcast, which is what does it mean to you to live the width of your life?
[00:37:37] Ben: So I'll answer that with a quote that I love and that's been kind of like rattling. It's been rattling around for several years, but it always feels relevant. We're talking here in the middle of January. Always feels relevant at the beginning of the year. It's from John's shed. He says a ship in the harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.
And I love that. I tried to remember that as much as I could. It's not about seeking comfort most of the time. It's not about seeking the easy route. As much as easy as important, we talk about fluency. It's about, trying things, exploring things, embracing discomfort, and all the wonderful stuff that comes along with that.
[00:38:14] Aneta: I love that. No one's used that quote, but I'm going to have to find it and save it somewhere. And it's so true, we seek comfort because it's easy, but it's not what we're built for. So much more. Thank you, Ben. So much. I appreciate you. Thank you for birthing this into the world. We need it.
And now. I need to do something with this information and everyone else. I'm sure that listens, we'll do the same. So thank you. And hope that we have further conversations. Have an amazing day.
[00:38:41] Ben: Likewise. Thanks so much, Aneta.
[00:38:43] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones, or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.