Alright. Welcome to another solo episode of the Growth Mixtape podcast, and I'm your host, Bob Mathers. Now I've been thinking lately about what it is about these solo episodes that I love so much. And, yeah, it's an opportunity for me to gather up my ideas from kinda disparate sources, conversations with friends, clients, podcasts I've listened to, and guests that I've had on the pod. And they and they, over time, seem to organize themselves around certain themes, and it gives me a chance to kind of put it together and make sense of it all. But probably the best part is the feedback that I get from people because I hear that people take very different things away from these episodes. And I'm starting to discover the power of it because, honestly, my ideas are not always fully baked. They're not always completely formed. And I feel like if I had spent more time thinking about how to polish it better, they might lose some of their spark. So I admit that some of these ideas might only be seventy or eighty percent formed. But what I hear from people is that that gives them the opportunity to bring their own stories in and take something different away from it. So if I provide seventy percent and you provide the next thirty, I don't know. There's something about that I really like. Maybe I'll start calling these episodes seventy thirty episodes. I kinda like that too. So I'm excited to talk about this topic today because it goes to the heart of something that so many people I talk to are struggling with, and it's simply standing out, becoming memorable. Now maybe you think this doesn't really apply to you. I guarantee it does. Maybe you're thinking about a new job, applying for a promotion, deciding what to do next in your career. Maybe you're pitching an idea to family and friends. Maybe you're trying to explore new business ideas yourself. Maybe you're an artist. It honestly doesn't matter because in this world where there are a thousand shades of gray, where the game seems to be rigged for all of us to blend in and look the same, at some point, your challenge is going to be standing out among all the other people who are trying to do something similar to you. And you owe it to yourself to figure out what it is that makes you remarkable, how to proclaim your awesomeness in technicolor so you are undeniably unforgettable. When you describe what you do, the words falling out over your lips are so uniquely you that nobody else could possibly have said them. I know it feels like sometimes you're stalled. You're blending in. You feel like you're not good enough. That's not it. You're just not being bold enough. You haven't figured out what it is that truly makes you special, different than everyone else on the planet. And once you do, you stop competing against people. You're giving people a choice, and the choice is finally clear. So I'm gonna walk you through some very tangible things that I've learned to help you get started on becoming unforgettable. Now here's where this story starts. I've probably talked to, without exaggeration, twenty five leaders over the last six months, and this is their story. They're in the job market. They find an opportunity, and they're really excited about it. They have a couple of interviews, and at some point, they're asked to put a bunch of work into some sort of case study or presentation for the selection committee. And they do that. They get to the next round. And maybe they're at the fifth round of interviews, and they're told you should have a decision by Friday. And Friday comes, and Monday comes, and the following Friday comes, and the Friday after that comes. And about three or four weeks later, they get an email saying, thanks. We've decided to go with another candidate. Now I've heard this so many times, and it is devastating for the people that have to go through it. But it comes back to this idea of becoming memorable, of standing out, of giving people something to react to. This really hit home when I was listening to a podcast with actress and director Olivia Wilde. Now early in her career, she was a casting director. So she tells this story from the the person from the the person that's deciding who gets the parts. But I've also heard this story from really famous actors who talk about the auditioning process. And these actors talk about the experience of going on hundreds of auditions and never booking a part and finally getting down to the point where they're basically on the verge of moving back to Iowa, taking over the family business, becoming an accountant. They're out of money, and they finally decide to take a big swing. They decide instead of trying to anticipate what the director wants for me, I'm gonna show the director what I can bring to this part. I'm gonna make a bold choice. I'm gonna give them something to say yes or no to. And what you invariably hear is that, sure, some of them get the part, but many of them don't. But their phone rings a month later with a different part because the casting director or the director never forgot that performance. And that's the power of making a bold choice. They gave them something to react to, something to choose from, a contrast between them and all the other people that they had to choose from. And that is what many of us are missing when we're trying to stand out in the market, applying for a job, trying to get investors to notice us, in our start up. Whatever it is, whenever we need to stand out, our natural bias is to blend in, to all be the blandest version of ourselves. So when the game is rigged, we need to change the game. If we keep playing the game, the same game that everybody else is playing, at the end of the day, it's come gonna come down to a coin flip, and we're gonna lose as often as we win. So I've been putting this into action in conversations that I'm having with my clients. And I just wanted to share a quick story about somebody that I was working with. She was a customer success leader, and, actually, we were working on her strategy when she got let go, which, I'm not gonna lie, is a bit of a hit to my ego because people come to me and, need help with their strategy, getting aligned with other leaders. And when they're let go in that process, it sucks. And it sucks for me. It sucks for her. But what we did was we switched tax, and I started helping her through deciding what to do next. And she was in the exact position that I described above. She found, a great job. She was super excited. She had done multiple interviews, and she was applying for what she was going in for what she felt was her final interview. And so I shared the stories of what so many people described, and we agreed that she was gonna make a bold choice. She was not gonna let this opportunity go by without making herself memorable, and she had never done this before. So we started going through her past, and she has a background in the military. That's what she did before she got into software. And this is a part of her story that she always shied away from because she was worried that it would come across as kind of rigid and un uncompromising. We all have a picture in our head of what it's like to work with people in the military, and it doesn't always sound awesome. But we decided that this was the thing that makes her completely unique, somebody that nobody else that this employer is talking to can say. So she went in and she made a bold choice. And she started talking about how in the military, you always have a very clear mission, and you spend a lot of time on your engagement plan to get from here to accomplish that mission. But usually hours into your mission, something goes south. Something happens you never could have anticipated, and your plan becomes completely irrelevant. But your mission does not change. You adapt. You pivot, and you become singularly focused on achieving that mission despite things in your environment changing. Now that's a pretty powerful message, and that's something that she's always shied away from. She had always played the game that everybody else was playing and talked about her experience and talked about the kind of leader she was. And she was at risk of just blending in and not standing out and making the same mistakes that everyone else makes. Instead, she picked the one thing from her past that gave her a different perspective and a point of view. She took a big swing. She gave the employer a choice. They picked her, and now she's six months into a job that she's loving. So let's talk about what makes it so hard to stand out. Now a lot of people wanna blame AI. And, yeah, there is a lot of stuff out there. Everybody's using the same three tools to try to stand out with their resumes or their, cover letters or their pitch decks or their value proposition. So when everybody's using the same tools to try to stand out, of course, we're all gonna start looking the same. But AI is a catalyst here, not a cause because the problem was around long before AI showed up. Because at the end of the day, there is only one thing that any of us has that makes us special. There is only one thing that makes each of us different, and that is your life, your story. The specific series of events, missteps, celebrations, hard lessons that got you where you are today. Nobody else on earth has lived the life you've lived. It's the only thing that makes any of us unique. And it's not just your story. It's what your story reveals about you that's different, and that is the foundation of becoming memorable. That's how we become unforgettable. So here's a couple of things that I've been thinking a lot about. If your story is the answer, if it's the thing that makes all of us unique and you've been carrying it around your whole life, what's so hard about using that to stand out? And I wanna suggest that there are two symptoms, and then there's an underlying disease that we've gotta reconcile. First, we don't actually believe there's anything special about our life. Each one of us has had one life. We were born in one place. We've had one set of parents. We went to school. We had one adolescence. We've had one career. It's the only thing we've ever known. So from inside, there doesn't seem to be anything special or remarkable about it. It's really hard to see what's remarkable from our life from inside it. So that's the first problem. We don't really believe that there's anything special about our license. And the second thing is that we don't actually really wanna stand out most of the time. We're really out of practice. So, sure, we wanna stand out when we wanna be recognized, when we want to get a job or get our idea funded. But most of the time, we live in fear of standing out. We grow up with a fear of failure that keeps us from raising our hand, that keeps us from taking a bigger swing. We're out of practice. We stop asking questions. We get less curious, and our lives get smaller. So you put those two things together. We don't believe there's anything particularly special about our life, and we're deeply out of practice at standing out because we've spent most of our lives playing small, those are two things we have to overcome if we wanna stand out. Now the good news is we were not born this way. You were born with everything you need to stand out. We've just had it drummed out of us, and the answer is curiosity. It's that childlike curiosity that we used to walk through the world with when we were a kid. Five year olds do not have any of these problems. A five year old believes that everything they see and everything they do is the most amazing thing that's ever happened. All they wanna do is be noticed. They love trying new things. They dance. They sing. They color. They don't give a shit what anybody thinks, and that's the part of us that we've lost. We were born curious, born with wonder and awe. And somewhere along the way, it got replaced by the fear of judgment, the fear of embarrassment, the fear of failure, the fear of what people will think. I mean, think about a little kid who comes home from school with a painting. Maybe the sky is orange and the grass is purple and the sun is green. And what do we tell them? Oh, Susie, that's beautiful, but the sky is blue. The sun is orange and grass is green. And it's one of the small little moments that we start learning that curiosity and creativity doesn't have value. A thousand tiny corrections that teach us that there's a right answer, that there needs to be a point to it all. I love the Einstein quote, it's a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. Over time, we learn that everything has a right and wrong answer. We stop asking questions that don't relate to the test. How many times have you asked, excuse me, teacher. Is this on the test? We only ask questions as they relate to a very specific outcome. Everything has to have a goal, a point, and our curiosity gets dulled. I think there was a there was a research study done by Harvard that shows that kids ask fifteen times more questions than adults. So what if we could reexamine our lives with the wonder and curiosity of a child just to look at the whole thing again from a fresh set of eyes. If you could describe your life to a five year old version of yourself, I guarantee you would be as interesting as Taylor Swift. Now before I dig into some practical ways of getting at this, let's come back to a book that you've you've heard about if you've, listened to some of the more recent episodes of this podcast. It's called What to Make of a Life by Jim Collins. It's a great book. Go and read it if you haven't. One of the just one of the things in the book is this idea that he introduces around encodings. And encodings are capabilities that we are naturally wired to do. They are not things that we are good at. They're not things that we've learned to do, but they are things that just seem to come naturally to us. Now the beautiful thing is that we all have an unlimited number of encodings, and they are revealed to us through the experience of life. So you can think of them as stars in the sky, and each one of us has a unique combination, a unique constellation of encodings. Our unique mix of things that we are uniquely wired to do is what makes us special. We all have more encodings than we will ever discover. But as we go through life, we discover more and more encodings. They're revealed through our experiences. So our encodings are what make us unique or rather our unique mix of encodings, those things that we are naturally wired to do is what makes us unique, and they are revealed through the experiences of life. So if we can go back and reexamine our lives, we can uncover our encodings. And our the most meaningful lives are not the ones where we do the things we are good at, but rather the things that we are uniquely wired to do, things that we do better than anyone else. Okay. So let's put this all together. I was I just actually recently did this at a workshop in Toronto for, fifty young leaders at a conference called the, Cansbridge Fellowship Conference. And we we took them through this. And it was a really powerful exercise, and I got feedback that from people that said they absolutely loved it. So here's the first thing we did. We did some morning pages. The idea of morning pages is simply complete stream of conscious consciousness journaling. Journaling, in this case, we did it for five minutes without stopping, whatever comes to mind. And it's meant to build the muscle of creating without judgment. Because what most of us do when we're writing or journaling or creating of any kind is we we can avoid judging things while we're creating it. So as we're writing down ideas, we're thinking, is this dumb? Is this worth saying? This doesn't sound right, and so we get stuck. The idea of morning pages is that it's getting ideas from your subconscious brain onto the page before your before your conscious mind can judge them. And if you do this over time, you'll realize your best ideas come flowing out of you because you're you're short circuiting that part of your brain that says, no. This is dumb. This is this is a waste of time. So we did a mini version of this, and it was really cool, and we did this for five minutes. It's just to meant to clearing the deck so that when we start looking back at our lives, we can do it without judgment. That was the first exercise we did. The second thing we did was we started building a story bank. Now I had somebody do this for the first time with me. It was a couple of years ago, and I was doing some personal branding. And and the exercise was simply start building your story bank and create ten stories. And I actually found it really hard, again, because of that judgment piece. So I came up with two or three stories, but what I found was over time, it got easier and easier. And as I would write down one story, ideas and memories of other stories would come up. So it became really powerful, and now I've probably got a hundred stories. So as an example, I use some recent not recent, but I I came up with some big things in my life that were the first to come out when I started my story bank. For example, the biggest fork in the road in my life I remember is my dad dying. I was twenty three. He was forty eight. I got fired when I was fifty. I got sober when I was fifty two, and my son had brain surgery when I was fifty three. So if you asked me to start a story bank, those were the things that automatically came to mind. Now one piece of feedback that I got after the workshop actually was those all sound fairly depressing, Bob. So you should probably mix in some positive things because I've had some incredibly amazing things, obviously, like the birth of my children and some of the amazing things that they've done. So try what I think you'll find is that maybe most the things that come out right away are negative things, but try to create a balance. But just to get started and what we did in the workshop was we spent five minutes just creating that story bank. Write down three stories, and build on it from there. Now here's another really fun thing we did. Shout out to my beautiful wife, Jill, who's a retired art teacher, but is a, an artist now. And she said people people attack these problems in different ways, and there's visual learners and, I guess, whatever the opposite of visual learner is. So I actually brought in crayons and Post it notes and, pencils and pens. It kind of looked like a kindergarten class. And I wasn't really sure whether people would lean into this, but I as I walked around as people were doing this, man, there were people with crayons drawing pictures of their lives of these different moments. They had timelines and Post it notes. It was so inspiring. I absolutely loved it. So that was our story bank. From there, we said, now let's excavate the stories. What does what does each of those stories reveal about you? And this is an attempt to get at some of those encodings. Also, to to think about those things that we've learned, those things have been revealed to us that just seem to come more naturally to us than other people. And, again, this is a this was this was a in a workshop setting with with limited timelines, of course, this exercise is it's you could consider it a lifelong pursuit. It's something that you that never really ends. But it was a great, exercise, and I suggest you really do it or at least try it to get started. And so the example I gave, for example, is what did my stories reveal about my life? Well, when my dad died at twenty three, I got angry. I was pissed off for a long time. I started drinking really heavily, and I my life got really small. I got fired at fifty. And what I learned from that is that playing small is kind of playing it safe. And playing it safe is what got me walked out the door, always trying to react to the changing whims and strategies of the executive team, and that's just no way to win. At fifty two, I got sober, and I rediscovered my curiosity. I found a a sense of urgency to do something with the years that I had left. And then my son had brain surgery at fifty three. We almost lost him, and I and I learned how fragile and short life is. So those are some of the things that my unique life perspective has provided. You can think about anger and kinda smallness, safety, curiosity, urgency. And so what is the statement that I came up with? Here is mine. I believe curiosity can save us from the mediocre lives we've been settling for. That's it. That's how my experiences and the hundreds of others, the other parts of my life have provided me a unique point of view. Now when I say that, if I was doing a job interview or talking to clients or pitching my ideas to prospective clients, it is memorable. And it's not just because it's kind of a unique and cool thing to say, because I believe it. Because I believe it is shaped from the unique experiences that I have, and that belief oozes from my skin. When those words fall over my lips, they are words that nobody else on the planet can say and believe them like I do. And that is the core of what we're trying to get at when we wanna become memorable and unforgettable. So imagine if you could go into an interview or a presentation or even introducing yourself at a social gathering with a single line like that that was so you that nobody else could say it. It's not I'm not gonna suggest that introducing yourself, for example, is the only part of becoming unforgettable. Of course, it's not. It but the point is when you excavate your life and you understand what you do that is unique, you're not competing against anyone else in the world. Just like those actors, you're not going in trying to impress somebody, trying to shape your experience into what you think other people wanna hear. You are proclaiming boldly, this is what I believe. This is what I do better than anyone else. And it becomes a compass that guides you through life. It becomes a compass that you can use to decide between the options at your disposal. When you come up to a fork in your road, which of these things is aligned with my encodings, with the thing that makes me unique. So I wanna come back to where we started. I hope this has provided at least seventy percent of an idea in which you can provide the last thirty. Because if you ever feel like you're not good enough, you're not standing out, you're not getting the opportunities, or you're not seizing on the opportunities presented to you. It's not that you're not good enough. You're just losing because you're playing a game that's rigged for everyone to sound the same. You're playing it with the same ten thousand words as everyone else. Change the game. Give people something to react to, something to grab onto, something to believe in. Your story is the only thing you have that literally nobody else on earth can copy. So you dig it up, and you be unforgettable. Man, I hope this has been as much fun for you listening as it's been for me kinda working through my ideas, putting this together. If any of this resonates, if you're open to sharing your thirty percent to complete the picture of this scaffolding that we've put out here, I I would just love to hear it. Drop me a line in comments. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Connect with me on Substack. Absolutely love this. I hope this has been helpful, and we'll see you next time. The Grow With Mixtape podcast with Bob Mathers is produced by Bespoke Projects. Music by Jim Appel Walter Cronkite. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to follow and rate us. When you do this, it helps to raise our podcast profile so that more people can find us. If you wanna connect, you can find me on LinkedIn using the link in the show notes.