--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Ryan Hanley Show. Today we have the absolutely fantastic, wonderful, creative, authentic, transparent, vulnerable, mind-bogglingly inspiring Ann Handley on the show. She is a best-selling author, partner in Marketing Profs, one of the most well-respected and prestigious marketing organizations in the world. She also has one of the premier conferences in the marketing space, the B2B Marketing Forum. She has given us an hour of her time to share her insights on what she has going on in the marketing space. It is just a tremendous episode.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But before we get to Ann, I want to give you a quick call to action, actually two quick calls to action. If you enjoy this show, please leave a rating and review on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. That helps us get found by more awesome people just like yourself. And if you're not already, every week I push out a video newsletter. The videos break down everything you'd normally get in a text-based newsletter: tools, breakdowns on things that happened that week, content I created. Then we always have a section at the end with exclusive insights, exclusive content, something I saw or heard that I think is going to help you market your business better and grow your business better. Go to ryanhanley.com/subscribe to get the video newsletter. That's where all the exclusives are. That's where all the news is. It's the best video newsletter in the world, hands down. I'm saying it right here. Get it at ryanhanley.com/subscribe. Now let's get on to Ann.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Where I'd actually like to start with you is the newsletter. To me, you and Tamsen Webster are battling for the best, the most valuable piece of email content in my inbox every week. Whether you know it or not, I actually have a ranking system that is arbitrary and subjective.
--:-- Ann Handley: Oh, really?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Oh, it's completely personal. But it is incredibly valuable. So few people are taking the time to really—there's a slight movement back to email, I think, but it still seems like, "Hey, let me just drive you with the shortest number of words to this thing on my website that I can actually track." You do it completely differently. It's so long form. There's so much value. I'm interested in one thing: what spurred you to take on an email newsletter, and why you continue to be so willing to almost add more value with each new edition?
--:-- Ann Handley: About two and a half years ago, I got an email from a guy who lives in the Netherlands. He said, "I signed up to be part of your personal website at annhandley.com, not at Marketing Profs. I never hear from you. Is there a secret list somewhere? Why am I not hearing from you? You publish there very sporadically. I never get anything in email. I follow you on social, but that's all I get." He asked me this fundamental question. Sometimes there are moments in your life when somebody asks you a question and you get hyper defensive about it, and then you realize it's definitely triggered you in some way. That's essentially what happened.
--:-- Ann Handley: When he asked me that question, I got super defensive. I said, "Well, I'm busy. I've got Marketing Profs. I've got speaking. I've got books." I gave him this whole flowchart of excuses. I realized he was absolutely right. I was missing an opportunity. I wasn't nurturing a community that had opted in to hear from me. That moment made me think: these people have given me their email address. They have opted in to hear from me, and I'm not engaging with them at all. I'm not talking to them at all. I'm not writing to them at all.
--:-- Ann Handley: As I thought more about that, about two and a half years ago, I thought, "I really need to think about this community a little differently." I started to really value that person who had opted into my email. My friend in the Netherlands was a proxy for that whole community. It was very small, only about 3,000 people on the list. Some people had been on the list for years just to receive an alert anytime I published a blog post, which was very sporadic. That was the extent of how I was using that platform.
--:-- Ann Handley: I started to rethink: what is the value of a person who hands over their email address to you? It struck me that this is a really important moment. For the first time ever, I thought maybe I should really do something with that. It sounds ridiculous in a way because Marketing Profs has built so much of our business around email. Our email list is massively important to us for so many reasons. Yet I wasn't translating that to my own personal stuff, to my own personal website, even though I had books and a speaking career. It was a reframing and a new respect for that individual who turned over their email address to me. I realized that's such an important and really precious gift that somebody gives you. I don't say that lightly. I really believe that is something we should be valuing as marketers way more than we do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: You obviously enjoy it. It comes through in the way you write, in the obvious time you take to curate everything from resources to funny images to the stories that go into them. I've also noticed, and I mean this in a positive way, they've gotten longer. Some of them, I save them like resources in my inbox because I think, "That thing's amazing. I don't have time to research it right now." I actually have a folder—this is going to sound weird, and please don't consider me a stalker, I just find it valuable—I have a folder where I stick yours and a couple other newsletters from people I want to go back to because there's so much value in there.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I completely agree. I feel like I have undervalued my email subscribers at different times as well. What I did was create a video newsletter. I talk for 15 to 20 minutes through what you would put into a regular newsletter, but I'm talking through it. I feel like I can be a little more authentic and differentiate myself. But that's not the point. The point is you keep coming back and you keep adding more value to this thing. I feel like a lot of people do the least possible to get it off their plate. Why have you continued to invest in this thing? I don't want to just say "the ROI" because that makes it feel shallow. But personally, what are you getting out of it that keeps you coming back to something that obviously takes time out of your day?
--:-- Ann Handley: Let me step back for a second. The reason I chose to do an email newsletter instead of a video newsletter like you do, or something on IGTV, is that I wanted to do something episodic. I knew I needed to communicate on a regular basis. I needed a schedule because as a person and a professional, if I don't have that, I'll keep pushing it further down the field. I decided on an email newsletter because I'm a writer. That's how I started my career—as a journalist. I've wanted to be a writer since I was a little kid. I've always identified as a writer. I wanted to communicate in that way because that's how I communicate well and I'm really comfortable.
--:-- Ann Handley: The second piece is that I publish it every other weekend because that's the only cadence I can manage. I can't do every single week. I thought, "If it's going to be episodic, it's going to be writing, and it's going to be every other week because that's all I have time for, then what is it going to be and how is that going to be a differentiator?" I wanted to create something that felt important when it comes into your inbox. I want it to feel like a gift from me. If you're giving me your email address, I want to give you something valuable in return. That's how I approach it.
--:-- Ann Handley: Some weeks it's a little bit longer because I start out with a story or a narrative that encapsulates the theme for that newsletter. Then I curate a few links that I think are interesting and tell you why I think they're interesting. It would probably take you about 10 minutes if you're a fast reader just to read it. I've heard that some people save them, and I think that's awesome. That's very gratifying for me.
--:-- Ann Handley: Where does the motivation come from? I think you interviewed our friend Brian Fanzo, right?
--:-- Ann Handley: One of the things Brian talks about all the time is "push the damn button." He's a good friend of mine. Every time I've seen him speak, that's kind of his catchphrase. I realized I wasn't pushing buttons anymore. The further you get along in your career, the fewer buttons you push. I wanted to push buttons again. I wanted to have something that was just mine that I controlled from the writing to the packaging to choosing the images, those funny GIFs and things, to choosing every little element. It's all me, 100% me. Even in the deploying of it, the mailing out, and then people write back to me, and that's all me. I wanted to own that from beginning to end.
--:-- Ann Handley: Why was that important to me? It wasn't just because I needed that psychic satisfaction of pushing the button. I think you learn a lot as a professional when you stay in that mode of creating and when you stay close to an audience. As I've gotten further along in my career, I'm not as close to the Marketing Profs audience anymore. We have 600,000 people on that list. It's a massive community, and I'm grateful for all of them, but I don't put the newsletter together. I'm not the one writing it, curating it, and putting it out anymore. I missed having that kind of connection. I think it informs who you are as a professional and keeps you close to an audience, which only enriches everything else you do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Would you recommend that advice to other people who have ascended to a leadership role or a role where they have lost that direct connection? Even if it's on a more extended cadence, beyond every other week, once a month or whatever, just keeping some sort of connection helps you overall, maybe just mentally, but also with making decisions in your business?
--:-- Ann Handley: 100%. I think it's helped me so much from so many points of view. Technology—understanding how technology works now. Figuring out how to grow an audience again. I started with 3,000 people on that list. When I started writing to them on a regular basis and launched the newsletter about two years ago, some people were like, "Whoa, what is going on here? We never hear from you." I had a flurry of unsubscribes. Those 3,000 people were maybe only about 2,000 by the time they self-selected off the list. I've now built it up to—I think I'm close to 23 or 24 thousand?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Somewhere around there, yeah.
--:-- Ann Handley: So in two years, it's not massive growth, but I've done it all myself. I learned about how to market a piece of content, how to market your marketing, so to speak. Having that connection to the audience, finding out what people care about, small things like what they click on, what resonates with them, am I packaging myself well so that when people get the email newsletter, they understand who I am and what I'm all about? All those small little tweaks really help you take a broader view of how you're communicating and how you're putting yourself out there. It informs how you make other decisions in your business.
--:-- Ann Handley: It doesn't have to be an email newsletter. I think it's hugely valuable for anybody to keep that connection. Publish on LinkedIn, start something on Instagram, start a YouTube show. It doesn't matter whatever platform you're most comfortable on. But I really believe that as a leader, you've got to be creating something.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, basically, if you're not on TikTok, then you don't exist.
--:-- Ann Handley: Yeah, you don't exist. Oh my God. I am so addicted to TikTok. I don't create anything on there, but wow. Sometimes I'll start watching it and an hour later, I'm just like, "Holy what?" It's just so entertaining. You have to believe in the creativity of the next generation. I could never think of these things that these people are thinking of, from all different walks. It's insane.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I had to delete it off my phone because I do the same thing, just voyeuristic. I was going down these rabbit holes. I said to my wife, "I can't watch these stupid videos anymore."
--:-- Ann Handley: I know, but they're so good. So much fun.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, so funny. Quick side note: my daughter is in college. For the past couple years, because I'm always looking at social channels probably like you are, just looking to see what's up and coming, I'll often ask her how she's using Facebook or if she's on LinkedIn yet. She's been in college a few years, so I ask if she has a LinkedIn profile. I'm always curious about how the adoption works for her generation. I've been asking about TikTok for a few years now. When it started, she kept saying, "No, no, no, that's for middle school kids. No, it's for high school kids. I'm not on that." Now she is completely addicted to it. She posts on TikTok. It's really funny the way it's bubbled up to her, to the early twenties now. Now I see people on there who are my age. It's interesting to see its evolution.
--:-- Ann Handley: I posted a couple things. Please no one go check me out. It's not a solid representation of what I like. I posted a couple things, and I immediately realized this is not the venue in which I am creative. The thought process, I'm just so overmatched. I was like, "I'm just going to watch this one." I believe in its power. If you can speak in this way and communicate, it's powerful. But I was just overmatched by it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was watching some baseball video, and these college kids were doing this thing. I thought, "Wow, that's so much fun. I wish I was doing that."
--:-- Ann Handley: I feel completely the same way. When I view videos on there, I'm blown away by the creativity. When I look at anything creative, I usually have one of two responses. The first is, "Wow, that's amazing. I could never do that." Or, "Wow, that's amazing. I can do that, or at least close to it." With TikTok, I'm absolutely in the "I could never do that" camp. It's not the way my brain works either. It's not how I work as a creative person. But it's hugely entertaining.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That kind of takes me into where I wanted to go with you next. Your persona in general—it feels, and I don't mean this in a negative way, very authentic, transparent, vulnerable. The way you speak about yourself, you're very self-deprecating. It comes across very inviting. Even though we've never met and this is the first time we've ever spoken, it feels very natural and easy to talk to you. I think a lot of people struggle with that particular thing. They see that characteristic as almost a superpower. I have tried in the spaces I operate to help people understand that through practice, maybe some people are a little more predisposed, but through practice and just pushing the damn button, you can start to develop these things and hone them. I'm interested in your journey with being authentic. Was it natural? Did you have to hone it? What advice do you have for people who struggle with this?
--:-- Ann Handley: It's not necessarily natural to me. But what is natural to me is that I can't have any artifice with how I am online because I honestly don't know how to do that. It's not false humility. I just don't know how to be anything other than who I am. The tricky part, and why people sometimes struggle with it, is that there is a vulnerability in that. If you are just who you are and you put yourself out there, people are not necessarily going to like you. They might react to you in a negative way. But what I've learned is that's just part of it. That's part of being out there as a professional.
--:-- Ann Handley: I also think there's a difference between being personal and being personable. I am authentic. I share who I am. I show my beloved little dog, my family, what I love and who I am on social media, through my writing, and through my work. But I don't really get personal because I feel like there's a line there. That line shifts depending on who you are as a professional. For me, I've found the place where I'm comfortable. I'm comfortable being vulnerable to a point, but not oversharing. I'm struggling a little bit to articulate that, but I think it's a very personal thing. You've got to decide how much you're willing to show. For some people, that's going to be way more than I do. For some people, it's going to be a little bit less. I don't think it really matters where that line is. I just think you have to figure out where you're comfortable with that line being.
--:-- Ann Handley: Number two, I do think you have to be relatable and personable. That's another thing Brian Fanzo and I have in common. We talk about it in different ways, but we talk about being relatable. That's what I strive for all the time. There's nothing I hate worse than seeing somebody who is in a position of power, who has accomplished a lot in their career, and they feel like they're not approachable. They have this artifice about them, a wall set up. I don't understand that. I don't know why people do that. I don't really know how to create that wall. For me, it's been an evolution. I haven't always been willing to do that. But once I started allowing myself to show a little bit more of who I am, I realized, "Oh, this is good. This feels comfortable to me."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is something I've struggled with my entire career, and I almost struggle with it the other way. I'm the same way. I don't know how to package myself in any other way than exactly who I am. I'm a terrible liar. My wife always says, "I know when you bought a Dunkin' Donuts coffee because I can see it in your eyes. You can't hide it from me." I just don't have it in me. If I'm not being exactly who I am, it's so blatantly obvious. So I've tried not to be that way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: But what I've struggled with is what you talked about before: packaging up who you are, what you deliver, and your offering. In my career, for other people as a marketing and sales professional, I'm able to do this for them. But for myself, packaging myself, I am terrible at it. When it comes to writing what I'm going to give you, all of a sudden the pen stops, the ink goes dry, my arm cramps up, and now I'm hungry. I can do anything except package my ideas. Does that make sense to you? I just struggle so much with that. It feels like I'm being—I don't know why—but there is this personal resistance. Now that I'm packaging myself in a positive way, all the breaks and resistance come in, and I can't use any of my creative abilities at all.
--:-- Ann Handley: That's interesting. What if you talked about it not in terms of what you do, but what you do for others? Rather than focusing on packaging you, what if you talked about a client you helped or one person who was affected by advice you gave them? Take it outside of you and frame it more in the results you gave one person. Have you thought about doing that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. That usually means I just talk to myself in the third person. I'm usually like, "This Ryan over here does this stuff and he's super cool and you should pay for all his stuff."
--:-- Ann Handley: That's funny. No, Tim Urban. Wait, but why do you follow him?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yes. That just reminded me of his monkey, his monkey buddy. I was like, "Oh, I was right." Excuse me. Sometimes I've got a dog sleeping on a chair right over there, and I just talk to her.
--:-- Ann Handley: Her name's Isabella?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. It gives you a person or a thing to talk to. That poor dog knows more about me than she ever cared to know.
--:-- Ann Handley: That's so funny.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Just to go back to the newsletter or creating content or starting any kind of channel or content program to communicate with prospects and customers in your audience—that's exactly what I do. I talk to one person. I've talked about this a number of times. Just thinking about that one person I'm writing that letter to, that email newsletter every other Sunday, that's the only way I can get out of my own head and get out of my own way. I focus on one person. I won't say "Dear Ryan," but I'll be thinking about you in my head as I'm writing. It helps me make it conversational and ultimately really useful to the person I'm writing to. As a result, the rest of the audience benefits by proxy, just by thinking about that one person.
--:-- Ann Handley: A lot of well-known authors have done this. Didn't Ben Franklin write to his cousin or his brother? Even though he wasn't actually writing for that person. You pick an individual. Warren Buffett writes his letter to shareholders to his sister Doris. That's another one.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I talk about that on stage quite a bit. I was at a talk yesterday, which is why I had to postpone our conversation from yesterday until today. I was speaking to a group in Boston. I told that story about writing to one person, the Warren Buffett story. Someone came up to me afterward and said, "It's so funny you said that because I write to my mom every time I have to sit down to write an email sales letter." I was like, "That's so great. It's like, 'Hey Mom, here's what's up.'"
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah. And it's funny how some of these tricks or hacks, however you want to call them, they really do crack whatever that wall is that was keeping you from getting to the words or to the ideas. Maybe it's getting hyped up on caffeine, or maybe it's going for a run or a walk, or listening to some hardcore nineties gangster rap. A little Wu-Tang just gets everything going and you're ready to go. I think it's so specific for everyone, but you do need to find that thing. So often the people who want to create more but are struggling to do so, it's because they haven't built a prompt into their life. Whether it's writing to one singular person, writing to their self, thinking in the third person, talking to their dog. They haven't done the work of finding what that thing is.
--:-- Ann Handley: I love that. It was just like a series of prompts you just gave. I love that so much. That's so good. Yeah, just before this call today, I was feeling very low energy. I got up super early this morning, didn't get a lot of sleep last night. I thought, okay, I've got to figure this out. I'm in Boston today, it's about zero degrees Celsius, actually colder than that, like 11 degrees. I went out and just ran around the block super fast to get myself going. It really helped a lot in terms of getting my energy up. I do that a lot. One of my promises I made to myself last year is outside every day, one hour. That's really changed how I go about my day. I schedule that hour just like I schedule a meeting. I don't break it. Every single day, outside one hour. It shifts my mind. It gives me the space to think with more intention about what I'm doing throughout my day. Sometimes that relates to what I'm creating on the content side, and sometimes it just relates to getting a break from your email, from the grind. Taking a step back and having that space.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So that's another thing that helps me. It's not Wu-Tang, but it helps me a lot. Listening to something or silence, it depends on the day. Lately I've been listening to a lot of podcasts. Did you have Joe Pulizzi on here?
--:-- Ann Handley: Yeah, I did.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, so he just wrote this murder mystery. I read his book and now I'm listening to it. He was generous enough to give me an early version. I expected that he would be reading it and he wasn't, so at first I was disappointed, but now I'm really getting into it.
--:-- Ann Handley: I asked him about that, about whether he read it or not. He said that because you have to do the different voices and hire an actor, it's someone's profession to walk through these different stories. He just said, "I didn't want to. It would disappoint more of my fans if I actually read it than if I didn't." I thought that was interesting.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, that's really funny. I've struggled with the podcast thing. I love podcasts to death. What I struggle with, and I guess this is the next question about inputs, is sometimes I feel like I get lost in other people's ideas. There is an amount of input from other places which is very productive, and then there's a line at which it starts to feel like I'm just filled with noise and it becomes a little jumbled. I'm interested in how you take in inputs. Is it reading? Obviously you do podcasts, audio books. How do you take in inputs and how do you make sure that even though you're taking in these inputs, you're true to your thoughts? And if that's even an issue for you.
--:-- Ann Handley: Yeah, that's funny. The way that I try to balance that is that I totally agree with you because I have fallen into those situations where I'll have a thought and then it'll occur to me, "Wait a second, was that my thought or did I actually hear that on a Seth Godin podcast?" That's the last thing you want. So that my brain doesn't get too saturated with ideas from other people, that outside one hour every day, I typically don't listen to a marketing podcast. I read marketing books, but for podcasts and anything audio for the most part, I don't listen to anything marketing related. That outside one hour every day would be my podcast time or my audio book time. I need a break from marketing for that time to ignite different parts of my brain. So I listen to non-marketing podcasts, non-marketing stuff. That's why I'm listening to Joe's book right now, because it's not about marketing. Although he has some funny Easter eggs in there for people who are marketers, and if you know Joe, it's even funnier. Lately I've been listening to Dax Shepard, Armchair Expert. He interviews celebrities or higher profile people. It's not business at all. I need that complete separation from marketing because if the intent is to separate your body from your work for an hour, I also need to separate my mind. I try to match those two up. If I'm taking a break, I'm taking a break. I'm not going to sit here and listen to somebody talking about marketing because I do that all day long.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I really love conspiracy theories. Not because I believe in all of them, there's just something about them that really hooks me. If I can catch a podcast of someone trying to convince me of aliens or ancient civilizations, I am in. What's funny is I started down this rabbit hole. I listened to this one episode of Joe Rogan with Graham Hancock, and he talks about this early civilization which is actually freaking fascinating. I go down this rabbit hole and now all of a sudden I'm not doing my job because all I want to read about is these humans that existed 25,000 years ago. I had to pump the brakes. I need to make sure that if I go down that path, I have to come back to sales and marketing. That's what I do for a living. But I agree with you. I don't listen to marketing podcasts either. I produce one, I guess this is my marketing podcast time is me trying to steal all your good thoughts for my audience. I should say I do listen to marketing podcasts, but not when I'm on a walk, not when I'm doing that one hour thing. I listen to the Marketing Smarts podcast at my desk. That's the break I need to take so that I balance out taking in the input with the output. I'm not taking in too much because to your point, there is so much. There's so many podcasts to listen to, so many blogs to read and newsletters. I have to curate that pretty carefully. I try to find the people who don't think the way that I think. That's another thing I look for in how I don't get too saturated. There are some marketers who are sort of in our world that I have a very similar outlook to. Their stuff, even though it's super valuable, is almost too close to what I talk about. It's harder for me to really read too much of their stuff because I start to get influenced by them in a good way, but it takes away a little bit of my voice and my own thoughts. I have to be careful about that. For example, I read Avinash Kaushik. He's a data scientist at Google. I love Avinash, he's such a good friend. He thinks about things so different than the way that I think about things. My friend Chris Penn, I don't know if you've ever had him on this podcast?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I had him on a long, long time ago, like 2014.
--:-- Ann Handley: Yeah, he's got some new stuff going on. He's another guy I read his newsletter because he and I talk about the same thing, but we have very different takes on it. Those are the people I seek out because I need that to balance my own prejudices as a marketer. But also they're so different that I don't get saturated. Sometimes something they publish sparks something in me, and I always have a different take on it. Do you know what I'm saying?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Yeah, I think to me, those are the types of inputs. It's probably why I like conspiracy theories. If you are a hundred percent convinced that aliens exist, I might be 82% there, but if you're a hundred percent, you're thinking about the world differently than I'm thinking about it. I don't care so much about the topic. You could input this crazy conspiracy theory with anything. But it's like, how did they get their mind to that point? How did they connect that dot to that dot? For me those two things don't connect, but for them they do. Right or wrong, insane or not, it's interesting from a behavioral standpoint to understand how they made that jump.
--:-- Ann Handley: Yeah, actually it makes perfect sense. What I really like about what you're saying is that that's the exact exercise that I talk to marketers about all the time. What you're describing is, why do you see the world the way you do? How did you get to that point? What informed that decision? That's thinking about things from a very empathic point of view. You're not saying "you're crazy" and shutting it down because they believe in aliens. You're saying, "Why do you think that? How did you come there? What happened before you started thinking that? What informed that mindset?" I think that's a really valuable skill as a marketer. It aids your understanding of other people, but I think it can also really help you as a marketing and salesperson from a behavioral standpoint, from understanding how you can build trust with somebody. The people you're marketing to, they may believe in aliens. Depending on what you sell, maybe you sell anti-alien repellent. If that's the case, you've got to understand who you're talking to. Asking those questions, thinking about the world from a worldview that's not your own, super valuable. It's really hard, but I never thought about listening to podcasts like that. My friend Rohit Bhargava talks about reading magazines that are not intended for you as a way to build empathy. I do that a lot when I'm traveling. If I'm walking through an airport, I'll pick up Car and Driver or Country Living, something that's completely not what I would ever read. I'm curious in a similar way, but also how do they package it? What are the ads in here? Who are they actually focusing on? How are they talking to them? As an exercise to build empathy, I think it's a really fascinating thing to do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is the last thing I'll talk about on this topic and I have one more question for you. I actually did this experiment the other day where I listened to a podcast that was anti-nuclear power. Just take the politics out of this. Then I went and found a respected podcast that was pro-nuclear power. I listened to them back to back. I listened to the anti one first and then the pro one second. It was fascinating. They were both done not in an extremist way. These were well thought out, rational arguments. One took a set of facts and pointed in one direction, and one took a set of facts and pointed in the other. They weren't trashing the other side, which is why I liked it. It was fascinating to compare. They would bring up certain pieces of evidence that they both used. In one case they used that piece of evidence to point in one direction, and in another case they used that same piece of evidence to point another. The persuasion techniques these podcasters were using to make their argument was like candy for me. It was like walking into a cookie store. "Oh my God, look at all these different things they're doing and the way they're framing this argument." It was the exact same study, the exact same conversations. It was awesome. In the end, coin flip on which one is right. Everyone has their own beliefs. The politics weren't the point. It was just so interesting to listen to this topic that most people don't even think about.
--:-- Ann Handley: Why did you do that? That's freaking insane. I'm curious, what made you think of that?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One, I'm incredibly interested in what motivates people to do certain things. It drives me nuts. I try not to accept shallow answers to questions, which is why this is as much about getting information and sharing information with my audience as it is practice for me to get below the surface with whoever I'm talking to. In this particular one, I was referred to this podcast called Congressional Dish by a woman whose name is escaping me. If you search Congressional Dish, you'll find her. She did this podcast on the Federal Reserve. Again, I'm just interested in these things. This isn't political. A person I respected tweeted, "If you've ever been interested in the Federal Reserve for any reason, this is the best podcast ever created on how the Federal Reserve was started." That was enough for me. I'm slightly interested in the Federal Reserve, so I gave it a listen. She was tremendous. It was so tremendously done that I said I want to give another one of her episodes a try. So I gave this nuclear power one a try. I disagree with her take on nuclear power. I think it can be a clean source of energy that gets us off of fossil fuels in a rational way that isn't perfect, but whatever. I disagree with her point. She made this argument and I saw certain persuasion techniques she was using. I wondered what the counter argument was. So I searched for a podcast. I can't remember which one I found because I did this three or four months ago, but I found another podcast that gave the pro nuclear power thing. I listened to hers again and then immediately listened to this one. That was two and a half hours of my life, but it was still worthwhile. In the end, I still think I'm right about nuclear power, but it is incredibly interesting to think about. In some cases, they're asking you to take leaps of faith with them. There were some interesting gaps in their logic because you could see where certain sides of the argument forced you to take leaps because they were biasing in a certain direction. They both had to do it to make their point, which was really interesting. In some places, she had the logical next step and the other side had to take a gap leap to make their point, and then vice versa. Once you listen to both sides, you started to see where they were forcing you to take logic gaps or jump over gaps in the logic to follow their argument. This is probably not interesting to anyone, but that's how I got there.
--:-- Ann Handley: Well, it's interesting to me. I think it's interesting just that you saw that though. You saw the difference between somebody taking the same research study or the same findings and seeing something completely opposite. As an exercise in developing empathy and thinking about things from another person's point of view and allowing yourself to be challenged like that, I think is kind of interesting.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: What it also did for me was I gained more respect for her, even though I disagreed with her opinion. It validated that even though there were certain places where she was forcing you to take a jump in the logic, it wasn't in a nefarious way. She wasn't twisting the facts. She was just saying, "I think that this takes us this way." By my perception, it went the other way. It was just really interesting. Taking it all the way back to marketing, there are going to be certain aspects of your offer, your product, how you enamor an audience to you, how you try to connect with the right people whose problems your product can solve. There are certain moments where you're forcing them to take a leap in their logic to get there. I always want to err on the side of being as transparent with that happening as possible. I don't want to be huckstery. I don't want it to be an assumptive leap. I want to be like, "Look, here's the leap I'm asking you to take. If you believe this, come jump with me." Not, "I'm going to use everything from Cialdini's book to get you to make this jump even though you don't really want to do it." That's maybe a check on myself.
--:-- Ann Handley: That's interesting. The other thing that reminds me of is going back to what we were talking about a few minutes ago about how difficult it is to package yourself and describe what you do. Sometimes when I've packaged myself in a certain way, or even through my writing when I'm describing a scenario or sharing a story, the feedback I'll get back from readers or newsletter subscribers is that what they hear is different than what I said. That's another important reason why being a constant creator, creating something on a regular basis and talking to an audience, makes you a better marketer. You get that immediate feedback loop. You see that maybe sometimes what you say, or the way you interpret it, or that leap you took, is not necessarily the leap that your audience is taking or that your customer or prospect will take for your product or service. I think it strengthens that empathy muscle. I also think it strengthens the communication muscle because you're taking that in and saying, "All right, that's the way she interpreted it. That's interesting because I took this in a different direction." That's a lesson you can apply to growing your business as well.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I feel like you buy yourself misses when you create more because it's more about your body of work and the impact that has. If your frequency is very minimal, you're creating once a year or just very rarely, then every single thing that you create is scrutinized. If you're more consistent or there's a cadence to it, then it's more about the general flow of value that you provide to people than it is any one particular topic. We're all going to miss or not have a connection on certain topics. It would be illogical to think otherwise. That consistency allows people to flow with you. Does that make sense?
--:-- Ann Handley: Yeah, I like that. "You buy yourself a miss" or "you buy yourself misses"? Is that what you said?
--:-- Ann Handley: Yeah, I like that a lot. I think that's really, really true. I hadn't really framed it in that way, but yeah, 100%, I agree with that. That's good.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Okay, here's my last question. I promise we will not take any more of your time. This has been unexpected. The trajectory of this conversation has been unexpected in a very good way.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I don't have a plan, but this crazy notebook starts to form, and that's how I get to where I'm going. They would put me in a padded box if anyone ever looked at this notebook with the things that I write in here. You're a speaker and you're a very highly regarded speaker. My favorite thing to talk about, which we are not going to get to, but I just want to get your general feel for what is your favorite thing about being on stage? I'm also a speaker mostly to the insurance industry. That's my area. I just love it. It's the closest thing to exhilaration because I was an athlete. When I get up on stage, it's the closest thing I can get as an adult. I have kids, I'm not jumping out of an airplane or going cliff jumping because I want to be here for them. But getting up on stage, I get that same rush of adrenaline. I'm interested in what it means to you. What are your feelings when you're out there and you're killing it, or not? What does that feeling mean to you?
--:-- Ann Handley: That's interesting. I never wanted to be a speaker. I started my career as a writer. I always wanted to be a writer. I didn't think of myself as a speaker. Like a lot of speakers, I'm more introverted. I'm not super introverted, but I definitely get my energy not from being around a ton of people. Being at an event requires a lot for me. I love it, but it also requires a lot of energy that I need to then restore with that one hour a day, typically outside. I've never really craved that moment. We have some speaker friends who love being on stage, they live for the stage, they did theater in high school. For you, being out on the athletic field would be a similar sort of rush. I was never that person. I was always very much behind the scenes. But then I realized that you have to be seen to have an impact. I felt like I had something to say. I have a take on things that's different than other people. I have a sense that I can help marketers and businesses. I wanted to deliver that message. That's really what drove me to get on stage. I wrote a book, I had to share that message. That was the trigger that got me there. But when I got there, I realized just how powerful that platform really is. I realized that I'm good at it. I worked at it. I really love it. I love being on stage. I love talking to people because I love entertaining them and making them laugh. But I also love sharing really important lessons that are wrapped in that humor. It's one part entertainment, one part education. There's really no other way to deliver that than being on stage at a live event. There's so many things that can go wrong. There's so many things that can go right. I love that tightrope that you're walking constantly. There is that feeling that you're making an impact and it is in real time. It's never the same twice. There's so much about it that I've really grown to love. The first thing is that I feel like I have something to say. I wanted to say it. Being on stage and delivering it in person to actual people in the audience and seeing them react in real time, making them laugh, making them think, it's just so gratifying. When you see somebody do it well, I really appreciate it even being in the audience too. It's changed the way that I think about being on stage and stage work.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Well, we are so glad that you do what you do. If you listen to this podcast and you have not read Ann's book, *Everybody Writes*, this is a must get. Google that, go to Amazon, go to annhandley.com. You can find everything there. I'll have links in the show notes, but don't go to my stuff, go directly to her so her Google gets the hits and she gets all the little dopamine hits in her brain when she sees her Google Analytics go up. I just think the world of your work. I'm very grateful that you do what you do and that you find joy in it because that comes through, and then we get to siphon some of that off for ourselves. Thank you so much for your time. I wish you nothing but the best.
--:-- Ann Handley: Thank you so much for having me.
--:-- [Host reads ad break]
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