Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 149 – Brian Solis

Peter Winick

Technology is everywhere, slowly impacting even the smallest aspects of our daily lives. It’s both a benefit and a detriment! With all this tech surrounding us, how do we rewire our brain to manage technology in a healthy and productive way?

This week, Peter is proud to welcome Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter Group, an award-winning author of “Lifescale and X: The Experience When Business Meets Design,” prominent blogger/writer, and keynote speaker. In this episode, Brian shares his journey through years of technological advances, and discusses his life and his role in making tech an everyday part of life. We dive into persuasive design, the long term effects of too much technology, and how to better manage our digital time and live a more creative, productive, and happy life.

If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage, and you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Brian Solis, who is a principal analyst at Altimeter, which is a digital analyst group at Profit. He is a world renowned author, a prominent blogger and writer, a keynote speaker. His latest book, Life Scale, is a little bit different than his previous books. It’s focused on how to live a more creative, productive, and happy life. Thanks for watching! Brian’s been at this for quite some time and is a bit of a rock star in the thought leader world. So welcome aboard today, Brian. Thanks for coming. Wow. What an intro. Thank you. We can end now. Thank you, good night. you’ve written several books, you’ve been keynoting for a long, long time. So I want to touch on that first in terms of what your core content has traditionally been. And then recently you made a fairly radical pivot in terms directionally with life scale, which there’s connections to your obviously your personal life there. So just first tell us sort of traditional Brian, and then sort of where it’s gone because it’s kind of a cool story.

Brian Solis Sure. All right. Well, it’s a long run. I’ll keep it short though, because I’ve been at this since, gosh, the 90s, and it was a love affair with Silicon Valley. I grew up as either wanting to be a musician or a developer, obviously. Those are the most two common choices people may or have to face. That astronaut and fireman were taken? Yeah, exactly. I grew up in Los Angeles, so hence the musician part of it, and then ended up moving to Silicon Valley in the 90s, and really just found my niche, which was not something I set out to do, which at the time, in the nineties, Silicon Valley was all about enterprise technology, big hardware, software was coming up, and as the late 90s started to come Of course we had the rise of internet 1.0 and the bust and then the rise of web 2.0 in social media and as the consumerization of technology, so we’ll say hardware and also software and the internet was coming about, I found that my niche was going to be in helping to explain the impact and the potential of technology in our lives. And, you know, if you put air quotes around our lives, that could mean… us as employees, us as customers, us, as parents, us as human beings, because before that, tech was all about features and capabilities and speeds and feeds and automation and scale. And so it was, it was talked about in a very in human way. So that’s, over the years, I found myself studying it and helping businesses make decisions. And ultimately, as time went on, I was also, sort of became a digital anthropologist, which was to understand how societies and cultures and norms and values and behaviors were changing as a result of technology’s involvement in our professional and personal lives as well.

Peter Winick Sure. And I would add that in the 90s when this started, tech was mostly research, corporate, government, you know, it wasn’t anywhere near as permeated as it is today in the consumer, the individual’s life, where if you can’t find your cell phone for five minutes, it’s, you know, total panic mode, right? So that was more of a database SQL networking, you know, sort of that stuff. And, you have the technology at home was a VCR blinking 12, right.

Brian Solis exactly oh my gosh yes I do remember that and having to still it’s still explain to my parents how to not just program a vcr because they don’t have one of those anymore thank goodness but anything related to tech we don’t weave as we’ve as children become the tech support

Peter Winick Right. When they, when they want to know if you’ve, if they’ve broken the Google, you’ve gotten that call. So, so you’ve been a leader in that space for a long, long time, written a lot of books, done a lot of keynoting, and then, then came life scale. Cause this is a really fascinating story. So tell us how life scale came to be. And then I want to talk about how that has changed or what has forced that to change the way you operate as an author and a thought leader in the business side of the house.

Brian Solis Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I should note is in my work, a big part of it was the advisory. So I would consult big companies and then also, starting in the mid-90s, like say 96, 97, I was dramatically working with, and by dramatically, I mean shifting all of my time and attention to startups. And the reason I share that is because the irony of the story I’m about to tell is. You will hear it. So in helping startups, I was learning quite a bit. The thing about startups is that unlike enterprise organizations where they have a lot of resources to throw at market development and business development, startups had to go from zero to 100 overnight. And to get them to become not just startups but bonafide businesses and deliver ROI to their investors. you couldn’t follow the traditional rule books. And so a lot of that work wasn’t just understanding and humanizing technology. A lot of my work was also understanding how to make markets. And where I think I built my name wasn’t on just the research and the books and all of that stuff. Just sort of before all of was sharing, blogging, writing about all of the strategies to make market for a lot startups. And I think that’s why I think my name really started to circulate in the industry. uh… which is what ultimately led to books and speaking and what have you uh… and

Peter Winick And I would say that was, you know, if you think about blogging in the 90s, that was before we were using the term thought leadership and where blogging wasn’t as rampant as it is today, right?

Brian Solis Yeah, well in the 90s and early 2000s, we were using, I remember using NetObjects Fusion as sort of building websites. It’s sort of before web blogs and all of that stuff in the early 2000’s. And it just sort of gave a, it just had a platform, you know, to write and express your thoughts because other places wouldn’t necessarily, they didn’t know who you are. So why would they publish you? And that’s where I built. cut my teeth, but also built my brand on that stuff. And ultimately that led to be consulting with in the early 2000s, a lot of the rising social media stars. So social media became attached to my brand for a really, really long time because I was actively involved in not just advising startups, but also helping to cultivate the entire space. I was a big, big, big optimist for social media. I really felt it was going to democratize information, influence, connections. And so, and here’s where the irony comes in is that after doing that for a good decade and having a lot of success in helping companies grow and helping a lot people sort of adopt and change their lives and become empowered with social media, I found myself radically affected by technology’s impact in my own life. uh… and that’s the path wasn’t necessarily as much a pivot, as much as it was a fracture or fissure in my work and thinking in that I had to get to the bottom of why.

Peter Winick So you can make an argument that because you were so good at the strategy and being able to see where it’s going as an advisor and a consultant to the social media companies, you might not have been as poignant as seeing the potential downfall or negative side effect because there’s lots and lots of good things about social, but not everything is great.

Brian Solis It’s really well said and as an optimist you tend to maybe You maybe tend to look at things with blinders on and so for example Social media was and web 2.0 in general. There were some radical UX and UI Innovations in the way that these apps and these networks were developing. He had the rise of mobile during this time. Yeah And so I would study UI and UX designs as a matter of learning how to communicate differently to… I knew brains were changing. I knew that we were becoming much more mobile, we were moving fast. So I would take those design insights and, for example, apply it to some of my previous books so that the book would emulate a mobile app and be much more intuitive and fun to read. What I didn’t know, and this is where the last couple of years of my work had What I didn’t know is that behind that design… was what’s called persuasive design and a whole school of incredible psychological things that are employed to make those apps much more sticky, to make you want to share more, make you wanna consume more. And so the difference was not the awakening I should say is that when I started to spend more time understanding what was going on with me, my inability to focus, my lack of creativity, my constant sense of busyness, my multitasking all over the place, My little, it just. the lack or loss of depth and full-blown critical thinking, a lot of that design was at the source of it and that’s where I decided to change or take a break from my normal work to pursue life scale because I had to fix my life.

Peter Winick Got it. So there’s this weird intersection between optimizing UX and design from that perspective without having the understanding that we do today of the brain and dopamine and all that, right? Because it’s that real intersection where some less than optimal things happen from social. So let’s just real quickly just give us the overview on life scale because I want to talk about how it’s impacted the business side of you. So life scale is an outcome of… some thinking and such that you’ve had on probably more on the personal side, right?

Brian Solis Yeah, it’s actually, just to be real honest, it is not a book that I set out to write. It’s not like I said, hey, aha, this is my next project. My next project was actually writing a follow-up to my last book, X, The Experience When Business Meets Design, and that’s where, so there’s two moments when you have a life, when your life changes. One is the aha moment. I thought this was the aha moment. I was going to follow up X and I was going to make it more of a mainstream book so that I could kind of continue my path of growth and personal development. And then the other moment is uh-oh, right? And that’s the moment I actually hit, which was I couldn’t get past the book proposal stage of that. I wasn’t, I mean, I was writing, I was, the ideas were there. I didn’t think anything was wrong, but what was happening is that I was getting a lot of edits coming back, you know, this isn’t making sense, this is not as clear as you had sort of explained it. And what I would find is as I would sit there and try to write it, I just, my brain was not firing the way that it used to. And so I thought, oh, well, it’s got to be writer’s block, it has got to be the pressure of all of these things. And then I started to just notice in general patterns across all of my work in my research writing. in my emails, the mistakes, the lack of clarity, things that you hear in your own inner monolog but don’t come across in any of the other work, even though you think it is.

Peter Winick So it’s so it’s jumpy. It’s not as focused. Oh, yeah, you can tell if the output of a distracted

Brian Solis Yeah, exactly. And coming to that conclusion, as you put it, right, like recognizing that it was a distracted brain took longer than you’d imagine, right? Because everything else is the problem.

Peter Winick Well, and not only everything else, but everybody else is doing it, right? So if you’re the only sort of multitasker with, you know, 17 screens open and a phone in one hand and this on the other hand, then you’re, the odd man out. But this is sort of normalized now. I mean, nobody, nobody at Starbucks is making eye contact. They’ve, you get their heads down doing whatever they’re doing.

Brian Solis Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I still had to write that book, right? I mean, as you know, a lot of books are huge, huge benefits to the world of speaking and advisory. Plus, I really care about still making markets and moving people in directions that are gonna benefit them. So I was really, really moved to get that book out the door. But the more and more research that I started to do around that distracted brain really started to reveal like wow Types of information and data that weren’t actually in the mainstream media Weren’t widely known by people who live a distracted life or who are constantly multitasking or busy

Peter Winick sort of an unreported epidemic.

Brian Solis Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. And so my passion shifted then to getting to the bottom of of what was going on and then more so doing something about it. And because I had access to a lot of the folks behind these big networks and apps, I got answers pretty quickly. What I didn’t get pretty quickly was the antidote or the solution to this. And to be fair, But persuasive design has been with us for a really long time. In the social world and in the mobile world, what that means for people listening is that to get you to use the app more, our attention is a currency, so that’s how they monetize these things, right? If they give it to you for free, they’ve got to make money somehow. And so the more we use it, that’s one thing, but the more that we share on these platforms, that is the real data that gets them the insights. That’s the network effect. Yeah, that’s the network effect. And then, of course, the more you consume, then that’s the ROI for their advertisers. So to do that, they have a lot of really interesting tricks to get you to use more and more and share more and more. But what they didn’t realize, though, was the long-term effects of what that does. If you’re constantly releasing dopamine, oxytocin, and all kinds of other chemical cocktails in your body because you get a like or because you get new followers. you’re actually building behavior that over time starts to reveal or resemble an addicted format. And what that means is your body starts to crave those chemicals more and more, just like any, any kind of substance abuse. And so I don’t think they Well, and with an addiction…

Peter Winick Well, and with an addiction, you’ve got to raise the bar, right? So it’s that one shot of tequila is not going to give you a buzz anymore. It’s five.

Brian Solis That’s exactly right. That’s what happened. As you said earlier, it became the new normal pretty quickly and it continued to get worse and worse and better and better, depending on your point of view. But almost overnight, 10 years in the making, everybody was suddenly addicted without realizing they were addicted because it was just the new norm. It wasn’t just about how you use these apps and networks. It’s also how it changes your behavior and everything else you do suddenly. Suddenly you’re multitasking, suddenly you’re doing all of these things and you’re just sort of skipping along the shallows rather than allowing yourself to go into the depths. It changed our dynamics of relationships and how we see things. I mean, just think about dating apps today and how they’ve changed the whole sort of the world of what relationships look like. Everything changed, how we communicate, how connect, how think, all of that changed without us realizing it.

Peter Winick So on the change beat, I wanna jump in there for a moment because here you are, world renowned for whatever, 20 years on one side of tech. And now all of a sudden, not that you’re throwing any of those things out the window, but you’re basically looking at the world through a different lens and a different perspective. That may not be as whatever flattering to the technology community as some of your earlier work. So as an author, as a thought leader, as a speaker, tell us a little bit how that has, that transition, that transformation has happened and how you’re taking that content into some of the same places in some different places, but it’s a very different message and you know, you talked about the book you were going to write, well, that’s the logical book to write. That’s what your market wants and would support your speaking. This was not that. And so how about the business implications and, and, you know this seems more mission driven than financial driven potential.

Brian Solis Yeah, absolutely. This is a really interesting turn. When I started to do all of this research and kind of reveal how our brains and bodies were being rewired and what those impacts were, and I also had uncovered that those same types of design techniques were also behind things like fake news and bots, and really started to, so for example, two years ago, I took all of that insight. around what was happening to us as individuals, but also what was happened to us as a society with fake news and bots and why it was so believable. And I shared that as a keynote at South by Southwest. I think it was 2018. And so I still, as I was doing that research, I still wasn’t on the path to life scale yet. I was just sharing all of this. I felt like somebody had to sound the alarm. And how the industry reacted to it was, wow, wow. but still the kind of wow that would say, Hey, this, we need you to do more and more and more of this. In fact, I would say that there was a bit of resistance to it in that no one wanted to poke the bear. No one, no one want it to say, Oh, I have a problem. Everybody actually didn’t want to accept that they had a problem with either their technology relationship or their relationship with information online.

Peter Winick Well, it’s not as good for business.

Brian Solis It’s exactly right and it’s also not good to you know, it’s the same like with any addiction, right? Nobody wants to say that they have a problem. So at the end of that Presentation there were a few people that came up to kind of quietly talk about hey, you know I’ve recognized that I do have this problem and that I and I have been Feeling anxious and every time I go online and what do you what is your research show that we can do about it? Right. Well, I Hadn’t done that yet Good question! Great question. I was just so stoked about what was going on and just so impassioned to do something about it.

Peter Winick But you got confirmation that it’s an issue, that it is a problem. So now the market could push back and say, yeah, maybe we don’t wanna talk about that. But then it seems like after a little bit of steeping, then they said, yeah, that kind of is a thing. Okay, big guy, what do we do about it?

Brian Solis Yeah, exactly So a couple things were happening at this time one. There’s a very well-known developer Tristan Harris who was his work was dedicated to then exposing a lot of these techniques and to also move the Tech industry in a direction that was going to try to motivate Next-gen companies to think ethically about the design. Okay, so I felt I felt confident then that is if Tristan and others like him are pushing in this direction, then I needed to just get back to my next book, but also think about dedicating time to understanding how we solve the problem at a mainstream level.

Peter Winick And this is early, right? So what’s interesting about this, where it parallels your earlier work, is you’re early to the game, right, because my thinking would be in three years from now, in five years from, more people will be talking about this more often with more solutions, probably some tech solutions, because that’s the way life goes, right. And you’re really to the as you were with social.

Brian Solis Well, yeah, and it seemed to be my track record has always been early in the game. So for better or for worse, right? I tend to develop markets and then move to the next thing just when the markets are becoming incredibly limited.

Peter Winick We’ll maybe stay a little longer this time.

Brian Solis So true, so true, but just to continue on the honesty front, as all of this is happening, I still have my problem, I’m still distracted, I still multitasking, I am still not able to get into the depths and where I started to get from a philosophical point of view was I can’t do anything, I can answer these questions, I cannot solve these problems, I cannot make a bigger dent if I don’t fix myself first. I started doing what anybody would do, which is Google solutions. And… And of course the normal stuff comes up, like mindfulness, yoga, meditation, digital detox. So I tried all of those things, apps like Calm and Headspace. And look, they all work in their own way, but they were also treating the symptoms and not necessarily the problem. And I think philosophically, where I really started to think about things was, what does it mean to be alive today? What does it means if we’re not… I’m not realistically going to live a life without digital, I need it in my work and so do a lot of people. So then what does it mean to be alive with these tools, not necessarily distractions? I think it was a choice. If I change how I look at them from distractions to tools and then think about then how to rewire my brain and body in a way that was going to allow me to use these tools. in ways that were not just positive but also productive and healthy and creative.

Peter Winick So let me just pause there because, you know, there’s one school of thought that sort of, you know that just will go on, just turn it all off, which is just not realistic today. And you know to just not use these tools, if you’re going to be on the cutting edge and a productive member of the universe, I don’t, my opinion is I don t think that’s wise advice. Thanks for watching!

Brian Solis Yeah, well, there’s it’s a movement. Cal Newport has a book called digital minimalism. And there’s also a movement that’s called essentialism. You know, look to each to each his own. Sure. I believe, though, that especially living in Silicon Valley, and being a digital analyst and anthropologist, digital was going to be a part of my life. And I was okay with accepting that. But what… what I needed to do and what didn’t exist or what I couldn’t find was how to rewire your brain if it’s been rewired in this direction and if you’re inducing all of these chemicals in your body that do these things that you crave in microdoses, then how do you do that in ways that push you, that do it where you’re happy and productive and creative, right? And so that’s the life scale journey. So still at this point, it wasn’t a book. it was my way of fixing my life. And I went, I went through these steps, I found what didn’t work. I found out what was working and what was pushing me little by little and then bigger and bigger and then deeper and deeper. And so I documented these steps went through the whole process myself and really started to really started feel good and great and started to notice my work was getting better and more creative and coming alive again. So that’s when I thought back to South by Southwest and everybody asking, what do you do about it? What can we do about and realizing that if I have this problem and there aren’t a lot of answers out there, then maybe this should be my next book. I called the publisher Wiley and kind of just asked them if they would be open to supporting a very different book from a person who has no authority or audience in this It’s not!

Peter Winick Just the call that we’re hoping we get from you. Exactly. Golly gee, we’re so glad you called with that, Brian, and when’s your next diet book coming out, right?

Brian Solis Oh, that’s so good. And probably what they were thinking to the back of their mind. And instead, my friend over there, who I’ve worked with for, I think, four books, maybe five books, she was right on board. And we started right away on it. And that became life-scaling. It’s been life-changing ever since.

Peter Winick So let’s as we start to sort of land the plane here, this was a little bit of a different conversation today because it was about, you know, someone that’s been incredibly successful and then sort of pivoting a little and just going with it because it felt like the right thing to do, probably is the right thing to and then it’s going to take you and, you know, who knows directionally when that’s going take you. Any thoughts, advice, recommendations, scoldings, whatever, just to folks that are out there that have achieved a of success with their core brand and their thought leadership and their content that are feeling like they wanna sort of pivot a little bit. Like, you know, someone that’s in that similar situation, you add a South by two years ago.

Brian Solis I’m going to answer this in two ways. One is that the pivot or just developing a new market or building a new brand has been incredibly different and incredibly difficult than, say, the evolution of where I came from, from the 90s and early 2000s. This has been profound learning experience and what it takes to build a brand in today’s environment, right? Everything we talked about in terms of being distracted and multitasking.

Peter Winick Yep, yep.

Brian Solis Oh, and also today’s news cycles and how crazy they are, right? It is incredibly difficult to get mind space now. And so that I say because if you’re thinking about a pivot, you now also have to consider how big do you want that pivot to be if it’s for yourself, right. So life scale helped me personally, but I felt that I also wanted to help people like me. And so I made the conscious decision to start all over again, knowing that it was going to be. a massive challenge, and I did it because I was really passionate about helping other people. So for those who are thinking about that pivot or pursuing something that they’re passionate about or that idea that they’ve been maybe pushing down for far too long, you also have to ask yourself and be real with yourself, how big do you want that pivot to be? And how quickly? And how quickly right because Because what I grossly underestimated is what it would take to even get any kind of mind share around the topic. And that if I had to go back and make that decision again, I would probably make other decisions about carving out more space for it. The other thing to consider is do you plan on monetizing that pivot because that’s also going to change how you approach the entire endeavor. Again, on the honesty front, I did not go into this space thinking I was going to monetize the life scale movement. But now, in hindsight, and also where I am at this crossroads, I should have done that earlier and now I need to in that because of the amount of energy it’s taking… to get the joke along the way is how do you sell a book about being distracted to people who don’t recognize that they’re distracted. So the level of missionary marketing that has to go into that at the front end is incredible. So now I’m thinking about the monetization and the scale so that I can help people with greater effect, so you gotta think about that earlier.

Peter Winick And do well and do good. And it’s never too early to think about the strategy around leveraging and monetizing it, even if it might not be the intent, it’s worth going through that thinking because if I, you know, if I were to say, Hey, Brown, would it have made sense to force yourself to think the strategic monetization piece of this 18 months ago, even If your head space wasn’t there, it probably would have been a good activity for you to force herself to do.

Brian Solis Yep, absolutely. Absolutely.

Peter Winick Well, this has been awesome. I can’t thank you enough. This has been really, really interesting. And I wish you only the best with life scale and wherever else you’re gonna go with your content in the future. So thanks so much for being so transparent today. Thank you. Peter, thank you so much. To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thought leadership leverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes, or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.