Today we sit down with Chris Brogan. Chris is one of the very first bloggers that ever existed. This was back in the 90s before anyone even knew what the internet was. He is the CEO of Owner Media Group and is a New York Times Bestselling Author of eight books, and highly sought after public speaker.

Chris has won a number of accolades. Tony Robbins had Chris on his internet Money Master series. Forbes listed Chris as one of the must-follow marketing minds of 2014 and put his website on the 100 Best Websites for Entrepreneurs.

Essentially what Chris does through his Owner Media Group is he provides education and tools for aspiring entrepreneurs to get their businesses off the ground. I think you’re going to really enjoy today’s episode. He is a very good guy and he just has a wealth of knowledge that he shares with us.

Jay: Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate your time. For our fans out here in Asia perhaps you could give us a little bit of a rundown. Who is Chris Brogan? How do you make a living?

Chris: Well, sure. My name is Chris Brogan. I run a small company called Owner Media Group. We do a few different things. I’m a business advisor. We also work with smaller and independent organizations through giving them courses and webinars to help them with strategy and some systems and tools for what we call the modern business.

I’ve worked with some of the biggest companies in the world, like Google and Microsoft and Coke and all those kinds of people, but I also work with people who run their own little design shops and holistic veterinarians, and a guy who runs a fence company. A lot of what I work to solve is very much the same for both, which is how do you grow your business and reach the kind of people you hope to serve?

Jay: Right, so you’re a problem solver. I find it pretty fascinating that you have gone from working with some of the biggest brands in the world, like going from a Disney or a Coke or a Google down to, like you said, you work for just regular, average people everyday just trying to solve business problems.

Why did you decide to scale that way? As in a lot of peoples’ dreams are to work with the large companies. Instead, it seems like you get fulfillment on a daily basis working with anyone.

Chris: I’m a book author as well, and a speaker. My last book was in no way successful in the United States, but it has been very successful in, strangely enough, China.

Jay: Wow.

Chris: It’s called The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth. It’s slightly different title in Chinese. I don’t remember how it plays out, but the ideas is basically it’s an idea for entrepreneurship for sort of A-typical people. When I looked at books about entrepreneurship it was essentially two white guys shaking hands in suits. I figured, “You know, maybe there’s some other types of perspectives out there.”

I really wrote it for my daughter and my son because they’re both weirdos and there’s no way they’re ever going to have a normal cubicle job somewhere. I thought, “I really ought to show them how they could run a business doing what they love,” because I think a lot of people get that wrong when they think it’s I love to juggle, so I’m going to be a rich juggler, or something.

 Anyway, back to big companies versus little. One of the chapters in the book is about how do you define your own success? I said my personal definition of success, which is just mine, is being able to say no to the things that I don’t want to do. Last year in my business it was not the most successful financial year. It was a horrible year financially, but I also didn’t say yes to anything I didn’t really feel like doing, so I feel like I had a really successful year.

When I work with companies like Google and Microsoft and those kinds of people, I love that they’re big, I love commanding that kind of a fee from that kind of a company because I’m trying to deliver something that’s on the big enterprise scale, but I don’t love that a lot of times my ideas get sort of into the smile, nod. “That sounds like a nice idea. Good talking to you.” Nothing ever gets done.

 The one thing I really love about working with smaller companies is that I’m usually talking with the owner and the implementer at the same time. In a big company I’m either talking to a chief executive type person or something like talking to Bob Iger at Disney. He’ll nod his head and say, “Yes, great,” but nothing goes because it’s not like we met with the kind of people who would actually make it run.

On the other side of that, if I am talking to the implementer then they don’t necessarily have the power. They’re like an internal champion who maybe does or doesn’t have the support. That’s what’s hard about big companies. What I like about little companies is you see end to end, Jay, how it works. If I say, “Hey, why don’t you try this?”

Jay: Right.

Chris: They could say, “Oh, that’s weird. I tried it and it worked.” Or they say, “It didn’t work. You’re an idiot.” Either way I learn something really fast with them.

Jay: Yeah. I guess the impact that you can make on a smaller organization is much clearer at the end. I guess that could be more fulfilling. You bring up an interesting point, Chris. You were talking about last year being successful in a different way other than being financially successful.

I was just wondering, doing what you love is probably the holy grail of being an entrepreneur, it’s the reason why a lot of people set out to be an entrepreneur. People have different notions of, oh, what an entrepreneur is. Some people think that you’re sitting on a beach sipping pina coladas and just watching your PayPal account accumulate money overnight. Other people are more real about it and they understand that it’s exactly what you said. It’s the freedom to choose what you want to do.

Are there ever days where you wake up and you’re just like, “You know what? Screw it. I’m just going to do nothing today,” or, “I’m just going to go hang out with my partner and kids,” or what have you?

Chris: Yeah, 100%. I mean, one of the beauties of this kind of life that I’ve built for myself is that I can choose how I want to spend it. I’m a eastern United States, East Coast, New Englander-type of guy. Very similar to the 2017 Superbowl-winning Patriots, I’m a big fan of work. I really like the ethic of, hey, we should go do something.

I don’t spend a lot of time with my feet in the sand doing Mai Tais. Also, the people who sell that vision are the people who make the money off that vision, right? Very few people end up on that beach next to that other person with the Mai Tais. You know? They made that money buying your … Taking your money and you’re still sitting on a train somewhere going to your dumb job you hate.

Jay: Right.

Chris: I like to show people there’s a way that you could actually run a business that serves other people and that service to the other person is the real core tenet of the business. That’s really what separates me with a lot of the sort of internet marketer-types is that every single time I talk about business, it’s all about service. It’s all about how do you find somebody that you want to serve and how do you help them grow?

My version of do what you love is really serve the people that you actually want to work with and be around. I think that’s sort of why I gravitate towards these guys who run fence companies and things like that. I don’t hang out with very many start-ups. I know you do, like that’s part of your career and your life is you like to go hang out with a bunch of young people at hacakthons and stuff like that.

I don’t know. I’m too into things like revenue and I’m too into things like people making money with a serious actionable business models, and things like that. I think that both need to exist. I’ve just decided that my side of the teeter-totter is this one.

Jay: Sure. I mean, everyone loves revenue. That’s very important. Okay, well, Chris. That’s awesome. Let’s take a quick step back. I know that you have a long history, relationship with the internet. You were one of the first bloggers that ever existed before perhaps the term blogging even was around.

Maybe you could tell us a little bit about your history. How you got into sort of the early, early web 1.0 and blogging, and how you think … Being an early adopter, you were there. You were early on Twitter. Your hand is on the pulse, so to speak. Your finger’s on the pulse with social media and these trends that are happening. I see you on Facebook Live a lot now. What do you think the trends in the future of social media are going forward? Maybe a little bit about your background and where you see this whole thing going in the future.

Chris: Sure. I love these moments because I get to be like old man Brogan because I got into the online world way back when it was bulletin board services. Your computer would plug into a modem and you would dial a very distinct phone number. One person at a time could log in and leave a comment on a message board somewhere.

If you imagine when you’re tweeting something like the Grammys, and you’re like, “What is CeeLo Green wearing?” Then millions of people message you back. This is like you dial in, you wait for it to connect, you go to the right file, you type in “What is CeeLo Green wearing?” You hang up and you wait for someone else to dial it in and voice their opinions.

Jay: Right.

Chris: Went a lot slower. That’s actually what got me into that was … I was a guy raised up in the Northeastern part of U.S. called Maine. Maine’s small and semi-rural. There’s not a lot going on. The conversations that were around me when I was younger were really getting kind of old. You know? The things that people wanted to talk about were which was better, Van Halen or Led Zeppelin? Did you like Camaro or Mustang? Were the Red Sox ever going to win a World Series? That was pretty much the three questions, and then maybe we’d talk about weather.

None of those conversations were interesting. I wanted to talk about superheroes and how could Batman beat Superman, and isn’t Star Wars cool? When I got online, I was able to talk to people all around the world. That’s actually kind of what brought me through to everything else I ever did in life because I just thought, “Wow. It’s so neat that we could connect with people around our interests instead of around our proximity.”

That’s been a through line of all the work I’ve ever done. My early business career was I worked for the phone company. I worked in customer service for a lot of those years and different call center-type jobs. I went into wireless telecom and did all kinds of other fun things there.

Back in ’98, I started journaling, when it was called that, before it was blogging. That really started catching my interest. I would be working on my job but I would be thinking, “Man, wouldn’t it be neat if I could find some way to make a business out of media?” It took me until about 2006 to do that. It was I ran an event called Pod Camp, which was about podcasting with Christopher [inaudible 00:11:35]. On the second day of that I got hired by someone to come and help run his conference Video on the Net, Jeff Pulver, who was famous for co-founding Vonage back in the day.

Jay: Right.

Chris: He’s a serial entrepreneur and whatever. He’s got investments in almost all the cool social networks that you’ve ever heard of. I guess I was into it back then. I’ve really tried most of my life to shirk the social media guy label because I think that it’s one of those labels like blogger that has people look down on you all the time. I’ve really tried hard to keep myself fashioned as a business advisor and a digital marketing professional and that sort of thing, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know it. I was user 10,212 on Twitter.

Jay: Wow.

Chris: That was back in March … October. I lied. October of 2006. I was like, “Oh my gosh. This is amazing. This is world-changing.” Everyone was like, “You’re stupid.” It took everyone else until, like, 2010 or so to start coming onto Twitter. I seemed [inaudible 00:12:35], but I just knew that there was something cool about the velocity of communication there.

Jay: Right.

Chris: I did not think much of Facebook. I thought very little of MySpace. I can see that Facebook is better than I thought it was, but I’m only on there because the 1.7 billion people are also there.

Jay: Right.

Chris: As far as the future of it, I mean, in the moment you and I are talking Snap is getting ready for their IPO. I think it’s shenanigans. I’m so nervous because I’m right about two-thirds of the time on what’s not going to work. I have this really burning part of my gut that says this one’s not going to work.

Jay: Yeah.

Chris: When I said in 2006, “Oh my gosh, Twitter is amazing,” everyone thought I was stupid. Now, every single day, everyday worldwide, news reports involve Twitter. Every single day. Partly because of our current choice of U.S. president.

Jay: Right.

Chris: I think that things like Snap … I don’t think Snap is the tool, but I think it’s what comes before the tool. I think Snap is what AOL was or something.

Jay: Oh, right. Yeah.

Chris: That’s a bad example because AOL was, like, we’ll make the whole web easier, and Snap does not do that. I think Snap is pointing at we’ll make things ephemeral, we’ll make things a lot more in the moment, and we’ll make things a lot less formal. I think that those details separate of the device and separate of what you’re supposed to do with the platform are what people should be clinging to when they look at trends because we’re mobile first finally.

In the world of WeChat and in the world of Line, we’re seeing these ecosystems being built up, but I don’t even think those apps, those platforms, I don’t think they’re the be-all.

Jay: Right.

Chris: I think that something next happens. I don’t know what it is, but it’s thinner. It’s Snapchat thinner, but I don’t know what it is. I think that that’s what we should be watching for is that breaking apart of platforms like WeChat and Line and to sort of take away the ecosystem part. I think the part that’ll maintain itself, Jay, is very similar to the fact that Facebook log in exists all over the web when we wanted a universal log in solution.

Jay: Right.

Chris: I think it might be the [inaudible 00:14:45] elements. I think WeChat has done an amazing job of making [crosstalk 00:14:49].

Jay: Yeah.

Chris: A huge powerful engine inside the platform. I think what else they’re doing on top of it is not as important as they might become sort of the next Wallet. More so than Bitcoin in my mind.

Jay: Right. Yeah, I mean, it’s really interesting. You’re absolutely right on Snap. I’m very nervous about it, but they have figured something out. I think it has to do with the attention. Peoples’ attention is very short now. That’s why it’s so hard to grasp [inaudible 00:15:19].

Even Facebook, right? Facebook is great, they’re like the institution, but at the same time my feed … I know for a fact, and I only follow … I don’t follow that many people, but I can imagine if I followed more pages or stuff like that my feed would be completely inundated like my Twitter stream is right now.

Chris: Right.

Jay: Where I miss 99% of the stuff. I agree with you and I think that it’s an exciting time. It’s definitely changed. The other thing, Chris, that’s really cool is that ever since I launched this podcast I’ve been … People are like, “Hey, what’s a podcast?” All this and that. I’m telling people, “Look, podcast has been around for over a decade.” It’s just not in Asia, right? It’s really cool that you were also an early podcaster. You were there in 2006 with Pod Camp. I think that’s really special.

Talk a little bit more about your entrepreneurial journey. I mean, I know that you’re obviously a New York Times Bestselling Author, which is an amazing accomplishment. You’ve done a lot of things. Like you sort of detailed in the beginning, you’ve worked at large companies. You’ve sort of brushed shoulders with some of the greatest and most brilliant minds in the world, which I’m very jealous of being a podcaster now.

What, if anything, are there ever times when you were … Felt like, okay, in order to achieve this sort of success or accomplishments, was there anything that you’ve had to sacrifice along the way to make that happen? Was there any moments in your life where you’re like, “You know what? I should’ve done this?” Or, “I feel like maybe I could’ve done more of that, but instead I did this?”

Chris: That’s interesting. I have the feeling that … The way that translates in my head is I don’t think I made any particular sacrifices, but I definitely did some trimming. One thing that people come to me a lot with as aspiring entrepreneurial-types is they say, “I’ve got a couple hundred ideas, and I have another hundred more.” I did the same thing. I mean, between 2009, 2010, I was … 2010 was like my peak year as far as revenue guess. I’ve never made as much as I did that year. It wasn’t world-shattering numbers, but it was just like that was my good year.

 I invested so much of that money into ideas that I thought would be really cool, my own ideas and occasionally some other peoples’. I lost pretty much all the dollars. I lost every single dollar. It was, like, probably 400,000 in expense to stuff that just didn’t pan out. That’s not a fund or anything. That’s just, like, what was in bank account.

Jay: Right.

Chris: That number sounds so huge that it’s like, whoa, good thing you still have so much left. I’m trying to stress in this podcast, I don’t. My point was I spent everything and lost it, but I say that to say that … Or was it 200,000. I don’t know. It was several hundred thousand dollars.

Jay: Right.

Chris: It was a lot. The most important storyline of this is to say that it was like buying my own MBA because what I learned was, to your question of sacrifice, you can’t run everything down. You can’t be everything. The minute you try, especially on your own resources and especially with a very small staff, you’re going to fail. I mean, there’s very few Walmarts compared to Dollar Shave Clubs. You know?

Jay: Right.

Chris: There’s so many more ways that you can make a win out of I think I’ll sell one type of razorblade for a while and see how that works compared to I think I’d like to stock some shelves with 5,000 things.

Jay: Right.

Chris: I tell people that, and not necessarily a sacrifice, but can you shelve all your ideas and just work on one for a while until you start finding some threads that connect them to other ideas? Then, you could pull them all out again. I mean, the way my business runs as a media company, I run a podcast right now, I’ve got a blog, I’ve got other websites that I maintain just all for me. Then, I work with a bunch of big companies and then a whole lot of small, little guys. I also write books and I also manage my keynote speaking career as well.

That’s a bunch of different things in the fire, but I use all of those things altogether to keep educating people on how to make their own platforms, how to build better media systems for themselves and their business, and then also to keep my ear to the ground on new developments and things like that.

Jay: Right.

Chris: I just want to touch directly on the podcast point you made about being able to reach cool people. I think at this point the only reason I have a podcast at all is so I can vaguely justify asking people that I admire that I could see if I could talk to them.

Jay: Right.

Chris: I think that’s the whole reason I do it. I’m trying really hard to reach General Stanley McChrystal right now. He blew me off. He said, “No, you’re not that good a person.” He didn’t say that, but they said that he was really busy.

Jay: Yeah, so who are some of the people that inspire you? I know that you have inspired hundreds of thousands of people. I mean, you’re a public speaker and you’re obviously a New York Times Bestseller, like I mentioned before, and you do a lot of good work. Who are the people that inspire you?

Chris: You know, probably top, besides my parents because they have to always be above everybody else, but Sir Richard Branson I admire a lot. I got to interview him a long time ago for Success Magazine on a fitness and health article.

Jay: Right.

Chris: I’ve been fortunate to already say, “Hey, I already talked to the guy that I probably most want to talk to in the world.” I talk to a lot of special operations military people because I think their determination is something that a lot of business people could really learn from.

Jay: Oh, yeah.

Chris: The way they [inaudible 00:21:09] their lessons. When you and I were talking the last episode of my podcast was another navy seal, Eric Davis, who wrote a little ebook called Habits of Heroes. I thought that it was kind of cool. His other mainstream book, Raising Men, was fun, so I had him back on. I like those guys.

I’m also very inspired by stories from people who are just doing it very differently than anybody else, who are kind of, like, weirdos. I’m always looking for … Who I’m least ever looking to talk to are people that are like me, people who are out there chasing the media dream.

Jay: Right.

Chris: That’s the least interesting conversation I could have. I find like video game designers and artists and farmers and things like that because we’re not going to learn from talking to the people that we go to conferences with. We’re going to learn from the people that we would never normally run into. That’s who I think are the best guests.

Jay: That’s right. I think that’s key. The deeper I get into this podcast game I’m realizing the same thing. I get inspired by a lot of the same people that you go to conferences with, but I can already see that at some point there’s going to be some fatigue there. I’m going to try to look for some more interesting guests.

You mentioned the different business lines. I like the idea of having sort of many irons in the fire. Let’s talk about specifically let’s say for me I’m trying to run a small business. Let’s say I have a podcast and maybe trying to do some blogging and whatnot. How can your company, Owner Media Group, specifically help me as just a small business owner? How could I level up my business? What products do you have that could potentially help me out?

Chris: Some of our core things that we came up with were, again, directly solutions that we came up with for people that we were working with and who said, “I have this problem going on.”

One of the things that we launched … It’s funny now because when we did it, I feel like such a hipster saying it, but we did this kind of early and then all of a sudden it seems like everyone’s selling this. We said, “Hey, you know, one way is you could stop trading hours for dollars, you could learn how to make an online course.” Well, now there’s a couple hundred people teaching how to make an online course, so that’s not that interesting.

Jay: Yeah.

Chris: We have a site called onlinecoursemaker.com. What’s different about mine is just that I show people how to make a very lightweight, simple kind of execution of a course. I think that there’s some really great thinking, great meaning people out there that want you to make the most polished, bulletproof, amazing, spend a few thousand dollars on cameras and lighting kind of courses. Then there’s me that’s like, “You could make this this afternoon if you want.” I kind of go for that.

The other thing is that once we finished Online Course Maker, it was kind of funny, we sold a lot of that. That was our bestselling course. Everyone got to the end of it and was really jazzed up, so they started building their course. They went, “Oh my gosh. Chris, who do I sell this to? I don’t have a list. I don’t have any customers.”

Jay: Yeah.

Chris: I was like, “What? Why would you even bother making a course?” They’re like, “I don’t know. I don’t know, because you said make one.” I was like, “Okay.” I made a course right away called Earn More Customers. I had just finished Online Course Maker and people were complaining that they didn’t know who to sell this thing that they’d built. I was like, “Oh.” We made Earn More Customers, so you can go to earnmorecustomers.com.

Now, the thing is too, Jay, my earlier courses had names like The Owner’s Heart and The Owner’s Mind and The Owner’s Path. People were like, “What do I get?” Now I make courses called Online Course Maker. You know what you get. When you’re done you’ve learned how to [crosstalk 00:24:39].

Jay: There you go.

Chris: Earn More Customers. What do I get when I’m done?

Jay: Yeah.

Chris: The other thing that we sell the most of is this thing called The 20 Minute Plan Jumpstart. What that is is that there’s so many people that they’re trying to figure out time management. We decided that time management’s a dopey thing. Gandhi said we all have the same 24 hours in our day. It’s just how we choose to use it.

We do priority management. We have a system by which we show people how to work on the things that matter most so that they’re not chasing down their to-do list all day. We’re very not into getting things done. We appreciate that it exists, we appreciate there’s a lot of people who are disciples of it, and I would definitely love to have coffee with [inaudible 00:25:18] some day, but the way we do it, Jay, is that we say, “What if you could find three slots of 20 minutes each, times three, so nine 20 minute slots, or three hours basically, to really work on what matters, what’s really going to grow your business in every single day?”

Everyone says, “Oh, I don’t have time. I just got done talking to a client 30 minutes before you and I talked.” Well, that was 100% her problem. I went to her website and her website had a coming soon page. I said, “What do you sell?” She said, “Websites.” I said, “Let’s just back up one quick [inaudible 00:25:50] here. You have a coming soon for your website.” “I know.”

I was like, this is, like, two and a half hours of work for you. She goes, “I know.” I just told her it’s not allowed and she has or get it done today, so that’s the plan. That comes from this 20 Minute Plan logic. When you said earlier about don’t you have days where you could just hang out with your kids, my business partner, Rob [Hatch 00:26:11], had developed a course based on something that he and I had worked on starting in, like, 2011, which was work like you’re on vacation.

Rob went on vacation and I needed him to do a whole bunch of things. I’m not in any way some kind of demanding boss, but I was like, “Rob, I need this. I need this.” He was on vacation and of course his wife and his kids were like, “Dad, what are you doing? You’re all over the laptop.” I’m not a jerk, so it’s not like I want him to be on the laptop, but business doesn’t stop because someone goes on vacation in a three person company.

Jay: Right.

Chris: Rob figured out, oh my gosh, if I get up really early, I could just do all the work and I’ll be done before 10:00 or 11:00. Then we could all just go do our vacation. He gets back from vacation, he goes, “Why don’t we do that everyday? Why can’t we just work a couple of hours and then have everything else nailed? Why do we treat all day as it should be eight to 12 hours?”

Jay: Right.

Chris: Something cool came of it. 20 Minute Plan is me ripping parts of Rob off and then making this 20 Minute Plan Jumpstart. Such a long answer, but hopefully it was interesting because people can see what I’m going after.

What I’m mostly always trying to build, all the different courses and webinars and things that I build and sell, and we have a private coaching group called Owner Insider where people ask us for very custom solutions, always trying to solve the same thing, how could I do business my way? How could I make my own game and approach business in a way that’s going to match my needs and the people that I serve as opposed to just fit tradition?

Jay: Yeah. I think that’s really important because once you start going down that entrepreneurial path all of a sudden it’s like you have 1,000 different options you could spend your time on. You could spend hours trying to tinker around on your website or your Facebook. You don’t know which vertical that you’re supposed to be spending your time with. To have a guide is very important. I think that would be very useful.

Even something as simple as … Well, it’s not simple once you get into it, but, say, building an online course. There are a million options out there on how you could do it. Email sequencing, what kind of product you should roll out. I think that it’s really key that you find someone that is successfully done it that you can sort of tailor to your needs and copy. In addition to 20 Minute Plan Jumpstart, which I think is a very telling name, what else are you working on specifically to [inaudible 00:28:37]? Are you writing another book?

Chris: I am, which is funny is in the span of time between the time you and I last talked I put out my ninth book.

Jay: Wow.

Chris: Now I’m two-thirds of the way through my tenth. This one’s called Make Your Own Game. In 2009 Julien Smith and I wrote Trust Agents. That was the one that hits the New York Times Bestseller list. The very first tenet of how to be a trust agent was learning how to make your own game.

In one way I’m kind of circling back to something that I said in ’09, but it’s all unique and new content. The other thing is that no one … Like I said, no one bought The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth because they in America everyone said, “Well, I’m a big, solid business. The last thing I’d want is entrepreneurship in my business.”

This is not true. Big companies want innovation. That’s what you read in every magazine and every news story. Companies lacking innovation. They just didn’t understand that innovation and entrepreneurship are kind of the same word.

Jay: Right.

Chris: It just means take a different approach to get the gold. On the one side, Make Your Own Game is written so that big companies will say, “Oh, I see what you need me to do, Brogan. I get it.” On the other side, if you’re just some weirdo like you and me, and we’re just trying to figure out a different way of doing business, you could pick this up and run with it and make it work.

It’s so weird because I feel a little bit like I’m cheating. I feel like I’m saying, “Come get this, big business people,” with my hand really close to my face whispering to other people going, “It’s for you, little guys.” It’s both.

Jay: Nice. When is that book going to be out?

Chris: Sometime in 2017. I’m still in the throes of writing it. I’m writing a lot slower than I wish I were, but the beauty is that the last iteration of this book I just couldn’t seem to publish. I couldn’t make it work. I just threw all of it in the trash. This time every time I feel like I’m missing something I’ll find it already written in another section. I feel like there’s a nice [inaudible 00:30:28] going on.

Jay: Nice. Chris, like to wrap up here soon. Just a couple last questions for you.

Chris: Sure.

Jay: You’ve obviously accomplished a lot. You sort of are an authority in your space. How do you want people to remember you by? I mean, you’re a New York Times Bestselling Author. You’re a public speaker. You’ve done a number of things. What’s one thing that when you look back on your life I want to be remembered by as Chris Brogan is x?

Chris: You know, the thing I’m hoping people say over coffee someday when I’m long since dead is, “Man, that guy really made me feel like I could do something. Really made me feel like I could accomplish something.” That’s all I want. I mean, I don’t really want to be remembered for any particular … I didn’t create that Tesla. I didn’t launch a spaceship or anything like that. I don’t want to be thought of as a genius because, one, I’m not, but two, I think it’s a weird thing to be considered.

I’d love to know that I helped someone move their own ball forward a little bit. I’d love to know that someone took something that I came up with and went, “Whoa. This fits me better.” That’s what I want.

Jay: Awesome. Final piece of advice for an aspiring entrepreneur who might be struggling at this moment in their life?

Chris: Especially when you’re struggling, it is never about looking down at your own bellybutton. It is 100% about reaching out and helping other people. Entrepreneurship is actually the action of giving to others and serving others, and then extracting some value back from it. That’s how you make your money. When they say risk and reward, the risk is you’re trying stuff that’s never been done before. The reward is you get paid for it.

You have to go and help others. Entrepreneurship is the least about what people perceive you to be and the most about did you or didn’t you help someone so that they can refer you to someone else?

Jay: Very powerful. Man, okay, Chris, thanks so much for your time. I guess the last question is where can people find you, follow you, and connect with you?

Chris: Well, if you’re daring, you could try to spell Chris Brogan and you’ll find me, or just type in Chris. Most times in Google I’m lucky enough to be in the first couple of results.

Jay: Nice.

Chris: Or just go to owner.media. Either way you’ll find me. I’m out there.

Jay: Awesome. Thanks again, Chris. Really, really appreciate your time and all of the insights that you’ve given to the audience here in Asia.

Chris: Oh, it’s been such a pleasure, Jay. Thanks for having me on.

Jay: All right. Take care, man.