Scott & Mark Learn To… Self-Promotion

Do you ever get stressed out? Yeah, all the time. Okay, so learning how to deal with stress. So I think I told you that I just did this TED Talk in Portland, and it almost killed me. It was just... Everything all added up into stress. It's just an unbelievable amount of stress I had not felt in a long time. Like low-key panic attack stress. So I think sometimes people perceive us as being not. Stress-free.

To deal with stress. I mean, the thing that kills me is I'll give a level 400 talk and then I'll have people like, this is way over my head, but it's awesome. And then there's one person like boring, like too simple. Or it's a talk, like I do this innovation talk every year, and I've got different content every time, but it's the Azure Innovation Talk. And then I get comments of, same as last time.

tell us something new. I was trying to explain that to LT. I was in a marketing LT meeting and they asked about that. And they're like, didn't he do this last year? I'm like, it's a tradition. It's different every time. It's innovations, plural. Yeah, I don't know. Like, and the part that I think is so funny is like, you know, the whole concept of those who can't teach. Yeah. So like, what would I do if someone came to me as a mentor and said people were being haters online and I was sad?

I'd be like, man, screw the haters. You're doing great. Come on. I'm giving the exact advice that I'm unable to take. Doctor, heal thyself. Yeah, exactly. And it's just like, oh, man. Some random internet person with an egg for an avatar doesn't like me.

You know what I mean? Yeah. I would tell everyone, I tell my kids, forget those people. But then I'm like, three in the morning. That morning person's bothering you. Yeah, exactly. Three in the morning, my eyes open up. I'm wide awake at night going, yeah. User 1265 on Blind hates me. Why does he like me?

I don't know, man. The self-promotion thing. Have you ever put on someone's connect, like, you should try to be more visible? I'd love you. Visibility. Visibility isn't about self-promotion. It's about... being proud of your work and letting someone be aware of your work. I used to say it's not a flex if it's true. If you're out there flexing on people and there's nothing to back it up, you didn't actually do anything, then that's...

a problem. That's just being braggadocious. But if you did something and no one knows about it, that's challenging. But like, what about people who don't want to be visible? Or what does visibility even mean? You know, you want... I always tell people also about diagonal visibility. Did we talk about diagonal visibility? I don't think so. It's like you can have your boss know about your thing, but then it's also helpful to have people who are up and off to the side to know about.

whatever you're working on. That's true. So are we just a bunch of self-promoters? And what does that even mean? What are we promoting? Vibes? I don't know. So let's talk about how are we self-promoting this podcast. Would you consider this self-promoting? Like a talk at Build. That's not self-promoting, is it? Well, if you put your name in it. In the title, I guess.

So when we put your name in a title, so I'm running with James Canard and a bunch of other great folks at Build, the Build sessions, and we'll put your name in it or Anders Heilsberg's name in it because people will come to the talk. Yeah. Right? And then...

And then you remember the joke I did last. So we had a little fight at Build a couple of years ago where people were saying that people internally, someone said, well, no one will come to a technical talk at Build. So that I made a talk called Highly Technical Talk to troll them.

And it became a pretty well thought of talk. And we're going to do it again this year. Stephen Tobe, he's fantastic. So people like Stephen Tobe. And when we do a video with Stephen Tobe, people are like, oh man, freaking Stephen Tobe, I love that guy. So I put his name in the title because people will go.

Is that self-promotion? Is that promoting Steven? I guess. Well, he's not promoting it. Well, he doesn't know I put his name in the title. Yeah, so that's not, by definition, it's not self-promotion. Yeah, yeah. But what do you think I get out of... Promoting myself. I'm not selling anything. Yeah. I don't know. I just think it's so interesting. But going back to a talk at Build, even if it's got your name in the title, isn't necessarily self-promotion. If it's there for a legitimate reason.

Well, you're promoting something. You're promoting a project you're working on or a thing that you want. Actually, in that case, it's promoting content delivered by somebody that knows how to deliver content well that people like. Yep. Take somebody that's a poor speaker and has got a reputation of not delivering interesting talks, put their name in the title, and that's going to actually have the opposite effect of...

Because people will be like, oh, avoid that one. Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. So you're promoting the dissemination of high-quality content, I guess. when you put somebody that's a good speaker's name in the title. Now, so I wouldn't consider that self-promotion, even if the person themselves is putting it in there because they've earned that.

Let's use this example because I just realized one that would be both Bill Gates and Satya run, ran the company. And each, when they started, at some point in the middle of their tenure, had a book come out. So when Nacha comes out with Hit Refresh, is that self-promotion? Yeah. Or is that helping them? God also came out with one, and so did Brad Smith. Yeah, and you've written a couple of books as well.

Both technical and nonfiction. Be sure to check out Zero Day wherever you get your books. But actually, there's a difference. Like Hit Refresh is Satya's own view of how to run a company. Right. The books that I've done haven't been, you know... business guidance books. Yeah, it's either... Technical or fiction. Okay. And so, the difference, I think, is that Satya's book is connected with Microsoft in a deep way.

Directly. Whereas my books, either they're connected, but it's product connection, not my brand connection. Or the fiction books, which are not connected with Microsoft. Right. So, I'm just trying to make a distinction here because you said, oh, you publish books too. Right. The reason I'm saying that is that when you do that, you do it in your own time, on your own computers, at night, on a different PC.

because Microsoft owns the things you make on your machine, so then when I do my side stuff in my blog, I have other machines. You blur these lines, but we have this moonlighting process, which is called moonlighting is working on a thing that's not your job on the side or at night. And that should be promoted and supported. But the question is then, like if you...

If one used Microsoft time to talk about one's book, it gets blurry. So someone might do, but they do. Okay. So then what do you do with that? Well, actually going back to. I think that it's challenging to call the books that I've done self-promotion. I think if you take a look at Satya's book, hit refresh, you could say it's self-promotion because Satya's promoting his way of managing.

Thought leadership. Yeah, thought leadership. So it is much more directly. And same with Kevin Scott's about the future of AI. Or Peter Lee, or et cetera. Leaders with books. It's very much like it's there. It's them. You're going to read the book because this is their vision. So it's really about them, their opinion on things. So I do think that you could say those are self-promotion.

much more directly than the books I've done. But the question is, what's wrong with that? And why is it good? And I think that from a Microsoft perspective... You want Microsoft to be seen as a thought-leading company. And what is a company if not its leaders and employees that show thought leadership? And actually having brands to present that thought leadership.

is a good way to rally and build momentum. And actually, this is your brand, Scott Hanselman. You are the most well-known developer face at Microsoft. Maybe, but that implies that it was a plan or a strategy or there was a goal. Like sometimes things just happen. Yeah, but well, it doesn't have to be necessarily a goal, but I, you know, just going on to the why is my name and the title of my talks.

It wasn't a plan for me to say, oh, I want my name in the title of my talks. No. But it's after some time of reputation and the momentum that's built up around the talks that I give. people said, it'd be good to put Mark's name in the title of the talks. Yep, that's exactly what happened. I was there and put your name in some of the talks myself. So, for you, you didn't necessarily start out by saying, I want to be the face of development at Microsoft, but...

You were just doing things that you thought were fun and promoting Microsoft products. And then it became, oh, Scott Hanselman is kind of the face of these things. And then other people in the machine, and then you recognize that. And so you lean into it, and I'm going to take Microsoft's products forward by leveraging the brand that I've developed and reinforcing the brand that I've developed. It's a virtuous cycle.

I reinforce my brand. That gives me more ability to promote Microsoft products and get reach and awareness. And if I do that well, that increases my brand value, which means that the next time... I'll reach more because the word spreads even further. I think that that's how your brand promotion, your self-promotion, connects with Microsoft. Everything you're saying is correct, and I agree.

But I do feel gross when people say personal brand. And I have done talks explicitly rejecting the idea of a personal brand. I always talk about... You can't avoid it. You've got one. That's the thing. You can't avoid it. But I've told people, just try to be yourself. Follow the whole person on social media. Both of you and I, we have our full selves on social media. to the best of our abilities. Actually, on that one, I'll say that I don't. I think I don't...

I don't have much of my personal life in social media. Actually, that's a good point. For example, people don't know my kids' names, and they think that they are connected to my family, but that's a parasocial relationship. I don't post pictures of my kids and stuff like that. But there's a, this person seems accessible kind of thing. And we put our politics and our opinions and our food. Yeah, I'm careful. We're not just putting out like...

We're not just tech fire hoses. But when people say personal brand, like, I don't know. I see people who are like full in on their personal brand and they're like, across all platforms, and it's almost like they have a whole social media team just to talk about how awesome they are. Well, I'm just kind of vibing it. So it's funny when someone would have an opinion and say, like, why does Microsoft allow...

folks to do this or do that. There's lots of room. There's more than enough room for everybody. I agree. But I think that there's a distinction. Both you and I have grown our brands organically. It's just been built on top of, like I said, I give talks. People like the talks. More people come to the talks. When they see my name, they come to the talks.

With you, hey, Scott Hanselman's doing a podcast, Scott Hanselman's doing a talk. He's no Rysinovich, but he's here, so he's like a budget Walmart version of Rysinovich. Rysinovich isn't speaking at the same time. We'll go to the other guy. These have been built organically. I think that when somebody talks about brand self-promotion in a negative way, it is, hey, I'm just going to go out and publish articles about how awesome Scott is. I'm going to...

try to increase my brand value independent of Microsoft. Yes. Because both of our brands... Or increase your thing on Microsoft's back. Yeah, exactly. Right, right, right. So... I think that that's a key distinction. I just heard the team's jam. Someone wants to talk to you. They always want to talk to me. I guess I should put it on Do Not Disturb. Yeah.

Always hard to find. And then you never know. It might be stuck there for months and you'll be stuck in focus mode for the rest of your life. Yeah. Or it'll randomly turn off in five minutes because it just feels you're suddenly available in green. See, now I lost our train of thought. Yeah, I think...

Promoting oneself. I just drank water, and one of the other blind comments was, Mark drinks a lot of water in meetings. I think that the comment that we should be talking about is, Mark looks refreshed and well hydrated. Yeah, he should. Somebody should say that. That's the opener right there. Scott on his third Diet Coke and it's only 9.30 and Mark is drinking water.

this is diet coke but it's not my third i got a soda stream so i can yeah see what you do is you get the mcdonald's thing and then you just fill it with soda stream and it feels fancy all right so on self-promotion i got a question for you on Because you just talked about your TEDx talk. Oh, yeah, I did. You didn't mention Microsoft anywhere in that talk. I mentioned Microsoft once because I was told to explain my job, but I was not there as a Microsoft person. Was that self-promotion?

So actually, self-promotion versus Microsoft promotion. Because I think that your normal stuff that you do at Build and everything else and your podcasts are Microsoft promotion. Well, no. So, my podcast, I had 20 years. Podcast and blog existed 23 years ago, long before Microsoft. Podcast was big before Microsoft. You told me that.

Probably hallucinated that. But yeah, the podcast and the blog, like Hansel Minutes and the blog have been around since 2000. And I've not been here that long. And it'll be around after. I do them on my spare time. It's my own thing. Those are self-promotion. Purely self-promotion. I mean, I guess. I'm not, the intent is not, I guess what I'm saying is self-promotion implies the intent to go. The intent is just to promote your brand versus.

You're having fun delivering. Well, I'm just enthusiastic about tech. You know that. I'm like, hey, have you heard the news? It's cool. This is fun. So it's just a mouthpiece. The promotion is a side effect. I think maybe that's it. Promotion is a side effect of what you're doing versus the goal. Yeah. So to the TED Talk.

And I like the way this is like the first episode you've ever asked me a question about myself. I knew you were going to. I was like, I'm going to ask Scott a question. Yeah, this is great. I like it. Let's make it about me because this is all about self-promotion, right? Yeah. I had said no thank you a couple of times to Ted.

thing because it's like do we need another random guy doing a TED talk you know what I mean like I felt like for years I was like I don't want to do that that feels gross but the whole point about TED is ideas worth spreading so the idea is not about you it's about your idea so you have to have an idea and i i took me four years to figure out if i had an idea that i was willing to talk about

And no, it was not about me. Because the other thing that's funny is that people are selling books. I felt like I didn't have a thing at the end of the talk. Yeah. I've got to ask this at the end because I don't remember. I watched your talk, but I don't remember at the end if you said, thanks for coming to my TED Talk. No, no, I didn't. I did say that. I was told not to by the speaker coach.

But I did get to say that later at Chipotle. I went to Chipotle and I saw a lady in line. She's like, hey, good talk. And I said, thank you for coming to my TED Talk. So that was kind of cool. Yeah. See, now you can say that in a way that means something different than everybody else. Yeah, yeah.

But it was just, it was, I wanted, you do a talk or you do a blog or you write a book. This is my opinion. And this is out to like the people who are, who have opinions about the blind, whether the person on blind, it doesn't like. this podcast, or like when you make something, create something, I feel like it's stuck inside you and you need to get it out.

you wrote like zero day and it was in you and probably it was like ruminating for a while. And you were just like, I've got this thing in me. I need to get it out. And then you did it. You got it out. Like I have an idea, a tech, you know, I want to write this app. or series of apps. I need to get it out of my body. And when this TED Talk finally coalesced, it was just this chunk of something. It's just like, I need to produce this. So the blog, the podcast, it's like, ah.

I need to do a thing about that. All the talks I'm doing at Build are because I'm excited about that thing, not because someone said, hey, Mark, we're going to need you to go talk about Azure FooFoo. It's a new thing we're doing. Which, by the way, I dislike having content given to me. Yeah, exactly. No one would ever go take this thing you don't believe in and go talk about it. Or just go talk about X. Yeah.

Scott, go talk about Azure Arc. Here's the slide deck. Which is cool, but no, if I'm not geeked about it, I'm not going to talk about it. Yeah, but that's a privilege that you get. by building up a group of people. But yeah, I'm just jazzed about stuff. I don't understand why it's self-promotion if you're promoting your idea. Like on my podcast, my face doesn't even appear in my podcast on purpose. That was intentional.

Again, I think it's promotion as a side effect versus promotion. Which could then be perceived as self-promotion. I feel like if I had thought leader or AI whatever in my... freaking LinkedIn bio. You have like world builder. You know what I mean? I don't understand why someone would be a hater on us when other people have literally world builder, thought leader, AI expert in there.

I was actually going to add that to mine. World Brother? And AI Thought Leader. Did you generate that with ChatGPT? Yeah, it's written a whole nice bio for me. So you watched the talk. It was pretty good. I thought it was okay. I thought it was good. Yeah. Good personal stories, which is a, you know, actually a good talk is storytelling, right? Yeah, I think so. I think it was fun. It was hard though, man.

Almost destroyed me. And when I talk about things getting stuck in you, it was taking up 20% of my brain power. It was like a system process and task manager. I didn't know what was going on or why I couldn't function until I released it. That was very challenging for a long period of time. Let's do an episode on stress. We should do an episode on stress. We should do that. This is a good episode to understand, but how would we encourage people?

regardless of whether or not someone thinks they're self-promoting, to be more visible. I don't think being visible is bad. I think that people, your boss should know what you're doing. I think sharing information that other people will find useful. Generously. Exactly. Without a hook or a string attached is valuable. It is okay to want to be visible if it feeds your spirit, but it's also okay to not...

want to be visible and just do good work. But it's also okay to have visibility simply happen as a side effect, to your point, of being excited and doing good work. Was Mr. Rogers or Ted Lasso a self-promoter? No, but they were promoting an idea. And if you believe in your idea or ideas, then I think some amount of visibility is going to...

going to happen on its own. As far as Microsoft allowing us... By the way, you just had one fictional example and one real example. And the Mr. Rogers example is interesting. People don't view him as a self-promoter, but his name was in the title of his show. You're right. Much like this show. Yeah. Think about that. Think about that. It's deep. No, it's good. There's your ending right there. Think about that.

Yes, Bruce in the chat. Genuine authenticity and being passionate about something versus a plastic meta version of a person by self-promoters. True. Nailed it! Very well said, Producer Bruce.