Will  00:00

All right. On today’s episode of legal currents, we have a very special guest, my friend Tony. Tony is the founder of contender, author of the book in the creative arena, host of the linked legal podcast, also an ultra marathon runner, former litigator turned entrepreneur, man of many hats, also a man who practices what he preaches, and in my experience, drops more knowledge himself on his platforms than just about anybody out there. So I’m really excited to have Tony on today as a guest. Tony, thanks for joining.

 

Tony  00:32

Yeah, thanks. Will appreciate the kind words,

 

Will  00:36

yeah, yeah. And before we jump into the weeds. You know, obviously, as I mentioned just then, you’ve done a lot of different things. Your journey has been nothing but or not straight by any means. You know, tell us a little bit about that journey in your own words and your story, what kind of led you to where you’re at today, and a little bit more about what you do currently.

 

Tony  00:58

Sure, I’m gonna hit the timer. I’m gonna try to keep this to less than 90 seconds. So I currently run, as you mentioned, contender. We are a LinkedIn ghost writing and personal branding agency focused on helping lawyers and other legal professionals be more magnetic online, specifically LinkedIn. I’ve been building this business now for almost three years. Before that, I practiced law for about 12 years, mostly out of my hometown of St Louis. I was licensed in Illinois, Missouri, and spent most of my time in practice in insurance defense firms. I describe myself not as a marketer these days, but I still think of myself as a lawyer who accidentally got good at LinkedIn. After making the decision back in 2020 my wife and I made this decision together . Do we stay in St Louis and I make partner in 2021 or do we move to Canada? And I probably need to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. She had told me when she agreed to move to Saint Louis in 2017 after we’d gotten married, that I had five years before I would be moving to Canada, and sure enough, she meant it. So we ended up doing that. One thing led to another. It’s how I started paying attention to LinkedIn after taking a business development role, and it’s been a weird ride, man, but I’ll pause there.

 

Will  02:41

yeah, and it’s a great story. And part of the reason why I wanted to have you on is because one of the most frequently asked questions that I get when I’m speaking with firms or attorneys, is, you know, how do we leverage social media? And it’s funny, because oftentimes when people think of ways that they can leverage social media. LinkedIn is not the first thing that comes to mind, right? It is, you know, Facebook, it’s, it’s Instagram, right? Those are typically the big ones, and LinkedIn is something that is often kind of put to the side. And I, in my personal experience, feel like LinkedIn is, if anything, maybe the most valuable one. And to my, you know, circle back on, on my original point there, right? Everybody likes the idea of getting involved in it. And getting involved in it is different than executing it well. When we’re looking at sort of the ways that people can jump into social media right before we even get there, talk about your experience and why you believe LinkedIn is really, you know, a value add and things that something that people should be focusing on.

 

Tony  03:50

Yeah, great question. And yeah, I say that like just about every lawyer, I pretty much ignored LinkedIn throughout my time in practice. It was the place where you would mention if you got a new job or share the firm press release, that was pretty much what it was for. And it was only after leaving the practice taking on a business development role where my CEO buddy Josh said, You need to learn how to do LinkedIn, that I started paying more attention to the platform, and had this really peculiar experience in late 2021 where the platform just sort of opened up in a new way, in a way that I I had never experienced. And I was surprised to learn that there was actually interesting stuff happening on LinkedIn. I describe it as a matrix, like a moment, it was, like all of a sudden, it was just, it was a different world. And to your question now, why? Why LinkedIn? There are a couple things that come to mind. Yeah, number one, everybody’s there. Because I say that actually, for a client of mine, we posted today about one of their firm’s big marketers who actually doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile. There’s at least one lawyer who doesn’t, but just about everybody is on LinkedIn. So regardless of where you sit in the profession, chances are there are people you’re wanting to be connecting with, building relationships with and talking to, who are on LinkedIn, right? Whether you’re a firm owner, looking for referrals, looking for clients, looking for talent, or you’re newer in your career, you’re early in your career, and you’re looking to find new opportunities. You’re looking to find clients, you’re looking to build your own business, whatever it is, chances are those people are on LinkedIn. Actually, I got three points for you here. The second point will be that on LinkedIn, because it is a quote, unquote professional network, the people there also tend to be more open to the idea of doing business and like we come to the platform with that mindset. It’s a different mindset than if we’re scrolling Instagram or Tiktok right where we’re looking to be entertained. People want to be entertained on LinkedIn, don’t get me wrong, but we’re there in a more professional, entrepreneurial mindset. We’re trying to make things happen. People tend to be, let’s say the third point is related to that, where we want to be entertained, but because when I describe it, we all learn LinkedIn the wrong way that LinkedIn is just the place where you announce when you get a new job, or you stash your digital resume, very few of us post anything on LinkedIn that is remotely interesting. We just don’t. And so, because all this attention is gathered there and so few people even try to post things that are interesting, it creates this supply demand problem where LinkedIn’s algorithm is starving for interesting stuff. So if you are willing and able to just say things that are even marginally more interesting than press releases, you have access to a disproportionate amount of attention. And so that piece of it, it’s an easier platform to gain traction on, from the right people, the people you’re really interested in getting in touch with and talking to, than anywhere else. I say all that, but I’m probably biased. Will I be living on the platform? 

 

Will  08:00

I agree with everything that you said, and I think that it is a fantastic way, and in my opinion, the most impactful way these days, to build that brand, right? And whether you are, you know, currently with a firm, and you’re thinking about going out and, you know, starting your own endeavor, or maybe you’re early on in the journey of starting your firm, right? That brand is something that can be really powerful, especially when you’re looking at some of these larger firms, right, that may have more resources to put towards things like marketing, right? They may have billboards, commercials, etc, that brand is something you can control, and you can dictate that really can’t be competed with in any way, right? You own that brand. You made a really good point. Oh, go ahead.

 

Tony  08:47

Yeah, just to double click on that for a second. I think you’re spot on about that. The power of that, it’s almost like it’s leveling the playing field. What I’ve noticed is that the bigger the brand, the bigger the firm, the less likely that anybody in that building is leveraging LinkedIn at all,

 

Will  09:08

or they’re putting out very cookie cutter stuff, exactly what you said, that we want to avoid, right? It’s Hey, yes, or look at that. It’s not personal.

 

Speaker 1  09:17

Yes. And that speaks to my point is that, again, all those people are doing it wrong. They are all it does not matter if you work at a firm that has $100 million to of marketing spend and 500 people on the team, if you’re posting that stuff, those posts are not going to go to they’re they’re going to have a hard time breaking 1000 impressions. Whereas I just wrote an email newsletter about, you know, a 33 year old associate client of mine, where we just had a like, he’s got a post that’s gone past 100k in the first 24 hours, and it’s still running. And it’s, how did we do that? It’s not magic, by doing what I just said, like we just told you. Uh, an interesting, real story that shows what makes him as good at what he does as he is. And because of that, then people pay attention. And so it moves.

 

Will  10:14

Yeah. part of what I see very frequently, right? And you see this on a much larger scale, for certain, is that people struggle with putting themselves out there online, right? Whether it’s that reputation management side of things, it’s, you know, people struggling to be vulnerable. You know, talk to me a little bit more about the importance of being open, of being human and vulnerable on these platforms, and why, you know that may be more successful than you know, putting out a position of, you know, only highlighting your wins, or you know, your accomplishments, or very easy stuff to look at and talk about,

 

Speaker 1  10:52

authenticity is a word that gets thrown out around a lot, and I do think it’s good to be authentic On LinkedIn. Now, what I draw the line there, is that I want everything that I say on LinkedIn to be true to me, but I’m not going to say everything on LinkedIn. So there’s a line somewhere where there are plenty of things we don’t want to be talking about, like, I stay out of politics. I’ve posed I’ve touched on politics, I would say three times in my 1400 or so LinkedIn posts, right? I very rarely touch politics. There are a lot of things I just don’t talk about, but everything I do talk about is something I truly believe. So we want to be sharing our true experiences, our stories, our insights, we don’t want to be the way I think, processing things we’re going through in real time on the internet. I think we probably want to avoid that. And also, we don’t need to share every opinion, opinion like we can like, if you want to do that, if that’s part of what you’re going for, have at it. Also, you don’t need to feel the pressure to do that. Yeah, that said to your question about that, that being open is such a huge challenge. And I remember going back to 2021, 2020 I was, I basically volunteered to take over the firm’s blog, like I was at a sort of mid size insurance defense firm based out of New York, and, like, I took on that mantle. But when it came to LinkedIn, my mentality, and this is not that long ago, this is four years ago. If we were going to post something on LinkedIn, it had to be number one, like, just the facts, ma’am, right? Just like some sort of case update or some sort of legal update, number two, it had to be perfect, right? It is technically perfect, grammatically perfect. And I would say number three, don’t offend anybody ever. Don’t say anything that could be potentially taken the wrong way by anyone. And I think a lot of us have that mentality that LinkedIn is a place where we can get in trouble, and that is, you can get in trouble on the internet, but I think LinkedIn is a nicer platform, just in general, I think because of that professional dynamic, and then also because LinkedIn has done a much better job with identity that there are bot accounts out there. They’re usually pretty easy to spot, and 99 times out of 100 you can be very confident that the person you’re talking to is the person. And so people tend to be more supportive, more welcoming. We’re recording this on May 29 which is my 15th anniversary of my last drink. And every year for the last four years now, I have posted a post that basically just shares that number of lessons for how many years? So today there were 15 lessons over these 15 years, and every year it goes viral. And it was also the first time I posted. It was the first time I got a This isn’t Facebook comment to your point about the like being open and having people maybe come at you a little bit in ways that are unpleasant. But what I’ve found is that you know, like by being open about things like my struggles with alcoholism, the DMS that I get, the messages, the comments, the support are overwhelming. It’s just, it’s a really beautiful thing, and I think that’s what most of us find, that when we, when we put ourselves out there, more on LinkedIn, that we get way more good stuff coming back to us than negative stuff. I paused there.

 

Will  15:22

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, and I think that to that point, right, the lessons that we learn through our careers, right, or that benefit our careers are not solely learned, you know, in the office or in the courtroom or in the classroom, right? These lessons we learn, them throughout, you know, our lives and all the experiences that come alongside of it, and so just because something was learned outside of a professional setting does not mean that those lessons don’t translate to what we do as professionals. Would you agree?

 

Tony  15:54

Oh, for sure, yeah. And I dropped in a comment earlier today, a buddy of mine who’s a fractional GC out of Arizona named Derek Woody, he posted something saying that life shit and work shit are the same shit. And my comment was something to the effect of, yeah, that’s like those. If we’re looking at the Venn diagram of work shit and life shit, they don’t overlap fully, but those two circles overlap a whole lot, right? That the things that happen in our lives affect how we show up at work and inform how we show up at work, and vice versa. So like that. I think the and a subtext to this conversation is the changing nature of professionalism and what it means. I mean, you and I are here doing a B to B podcast, and, like, I’m wearing a little hoodie and you’re wearing a t- shirt. We both have beautiful beards, you know, like, if we’re, if we’re doing this 30 years ago, anything like this, right? This, we’re not showing up this way, right? But this also is professional. I hope, yeah, otherwise, we’re failing will.

 

Will  17:07

And you know what, they’re probably not letting us play for the Yankees, either with these beards, or actually they are these days. Now, I think they’re letting you loosen things up a little bit, which says, which says a lot.

 

Tony  17:18

It does. But I also have other problems when it comes to me playing for the Yankees.

 

Will  17:24

Yes, yes. This is down, farther down the list, and I will speak a little bit more about the idea of getting outside of your comfort zone, because this is something that we talked quite a bit about in person when we first met. And I think for a lot of people, even going on and being vulnerable or being open on LinkedIn is outside of people’s comfort zone. You know, what would you recommend is like an easy way for people to dip their toes into the idea of getting outside their comfort zone on LinkedIn, on social

 

Tony  17:59

I posted about this a while back, a little framework suggestion specifically for law students, for new lawyers, or people who are just trying to dip their toe in the water of how do I start to get more active? You don’t need to start posting every day. You don’t need to start posting at all. There are a lot of ways to make good things happen on LinkedIn and leverage the power of that network and that platform without posting anything you don’t have to. What I would recommend doing is committing to doing this for, let’s say, a week that for a week, you’re going to spend 10 minutes a day, Monday through Friday on the platform. And all you’re going to do is you’re going to try to find one post that you find genuinely interesting. You are going to read that post that you find genuinely interesting. You’re going to leave a comment just expressing what you find interesting or what that evokes for you, what that post brought up for you. Posts are the way I think about it. They are conversation starters. They’re not billboards. They’re just there to be looked at. Okay, post is an invitation into conversation, so if you can leave a comment that moves that conversation forward, great, that’s a win. LinkedIn just started showing us the impression counts on comments which reflects a truism that US slinky nerds have been aware of for quite a while, which is that a lot of the good stuff that happens happens in the comment sections, and leaving really solid comments can become a superpower. So for people who are starting out, you may be. Better off focusing on comments than even trying to post your own stuff in terms of how many people are going to see this stuff, right? So if you can just do that, say, spend 10 minutes a day, find one post, leave one comment, and I’d say, connect with if if you’re not connected to the person who made the post, send them a connection request, preferably with a message saying, Hey, I appreciate that post. I would be happy to join your network. And I would also, if you’re, if you’re a real go getter, I would also say, look through the comments section of that post and see if anybody else left a comment you’re interested in, and if you see any like that comment, and send that person a connection request. Alright, so that’s, that’s the simple exercise to no more in 10 minutes a day, try to find at least one post and leave one good comment. And if, if you got anybody, you can send a connection request to do it. And what this is going to do for you, you’re starting to strengthen that muscle of showing up a little bit, which is that’s a big part of the battle. To your point, what it’s also going to do is draw more attention to you in a positive way. It’s also going to strengthen a bond in the network between you and the person who posted that are you and anybody you’re sending a connection request to, and those things that leaving the comment, the sending the messages, the connection requests, these are ways of strengthening, say, bonds between you who are one node in the network and other nodes in the network. So ultimately, that is the game we’re playing. LinkedIn is a social network, and to be able to leverage it effectively, what you want to be doing is finding a way to be that node who has more and more strong connections with other nodes. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

 

Will  22:09

That’s all great advice. And I actually, I want to take a step back, because someone is listening to this podcast right now, right? May say, you know, these are all fantastic tips, but you know, what’s the end game, right? And, you know, can you talk a little bit about what success through these strategies may bring? You know, like, what, what is the end game for these attorneys? What wins Have you seen? You know, people get through LinkedIn?

 

Speaker 1  22:36

Sure. So the quick and dirty list. Most of my clients, I work primarily with firm owners on the plaintiff side, they’re mainly concerned with case referrals from other lawyers. So let’s say case referrals would be one. Let’s say cases acquired directly through clients, new clients, finding you there. That’s certainly one. I think talent is an underrated one that I was talking to a client yesterday who’s actually a family firm owner out of the Bay Area, and she was saying that a post of hers from a couple weeks ago led to, you know, they’ve been trying to hire a couple paralegal or a new paralegal, for months. They’ve been having a really hard time. She had a post do really well in particular, and landed too inbound, like they had had it the job posted on LinkedIn for a while that wasn’t working, but through the real content, paralegals, experienced, capable paralegals reaching out, saying, I would be very interested in working for you specifically. And so is the talent aspect of being able to stand out from other firms. There’s a big third one. Say speaking opportunities, whether it’s conferences, podcasts, yada yada, that would be another one. I did have one client who got pinged about whether he’d be interested in going and going on The Bachelorette. That was one thing. He is attached in a way that he politely declined. But that was, that was another one of the fun ones.

 

Will  24:33

They’re looking everywhere, apparently.

 

Speaker 1  24:35

Yeah and I guess I would add brand awareness, right? That when it comes down to it, if you show up on LinkedIn and sort of develop a strong description as a magnetic presence, you’re going to have more people who are running across, your name, your face, your message, your stories, your insights. This in a way that just builds affinity and also helps them come to know, like and trust you as it were. So there’s, there’s my list for you.

 

Will  25:09

All great answers. You know, how does somebody start to get an understanding of what, or whether or not what they’re currently doing is working? You know? What? What should they be looking at to kind of make sure that they’re on the right track with what they’re doing and the way that they’re using their time on the platform?

 

Tony  25:26

That’s a great question. I’m trying to think of a specific use case so to say most, very few lawyers, very few firm owners, very few firms are really investing much time and energy into LinkedIn. And even fewer of the ones who are doing it in this way that you and I are talking about, Will, which is, let’s say, leading with personal brand rather than firm brand. And at a base level, we’re talking about social media. People don’t want to talk to brands. People want to talk to people. Very, very few are doing that. So the baseline for the vast majority of firms is that you post things that look like, you know, announcing a holiday or a birthday or a new hire or some, something that looks kind of like an SEO optimized blog post that you just copy and pasted into LinkedIn, right? All that stuff is fine. It’s better than nothing. You are leaving almost all the upside on the table, I think, in terms of the amount of attention and opportunities you’re able to generate. So what I would do is I’ll actually answer your question in an efficient manner. Now, will that be that, if I’m trying to gage, like, how are we doing so far, it’s how consistently do you have stuff going up on your personal page? Right? That would be that if, if you haven’t posted anything in the last six months, right? Like, we want to have some presence, so that if somebody ends up on your profile, that there’s something there if you are posting stuff, my question for you would be, is anybody paying attention? Are your posts kind of stuck around? 200 views, 400 views, 600 views, do you get three reactions, one comment? Basically nobody’s paying attention. And if you’ve been doing it for some time, is your stuff growing like, are more people paying attention? The one of the first benchmarks I’m looking for when I start working with a client is traction. I want to get us as quickly as possible to a place where when you say something, people pay attention. That’s what I define as traction. And most people don’t have traction. Like, when we say something, we’re just throwing something on the ether, just contributing to the noise. And nobody paid and it pretty much just disappears, right? So that would be my assessment is like, if you don’t have anything, you want to start getting something, start getting those reps. And if you have some stuff out there, you are posting with any consistency, but you’re having a hard time, let’s say, breaking 500 impressions, or even 1000 impressions, and your stuff isn’t growing in terms of the amount of attention and engagement it’s attracting, then that’s a serious problem as well.

 

Will  29:09

Yeah, and you know, a lot of the audience here, right? When we look at two finite levels of resources, right? You know you have your dollars, but you also have your time, which is a finite level of resource, right? When should somebody look to make the leap of, you know, working with someone like yourself, right, or starting to bring in some support to help grow their presence? When is that time, right?

 

Speaker 1  29:34

I don’t know the answer to that, yeah, when I started doing this, yeah, I started contending on Halloween of 2022 I was basically the only one in legal, and that was by virtue of the weird set of circumstances by which I was not a marketer. I was a lawyer who accidentally got good at LinkedIn, and then sort of fell into the opportunity to help lawyers like blow up their presences here. That said, I think you want to start with finding a little bit of time. And you know, I talk about, I have a framework called the one, 510, as a weekly baseline of engagement that is less than an hour a week. You can post one genuine post, you can send five generous DMS, and you can leave 10 substantive comments. You can do those things in less than an hour a week. If you could do that, and kind of get that as a baseline that you can deliver on consistently, you’re already going to be ahead of the game in terms of like, when do you hire somebody? When do you hire a ghost writer or bring in? I’ve also started doing a lot of coaching for individuals and for organizations. I think it’s a matter of, do you have you need this spend like obviously you you need to have the marketing budget to be able to afford it, you need to have enough time that you’re going to be able to dedicate not just to showing up for a session, but to actually do the work necessary to get some Momentum and make progress. But yeah, but yeah, that’s not a great answer. Maybe well, but I think it’s a messy process for people.

 

Will  31:47

You know, it’s absolutely a case by case situation. I think you used a great analogy that you know might be similar to, like, hey, if I go hire a personal trainer, right, and I show up to the personal training session, but I am not putting in the effort in the gym to get stronger, to do, you know, what I’m being coached on, and make those adjustments. That doesn’t mean you’re going to get stronger just because you hired a personal trainer, right? And it sounds like that might be a, you know, roundabout way of saying, you know, you should know when that time is right, right? You’ll start to get a feeling of it. If you’re doing everything that you’re capable of, and you still think that there’s room left on the table, that might be a good time to reach out and consult, right, and speak to someone who might be able to tell them if they’re a good fit.

 

Speaker 1  32:32

Yeah, although I’ll say that for a good number of my ghost writing clients, there are people who have sizable marketing budgets. They’re established in their markets, their brands are strong, and they just see that it’s an untapped channel. Yeah, right. So it’s a, if you’ve got your say, your marketing engines dialed in where the phones are ringing in the way that you need them to, and you’re looking for an edge over other folks in your market. I do, whether or not you work with somebody like me, don’t stop sleeping on LinkedIn. Yeah, everybody, everybody’s there, and still almost nobody’s even trying to get in front of those folks. It’s just, it’s still, it’s a lot noisier than it was two years ago or three years ago. Out there, it is still a blue ocean, something

 

Will  33:35

you talked about on one of your podcast episodes. You asked one of your guests if you felt like being creative made them, you know, a better attorney right in the courtroom. I’m curious to hear from you. You know, do you feel like being an attorney also helped you throughout that creative process, whether it’s storytelling, whether it’s you know, you know, painting a picture of yourself. You know. How do you feel like attorneys may have an advantage when it comes to putting posts out there.

 

Tony  34:02

It’s a great question. So one of the ways that my background as a lawyer helped me once I started posting was I think once I got past that mental block of, oh my God, I don’t want to say anything on LinkedIn that might make me look stupid or get me in trouble once I got past that block. There’s some status just associated with having the JD behind your name with having practiced as a lawyer in a way that if you’re, let’s say, if you’re an associate attorney who’s just out of school, you may feel like, why would I say anything on LinkedIn when I’m not a partner yet, or I don’t have my own firm? The reality is that, amongst all the folks. In the world. You’re, you’re doing pretty good, right? You’re, you’ve gone to a lot of school, you’ve you’ve accomplished a good deal of stuff. You can be confident in sharing your experience. From that perspective you are the expert of your own life, right? You’re the expert of your own experience. So that was one thing. The other thing that I think helped me is in the ghost writing context, I spent most of my career. I mean, I was basically like a depot jockey. I was just taking depositions for 10 years, and I got very comfortable talking to folks and asking them questions that would pull their stories out of them. And it’s like, get into the good stuff and try to get the good stuff out. And that’s come in handy, as a ghost writer, where it’s, it’s been a rather natural transition or application of that skill set. Where I’m, I’m able to ask the questions and have the conversations that bring out interesting, genuine, really insightful stuff, but then it’s just a matter of reflecting that on the platform and having it behave itself.

 

Will  36:31

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Something that I see very frequently, and if I’m seeing it, I know you’re seeing it on a much greater scale. Is the role of AI in some of these presences, right? And sometimes it’s something where I take a look at it and it can be cringy at times, you know, what is the right balance? Because AI is obviously a tool that can help make this process efficient, right? But it is a very fine line when you’re talking with firms, yeah, how do you know, what level of involvement do you believe that AI should, you know, have in that process? And you know, what shouldn’t it have from a role standpoint in that process?

 

Tony  37:17

Yeah, it’s, it’s a really good question. And frankly, if we’re having this conversation six months from now, the line may have moved. Yeah, we are just in a moment where AI is clearly a transformational technology, and it is moving incredibly fast. So the way I think about this, and you know, I think I was relatively slow to adopt AI among, say, some other folks who do what I do. At this point, I rely on it as a thought partner. I rely on AI. I mean, we have our custom gpts, and at this point, my Tony Albrecht ghost writer GPT is a better copywriter than it was, certainly way faster, and it does a better job than just about anybody I’ve worked with in terms of drafting LinkedIn posts. Which is not a not. I’ve worked with some really strong writers, so it’s not a not, that’s not a knock on them, that is a tip of the cap to how good the technology is getting very quickly. So I think we ignore it at our peril, and then we want to be finding ways to leverage it. That said, I think using it for commenting is really a challenge, because those AI comments, you can tell and LinkedIn is going to be cracking down on them. That’s been the word on the street when it comes to actual posts, like I said, I use it to draft, but if I do my job right, when you see our stuff it’s not the stuff where you say, oh, that’s AI garbage. You can’t tell that it was drafted by AI. I’ll give you a couple things that I just like to readily signal, AI for me that I see lawyers making this mistake. One is when the first line, like what you call the hook, the thing that comes at the top looks like, let’s say, the title of a bad novel that is like, you know, a lawyer’s journey from Albuquerque to Alaska, you know, like that, that sort of thing. Just cut those off. Just take those off. Like chat, GPT loves to make those you could just remove those you don’t need. They don’t help and they actually hurt. The second thing is, you. I see chatgpt is loving these transitions that are shorthand . It’s not about X, it’s about Y, or it’s not just x, it’s Y. ChatGPT loves doing those so but that may be more my LinkedIn nerd coming out. Other people may not notice that one, but those are the two things that say, like, pull those things out a little bit,

 

Will  40:32

VM dashes as well. Get me every single time. Chatgpt No, no, no,

 

Tony  40:37

no, I should have said that. No, I am not on board with the chat. GPT, hem, dish, I use some dashes all the time.

 

Will  40:44

You gotta stop now. You gotta stop now. No, I couldn’t I. I couldn’t figure, I couldn’t tell you how to, how to put one of those on, on a, you know, a post, if, if you asked me, I have no

 

Tony  40:57

idea. Shift it. Shift Option. And then the, you know, that little thing up there by the plus side,

 

Will  41:08

you know, if it’s something that people have used historically, that might be a different story. But sometimes you, all of a sudden, you start seeing people pulling em dashes out where you hadn’t seen it ever before. That’s something I always see but maybe I’m wrong there.

 

Speaker 1  41:22

No, I, I mean, that is I, I just, I have become a huge fan of the em dash over the last, I would say, five years, and I’m partial to it in a way that I, I just, I feel a need to defend the honor of the M dash that it’s right. Chat GPT does like the M dash, but humans do as well. So I’m one of the voices defending the honor.

 

Will  41:51

on the front lines, on the front lines. And you know, Tony, when I was looking for questions to ask you, and I say this is the utmost compliment. I found it almost impossible, very challenging, to find questions to ask you that you have not already spoken about recently on, you know, the own, the information that you’re providing through your LinkedIn, right through your podcast. I want you to, you know, take a moment and let people know, like plug all of these different ways that people can learn and get in touch with you, because we’ve barely even scratched the surface of the information that you put out there yourself on some of these platforms,

 

Tony  42:29

right on and thank you for saying that. Well, that’s really kind of you. LinkedIn is the best place to connect with me. Obviously, I try to post every day. I try to be useful. I have a weekly newsletter you can join. Link to that’s on the profile. As you mentioned, I have a podcast. I actually just changed the name of the podcast. Will, oh no, this totally, totally bush league. But yeah, I realized linked legal is actually a terrible podcast name, like five episodes in so that podcast is now in the digital arena with Tony Albrecht. So there’s that as well. And then in terms of working with me, we are launching a coaching program for LinkedIn in June, which is, you know, after building my business for three years as a ghost writer with a fairly small roster, we see this as a way to be able to help a lot more people. So we’re going to be looking for more folks there. I also do a one month LinkedIn training every couple months. Our next one will be in July, called the one, 510, boot camp. So like a little four week deal where we unpack how you can go from wherever you are in that journey to really having a better understanding of how you move through the platform in a way that makes things happen and creates opportunities. So yeah,

 

Will  44:13

and I truly can’t recommend it enough. You know you, you give out the secrets yourself on post, right? And anybody who’s connected with you, in my opinion, is getting value if that’s something that they’re looking to do, it grows and scales their own presence. And so I really can’t recommend that enough. Before we wrap up here, I want to shift gears, because we have to talk a little bit about some of the, you know, endurance training and those efforts. For me, that’s something that, you know, I have found a lot of passion in over the past couple years, and I feel like it translates to, you know, my professional career, the discipline, right? Just the focus, that pain cave that people like to talk about, you know, talk to me a little bit about how you felt, that. To translate to your professional world.

 

Tony  45:05

Also a good question. Yeah, I appreciate our conversation when we met in Arizona, yeah, a couple months ago on the running front I say that when I gave up booze in 2010 that my new addictions I picked up were coffee and trail running. I ran my first, my first trail race was like a 12 mile race in early 2011 and since then, I’ve done Adam. I think I’m 10 plus ultra marathons at this point, and I keep going longer and longer where I did my first 100k in two years ago, and then my second 100k last year. And actually it took a shot at 100 miles a couple weeks ago and decided I’d had enough fun after 52 miles, I hung it up after a couple marathons, which

 

Will  46:04

is more than just about everybody listening to this podcast. If not, I’ll go as far to say everyone listening to this podcast has probably done it collectively throughout the past couple months at times.

 

Tony  46:17

Yeah, well, and that’s one of the questions of like, what? What are the lessons that running teaches me about work and life? And one of those things is, we’re all just trying to do the best we can, and even when we don’t win or we don’t accomplish the goal, that idea like you either win or you learn right that there’s there’s so much to be learned from taking chances, from pushing beyond our comfort zones, from trying hard things and taking a crack at things where you very well might fail. Describe myself as somebody who optimized for not failing basically through my 20s, much to my detriment. And so for me, it’s been so much about that, about just trying to challenge myself in ways where I’m not out there to break any land speed records, I’m out there to become a better version of myself. It really helps now I also find that running does help. It helps me get out of my head. Frankly, I describe it as like a cheaper form of therapy. Though, with travel, they can get, they can get rather expensive too, but it’s just yeah. It’s yeah, that’s the breakdown on it.

 

Will  47:56

It’s, it’s, the thing that I love about it is it’s, it’s you versus you, right? In theory, there may be hundreds or 1000s of people running the race, but it is you competing against yourself to try and better yourself. And I think that falling short at times is part of the journey, and why you know in theory, whatever you deem to be a successful outcome, right? Such a great thing to happen, right? Because if you don’t get out there and you aren’t failing, then you’re not pushing yourself the way that you should be. Whether that’s going out and running five miles, or it’s going out running 50 miles, or if you’re Tony, you’re trying to run 100 miles, and that’s something that I feel very passionate about, and I’ll say as well. People talk about like, you know, at least for me, the best ideas come, you know, in the shower, right? People like to say that for me, the best ideas, you know, I have my best ideas and my clearest thinking. You know, halfway through my runs, right? And you strike me as a guy who maybe is no music while you run. Type of guy? Are you a music or no music guy?

 

Tony  49:07

Great question. Ideally I’m a no music guy. I would like to be a no music guy during that 52 mile race where I spent 13 hours out there. I think I spent nine of those hours or eight of those hours without music, but I will do music. What I actually do more audio books, yeah, podcasts than music when I’m running

 

Will  49:32

yeah and great segue. The last thing I want to ask you that I don’t think we’ve touched on is your audio book. You know, tell people a little bit more about your audio book, and you know who that might be a good fit for, and plug that as well.

 

Tony  49:46

So in the creative arena, my first book I released on my 40th birthday, I’ve actually never recorded it as an audio book. That’s like on my to do list for somebody who loves audio books. Much as I do. I really need to do that. But you know, it’s, have you read The War of Art? Steven Pressfield, I have not. I have not. It’s an excellent book. Well, you should check that one out, but in the creative arena, it is basically me doing my best impression of that book. So it’s, it’s, it’s a quick read on why our creative muscles tend to atrophy by the time we get into our professional lives. Why I think that’s a bad thing, and then what we can do about it to start to strengthen those creative muscles again. LinkedIn is one one place to get a lot of creative reps. Yeah, love it. Love it

 

Will  50:44

Well, you know, we’ll go ahead and wrap things up, but I absolutely encourage everybody to, if nothing else, go out connect with Tony on LinkedIn, and, you know, really start to pick up some of these pieces of knowledge that he drops on a nearly daily basis out there. So Tony, I appreciate you taking some time to chat with everybody and allowing people to learn just a little bit about the value that’s out there. Appreciate

 

Tony  51:09

the opportunity will Alright. Thanks Tony.