As a consultant, it can be very challenging to stand out in a world overloaded with content. Right now, people have the power to just Google you up and decide whether or not they want to work with you. So instead of trying to communicate with everyone, focus on your strengths. Share your story and be transparent because people want to work with people they can relate to.
Join Michael Zipursky as he talks to the author of The Iconist: The Art and Science of Standing Out, Jamie Mustard, about standing out in today’s world. Learn more about Jamie’s book and why he decided to share his story with the world. Discover more about Blocks and how you can have people remember you. Start sharing your story today and build that credibility.
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Welcome back to another episode of the show. I’m very excited to have Jamie Mustard join us. Jamie, welcome.
Thank you for having me. It’s an honor to be here.
You are a consultant, author and writer. I could probably add a whole bunch of additional titles to what you do in the creative space. You’ve worked with some very well-known clients over the years organizations like Adidas, Intel, Cisco and a whole bunch more. You have another book coming up, which we might touch on. The book that will get into a little bit more in this episode, which will be very relevant for our community of consultants all around the world in many different industries is The Iconist: The Art and Science of Standing Out.
Where I thought we’d get started with our conversation is going back to the early days. You had a different upbringing compared to where you are in the world and your surroundings. You started your life in LA with poverty, running through your upbringing. Can you talk a little bit more about that time? How did you get to where you are from a grown-up perspective and any education that took you into launching your career?
Before I launch into that, can I say something very controversial to your audience at the start of this interview?
Knowing your work and book, I am not surprised that you’re going to hijack the interviewing and get it started that way.
I want to say one thing before we start because it will tell us where we’ll go. It will say a lot about how before I launch into my superhero origin story. People ask me a lot if I’m a freelancer or a consultant. I consult for some of the biggest companies in the world but whenever somebody asks me if I’m a consultant or a freelancer, I cringe. I say, “I’m not that,” but I am technically that.
If you work at something, even if you're failing all the time, you'll get better at it. Click To TweetThe reason I say that I’m not that is that what I’ve managed to do in terms of the way I frame my work is to make it so differentiated and so personal to me that to call it consulting would be a downgrade. That’s one of the keys to being successful. Consulting is a word and it can get in the way of the point and purpose of why you’re being hired to do what you do. You need to look at that as very special and unique to you like a fingerprint.
This is no surprise. The subtitle of your book is The Art and Science of Standing Out. Whether we’re saying consultant or any other definition or term that would describe somebody’s work or what they do, the heart of what you mentioned that resonated with me was it’s all about differentiation. It’s about how you stand out, how you align your impact and your contribution and what you want to be known for.
Consulting is a word that makes you feel like you’re huddled in the corner curing someone or giving them some advice. A lot of your readers too are people that alter the makeup of organizations. I almost feel like we need a better word.
Alchemist.
I like that. I have a crazy story. My parents dropped out. I ended up being abandoned and growing up in extreme poverty in Inner City, Los Angeles. I’m going to say some things and they’re extreme. I didn’t go to school much growing up. I was semi-literate into my late teens. I ended up graduating from the London School of Economics. That’s a pretty extreme and powerful arc.
I’m a mixed person. I’m this little brown kid in these brown neighborhoods in Los Angeles. I would’ve faded into the brick. You would’ve driven right by me. I couldn’t have been more invisible as a human being. I have been invisible to my parents, my circumstances and society at large. It’s ironic or maybe it’s not ironic. I have a friend who lives in Canada who says that it’s not ironic that having been so invisible, I teach visibility. That’s a crazy thing. I didn’t put that together probably until after my book came out. I never thought about it like that.
I do think because of technology overload and all the mass messaging that exists in the world, I believe that we, especially independent consultants, are all being made invisible by the messaging overload that makes it impossible to get engagement. The point that I’m making is that the invisibility that I experienced as a child, everyone in every class in every field that’s trying to get people to engage with them is experiencing that invisibility. There are psychological consequences to it.
When you talk about poverty and growing up in a very challenging environment, is there a memory that you have that you still carry with you or you almost used as a launch pad? It could be something that stirs up or stirred up emotions inside of you when you are looking back with the benefit of hindsight. Maybe it’s always been present for you and it spurred you to reach for higher levels or try and accomplish more yourself. Is there anything from those times that still connects with you or do you feel was that tipping point?
You made me think of a story that I don’t think about very often. I don’t think I’ve ever shared it. I don’t know if it is that. I was probably 8 or 9 years old. We were living in this slum in east Hollywood. It was a real slum. It’s hard to describe to people what a slum is.
For people outside of the US or people who aren’t familiar with Los Angeles, when you say Hollywood, right away, most people don’t even believe that there is poverty inside of Hollywood. They think of glitz and glamour. If you don’t mind veering off to the side for a moment, what do the surroundings look like?
When you go East on Sunset Boulevard, you get to this area neighborhood called Silver Lake. You get towards downtown LA. Those are mostly Mexican, Nicaraguan and Armenian neighborhoods, which are the neighborhoods I grew up in. If I walk South a little bit, then they would be Black neighborhoods. It’s extreme poverty. I’ve written a graphic novel where I address that. It’s very close. You can go 2 miles from the fanciest place in Beverly Hills and you’re in dangerous poverty that you wouldn’t even imagine. LA is strange in that way. It’s pocketed like that.
When you’re in those neighborhoods, it’s a very small universe. It’s all you know. I didn’t know when I was a little kid that people were living in mansions in the hills. I knew my little stretch of ground. I don’t want to get into too much detail but there are roaches. Everything’s falling apart. It’s hot and there’s no air conditioning. There’s no one around to turn to when things go wrong. It’s an oppressive environment. I thought a lot about it during COVID. I live in all this space. I have a front deck and a back deck. I thought, “How do you social distance in a slum?” I don’t want to get too far into that. I don’t even know if I remember what the question was.
I took you off track there. You were starting to say that around 8 or 9 years old, something happened that you felt had an impact on your future.
I had this moment where other kids had dads. I didn’t have a dad. I remember I would watch TV and kids my age would have some person teaching them to ride a bike. I didn’t have anybody to teach me to ride a bike. One day, I somehow got hold of this old bike that was parked in the building. On a day where no one was around, maybe a Sunday afternoon, I spent five hours trying to ride this bike, falling on each side of the hallway of the tenement building. I taught myself to ride a bike in the hallway of a tenement. The walls were barely big enough to keep me from falling over on each side.
Revealing who you are is what allows people to connect with you. Click To TweetI’d never told that story before but after 4 or 5 hours when I was finally able to stay up and did that, something got triggered in me. I’ve never spoken of this publicly nor have I ever thought about it when in an interview and I do a ton of these. There was something at the moment that I did on my own. I was so numb. I don’t think I was consciously aware of this but what I realized at that moment was if you work at something, even if you’re failing, you’ll get better at it.
I say this quote sometimes and people say, “Who said that?” I say, “I said it to you.” One thing I say a lot is, “If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, then genius is doing something a different way over and over again until you get the desired result.” Maybe that was an original moment for me. When I was 17 or 18, I ended up teaching myself how to ride a motorcycle the same way. I almost killed myself popping wheelies because I didn’t understand how a clutch worked.
We’re not talking much about consulting or business building. Some people might be wondering, “Is this the right show? I thought this was about growing a consulting business.” With all of your experiences over the years working with large organizations and focusing on brand, you’ve been sharing some nooks and crannies of your story of how you got to where you are or at least in the early days.
How important in your experience is that storytelling moment, whether you call yourself a consultant, alchemist or advisor to build it around yourself and your brand? A lot of people don’t do that. They don’t want to tell stories of how they grew up or shine a spotlight on things that are not professional, expert and so forth. What’s your stance and experience on that more personal side of storytelling and bringing that into the business world?
It’s everything. You have to redact. I didn’t sit here and tell you stories of woe. Mastering your story and weaving that into the story on your About page and who you are in the visual narrative of how you promote yourself is what I call transparency. I write about it in the book. Many of your readers have probably seen Brené Brown’s TED Talk about vulnerability. She’s this PhD researcher who’s got one of the most watched TED Talks of all time, even though it was TEDx Houston. It’s got maybe 60 or 70 million views if you look around at all the different places it’s been viewed. She talks about vulnerability being necessary for connection. She’s researched this and proven this.
In the corporate or in the business world, that same thing that creates connection, the business parallel of that is what I would call transparency. Revealing who you are is what allows people to connect with you. If people are looking at ten consultants and they’re all offering something that they can use that are similar, which one are they going to hire? They’re going to hire the one they connect with.
Let’s get into BLOCKS. This is your intellectual property. You’ve coined this term. It’s all about how companies and people can stand out from all the noise and grab a prospective buyer or client’s attention. Can you break down what is BLOCKS?
Before I do that, can I present a little bit of the problem for two minutes so they can understand why? It will make the solution a little bit more important. I have codified the primal laws of what causes us to ignore one thing and discard another thing. Why do we pay attention to one thing and discard another thing? I believe it’s based on the primal laws of human perception. When you understand those laws, you can move your message. It applies to art, music, business and science. You can move your message a little bit to the left and then you’ll get the attention ahead of your competitors. What’s important is to set the stages to why that’s more important now than it’s ever been before in human history.
Let’s start with advertising messages a day. We’re all competing with billions of messages. We’ve become smaller, diluted as human beings and invisible. It gives us anxiety. There’s not one person reading this that doesn’t have some anxiety about their ability of whether they’re being seen or heard and whether they’re able to get their message out the way they want. They’re somehow punching themselves in the face because even if they’re doing well, they know they should be doing much better if people were engaging with them.
In 1950, if you were to walk around in any town in the world, like Vancouver and watch TV, the average human being saw about 250 advertising messages a day. By 1970, we were hit by about 1,000 advertising messages a day. By the late ‘90s, the last time this was researched, it was estimated 5,000 to 7,000 advertising messages a day.
Since phones have gone on mobile, there have been thought experiments that have shown that we’re all hit with about 10,000 to 15,000 advertising messages a day. A person couldn’t process 1,000. What happens is this affects the way that we take in all information. The people that you’re trying to communicate to, this is what they’re experiencing. Imagine if I threw a golf ball at you. What would you do?
I would bat it away like a ninja.
What if I threw 10,000 golf balls at you?
I’m a ninja. I’m out the door already. The golf balls are behind me. It’s all good.
Turn your message into a road sign so people will move towards you rather than you push them away. Click To TweetWhat most of us would do is we’d be in a fetal position cowering. As much as we rely on all the micro information that exists in the world, we’re also overwhelmed by it and pushing it away. The people that you’re trying to communicate with are pushing you away without engaging with you. This is the climate. I’ve come up with this concept called BLOCKS. It’s a repetitive system of human perception. It explains why we pay attention to everything so that we become the person that people magnetize to and don’t push away no matter what we do.
I take that term BLOCKS from what happens when you put a toy block in front of a baby. If you put a toy block in front of a baby, it’s massive to them. They’ll gravitate to it. Any large monolithic thing that has an intricacy inside it gravitates and magnetizes our attention for a split second. What I teach in my book is how to magnetize that attention for a split second and then how to hold it.
A block is a big, bold monolithic thing with some simple intricacy inside it. That juxtaposition magnetizes us. An adult modern-day equivalent would be a road sign. There are billions of road signs and warning labels but we always pay attention to them. That’s the adult version of an ABC block. They keep us from drinking poison and killing ourselves. We can’t look at them even though there are billions of them. What I teach in my book is how you turn your message into a road sign so people lock and then move towards you rather than push them away.
In 1998, there was a woman who was doing research for Microsoft and Apple named Linda Stone. This is before the internet was rolling, let alone mobile. We were barely into the internet. She’d coined this term, Continuous Partial Attention, to describe how we’re being all hit with so much messaging that we were only partially paying attention. If that was true, back in 1998 with pretty much no internet, the people that you’re trying to communicate to have no attention. The ability to lock them and then hold them becomes one of the most important commodities of our time. Attention is probably one of the most valuable commodities in the world.
We don’t have the time to get into here but I don’t want to leave all of our readers and community hanging. I’d love it if we get tactical for a moment. Could you share 1 or 2 of the concepts or the most powerful ideas? People could start to think about them and even implement them to be able to grab the attention of their ideal clients in the marketplace that they want to make an impact on and serve and hold the attention. Those are the two things that you mentioned. It’s how to grab and hold the attention.
There’s a lot of research in my book to back up what I’m saying. Let me pose a very fast problem to show what most companies, consultants or people trying to engage attention do as a mistake. This is the biggest mistake that most people make outside of not understanding your story and putting your story into your identity. People want to understand you and connect to something real in the modern world. The biggest mistake is if we’ve become a consultant, a scientist or something that has so many parts to us that we can improve others, there are probably about 10 to 20 things that we do that could make us special and irresistible.
What most people do is lead. They say, “I do these 10 or 20 things.” The problem is in a world overloaded with content where people are pushing information out, they can only grasp about 1 to 3 things at a time. You need to take the 20 or 10 things that make you magic and distill them down to that one thing that makes you irresistible. You need to make it massive. Scale. Part of it is blowing everything up like a road sign, like Sesame Street.
There have been all sorts of studies that show when we have big, bold pictures, like in elementary education, it changes the way that people relate to specific information. In elementary school, books are full of pictures. There have been studies with adults. If there’s a big elementary school picture with a bunch of complex information, it changes their relationship with the complex information. They enjoy the information more. They have a higher retention rate. They appreciate the information more. Big, bold imagery is how we want to connect and retain complex things.
As we get above elementary learning, we stop communicating with each other in elementary ways. What I would argue is that adults create elementary baby toddler communication even more than babies and toddlers do. John Locke was the guy that said we were all tabula rasa. Over 300 years ago, he said that blocks were the best way to teach children and have them retain information. This idea of a big blocky irresistible oversized thing as a form of communication is not new.
Let me spin you a yarn. Let’s go back many years. Many years ago, it was a time that many would argue was a far more difficult time than what we’ve been through. It was worse than $5 gas prices. It was worse than a global pandemic. I bring you back to the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Tens of thousands of people starved to death across America, even though those numbers are exponential across the world. It was one of the most difficult times in modern history. It was a far more difficult time than the global pandemic or what we’re experiencing in terms of what’s going on in the world.
There was a guy at this time in the early ‘30s and late ‘20s named Ted Hustead. Ted Hustead had one simple goal for his life. He wanted to own his own business. In this case, he was a pharmacist. He wanted to own his pharmacy and raise a family. He was a Catholic so he wanted to practice mass. That’s all he wanted for his life. Ted, at this time of deprivation, had a huge thing going for him. He had an inheritance of $3,000. He took every penny of that money and invested it in a home and a pharmacy in the tiny town of Wall, South Dakota.
He bought his pharmacy and his house and brought his wife. It wasn’t before long in the middle of this depression that Ted realized the town was busted broke and no one was coming into his pharmacy. Wall, South Dakota had a population of 469. Ted had one thing going for him. He had one advantage, which was that Route 16 went right by the town. There were tons of cars. It went right by Wall but in a town of 400 people, everyone drove by it. Ted was getting anxious and concerned about whether his simple hope for a future and the simple life that he’d wanted was falling apart before him. He had a tremendous amount of anxiety.
One day, his wife, Dorothy, turned to him and said, “What is it that these people driving by on the interstate need more than anything? What is it that these people truly need?” This was a time when air conditioning isn’t what it is. She was like, “What’s that thing that would make them overwhelmingly give their attention and time?” Ted looked at Dorothy and said, “I have no idea. What are you talking about?” She said, “Ice cold water.”
They constructed a massive road sign equivalent to a stop sign, yield sign or road exit. It was massive. Right before the Wall exit, they started to erect this huge billboard that said, quite simply, “Free ice water. Wall Drug.” This was many years ago. Before they could even get the sign up, the pharmacy was mobbed. It has remained mobbed over the years.
Every person you're trying to communicate with has an irresistible problem. Click To TweetWall Drug is a state landmark of South Dakota. It is a complex of restaurants, gift shops and rides. It has become one of the primary tourist attractions of the state. Millions of people go every year. It’s still simply called Wall Drug. The moral of that story is what is your free ice water? Can you say it big enough, loud enough and repetitive enough?
That is a great example and story. Everybody is thinking, “What is the number one pain point or the top-of-mind issue that your ideal clients have? What do they truly care about? How can you develop a message to focus on that?” There are a lot of things you could say and offer but less is more. Speaking in a laser-targeted way to what’s most likely on their mind will typically get you a much higher level of response.
Businesses and consultants exist to solve problems. Every person you’re trying to communicate with has an irresistible problem. Most people are concerned with everything that they do well. The complexity of that pharmacy was not summed up in ice water but it’s what got people in the door. What most people do is they work their butt off to become great at something and then they want to focus and share about what they’re great at. It’s not about you. It’s about them.
When you have the courage to take that simple thing that is the ice water of your client that you’re trying to reach and have it oversize like Sesame Street on your entire landing page, you communicate something in the lizard brain of those you’re trying to reach. By saying it in an oversized, childlike way, you’re communicating to these people in their lizard brains. They’re like, “This person has taken the time to understand me and my needs.” If they’ve got ten companies they’re looking at, they’re going to go with the person that took the time to understand them and was unashamedly screaming at them. That creates instant credibility.
I want to shift for a moment with the time we have left for you and your business. You provide workshops, speaking engagements and consulting. You write, take all the information from your book and bring that to life for your clients. For you, what is working best to attract clients into your business?
Stand out in the world overloaded with content.
Break that down. Give us a couple of examples of how you’re doing that. You have a book. Is there something else you’re doing in addition to the book that you find works well to get people into your world?
One of the problems is depending on how long you’ve been around, it affects how much you struggle with this. When the internet came along and it started to proliferate seriously in the early odds, it changed the way that people decided to buy things. Look at it this way. This concept of revealing yourself and your identity DNA became essential. Selling and being a salesperson used to work. That doesn’t work anymore. There’s an intersection point between the pain point of what your client has and the best of you. That’s how you find that block state and then you repeat.
What I find is that the internet has demanded transparency. In other words, people can check any claim you make in a 30-second Google search. The minute somebody starts to feel like they’re being sold, they’re on the next. They want to feel like they’re talking to someone that’s being real. What transparency means is if you have employees, the same thing that’s going to want to get your employees to get out of bed in the morning is the same thing that’s going to pull your customers in. Simon Sinek says, “Start with why.” That’s half true. You start with why or the problem you solve. It’s one or the other. It can be a why or a problem you solve.
I tell a story in the book about when I was doing some consulting at Intel and they had a new chip. This was several years ago. AMD and other low-cost competitors were starting to take their market share. They couldn’t resist it. They were less expensive and as good. Intel was doing some stuff to come up with some tips to make them competitive. They have come up with this thing called the vPro, which had all these incredible capabilities. If you had 10,000 laptops out there, you could update all your employees’ computers simultaneously so everybody had updated software. You could remote-wipe computers if they got stolen. This thing did about 22 things. Intel had invested all this money in it.
I was meeting with their engineers, marketing guys and different teams. None of them could agree. The engineers wanted to share everything. They were like, “It can do everything.” The marketers didn’t know what to say. They were conflicted about how to promote this thing. Nobody was turning it on so it wasn’t helping to give them a competitive advantage. When I sat down, I spent two days with them. The engineers and the marketing guys were able to hear that the only reason the 1% of people that had this chip in their computer were using it was as a security device to remote. If laptops were stolen, they could remote wipe proprietary information. It’s the only reason people were turning it on.
Everybody was together. We went through this process together over two days. I was with the marketing guys, engineers and salespeople. I said to them, “This needs to be 100% sold as a security device. Once people are in the door because they understand it’s the most secure corporate proliferation of information through laptop system on the planet, then you can show them the other 22 things you do.” Lead with one thing. That would be an example of that. I can give you another great one.
That’s a good example because so often, that’s what consultants are faced with. They feel they can provide so many different solutions and ideas and help their clients in many different ways. If you try and communicate all of it, you end up communicating none of it because it’s overwhelming for people.
Can I say one thing that you touched upon that I thought was so clever that I rarely get to talk about? It’s this idea of how important it is to bring your story. I never get to talk about that. Partly, what I do is identity DNA. To me, whatever that thing about you that you bring to the forefront and the way you visually represent it has to be core to who you are inherently. It has to be true to you. To be transparent means that you reveal yourself, the true you.
If you want to attract customers, you can either start with the why or with the problem you solve. Click To TweetHow would you suggest that people do that? People are joining us. They’re going, “This makes a lot of sense. I get it. I need to tell more of my story, be more transparent and bring my experiences even outside of the business world into the business.” What’s a starting point? Is it about weaving some of that into an article that you write? Is it about weaving into a presentation? Do you start jumping on social media? What are some ways that you would suggest people start bringing that into their business?
Telling my story was not something I ever intended to do or wanted to do. When the book was almost done, my publisher asked me to write an introduction and talk about that. I didn’t want to. I thought, “I want to be as good as Malcolm Gladwell. I don’t want to have to use a device to do that. I want it to stand on its two feet.” I realized that I was being silly and I had been invisible. What I’ve done with my life is quite remarkable in relation to that invisibility. Being true to this thing that makes me uncomfortable makes me unwaveringly credible because I’ve done it. Everyone has a story and some aspect of themselves that’s going to amplify them in a quantum way.
Is your guidance or suggestion then to people to start weaving in anywhere that they can? There’s no one best place. Start getting your story and telling it anytime you have an opportunity when it makes sense to share it.
Sales don’t work anymore. You have to do something better and present it in a transparent and digestible way. Sometimes, people tell me that I’m good at selling. Dan Pink wrote an incredible book called To Sell is Human. I’m not good at selling. What I’ve learned to do is to represent things that are different and better than what everyone else has and speak about them with certainty in a transparent and digestible way. Facts have to speak for themselves.
One example I like to give that is a good example is if you go back to the 1970s before we had even fax machines, let alone scanners or email on the internet, FedEx had come up with this campaign where it positively has to be there overnight. Before even a fax machine, when you had a mortgage, bank documents, real estate or inheritance and they’d have these drop dead dates on them, a billboard that says that was a gut punch. It was a 2×4. That’s a statement and a fact. They could get something anywhere in the country the next day. Everyone has free ice water when it positively has to be there overnight. There is something in them and their story that will have that effect on their customers. That’s what you’re looking for. You blow it up.
That’s a great place to wrap up on this. I want to make sure that people can learn more about you and your book and dive much deeper into the details and your experiences around this. Where’s the best place for them to go learn more about you and your work?
They can go to TheIconist.org. They can google my name, Jamie Mustard. It’s an unusual name. They can google The Iconist and my work will pop right up. I am very passionate about visibility. I do external work and one thing that I never expected is it changes people. They walk a little taller. They brighten up their work. It changes the entire culture of a company sometimes. It’s something that I’m deeply passionate about. I’m deeply passionate about having people live in themselves in a way where people are gravitating toward them.
Whatever you bring to the forefront, it has to be core to who you are. Click To TweetConsulting as your business is watering down. This is 50% of your life. It’s paying for your mortgage. It’s your kids’ college education. It’s a major part of who you are. Making that transparent has profound effects on the happiness and well-being of human beings. If there’s anything that I’ve said but you’re not sure how it works, reach out to me on my website. Send me an email at [email protected] or go to the message page. Everything comes to me or my people. I will answer any specific questions. I’ll give anybody twenty minutes. I encourage people to reach out to me whether or not they can afford me. I will help you.
I appreciate you coming on here and sharing some of your stories with us and some of these best practices for everybody to benefit from. Thank you.
Thank you. I enjoyed myself. I appreciate this. This has been fun.
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About Jamie Mustard
Jamie Mustard is an expert on perception in the physical world, a strategic multi-media consultant, art, design and product futurist, conceptual artist and Iconist. He has codified the primal laws of what makes anything iconic–the anatomy of what causes any idea, art or message to STAND OUT and take hold in the human mind, across any medium. His passion is to teach the science and art of obviousness, helping professionals, change agents, artists and businesses confidently and at will make their messages, brands and ideas STAND OUT to their desired audiences–breaking through “DRAG” from dilution that we all know we are all up against.
A graduate of the London School of Economics, Jamie’s work is an explanation of the ‘economics of attention’ based on the primal laws of human perception. Jamie’s Iconist work has spanned some of the world’s leading companies, technologies, artists, designers, creatives, nonprofits and the globe–Cisco, Intel, Adidas, Symantec, Pacific Northwest College of Art and TEDx at creative giant, Wieden + Kennedy. Jamie was most recently interviewed live on stage at Content London with Mindhunter lead actor and movie star, Holt McCallany.conceptual
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