Category: Uncategorized

NFT to TV Star

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

So here it is: my latest world first! As part of The Rebound TV show, we are selling the final episode of Series Two as an NFT. This is the first ever Australian TV show to be sold as an NFT.

Here’s the kicker: The winning bidder of this NFT will also become part of the next series of The Rebound. We call it NFT to TV Star! We will mentor them in their business or career, as part of the Accelerator programme on Series Three and broadcast nationally in Australia. This NFT will be someone’s ticket to TV stardom and a new financial trajectory.

You can buy this NFT on Rarible.com – check out the NFT here. Heck, why not bid on it? At the time of writing, it’s a mere 10% of 1 Ether (around $323 USD). I’d love to have one of my readers win it and come on the show – that’d be rad.

As you may know, NFTs are tokens of digital assets. The cool part is that you can attach other entitlements to these tokens – all of which are verifiable on the Ethereum blockchain. In this case, the buyer wins the token to our Crypto episode, as well as the right to actually appear on the show. But it doesn’t end there. The person who buys it can sell the NFT to someone else, or even a company looking to promote their business (a TV show would be a pretty good place to do that). So the NFT could also become a traded asset that increases in value before a smart contract is executed against it.

Bonus: You can buy this experimental NFT gif here. It also comes with an hour long mentoring session from me or Tommy. I have already sold four of these this week. Only one is left! I have listed it at a very reasonable price of 0.01 Ether (around $30, the minimum listing price). It’s a good way to dip your toe in the water to experiment with the tech and learn – which is what I did. Get on it and chat NFT / future stuff with me!

This is a nice example of how we can better use digital assets by attaching real physical things and future contracts to them. The world is getting increasingly meta. This means the most important asset isn’t the technology itself, but how we apply our imagination to it.

Keep Thinking,

Steve.

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Competence, Confidence & your Future

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

As a social species we humans are naturally attracted to certain behaviours: Competence and Confidence are two that really matter. While they may seem like separate entities, they interact in interesting ways.

Bonus: Here’s a must watch funny story of me being too confident with my school principal and him swiftly reminding me I lacked a certain competence.

They Feed Each Other: When we are competent at something, our confidence grows as a result. When we meet a confident person, it’s not their confidence we are actually attracted to, rather our internal belief that it must be a reflection of competence. Our mind believes they must have valuable skills. The reverse is also true – if we lack confidence people believe will it is because we lack competence – regardless of ability.

This interaction forms a huge part of our economic success. People buy us, before they buy anything we happen to be selling. By reminding ourselves of this feedback loop, we can hack our own behaviour to forge ahead in our work, life, and even our relationships.

Invest in Yourself: When you invest time in developing competence (maybe it’s learning about an emerging technology, or a career or business skill) confidence increases. Even before the skill is acquired, the effort itself, will build self esteem. You start to believe in yourself. You believe you can do and become more, you can jump over those difficult competence hurdles. This is especially important if you are not an overtly confident person, or let’s say, humble in your abilities.

Reality Check: While confidence matters a great deal – if there is no competence to back it up, it will eventually all come crashing down. In the long run, the person will always get found out if they are a fraud. We should always aim to be good at what we do, be competent, yet we must never forget that unless we have enough confidence, we are unlikely to ever get that chance to prove ourselves.

Bonus No: 2: Tommy and I do some ‘Acting’ in The Rebound – which displays how a confident designer can get the price they deserve!

Speaking of Competence: Be sure to tune in tomorrow at 12.30pm on Channel 9 across Australia for The Rebound. Tomorrow is all about the Future of Work – a topic which affects us all. You can catch up on all the episodes here.

Keep thinking,

Steve.

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The Rebound – Season 2

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Did you miss me? I’ve been busy working on my TV show The Rebound which is now in it’s second season. You can see it on Channel 9 nationally every Saturday at 12.30pm. It’s filled with Sammatron philosophy and soundbites of goodness. We are 4 episodes in – which you can catch up on here. We have another 4 to go. Each episode has a theme and this season we are covering Skills, Design, Story Telling, Pricing, Culture, Growth, Future of Work & Crypto

I thought I’d serve up some of my fav’ bits so far. Stuff you can take to the board room, the bank and get your brain firing.

Skills: The internet is like a giant supermarket – it has all the intellectual nutrition anyone could ever hope for – but it is hidden among junk food for the brain. Here, Tommy and I break this idea down for you. Worth explaining to your kids. Another must see story is the guy who outsourced their job. It might be the greatest career hack of all time!

Design: The most important design principal of all: Design isn’t just how something looks – It’s about flow, how a a system works – or even how to flow through people’s minds. Here Tommy shows us the greatest packaging of all time and uncovers the art of biomimicry. And here I play a game of design based Fail or Scale with Tommy.

Story Telling: Perception is always more profitable than reality. Often we think we are buying products features, when what we are really buying is a story. Here’s the worlds only $500 billion story. And here I deliver a short DM on a concept I call Industrial Tourism.

Pricing: Pricing is a game where we need to experiment. We should be more fluid than we usually are. People don’t expect prices to remain the same – so always remember this when doing business. The Fast Track Hacks segment in this episode is gold. Here, I demonstrate why value is in the mind of the customer – and not the price itself.

Tomorrow’s episode is all about Culture – and it is a cracker. Be sure to tune in and let me know what you think.

Hope you staying safe.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

Changing Shape & Big Tech

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

In 2019 I wrote a manifesto on what we need to do to fix ‘Big Tech’ because I was concerned with how powerful the top six tech firms were becoming. At the time Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Alphabet and Tesla had a collective Market Capitalisation of US $3.9 trillion dollars. It is now US $8.9 trillion (28/5/21).

Since then we’ve had a global pandemic stretching 18 months. Peoples lives, health and economic circumstances have been torn apart. Businesses the world over have pulled down the shingle, people have lost their jobs and yet these same six companies forge ahead. While the world went backwards, their size more than doubled. We need to talk.

It’s hard to conceptualise how big a number is – especially a trillion. So let me provide a couple of comparisons to show how big $8.9 trillion dollars is:

  • Bigger than all but two countries GDP (USA & China)
  • 40.5% of the USA’s GDP
  • 6.5 times the size of the GPD of Australia (where I live)

Visually – 1 million dollar stacked in $100 bills, would be 3 feet high. While a trillion dollars would stack 1015km high or 2.5 times higher than the international space station.

In Time – If a person spent 1 million dollars per day, since the birth of christ, they’d still be under the trillion mark, coming in at a cool $737 billion dollars spent.

At some point we need the wisdom to know when something has fundamentally changed. Often things change long before we realise it. The lag between reality and social sentiment can be dangerously long. But once we do realise something has undergone a metamorphosis – it’s vital we treat it differently. In my view, some of the the large scale technology firms (on this list I’d place Alphabet, Facebook and Apple, maybe Amazon in USA) – are now so important to our daily lives they’ve become utilities – critical Infrastructure. Elon is even building a private global satellite network. They’ve changed. They are no longer the quirky little tech darlings we once loved.

We simply cannot participate in the modern economy without their services. While I think we can all agree the digital revolution has been a net good for society, and we all love the products, try to live a week without your smart phone, search or tools of social connection – it would be extremely difficult. In the past when firms have become indispensable we’ve tightly regulated, nationalised, or broken them up into smaller parts. We need that to happen again to avoid our world morphing into a techno-feudal state where corporations literally, usurp nations.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

Channel Overload

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Social researcher Robin Dunbar concluded it isn’t possible for humans to maintain relationships with any more than 150 people, with only 50 of them being close connections. Known as Dunbar’s number, this is why people drop out of your life as new people enter it. It’s easy to see when you look back. There are only so many people we can pay close attention to.

This translates very well into our media and technology consumption habits. The only difference is that the number of media we can pay attention to is actually far lower. This reality needs to be part of our business and career strategy.

Now, do this simple experiment:

  • Count how many apps you use at least once per week
  • Count how many podcasts that you listen to every episode
  • See how many email newsletters and blogs you open and read every time
  • Review how many news sites you visit weekly

Here are my results:

  • Apps = 7 (excluding functional apps like Uber and Airbnb that I use when required)
  • Podcasts = 4 (Future Sandwich / EconTalk / Akimbo / Pivot) for those who are curious
  • Newsletters = 3 (Exponential View / Wired / New Mercy – No Malice)
  • News Sites = 4 (AFR / NYT / The Age / ABC)

I’ve done a small random sample with colleagues and their numbers are similarly small. There are only so many channels we can pay attention to. Yet every brand and business wants to develop a devoted following. So we have a paradox on our hands. Habits of attention are incredibly valuable, but they are increasingly difficult for anyone or business to acquire. As the flood of content available shows no visible signs of slowing, we need a strategy that makes sense.

As far as I can tell, we have two clear options:

  1. Become a global brand or authority in your category
  2. Keep showing up every week and build a niche, yet valuable audience through compound effort.

I fit into the latter category – and it works. It’s worked for more than 15 years and the returns keep on getting greater. While only 10% of people who read this blog (it’s in the thousands) do so every post, it’s enough. It gets me more respect and work than any other commercial activity I partake in, including my books and TV show.

Like anything in life – doing the work eventually gets noticed. We can all become one of the niche players on the must-read/listen/see media channels alongside more famous brands or people . It isn’t without irony that focusing on goal number 2 gives us more of a chance of achieving goal number 1.

The immediate upside? Often it’s the more niche and personal brands we are most loyal to.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.

Rebound out of COVID-19

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I’m pretty excited!

My new TV show ‘The Rebound’ goes to air nationally tomorrow, Saturday the 14th at 12.30pm on Channel Nine. In short, the show is all about helping Australian businesses bounce back. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, freelancer, corporate climber or run a business, it’s jam-packed with useful hacks to get you on the fast track. You can watch the trailer here and follow the show on Insta here.

The thing that really matters with the show is this: I practise what I preach. At the start of the pandemic, my work literally went to zero. Overnight, all my gigs were shut down. I usually spend most of my working hours on stage doing keynote speeches around the world. Suddenly – no travel, no large rooms filled with people, and no possibility of doing consulting with even a few people in a board room. I had to pivot and do it quickly. That’s what spawned The Rebound. Sometimes, hard constraints force creative solutions. We decided to take the ideas – many of which I’ve been writing about here on my COVID-19 series – to the screen. While it’s also true I’ve been planning to do content like this for a while, I never really had the time to focus on it. 2020 changed that in a hurry!

So the show was conceived, pitched, sold, written and delivered all during the middle of one of the strictest lockdowns in the world here in Melbourne. We sold a new TV show that didn’t yet exist – to a bunch of people we had never met – with a production schedule we couldn’t confirm with any certainty! If there’s anything you take from this post, let it be that persistence is powerful and people are more understanding than you would anticipate. Once the show was commissioned, our shoot schedule was cancelled no fewer than four times due to lockdown extensions. We had to beg sponsors to stay with us and we are very thankful they did.

The series is six episodes long and we cover these timeless topics in business:

Entrepreneurship

Branding

Innovation

Digital

Business models and

Artificial Intelligence.

It’s all done with a dose of fun and an unashamedly motivational spirit.

It has been a really tough year for everyone and we hope the show can contribute to a better 2021 for all.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve. 

How to sell ideas

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

A decade ago I got a business lesson I’ll never forget. A vital one for people who trade in ideas, creative output, concepts and the like.

At the time, I was working as the head of strategy in a large advertising outfit. We were in a meeting where we got briefed about a new product which we had to launch to the market with a new advertising campaign. During the meeting I came up with a killer advertising idea and copy line. I was thrilled I came up with it on the spot and suggested it to the client. As I expected they all thought it was amazing and loved it. But when I looked across to my CEO at the time – he didn’t seem very happy at all. I was a bit thrown, the client loved it, it was clearly an incredible idea – so why didn’t he like it? It all became clear when we left the room.

Driving back to our office this is what he said to me:

“You probably cost us a few million dollars in there” I was confused, he went on. “The idea you presented was amazing. But now we have a problem. Clients have a hard time accepting the first idea you present – even if it is the best one they’ll hear. Now they are going to expect something better when we go back and work on the creative. Worse, they wouldn’t want to pay us for the original idea. The fact that that we solved it immediately – to them, it’s like we haven’t done any real work. It doesn’t matter that it took you twenty years of thought and training for you come up with that creative solution. They need to feel like it has been worked on. So, now we will struggle to come up with anything better, and if we go back with our first idea as our final idea – they won’t want to ‘buy it’ because it was fast and simple.” He then went on to say. “Next time keep your powder dry. If you come up with something amazing in the room – bite your tongue. While clients should be focused on how good something is, often they align value with how long something took.”

I never forgot that. Although sometimes I still can’t help myself and give away my ideas on the future with clients in the first meeting. I just can’t help myself and I get too excited and tell them what they should do and why.

If you are in a creative field – never forget your ability to solve problems quickly is because you’ve invested years thinking about it and being in the game. And if you want to get paid for the thinking that you have done and do – remember it is Ok to have ideas and hold them back until it is the right time to share them.

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Keep Thinking,

Steve.