Back in April, when I was launching my book, I hired someone to help with outreach to bloggers and book reviewers. They had a mailing list. I gave them some background on the book and on me, and they handled the outreach.
The good news: it worked. A number of reviewers responded, read the book, and wrote reviews. I was very grateful for that.
The slightly more chaotic news: because it was their proprietary mailing list, I didn't have any control over who the outreach was sent to. Apparently, some podcasts were mixed in. And this was not exactly precision-guided outreach.
At one point, I got a reply from a podcast for grandpas saying something along the lines of: "After looking at your profile, I'm not sure you're a good fit."
Correct. Very correct.
I had to send the digital equivalent of slowly backing out of the room: "Sorry. You're right. I missed that."
Then another reply showed up. Kate Davis had accepted me as a guest on Humor in the C-Suite.
This was somehow worse.
Getting rejected from the grandpa podcast was embarrassing. Getting accepted to a podcast about humor meant I now had to be funny. My immediate reaction was: I'm not funny.
But after the panic wore off, I started thinking about it differently.
For those who have read my prior posts, you might have seen that doing some kind of stand-up routine is on my professional bucket list. Maybe, just maybe, this was my chance to get as close to checking that box as I'm ever going to get.
And while I'm certainly not walking around the remote hallways of Ambiki telling jokes all day, humor is a pretty big part of how we work, communicate, survive difficult days, and make building a company a little more fun.
Maybe I did have some stories to tell.
So I went on the show. And I'm really glad I did.
Check out our conversation on Apple Podcasts or YouTube.