Be Curious and Be Urgent w/ Chris Richardson

What’s up y’all! I’m writing this email to you from Gun.io HQ office in Nashville at Marathon Music Works. Listen, I am a remote fan boy. I don’t love people ;) and love being in my sweatshorts drinking premium black iced coffee BUT I do have to say it’s a vibe being in the office with the leadership team and local Nashville people. While I am not as productive I will tell you that, I’m willing to sacrifice this for 2 days to be able to hang with my VP of Product that I never talk to who is currently sitting next to me. 

Which leads me to ask YOU. What do you prefer? Onsite once a quarter like we do it at Gun.io? Or fully remote never leaving my house? Or some of y’all I talked to recently who are WILD want onsite full time:) 

I really hope you enjoy this interview below. This guy and I served tables together back in the Outback Steakhouse days of my career now he is an executive sales leader formerly at Google. Lotta good tid bits in here about career goals. 

One more thing…I just launched a group job search/counseling session! Link here. I’ve had so many folks need my help but can’t afford my hourly rate so it’s $50 for the hour with a small group. First date is June 7th!  I hope to see you there!

Let’s get into it. If I were you I’d go ahead and watch the full convo with Chris Richardson:

But we can do a short version too. Like I said, I met Chris working at Outback an undisclosed number of years ago, and I think we can both agree that everyone should be required to spend some time in the service industry. You learn so much from time management to progressing in your responsibilities to (and MOST importantly) the people skills you learn…. The impact of learning and valuing customer experience will never stop helping you.

So what does “be curious and be urgent” mean? Well it starts with the motivation to want to do more and be your best self. To get there you’re going to have to ask a lot of questions to the right people. We have the luxury of being a few clicks away from LinkedIn DMing business leaders around the world, but what are you going to do with that opportunity? Chris gave the example of seeing someone in a role that you wish you had and then reverse engineering how they got there. But before you start shooting off DMs:

• Do your research. Make sure your questions and your curiosity are specific enough to merit a response. No on wants an inbox full of questions written by ChatGPT that you copy and pasted to 50 different people. That’s just lazy.

• Just go ahead and get your hands dirty. It’s easy to put 15 conditions and steps between you and what you really want to do, but unless you’re trying to be a doctor or something just go for it already. You can stack up all those certificates and courses you thought you needed later. But don’t give yourself roadblocks just because you’re afraid of making a change.

• Don’t forget to give back. If someone helps you, offer something in return. It’s pretty simple y’all.

• You don’t have to keep doing what you’ve always done. If you’ve been typecast in a role, whether by yourself or someone else, acknowledge it. Your “career” doesn’t mean that you only have to do one thing your whole life. If you know you can do something, but your boss keeps telling you that you can’t…. see ya. It’s time to create your own narrative.

This really just touches the surface of what Chris and I talked about. And if you get nothing else out of this, know that the most stressful point in my career was showing up to Outback in the early 2000’s on Friday night trying to get every table their Bloomin’ Onion. No meeting or sales pitch or talk could be that bloomin’ stressful. So be nice to your servers. Anyway, Chris also weekly sessions on Cloud Security, so go check that out.

Don’t forget, you’re not alone.

-Taylor

Gun.io/taylor