Getting Known

I’ve spent most of my career getting good at the work and assuming that would be enough. Lately I have a growing suspicion it isn’t. The people who get the interesting jobs, clients and introductions are often the ones other people already know, and I’ve done very little to be one of them.

These are my notes on six videos, covering four different rooms: online, a dinner table, a pitch, and the office. They’re a synthesis of other people’s arguments, five of them from people with a program, a book or an app to sell, so I’ve kept what held up and said where I’d push back. One idea runs through all of them: people pick who they already know and trust, and being good is what gets you considered once they do.

1 · Online: own a few ideas

Start with a definition I keep coming back to: your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. You have one either way, so the only choice is whether you shape it. Shaping starts with clarity: who you’re for, and what they’re struggling with, learned by actually asking them.

From there it boils down to four content categories, the “drumbeat” people come back for. On top of those sits what one brand founder calls content IP: the recurring elements and coined words that make work recognisably yours, like Casey Neistat’s sunglasses or Peter McKinnon’s greeting. Name your processes and you own them. I have one by accident already, the OX Stack, and I’ve never once used it on purpose.

The practical advice is to pick two platforms, start with written ones (X and LinkedIn, say, because there’s no gear to buy), and post every day. The brand founder’s target is twice daily, which I’d argue is a lot for anyone with a day job. The trick that makes any cadence possible is the content waterfall: make one pillar piece and break it down into everything else.

Written platforms grow the way YouTube does, by recommendation. Read an article and the platform shows you more shaped like it, so a new piece gets found by looking like something its readers already chose. Eden, a creator-tools company, says the title does most of that work and the image a little, and then the piece has to say its idea in a way that makes people sit up. Replying to bigger accounts gets eyes, but their test for a brand is whether anyone would wonder where you went.

Each platform has its own packaging, and you learn it by reading a lot of it. Substack images rarely carry words and its titles read calmer than YouTube’s, so a YouTube title moved across tends to flop. Look for outliers, posts that did several times better than their writer’s average, on broad topics, since you’re after the structure and the idea can be yours. Turn a few into frameworks with an outline, and write from those until you stop needing them.

The rest is housekeeping. Batch the work (fifteen videos in a day beats one a day), look at what’s resonating and do more of it, and give each post one clear next step for the reader. After that comes a team of editors and writers, which is a later problem than mine.

The harder part is keeping going when nobody’s watching. Make it fun, because audiences can tell when you’re grinding. One speaking coach got out of a clinical run of tutorials by putting more of himself in: a guitar in the background if you play, a hobby as the analogy, a story from your own life.

Swap the scoreboard, too. Views ride the algorithm up and down, and your mood rides with them, so track emails and sales instead. Even on Substack, where a paid subscription is the obvious money, Eden says the writers who earn well sell their own offers: products, coaching, cohorts.

The coach’s cadence, three to seven videos a week, is gentler than twice a day, and it’s the one I’d actually try.

2 · The table: host instead of attending

Keith Ferrazzi wrote Never Eat Alone, and his video asks how he’d rebuild his network from nothing in a new city. First he rules out working the room and sending a hundred LinkedIn requests, which builds a thousand contacts and nobody who’d pick up at midnight.

Instead, write down a goal for the year and the 25 or so people who could open that door. Find them by working backward to the real decision makers, by raiding the network you already have (school, old coworkers, friends of friends), and by borrowing other people’s lists, like a city’s “40 under 40.” Then find your anchor tenant: the most connected person on the list who already has some tie to you. Lead with something genuinely useful to them. Once they say yes to dinner, everyone else does too.

The dinner is six to ten people, invited a month out, and it does not need to be fancy. He told one mentee with a studio apartment to put a cheap card table over the coffee table and serve rotisserie chicken from the deli. The format is a toast and a check-in: everyone shares what matters most right now, personally and professionally, and the host goes first with something real. His claim is that vulnerability is what turns a table of strangers into a group, and that the host becomes the connector every later introduction runs through.

Run it again monthly, maybe with a co-host, and keep a master list scored by priority:

He calls the touches pings: a text, a forwarded article, a comment on a post. Mix them up, because people need to bump into your name a few different ways before it sticks.

3 · The pitch: need, then relationship, then product

Simon Squibb opens with “like it or not, you are a salesperson,” and backs it with 30 years of selling, including an agency, Fluid, that he sold to PwC. His whole method rests on honesty. A Mini salesperson once told his wife she should probably buy a Tesla, and that’s the person they’d buy from next. As a teenager working a summer in a clothing shop, he told a customer a suit didn’t look good on them, and they trusted him from then on.

His three steps are in a fixed order, and most people start with the last one. First, find out whether they need it, and if not now, when. Second, build a relationship where you like each other. Only third do you get to “here’s my product, here’s what it costs.” He says he’s never failed the third step when the first two were in place, and that staying present until the need shows up is the job: he contacted one big brand every month for nine years.

The rule that stuck with me most is about promising. Split every pitch into what you can guarantee and what you only hope will happen, then say both out loud. The PR firms he kept working with were the ones that did exactly that.

The other steps are shorter. Sell in whatever style is natural to you: his best salesperson was his accountant, who just talked about the company she believed in over lunch with other CFOs. Train everyone around you to do the same. One good-name client opens doors for the rest (he did free work to land CNN, then led every call with it). Sell the outcome, which he calls the sizzle over the steak, and only sell what you believe in. The “emotional sale,” asking people to back a mission, works only if the mission is real; otherwise people see through it and the brand is gone.

Squibb’s steps get you to the conversation. For the conversation itself I keep my own notes, which aren’t from any of these videos: ten steps for getting to yes without tricking anyone, and one rule that overrides all of them. A few of the moves, like inviting a no and waiting for “that’s right,” will be familiar to anyone who has read Chris Voss.

4 · The office: be seen, get it in writing

Every office I’ve worked in has been engineers with their heads down, no drama to speak of, and no obvious way to get ahead. This advice comes from someone who says they spent ten years at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley type firms, and the premise is uncomfortable: keeping your head down and hoping the work gets noticed is a strategy, and usually a losing one.

The most useful advice is also the most boring. Vague instructions get pinned down before you start: ask about the tasks, the criteria and the outcome, then send a short email saying what you agreed and by when. They tell a story where a new manager tried to put them on a performance plan for following the old manager’s instructions, and the emails ended it.

Subject: Recap: the login migration

Hi Dana,

Thanks for the time today. Writing down what we agreed so we're working from the same page:

- Move the login service to the new auth provider
- Keep the old one running until traffic is under 1%

I'll have it done by Friday the 30th. If I've got any of this wrong, reply and I'll correct it before I start.

The same goes for promotions. If you’re told you’re “eligible next year,” ask exactly what you need to show, and if the goalposts move after you hit them, believe the pattern. They also watched a team post record profits and then lose half its people, which is the case for knowing your market rate, keeping your skills current, and treating company praise as nice but separate from security. When onboarding is thin, keep your own map of who knows what; people on other teams, who don’t see you as competition, tend to be the most helpful.

I’m leaving out about a third of that advice. It also recommends pretending to agree with whoever has power, letting a rival walk into a mistake, and assuming coworkers are jealous. That might describe a trading floor, but it doesn’t describe any team I’d want to be on.

The plan

Simon Squibb’s three steps turn out to fit the whole page. Getting good at the work is step three, the product. Steps one and two are people, and those are the ones I’ve been skipping. Here’s my plan:

1. Write down the goal for this year and the 25 names, and find the anchor tenant.
2. Pick two platforms. Every article I publish becomes a waterfall instead of a single link, packaged for each platform, and I count emails, not views.
3. Host one dinner, even if it’s a card table and a rotisserie chicken.
4. Keep the priority list and send the pings.
5. When I pitch anything, start with need, then the relationship, and split the promise into what I guarantee and what I hope.
6. At work, send a recap after every vague ask, and get promotion criteria in writing.

Sources

Six videos, watched in October and November 2026. Everything above is my synthesis of their arguments, and the figures (followers, revenue, years, the PwC sale, the nine years of monthly contact, the $7 offer, the email numbers and Eden’s claims about Substack) are the speakers’ own. Five of the six pitch a paid program, a book or an app along the way; I’ve kept their advice and left the pitches. In the prose I’ve called most speakers by what they do; whose channel each video is from is on its card below. The persuasion system in section 3 is my own notes, not something from these videos.