Read The Transcript

Connect with Dustin
https://polyinnovator.space/
https://pod.co/polycast/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/polyinnovator/

Connect with Russ
https://russjohns.com/
https://thepiratesyndicate.com/
https://nextstepnext.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nextstepnext/

Audio digitally transcribed by Descript

Introduction: [00:00:00] Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast™, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. Where you can expand your connections, your community, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let’s get this party started.

Russ Johns: [00:00:10] And it's a beautiful day for the #PirateBroadcast™. And if you're going to join us live, drop a comment, drop a note, let us know that you're listening in. And also if you have any questions, let us answer your question because there's a lot of things that we can probably cover today. And it's nothing short of amazing sometimes in these conversations. So like, comment, share, and make sure that people know about all the shenanigans going on in #PirateBroadcast and today we're  going to be hanging out riffing on a couple of ideas with Dustin,  the poly innovator. How are you doing Dustin?

Dustin Miller: [00:00:45] I'm doing well. You?

Russ Johns: [00:00:47] Absolutely fantastic. And it's been a little minute since we connected and hung out a little bit. And I just wanted to start a conversation about some of the contrast between a narrow niche and the diversity that we can have as a poly innovator. You and I,  we have a lot of interests. We have a lot of diversity in our skill sets and some of the things we're doing, and sometimes it's challenging to tell people what we do because... squirrel, whatever happens to be. And so I want to riff on that today and talk about some of the challenges that we have as people that have a lot of different interests and then the messaging piece to actually talk to our ideal client.

Dustin Miller: [00:01:32] Yeah let's start off by also saying, too, that being multidisciplinary, whether you're a generalist or polymath or Jack of all trades or polyinnovator,, in my case, it doesn't matter what term you're using. I like to make an umbrella term as multidisciplinary. It makes it a lot easier to be like, hey, I do a lot of different things,  many, lots, that kind of thing. But when you're trying to explain to someone, I remember I actually one night at a karaoke bar, I handed my business card to a friend of mine. And I was really excited because I had comedian, singer, swim instructor, water vessel instruction,  personal trainer, content creator, podcaster, all that on there. And it was one of those things for me, I thought someone would see that and they would pick one they wanted and they would ask me about it. And it usually wasn't the case. And he ripped into me. He was saying, you need to have just one thing on there and that way you can get that job. And it's yeah, I had such a internal debate afterwards. Like I agreed with him. I understand what he was saying. Like you have to be able to communicate to somebody, but for me, I was like, that seems unnatural to me. It seems so foreign in my mind. I was like, how am I going to do that? And even now, if you look at my new business card, I still have content creator and podcaster and fitness instructor on there too. Cause I either give it to people for content creation or fitness related and so I had to niche down a little bit, but like more of my messaging.

Russ Johns: [00:02:50] But it's not that you excluded the activities from your inventory of things you enjoy. It's just that the messaging. So it's not necessarily... and that's a dilemma for a lot of people because they think, I don't want to exclude anyone. However, if you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no one.  In the messaging. So it doesn't mean that you can't do these things.

Dustin Miller: [00:03:15] We have to market it in a sort of way.

Russ Johns: [00:03:17] Marketing is different. Are you working on any projects right now? I know you're doing shows yourself and you're recording and podcasting and broadcasting. Give us an update on what's happening there.

Dustin Miller: [00:03:29] And just a reminder too, I don't actually call it a podcast. I call it a poly cast because there's a lot of different topics and series. And again, that goes back to the marketing aspect behind it though. I also don't like Apple, so I don't like calling it a podcast, but that's a whole nother story. But it's a great way of going about the marketing aspect, because I have multiple series through my show. I have short, long, medium form episodes. And so when you have that poly, you could think, okay, there's many series, many topics and many kinds of guests. And so it gets people in the right mindset when they approach the show. And then when they actually get to the show, they can see that there's different series and stuff like that. But beyond that, the interviews, I think I was telling you before the call today, I have done 95 since last May. And for most people they're like, wow, for you considering how many you've done. It's probably not that much, but I was just cranking them out and we're doing these amazing guests. Like I somehow got some of the best guests I could ever imagine on the show. And each interview brought something new to the table. And so I'm excited to get the episodes out, but I've definitely experienced a lot of burnouts and trying to keep up my energy levels in order to get through that editing. Cause it's like editing a movie every week.

Russ Johns: [00:04:38] Yeah. That's why I do live. I have edited a lot of podcasts and working in radio, I've done a lot of work around that. However, going live. and then having this go out to multiple platforms immediately and then generate a podcast  that goes out  in distribution to 20, 30 other sites is exciting for me from a content perspective, content creation perspective, and for someone that comes on board and I can highlight someone like yourself, that's a lot of content generated in a single day.

Dustin Miller: [00:05:14] And you and I have the same approach to this Omni channel approach. And I really like that.

Russ Johns: [00:05:19] Yeah. I used to teach this workshop called the Traffic Circle, developing your traffic circle on how you could take any piece of content and multiplying that content into different sections of the web and how you can actually diversify your content in order to amplify your message and get it out there. And so  multi-platform  and it shows up and it shows up in a way people can see that you're doing something, you're staying active, you're out there, you're producing content. And  a lot of business owners, and maybe you have experienced this and you can share is not all business owners think they need to create content, or they don't even need to think... some believe that they don't even need to be on social media. And I love the idea that when I hear the business owner, yeah, my clients,  my customers aren't really on social media.

Dustin Miller: [00:06:11] Every body is. Really like 99% of people are.

Russ Johns: [00:06:15] At some point, somebody is on social media. The funny thing is it's like searching Google. They used to say, why would I need a website?  And then they'd say, why do I need an email? And now it's like, why do I need social media? Eventually, it all happens. So I want to give a shout out to Elise from South Africa. Good morning, Russ. Dustin, thank you so much for being here. Love that you're here everyday. Marcia. Good morning. Fun fact Marcia. We're going to do a an Amazon live. Probably Friday afternoon we're going to go live on Amazon. I don't know if you're familiar with Amazon live, but a lot of individuals are starting to become aware of Amazon live and I'm going to be highlighting Marcia and Howard Kaufman and try to get that together and put that in place because Chris Stone is an awesome individual that is on Amazon live with deal casters, and he's doing a lot of great work out there with with his buddy.

Dustin Miller: [00:07:16] And I want to bounce off what he's saying there too. So he's saying people want to put us in a box. And what I want to say is, marketing, is you controlling what that box is. If you market yourself in a right way, you can determine what kind of box people will put you in. Granted, you can't control it, but you can try to guide people into what kind of box people are in. That's why I createdPolyinnovator in the first place. So people can get in that right mindset. Hey, this is something different. This is something that I'm not quite used to. And so people labeled me as a polymath. I quite wouldn't label myself one just because it takes a long time to get to that point. But there is points where people say, oh, you're Jack of all trades and people get in that right mindset of using those terms versus saying, oh, he's flighty. He squirrely, like you mentioned earlier. Like lack of attention, lack of focus. And so that's why I wanted to really go off of Chris's comment.

Russ Johns: [00:08:08] And I'll tell you a side story here. In one organization. I probably had five different positions because I was an entrepreneur. I was always creating a new job for myself because I'd get bored at the last one. So I was a safety director as an IT director. I was software developer. I was all of these projects and I ended up getting called into the CEO's office and literally he drew a square on a piece of paper and he said, Russ, this is the box we live in. And then he drew a circle outside the box. This is where  you've been working. We need to get you inside the box.  And finally, he actually hired me. And I graduated up to the corporate level and became the director of communications and managing all the facilities for some of the tasks that I was assigned to. And it goes to show that the creative thinker will always be outside the box. The innovator will not necessarily always stay inside the lane. And people that have the creativity and the tenacity to go after it and innovate, I think is really important for humanity. That's how we get to space. That's how big ideas and change the world.

Dustin Miller: [00:09:28] And I was in the same thing at my main job all throughout my life. I worked at the pool and from lifeguarding to swim instructing to any kind of other fitness. I also basically got a new role this past summer doing admin work for my bosses, purely because I asked and was trying to do something new and get  more hours. And there's no technical role that I got, but it essentially is something that is a new role that no one else has really had before. So that was nice.

Russ Johns: [00:09:54] Yeah. And what it does is allows you to see new skills in a new perspective and create something different than what has been in there in the past, because your skillset adding to that role or expanding that role will change. It'll evolve.  So we all have our new perspective. And sometimes when you go into a large organization, especially in corporate America people are resistant to change. And so there's friction at times when you try to impose or introduce change to the world. And so it's always crazy to think how it evolves, but I want to talk a little bit about your process as well, because as you're working on multiple projects, we were talking before the show that there are different tools and different ways to catalog and collect information. And I think that one of the things that I really enjoyed talking to you both online and offline was how you think about it and how you go through that and how you think about the process of collecting information. So maybe you can talk a little bit about that.

Dustin Miller: [00:11:04] Yeah, I would love to, because this is literally where I get nerdy and excited about. And you and I talked for what an hour after the last conversation we had, it's suppose to be like a 15 minute call and it was like an hour long. And one of the biggest things is I've always been a systematic thinker. So I want to create systems because that's how my brain feels like okay. And there's no system. It's cool. Stresses me out. If I can make a system, it'll make it a lot smoother. And that's why I came up with my Omni content system for trying to create Omni channel content creation. So you were mentioning earlier how you help people get to that point of creating content for multiple channels. And that's what your approach is that multi-channel platforming.  And it's interesting. That's like Gary V's concept as well, going like everywhere, chopping up a piece of content into 60 different pieces. And ironically, he mentioned, and multiple keynotes, you need to be making a hundred pieces of content a day or else you're wasting your time. You're not wasting time, but you're missing out on a great opportunity is more apt. And as like some reason that hit me, I was like, why is that so important to me? So I created a system and I'm not successful so much at it, but I have done it. I know it works. I just need to make sure I make it smoother and work out the kinks, but trying to create a system, of course, audio, video and written content and then chopping those up and sharing it to multiple different platforms. And I tried dozens of task and project management tools. Like I told you before the call, even Click Up, which I really dig Click Up and that was before they even got some of the updates that made it even better. And I tried Monday and I tried some of the other ones like Asana and I just didn't like the restrictions behind it. And so I created a system that allowed me to have multiple layers of extraction, and now I've actually changed it into funneling it all into a master task database. Allow me to, like anytime I make a new piece of content or work on my finances or anything personal life too, I can create a task that will automatically go to the main task database and that can funnel into what I'm doing on a daily basis.

Russ Johns: [00:12:59] And what does that offer in terms of organization? Does it allow easy access to the information when you need it? Because one of the challenges I have is I collect a lot of information, then it's oh, where did I put that? Where did I put that? Because well, like yourself, I've used a number of different systems and every time a system comes out, I have to test it.  I have to check it out, see what I like about it, what I don't like about it, run through its paces.

Dustin Miller: [00:13:27] This is like a combination of multiple systems. It seems like because there's the para method and there's also get things done. There's also a pipes, pillars and vaults by August Bradley, all three of them are great and pretty much they talk about input, slow burner and outputs, finding a way to collect that information, like you're saying, they're putting it on the slow burner, either adding ideas to it, or when you get a new link, you can add that to that same idea and eventually create some sort of output like a blog post, or a video. And I found that all except August Bradley's systems were basically made before notion came around. Then he made that system for notion specifically, and there's great minds doing great templates on all of these, but I found that they were limited for me. And I also created my own templates do that. I wanted to actually incorporate like my omni content or modular degree. And I was like, okay, how am I gonna put this all together? So I created this polyinnovation operating system as I call it, but allows me to use the notion extension for the web browser, put that straight into my residence calendar database, or let's say the modular degree database and allows me to have that input. And then while I'm on there, I can add tags. I can add different ideas. I can take notes and those notes will help me figure out, hey, what can I use this for later on? I wish notion was a bit more like Rome research or obsidian where those notes could be like synched up. So when you have a note about polymath that you can have, and I don't know about polymathic or connect to each other, like those other tools do, maybe eventually they will maybe with the notion API, we can get that going, but that's how I approach it.

Russ Johns: [00:15:06] I love that. And the use of tags has saved me over time. I love tags. I love using tags and for anyone that's listening that hasn't used tags, I endorse and support the use of tags because it's such a quick organizational tool in any system that uses tags. I think it's really valuable. One of the things that I really enjoy also is researching and I have a sense that you probably enjoy that same process. Is there any particular method you use to research a topic before you venture down and decide to take ownership of what you're doing?

Dustin Miller: [00:15:49] It's one of those things... yeah, functional visionary. Thank you, Wendy. I think it's one of those things where I take a swath of information. I like to be squirrely about it at first, because you really have to see the holistic picture. If I wanted to build a computer, I have to know about power supplies and that way, you know, how much power are you going to need. Then you realize all these different parts take different powers. Okay. What kind of motherboard do I need? Do I want Intel or AMD? Red or blue? And starting to learn the holistic picture, then you can actually start putting it together. And so right now I'm actually looking around to build a new PC, but before I actually figure out anything else about that PC, the case, power supply, GPU even, I have to find what CPU I'm doing first. And I know that now after building many PCs in my life, that that's what I'm going to go for. And it's interesting how I'll just open 50 tabs and just start going through them, reading, watching, listening, whatever it may be, and just take an overload of information, which excites me at that point. Most people get overwhelmed and then I can distill it into notes or just put it into memory.

Russ Johns: [00:16:52] I love that. Wendy says resist and abolish the box, pirates. Good morning, Dustin. Welcome to the best posse in the known universe.

Dustin Miller: [00:17:05] What about the multi-verse?

Russ Johns: [00:17:06] Yeah, the multiverse. I read where it's a donut now.

Dustin Miller: [00:17:10] Oh yeah. Oh man. Loki. Spoiler.

Russ Johns: [00:17:14] Good morning, Russ and Dustin from groovy Los Angeles. Luis, thank you so much for being here. Wendy goes on to say, Dustin is a perfect example of a rare, functional visionary. He sees the issues, addresses them, makes use of his  innovations because he needs them to maneuver at a high level. Rock on.

Dustin Miller: [00:17:35] I took a screenshot of that too. Thank you, Wendy.

Russ Johns: [00:17:38] Good deal. Good deal. So the thing is we were talking before the show is the balance between diversity in thought and ideas and attempting to get people on board with expanding their thoughts and then talking to a single person about what problem are we solving? Cause there's only one problem that's causing a lot of pain typically. So in order to speak to that and  dial in the messaging, like we were talking about the marketing message has to really resonate with somebody that's in pain. And so as we go through this and we expand our thoughts and our ideas and our interest in diversity in our things we're working on, is there any one thing that resonates with you on a regular basis that you really want to spend more time on versus something else?

Dustin Miller: [00:18:32] What do you mean? As in something I do in life?

Russ Johns: [00:18:35] Yeah. Like any one topic that really, if it were a clean slate, you woke up ohe day and you didn't have to worry about anything in life and you had something that you wanted to do. Is it working on a PC? Is it creating? Is it content creation? Is it blogging?

Dustin Miller: [00:18:52] Yeah. Oh, I was just going to say, I thought about it and I thought about it's a good brain teaser. Not teaser, but  brain exercise for anyone to do. If you had unlimited money, where would you live in the world? If you had whatever job you wanted, what would that be? And just go into that extreme notion that if you had exactly what you dreamt of, what is that dream?  Do you want to be an astronaut? Great. Go be an astronaut. But in fact, I know somebody who's literally had two careers already and she's only just a little bit older than me and yet she's going to literally go be an astronaut and that's because she had that dream. She wanted to do all three and okay go for it. But it's a matter of focusing on one. I thought about it and content creation is something that I always want to do. I've been doing blogs since 2011. So basically 10 years now, creating audio casts for about four and videos for about three, I've made over a thousand videos on Tik Toks for example, and 170 video and audio on YouTube and podcast platforms. And it's one of those things where I still feel like I have nowhere close to where I want to have in the future. I have a list of over 700 ideas for my Omni content. And in those ideas, I do not focus down on one thing per se. I have little mini series that help me focus. I have certain phases of Pauli innovator that helped me focus, but all the different topics I want to talk about whether that's swimming or content creation, or even how to build a computer. I want to do that too. I have set in there and an order allowing me to have a smooth process so that I can actually create other content like courses and books around that.

Russ Johns: [00:20:29] So are you going to write it

Dustin Miller: [00:20:30] up? Oh, yeah I've already started a couple of them and I have around 12 on the list. And it's interesting because the first one I need to write is the one I'm not actually writing. The one I have in writing is the one about swimming. And that's because it's most prominent in my life at this point, because I love teaching people. Even yesterday, I had a swim lesson that wasn't working with me, so to speak. She wasn't necessarily trying to actually learn that day. And normally she's a great student, never had any issues with her, but she just completely was not actually listening too much. But  I still learned something as an instructor and how I could approach it. I still went out of my way to try to find new avenues of approaching her attention and trying to get her to learn and get her to actually try a little bit. And they worked a little bit for a time, but we had to stop the lesson cause like, okay, it's not progressing. But my point is, as a teacher, finding those new avenues is something I enjoy and teaching someone else, I can use the knowledge from those avenues to teach them something new as well.

Russ Johns: [00:21:25] Yeah. The beautiful thing about teaching is you always learn something. So Wendy says in the film industry, we have to determine the sales structure of any project before one single second of footage is filmed. Focus on the outcome, then serve the process with one finger on the goal. Think of the game of twister with my left foot, always in the same color location. Everything else must lead back to that green dot.

Dustin Miller: [00:22:00] Ooh, that's nice.

Russ Johns: [00:22:03] Connecting it back. What is Dustin drinking? I want some.

Dustin Miller: [00:22:07] I don't necessarily endorse drinking an energy drink. I was going to drink some coffee. I put on the coffee and it turns out it wasn't plugged in. So when I took my shower and came back, there was no coffee. So I was like, ok, I'm going to drink this quickly. And some water, I've got to stay hydrated. Also, apologies for the beeping, I thought I was on mute, but it was too hot to leave that off.

Russ Johns: [00:22:26] No worries. No worries. I just love this conversation because I resonate so much with the idea that  throughout the course of the day I work on a lot of different projects. I have clients all over the world and it's just amazing to think we live in a time in history where we're so able to access information, we have access to each other around the world. And right now today, we've had people all over the world join us on this show and we have to start thinking a little broader and a little bigger in our ways that we can connect, have conversations and inspire each. And I just think it's important that we don't limit our imagination to just being one thing at one point in time. And so I just think it's an important conversation to have. And like you said, you can have multiple careers over time, especially right now where, the gig economy and the travel is lifestyle oriented and people are doing a lot of different things. So it's really important to, to expand this idea and share it with you.

Dustin Miller: [00:23:37] It's bringing together a couple of things you talked to me about earlier, too, is that you asked me about input. Like, how are you collecting information? And that's literally why I created the modular degree. I personally didn't want to go to college. I tried to, and I even looked around all around the world to find a college I wanted for the degree I wanted, I couldn't find one. Maybe I can try again at some point in the future, but I ended up creating my own degree because I needed some way to organize all the links and stuff I was collecting. So I literally created a Google sheet of like 400 something courses and  ideas and videos and Google sheets is not good enough for that. So I had to like air table and eventually notion because it's air grouping makes a world of difference, but the point is it was a system that I created to make a input system. And on top of that, the modular degree became the first phase of Polyinnovator. And these phase as an idea is what I want to share with people because that's something that I didn't create, but it's something I've really taken to heart. And so instead of having phases that take decades of your life, which these certainly could, but I want to approach it more on a yearly basis. This year, I'm talking about this topic this year, I'm talking about some other topic, that kind of thing. And even if if I fail at doing that's okay. Because I'm trying to market myself into this one phase. So the first one's modular education, the next one might be exercise, then gaming. And the cool thing about phases is that they can repeat. So the first part of that exercise could be minimal. Maybe I just talk a little bit about it on various different contents, share a book, move on to the next phase. And then a couple decades later, I really want to get into it again. I still don't want to build my career around. So for the next decade, make it another big phase around that same topic. It's like a little intro to the story.

Russ Johns: [00:25:17] And the interesting thing about it is we can choose anything you want. I've been everything from a firefighter to a farmer to a project manager to a content creator, to radio host, lots of different things, a carpenter. The reality is that a life is not a single thing.  It's always evolving. It's always changing. It's always moving forward. So just decide to learn something new today. Inspire someone new today. Create content today, create something amazing today cause you can. Dustin, I really appreciate you being here. Any last thoughts, anyone that you want to really reach out to or how do you like people to reach out to you?

Dustin Miller: [00:26:08] Last thoughts I would say is that even if you're not a systematic thinker, which not everyone is, some people think in different ways, try to find a way to incorporate systems into your life. Read atomic habits. It's a great book to get started with.

Russ Johns: [00:26:20] James Clear.

Dustin Miller: [00:26:21] Yeah. And build up your habits into systems and find a way... there was one idea that I wanted to share, actually that we ended up talking about something else, but you're talking about marketing and actually approaching yourself. When I approach, let's say swimming to somebody. I think about it in my four pillars philosophy, mind, body, spirit, and emotions. And someone is going to be approaching it from one of those pillars. Sometimes they're scared, so their emotions are heightened and it makes it to where they can't swim. Maybe they're physically incapable. I know a guy who didn't have a hand and so he had to swim differently. Or perhaps they're not that strong to build a strength. Maybe their mind isn't in the right place. They don't know how to literally swim. Logically approach it. And when you approach it with that, it makes a great idea, but there's also Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Are they worried about survival? Then they're not going to focus on swimming. If they're worried about self actualization, then it's a perfect time to learn about swimming. And especially if survival to go into a beach and they needed to be able to swim. That's a different scenario. So overlaying that hierarchy of needs with the four pillars allows you to find that little niche that you're trying to approach that particular person to market to. And that's what I wanted to share. And if you wanted to find me, you can see the name right above, right here. Polyinnovator. You search that on any platform, I guarantee you'll probably find me even on the centralized networks and stuff like that, too.  Or go to Polyinnovator.space.

Russ Johns: [00:27:40] What did you end up building your website on?

Dustin Miller: [00:27:43] Ghost. Did we talk about that much?

Russ Johns: [00:27:45] Yeah. We talked about that last time.

Dustin Miller: [00:27:46] Oh my goodness. I'm so glad I went with Ghost. I hate WordPress now compared to Ghost. Oh my goodness. I've been using WordPress off and on for the past decade. And I also use screw medium and ghost allowed me to combine all different things. I even tried stub stack, too. Stub stack was really cool, but ghostis so much better. And I made one of the best ghost themes in the world. Like I looked at all 3000 themes that are on the internet.

Russ Johns: [00:28:11] It does not surprise me, Dustin. Wendy says we crave true connection. Innovators have made some of that still possible before COVID. Thanks Russ. Love you Wendy. I would love to go on and on about this Dustin and we have to come back, we have to have a conversation. And I think we could talk about a couple of other things and I'm coming up on 500 shows.

Dustin Miller: [00:28:36] Wow.

Russ Johns: [00:28:36] And and I'm probably going to and I want to expand some other shows in some other topics, in some different areas. So I want to be able to do that. And I know that you're probably going to be able to have conversations in the future and continue this idea and this thought process and showing up, being here, being consistent, having these conversations is important to me. And I just want to highlight people like yourself that are doing some amazing things out there. Thanks for being here.

Dustin Miller: [00:29:07] And I apologize to everyone listening in. I don't have quite a voice today. I've lost it because of the allergies. And I was telling him before I got on, I had to take a shower and take some water, some medicine and whatnot to make sure we got here on time. And I wanted to make sure we had a good conversation. And I think we did.

Russ Johns: [00:29:21] Yes, it was wonderful. Everyone, anyone anywhere, for now or into the future, if you found this interesting or you found it fascinating and want to share it, please do. Subscribe, all those shenanigans that social media requires and the algorithms, et cetera, et cetera. And do show up, do be part of the pirate community because we're here, we're doing this every day. And I just want to encourage you to think about how you can make a difference in the world where you can go with it because  #kindnessiscool, #smilesarefree and I want you to #enjoytheday.

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