Shama Hyder:
See, I don’t think the world belongs to generalists or specialists. I think the world belongs to cross pollinators. People who can take two, sometimes very different, areas and combine them to do amazing work. And this is where I think you see some people who exceed and excel in their chosen fields. So think about it this way. Someone who is a great writer. Great, there’s lots of great writers. Now what if they had a background in criminal psychology? Now you’re combining criminal psychology with great writing and you elevate whatever they’re writing about criminal fiction, crime fiction. Now their books, their writing is going to stand head and shoulders above someone who might just be a good writer, but doesn’t have that background, that can’t pull from that. So many other ways you see this. Think about people who are good chefs or what’s the difference between a good chef and a great chef? A great chef might actually study art.
Shama Hyder:
They might have a background in art history, where they pull from art and they merge that with their cooking. Or cooking in molecular chemistry, wow, very different things. But in many ways similar, right? How do you create a new, authentic, amazing taste? Well, a good start would be to understand well, chemistry and how certain things go together, certain flavor profiles might go together. For me, starting Zen Media, starting my company, I’ve always known my strengths, which were communication and my passion, technology. What I do today combines best of those worlds. So when we help clients to get their messages out there, it’s not just because I have a masters in communications. It’s because I was able to use that master’s in communication and merge it with the world of technology. I’m was talking about social media before social media was a thing. When I wrote The Zen Of Social Media Marketing, hold on, I’ll grab it for you right here.
Shama Hyder:
Here it is. Which I have it on my desk. So when I wrote The Zen Of Social Media Marketing, it was one of the first books on the topic. There really weren’t any, and now you can see it’s in its fourth edition. It’s used as a textbook in a lot of colleges and college classes and so forth. My second book Momentum, also handy enough right here. Part of the reason why I’ve had the success I’ve had as an entrepreneur and why I love sharing this, is because I think I’ve been able to cross pollinate really well. And even when I started my company, a lot of people said, “Well, you should pick one industry and just stick to it.” But I didn’t want to do that because I felt like where we got our best work, where we did our best work, was finding an industry that was doing really well, creative stuff, and then applying that to our client in a different industry, and then seeing how that success steamrolled, because no one else was doing that in that industry.
