Joseph McCormack, Author, Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less – Interview

Joseph McCormack, Author of  Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less - Interview  

Invisible Mentor: Joseph McCormack, Author of  Brief: Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less
Company Name: The Brief Lab
Website: http://www.thebrieflab.com/joe-mccormack

 There are many nuggets of wisdom in Joe McCormack’s interview, but one of the things that resonated most for me, is that we can be more. As an invisible mentor, Joe recommends that we go deeper to understand more. What does that mean? To me it means that the learning never stops, and it is not just learning, it’s also applying the new learning to perform at a higher level. Do you understand all there is about your role? How can you delve deeper to gain new insights and become more valuable and marketable?

Part One: Introduction

Avil Beckford: In a couple of sentences, tell me a little bit about yourself.

Joseph McCormack: I am an entrepreneur. I started a business, a marketing agency about eight years ago that has been very successful, and I am a family man. I have been married for twenty two years and I live in suburban Chicago.

Avil Beckford: What’s a typical day like for you? 

Joseph McCormack: Typical day for me is a balancing act. I’ve got a lot of demands on me in my company. I’ve  got a lot of clients, I travel quite a bit and I’ve  got a big family. A typical day is trying to keep those two realities in harmony with each other, which they most always are, and making sure that everybody involved is happy. It is to balance the needs of everybody around me, to make sure that everybody has got what they need and are happy. I would describe that as a pretty typical day, whether I am at work or on the road.

Avil Beckford: Tell me about your big break and who gave it to you.

Joseph McCormack: My big break happened about eight years ago. I was working at a large agency before I started my company Sheffield. So this is in 2006, and I had the opportunity of giving a presentation to a group of Public Affairs Officers at the US Army in Washington DC. I was talking to them about my specialty, which is narrative messaging – story telling. So, the room was filled with people that are spokespeople for the Army, people that engage the media. I had the opportunity to talk to them about the topic of messaging and they were very super interested in the topic. One of the results of that presentation was that I was invited to go to an Army base in Bragg, North Carolina and be the media trainer for William Caldwell, the chief spokesperson for the US Army. That was a big break for me because at that point, I realized that I could play at the highest level, and I could give a person who is going to be engaging the media a lot insight and a lot of help. And they asked for me by name and that was a defining moment for me and my career.

Part Two: Career

Avil Beckford: How did mentors influence your life?

Joseph McCormack: There are three different people when I think about mentors, who influenced my life. The first is my father who passed away six years ago. He had a huge influence in my life in many regards. The second influence in my life is a guy that I worked for about fifteen years ago. He is a terrific guy, but his business was a huge failure. He had a very successful business, he mismanaged it, and it went bankrupt. I learned a lot from that terrific guy, but he didn’t see it coming, and he just mismanaged the success. The third mentor is a guy that I worked for about eight or nine years ago, who was very entrepreneurial and very successful. Those three people – my father, the entrepreneur who failed, and the entrepreneur who succeeded, I would look at as the three people that had the most impact on my life.

Avil Beckford: I want to probe a little further. You talked about your father and in fact many people I interview actually say that. How did he influence you?

Joseph McCormack: My dad influenced me in a lot of ways. Number one is he wasn’t a college graduate, he never went to college. He was the son of Irish immigrants; he lived a very humble life and was very hardworking. He taught me the value of working hard and setting goals. Though he didn’t go to college, he was one of the most well-read people I have ever been around. He had a voracious appetite for books. He was constantly reading, and probably had the equivalent of a few PhDs because he read so much in his life. But he grew up in a humble life.

I saw earlier on that he had an appetite for learning more, and working hard. That really was contagious, but at the same time, even though he was successful he was very humble. He was always focused on the family. I grew up with a big family. I had five sisters and three brothers. His focus was always with us – making us better people, making sure our Mom was happy. He was a really great dad and a very good role model. When he died, many people came to his funeral because he had touched so many people’s lives. He was a bigger than life kind of guy and he was very generous with his time and it was never about him. He was always focused on other people around him, and he gave everything to those around him and that made a huge impact on me.

Avil Beckford: What’s one core message you received from your mentors?

Joseph McCormack: I think that one of the core messages I received from them is to ‘keep working’. All those people were people that never became satisfied with what they had. My dad was always constantly working, the gentleman whose business ended up being a failure was a recovering drug addict, he was in Vietnam, he really recovered his life, and he turned his life around completely. The third man always said, “keep working – don’t stop” until you are done. These three mentors were constantly going and working to do more and to be more.

Avil Beckford: An invisible mentor is a unique leader you can learn from by observing them from a distance. In that capacity, what is one piece of advice that you would give to others?

Joseph McCormack: The piece of advice I would give people, is actually a saying I learnt from my dad, which I am just beginning to understand. There are depths of understanding you have, no matter what you are doing. There is one type of person who thinks they understand and the other type of person is a person who is just beginning to understand. You can always go deeper in your profession, in your family and when you have that sense of “there is always more to discover, there is always more to understand” you can always go deeper. The people who are self-satisfied stopped, but the people that are not they keep on going. They always want to understand more, they always feel like they are just still skimming the surface and that knowledge goes deeper. I think that would be the difference, that you don’t arrive, you are always in the process, always pursuing a deeper understanding of whatever it is that you are doing in your career, in your job, your family or a problem – you don’t come and solve it and you are done. I think that would be the biggest suggestion.

 Avil Beckford: Looking at your career and where you are right now, what would you say are the five major steps you took to get there?

Joseph McCormack: When I look at my career and the steps I took, the overall learning in this process is to be open to the possibility. Along the way, surround yourself with successful people, learning from failures, studying and becoming better at your craft, challenging yourself even more – the biggest one of all is to be open to the possibility.

I think a lot of people when they look at their lives, they have it all figured out in that  a lot times when you are open to the possibilities, new opportunities, new things come, and you have to see them, you have to be open to them. People have it all figured out, when it changes a little bit, with their career, when there is a setback or their circumstances might be different, or it’s not exactly the way they thought it was going to be, they are not open to it, so they don’t see the possibility, and it just passes them by. I think that to be open to the possibility of anything in your life is the characteristic that I have learnt over time is – it’s never going to be quite the way I thought it was going to be – it could be better. Even when I was in college, I remember being around students that had their whole life planned out, “This is what I am doing in the first five years and the second five years.” When I look back at my life, and the things that I have made, I have always seen that there are things that I have been open to that came to me that I never saw coming and they were much better than I thought my plan laid out.

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Author Bio: Avil Beckford, an expert interviewer, entrepreneur and published author is passionate about books and professional development, and that’s why she founded The Invisible Mentor and the Virtual Literary World Tour to give you your ideal mentors virtually in the palm of your hands by offering book reviews and book summaries, biographies of wise people and interviews of successful people.

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