Jim Marous on defining yourself, ahas from unstructured dialogue, mutually beneficial learning, and the excitement of what you don’t know

“If somebody asks me to write about what’s not in my field, I push it out. I may know about it, I may feel comfortable about it. But at the end of the day, I need to make it so that my audience is defined and my information perspective is defined. Otherwise, thriving on overload, I would have been buried by overload.”

– Jim Marous

About Jim Marous

Jim Marous is the publisher of the Digital Banking Report, co-publisher of The Financial Brand and host of the Banking Transformed Podcast. He has been named as one of the most influential people in banking, a sought-after keynote speaker, and is regularly featured in leading media such as CNBC, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, The Financial Times, and The Economist.

Websites:

Jim Marous

The Financial Brand

Digital Banking Report

LinkedIn: Jim Marous

Facebook: Jim Marous

Instagram: Jim Marous

Twitter: Jim Marous

What you will learn

• Why generosity with your insights builds your brand (02:20)
• How to start building your niche expertise (05:13)
• Why a process for a steady flow of content is vital (09:51)
• Why you owe it to your audience to look at alternative perspectives (14:10)
• What does it mean to build a framework? (20:14)
• Why we need to speed up our learning and execution (23:27)
• Why human interaction is essential to mental models and synthesis (24:40)
• Why you need a daily routine for information processing (28:14)

Episode resources

• Fintech

Transcript

Ross Dawn: Jim, it’s awesome to have you on the show.

Jim Marous: Hey, great to be on it.

Ross: Throughout your career, you have been on the edge of change and seen the transformation, how do you do it, Jim?

Jim: It’s interesting. A little historical reference here, I started in the banking industry over 40 years ago as a retail banker within a management training program right out of university. During my entire career, I went from being a banker to selling to banks for 25 years, and the last 12-13 years have been focused on communicating about the banking industry. But the whole background on what I was interested in throughout my career was in trying to stay ahead of what was going on, and continually learn in the process of doing what I was doing. The aha moment maybe came when I was 35, which is still over a decade ago. I was worried about becoming irrelevant. I figured out then, that the best way to not be irrelevant was to communicate to all my prospects in the universe as a whole; here’s what I see happening in banking, and here’s my interpretation of that.

I started building a voice and the voice was really about I want to share what I know and share with everybody but as soon as I shared it, I emptied my bucket and had to fill it again. It was a way to not only learn but was a way to show that I am on the front edge of what is going on in banking. It just so happened 14 years ago, that was also really the beginning of social media, I realised quickly that Twitter and LinkedIn really provided me with the opportunity to broadcast that I was doing these things. I very quickly gained a fairly large following back then on the blog. I then joined a bigger organisation that uses communication in articles called The Financial