People I’m Thankful For This Year

It’s Thanksgiving and besides deep frying a turkey, I wanted to give thanks to the people who made My Food Job Rocks what it is today.

Doing projects alone sucks. Whenever I’ve done projects where it was just me, I’ve failed terribly. Financially, emotionally, etc.

This project was the first one I realized that to feel good about yourself, you need to build a supporting community.

I’ve achieved that this year. People love the podcast, the blog articles, my snarky linkedin statuses. It feels awesome.

Below are the list of people who have supported me and have kept me sane. My Food Job Rocks would not be the same without your support.

Nicole Gallace

My Food Job Rocks was created because of an article that Nicole wrote. At the time, Foodgrads was also barely about to walk. My Food Job Rocks was originally on the Foodgrads site but eventually move to its own site. We had a mutual agreement that the podcast would “leave the mother’s nest”.

Nicole and I kept in touch. Through good times and bad times, we talked about our struggles early in the morning right before I got to work. Once in a while, we send each other info. Nicole has sent some awesome guests,  I send a lot of marketing articles.

We eventually worked out a very awesome symbiotic relationship between Foodgrads and My Food Job Rocks! Which essentially is cross promoting everything we do. She shares good My Food Job Rocks! media and I sponsor Foodgrads every show. It’s worked out very well for all of us.

I am so impressed with Foodgrads right now. It’s growing at a tremendous pace and Nicole is going all-in on this platform. In terms of recruitment based companies, this is the only platform which takes good-hearted contributors and helps her build a community.

Foodgrads is just starting and I am so excited to see what will happen in the future.

Thom King and The ICON Foods Team

Lisa Sheridan emailed my coworker Ashley and told her about my podcast. At the time, I was scared to talk about the podcast so things got interesting.

In terms of advocacy, Lisa, Ethan, and Thom King have been supporting the podcast so much, their whole office is on board. This made me so happy to see a whole company listening to the podcast.

I wanted to interview Lisa, but I got the CEO Thom King instead. Thom blew me away with his interview. Him and I follow the same wavelength, which some will argue, is called the growth mindset and a community focused attitude. That’s why I loved Thom’s interview.

At IFT17, Thom invited me up to his suite and I chatted with him and Lisa. He then offered to sponsor the podcast and it’s been helping a lot with the maintenance of the whole thing.

ICON foods is also growing super fast. Their new facility just passed an important audit and they are busy! I can’t wait what’s going to happen next.

Veronica Hislop

I challenge people who want to write articles for My Food Job Rocks and say that they must post every week and have 3 articles as backup. Because it’s a good habit. Most people won’t even write 3 articles.

The only person who’s been successful in this is Veronica Hislop, who blew away my expectation by posting quality articles about the flavors in food. She is currently up to article 33.

Not only that, but she is crushing it with Foodgrads right now being an ambassador and helping with Youtube Videos. Oh, did I mention she’s a student?

A new theory of 10,000 hours or practice makes you an expert is now about doing deliberate practice. Boring, tiring, non-monetary practice.

Those who succeed in this, become experts. They may not be experts now, but isn’t it nice to watch them grow? Watch out for Veronica.

Taryn Yee

Taryn has been like a sister to me ever since college and has been my best emotional support person.

She does a lot of the tracking stuff for My Food Job Rocks. Especially contacting guests before their episode launches.

Every week, we talk a little on Google hangouts. She always asks “how’s your day buddy?” and we talk back and forth.

Recently, she had to leave her current job and was really stressed out about it.

I connected her with another podcast guest on the show who was leaving for LA and had to give up her job in the Bay.

Every part of the process, we talked about stuff. It was great bouncing situations back and forth with her. Needless to say, Taryn got the job right before they had to lay off a bunch of people at her old company.

David Despain

David is an employee at Isagenix. Like the Director of Science Communication or something. I actually met him before joining Isagenix at a Cactus IFT event and he interviewed me during my hiring process.

Over time, we’ve become really good friends and awesome work collaborators. We’re in the same department, and he’s been a great idea wall for innovative ideas in both the R+D department, and supporting me in IFT.

One day during lunch, I was complaining about doing interviews at lunch. I told David that I was interviewing at the café down south and the music or the gardeners just kept on being such an annoying thing to edit.

Immediately, he offered his house, which was 5 minutes away from the building. I could go into his house and use his office to bust out a lunch interview. Heck, I’ve even used his patio outside to do interviews!

Now that’s trust: letting an employee into his house just to lock himself in his home office and do an interview.

Thank you David, you’ve eliminated such a pain point for me. And also thanks for the lunches.

The CSO of Isagenix

You can easily use linkedin search on him, so go ahead.

Dr. K and I have office hours once or twice a week to just talk. Most of the time, I pick his brain, other times, I use him as a direct line of access to discuss problems I’ve observed.

In essence, he is a mentor to me. In exchange, I have to work my ass off.

Dr. K has an interesting sense of humor that’s hard to read to the point where it can be off-putting to some. This makes it a challenge yet an adventure promoting banter with him. Apparently, I do well.

I tell Dr. K pretty much everything. Even this podcast. He’s not a regular listener, but he knows what I’m doing is above and beyond the average person and that’s what is really important here.

Having such a high level person be interested in your side project is the reason why I love my job.

Dr. K can be described as the ideal leader and showcases it through not only getting stuff done, but having the ability to empower people to get stuff done.

A lot of corporate life can choke out A-players because of the bureaucracy and the gunk that fills the corporate hierarchy. Dr. K is well known to elevate those who work hard to be in a position of authority by using his authority as leverage.

Without his ability to “clear the path”, I would have never gotten to go travel the United States, be a part of game-changing meetings such as commercialization and product marketing, and speak in front of the top executives in the company.

Oh, and how did I get so close to Dr. K? He heard I was good at making bars so we flew to Canada to talk to a promising business partner and everything went to crap. Even though we failed, I never gave up on that project. We succeeded with a product, yes, but it was the messiest, most political corporate battle I’ve been involved with. I made a lot of enemies, who now respect me. But that’s a story for another time. But the moral is, good things happen to those who weather the storm. Don’t give up.

All the guests

All 93ish episodes of My Food Job Rocks! Would not have been possible without the guests I’ve contacted to share their stories. I’ve learned so much from every guest to the point where I can recite a lesson for each one. A fair amount of them grew to be my biggest advocates and I can’t thank them enough for sharing, liking, and commenting on my content.

Big shout out to Kimber Lew, Ana Stevens, Cheryl Clements, Elliot Begoun, Shyamoli Gramopadhye, Lin Carson, Rachelle Boucher for commenting and contributing. You guys are so awesome!

All the listeners

More than 2000 people a month listen to my voice.  More than 2000 people a month have viewed the My Food Job Rocks! website. Some might find these numbers lame, some might not. I’m really happy people like what I say. It can be difficult at times to post things from the heart. Thank you for listening to me.

Whether you were here from episode 1 or episode 90, expect some awesome things coming through the pipeline. I really want this to be a resource to help people in the food industry become the best they can be.

Again, big shout out to some amazing contributors such as Victoria Prazo Uzitas, Austin Bouck, Lisa Sheridan, Rachel Zemser, Ana Rinck, and Kenny Strine just to name a few. There are so many others now who are contributing to the discussion. And I can’t wait for more.

Have a great Thanksgiving