‘Service is love in action.’
Tim Ash is an author, keynote speaker, and authority in digital marketing. He co-founded his own digital agency, Site Tuners, in 2001 and was an early adopter of website conversion rate optimization.
‘Once you know what your values are, then you only pay attention to things that are in alignment with those values.’
In this episode, we don’t only talk about digital marketing, landing page optimization, and other SEO topics — subjects Tim is well-versed in. Tim also shares unique insights through the evolutionary psychology perspective, along with his entrepreneurial journey.
Connect with Tim on the following platforms:
Personal website: https://timash.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timash
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tim_ash
John: Thank you for tuning in to Local SEO Today. Don’t forget to subscribe and share this episode. Joining me today is Tim Ash, he’s an author, keynote speaker, and authority in digital marketing. Tim co-founded his own digital agency SiteTuners in 2001 and was an early adopter of website conversion rate optimization. Thanks for joining me today, Tim.
Tim: Hey, John. It’s great to be with you.
John: I know you’re a West Coaster out in San Diego. I love the weather there, I’ve been there once and I do intend to go back.
Tim: Yeah, well the downside is we have high housing prices and low pay but we joke that we get paid in sunshine dollars so that makes up for it.
John: Well, the amount that I spent on Vitamin D, you get it for free. Every time you go for a 30-minutes walk so there’s a lot of pros to where you’re living and I’m definitely going to come back and probably reach out to you when I do.
Tim: You’re fantastic. Yeah, I can’t complain. I walk about a mile to the cliffs here by the ocean every day to do my tai chi so it’s a pretty good life.
John: Amazing. Well, if you don’t mind sharing with the audience members. You know, what do people know you buy a little bit about your journey back story and what got you into being your own entrepreneur?
Tim: Well, I’ll start at the very beginning. I was born in Moscow Russia, actually during the Soviet Union days back in before when it was still the communist empire and we emigrated to the US. When I was eight years old I had younger brothers five and my parents and they decided to come to America so we’d have a better life and it was very early days. Very few people were allowed to even leave the country and so we ended up through an uncle. My dad who had settled in the US living in Albany, New York, and then Ann Arbor Michigan, and then Cherry Hill, New Jersey which is near Philadelphia that’s where I went to high school. Basically, my parents always picked small towns of about a hundred thousand people that had excellent public school systems. That was kind of their criteria and then I ended up getting a full UC Regents Academic Scholarship on the beach in LA Jolla California and I never left San Diego, so that’s how I got here.
John: That’s amazing. So, if you don’t mind sharing like your parents did they have businesses prior like, why America and why did they leave Soviet?
Tim: Yeah, that’s a great question. My dad was ethnically Jewish and there’s a lot of discrimination back then and still to this day against Jews in Russia and so this was when there was political pressure being applied by the west to start letting Jews out ostensibly to go to Israel but once you leave the Soviet Union and we were stripped of our citizenship and we were stateless there were four countries that were taking Soviet Jewish refugees of course Israel and then the Canada the US and Australia were the others. And so, we were in Rome Italy, and deciding where to go and my dad happened to do this transatlantic. This is an early 70’s collect call to his uncle’s apartment who was a success in the US and had businesses. And so, he called his madison avenue apartment in New York, and of course like all good Jews uncle Saul was wintering in Florida so they actually forwarded that collect call to Florida got a hold of him. And my dad’s like “Hey, Uncle Saul it’s Sasha and we’re in Rome and we’re thinking of going to Canada and my dad or my great uncle said “No, Sasha you come to America I’ll take care of everything.” and so it was like that five-minute phone call and the fact that he happened to catch him on the phone and that determined the country we ended up in. I could have just as easily been a Canadian.
John: Well, you could have been a neighbor of mine right like you never know.
Tim: That’s right.
John: That’s awesome to hear, and then growing up. How old were you when that all transpired?
Tim: That I was eight years old so I basically finished elementary school in New York State. You know my parents just stuck us in public school we’re fluent within three months. I think as younger kids, I don’t believe in bilingual education for younger kids. I think you should just be thrown into the middle of it and you’re very flexible and can learn the language. Then junior high school in Michigan and basically high school in New Jersey near Philadelphia so the focus was always you know the immigrant parents. You may be familiar with this. It’s kind of, like you just get straight as that’s your job everything else will take care of you know that was the attitude.
John: That’s amazing. So, going into LA or California you mentioned.
Tim: Yeah, San Diego
John: Yes, San Diego. Your undergrad or college university? What did you study and why?
Tim: Well, I actually wanted to do visual art because I was a pretty good artist. I did painting and drawing and my parents again were very practical immigrants. And they’re like, okay just do something in engineering and you’ll have a job for life. I got to UC San Diego which is a fantastic school but it’s very experimental in a lot of way so their visual art department was actually into video. This was back in the 80’s and performance art was not the kind of traditional stuff I was looking for. So, I ended up since I was going to be there for five years. Anyway, to finish my Computer Engineering Degree, I’m getting a double major in cognitive science and computer engineering. I stayed there for graduate school for seven years, almost finished my PhD in what would now be called machine learning or artificial intelligence neural networks is what I studied. So basically, how to teach computers by example. And we were working on the algorithm side. How to actually teach them what we didn’t have back in the day were large data sets to train on. Obviously, when the internet comes along that all changed because now we’re drowning in data and that’s why artificial intelligence is really taking off, but I had an itchy feet and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in school. So I’d been working full time through graduate school. I decided just to start my own company in 1995 so I quit seven years into the PhD program. Gave my mom a heart attack but that’s another story and then that was the launch of my entrepreneurial journey. I took 2,000 square feet of office space, got a phone line, a computer and a desk and an internet connection, and then I called up my girlfriend and said “Hey, guess what I’m doing right now I’m running around my office naked because I can.” and so that was kind of the start of it all.
John: Amazing! So, a couple questions. Did you have siblings or were you the only child?
Tim: Oh no, I had a younger brother. He was three years younger than me and he followed me out to UCSD and then eventually moved to the bay area.
John: Amazing, and then regarding your starting of that new entrepreneurial journey. What kind of business was it when you first started? And how did you discover that’s something you wanted to pursue and grow into?
Tim: Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever read Gerber’s book the E-Myth the Entrepreneurial Myth looks like it’s on your bookshelf right there. So, you’re familiar so basically, it was that fit of entrepreneurial insanity where you say “Hey, I can do this a lot better than the people. I’m working for and I don’t need them so I’m just going to do my own thing.” I’ve worked at big companies NCR and SAIC which is a big defense contractor and I just saw that just the soul-killing environment and the culture of big companies. I said this is not for me so I just decided this is “Early.com” days 95 to start essentially a dot-com incubator so we designed database-driven websites for people but we’re doing it kind of, in the raw internet marketing that sort of thing and worked with some huge companies and then refocused on something measurable. Which was pay-per-click campaigns driving paid traffic to websites we were early days into that as well I worked with a company called “Goto.com” which was later renamed overture which became yahoo search but we created one of the first bidding tools to manage how much you want to pay for each keyword and run automated campaigns. So, once we did that what I saw was we were managing campaigns for clients you know we can do this for ourselves so that’s when the affiliate marketing space was just blowing up and so we decided to spend our own money to drive traffic to other people’s websites and just get paid a commission and we were making money on the spread and that worked really well. And then I realized you know the scale of the money we’re making depended on how crappy their landing pages were, so we said “Hey, let us fix your landing pages we’ll all make a lot more money.” and that’s what got me into what’s now called conversion rate optimization and then so we jettisoned all of the pay-per-click stuff and the affiliate marketing and just became SiteTuners which was a conversion rate optimization agency to make websites more efficient basically.
John: Amazing. So how long, like I know you mentioned you started in 95 was that a first business? And then was it successful or did you pivot to change the brand or has it always been SiteTuner?
Tim: Well, it was the holding company had a different name but we were branded as SiteTuners around 2000 – 2001 so it took about five years to find our footing in the space and what we really wanted to do. And along the way, I wrote a couple of best-selling books on landing page optimization a lot of people consider this the bible in the field and it was translated into six languages and sold 50,000 copies which is really good for an advanced business marketing book and I also started I’m very proud of the conversion conference which was the first conference about the topic in the field and it’s now called digital growth. Unleash still happens every year in the US, UK, and Germany so I ran that for 10 years alongside SiteTuners and we worked with some very cool companies. We work with Google, Facebook, Nestle Expedia you name it and we’ve documented 1.2 billion dollars in value for our clients while I ran SiteTuners.
John: That’s amazing. So, over the course of 20 plus years now. Are you still leading it? Are you still a part-owner like how involved are you in the Business?
Tim: Well, I’m not involved in that business about two years ago. My mom had died three years ago and I decided that I really more stubborn than most people and I also work hard and I don’t give up on things and that could be a plus or a minus. And what I decided was that really running any kind of professional services firm wasn’t my highest and best use on the planet. You know you have client problems, you have employee problems and I thought I was becoming my own boss by running an agency but really what you do is if you run a professional services firm you hire your boss, your next boss, and your next boss. And basically, sort of like oh you got money let’s get married, and then you realize oh wait you have a really warped corporate culture or you can’t get things done for whatever reason. It’s like finding out your spouse is insane after you marry them and that’s not a lot of fun so I just said I don’t want to hire bosses anymore and I don’t want to run companies anymore. I just want to do what I do best so I think I was like said more stubborn than most, but when I started focusing on what my personality type was that’s when I made this shift to what I’m doing now.
John: What is it that you’re currently working on and passionate about?
Tim: Well, As I’d say it starts with personality so you’re probably familiar with some of these personality typing systems like Myers-Briggs I’m an ENFP which is the evangelist on disc. I’m high dominance, high influence like a lot of entrepreneurs players and that’s the initiator right someone who starts things on Enneagram. I’m a type seven which is basically like a visionary type person so they basically all say the same thing. I need to be future-focused and idea-driven and curious and I don’t like anything routine or boring or operational and so by honoring that. I was doing things in that direction already but I had to get rid of the anchors and the parking brake and everything else that wasn’t serving that, so I did a lot of public speaking. I’ve done that for a dozen years. I’ve keynoted over 200 conferences on four continents and with all his stages as big as 12,000 people and that’s a lot of fun writing books. I just finished a new LinkedIn Learning Course, an introduction to neuromarketing and starting a mastermind group based on neuromarketing techniques called primal brain marketing and so it’s about teaching and evangelizing. I still do digital marketing consulting but it’s in an advisory capacity. I’m not going to be writing reports or implementing anything, a little bit of Tim goes a long way so you just want to make sure that you talk to me if you want to do the right things it’s not about doing things right.
John: Gotcha! That’s amazing, and I think you know as you mature in your business in your life you come to realize where you want to be and what you want to do ultimately, right?
Tim: Yes.
John: And it seemed like you’ve lived such a fruitful life with so many different experiences and so many different brands and companies and people that you’ve already encountered. Stages that you’ve spoken at books that you’ve written like there’s so much that you have done right and given the world were their people that inspired you? Like, were there mentors and coaches and people that really stood out along the way?
Tim: My dad was a very inspirational figure for me. He died when I was about 25 still in graduate school but he left a deep in print on my world and I’ve always looked to older people for advice and I’ve done that formally. I was in a peer mentoring organization, one of them is called the entrepreneur organization EO. I was in that for several years and through that had contact with people in WPO (World Presidents Organization). I’ve always sought out people that were mentors and I think that’s one of the keys to life. In fact, in my latest book Unleash Your Primal Brain. I talk about how we made this evolutionary bet on spreading culture and that means that we have to be part of this chain. We not only have to learn from others we also have to give back at some point and pay it forward if you will, so we actually get prestige which is different from dominance. We get this psychic payoff by teaching what we know and I think that the world would kind of just come to a grinding halt if people didn’t do that so part of also what I’m doing right now is that attempt to give back and to help others and to educate and it was great making money for our clients but it’s not curing cancer. You know what I mean, it’s taking money from the consumer and putting it in the bank account of one company versus their competitor. You know, it’s just more efficient money extraction and I wanted to do something that said “Hey, this is the way the brain really works understanding yourself will help you in business and relationships and personal growth.” And that’s why I wrote Unleash Your Primal Brain, my motivation was really to give back to all eight billion people on the planet not just a few handful of clients.
John: That’s amazing, I love how you’re wording it as well as what you’re all about now in life right. I’ve always been that giver type coming from an immigrant family you know residing from Vietnam escaping the war in a very similar situation like my background. I was young though, I was born here in Canada but I kind of reflect and have a very good perspective of what they had to go through my parents to come here and they sacrificed them.
Tim: Huge sacrifice and I think I was probably even bigger dislocation. Actually, you know coming from Vietnam than it was for me from the Soviet Union.
John: We didn’t have a lot of support right? We didn’t have people to lend a helping hand, we were surviving, which is shelter and food so it’s a little bit different but I totally can relate. And this is what the world needs more of right people that can inspire, people that can give back to, people that are grateful and understand perspective wise like global perspective and not just in their neighborhood and community. I mean, understanding how many other people they can make an impact to and give and inspire and try to get them on their feet.
Tim: I think that this is a critical time in the history of the world. I believe history moves in cycles there’s a great book called the fourth turning that I read recently it talks about these 80 to 100-year cycles that are based on essentially the length of a human life and the role that the four generations that go through that cycle have within it and the dynamics they create and every 80-years there’s this fourth turning that’s a crisis. We’re in the middle of it right now and I think from a very high-level view what happens with society is that people get more individualistic and they’re out for themselves. It’s about individuals and then that leads to nothing working and that leads to a crisis often a war is sometimes really terrible wars. Only then do people start building community again and I think we’re at that cusp right now, where we have to start pulling towards the center and building community and connections and so get away from this notion. I think it’s more pervasive in the US of individual rights I have my right to be an idiot, you know everyone wants their rights without any of their responsibilities so I’m very much about that how do we weave things back together and how do we build bridges and not walls.
John: I love that, that’s why I started my own agency right like I wanted to help those community leader business owners small, medium-sized business owners strive because they are the foundation of small neighborhoods right. Like your local bread shop, you know local cheese shop or dentist right these guys support each other. They understand people on a personal level right, they want to provide and add value. You know provide for everyone, giving everyone a voice right, and adding value in their life so I love what you’re standing for and I’m in the works of writing a book as well as creating a community to help like-minded small business owners right get through the challenges of digital marketing.
Tim: Fantastic!
John: Because that’s what we need more of right like just people are out to help.
Tim: I think it needs to go beyond business. I mean, I think one of the silver linings of this pandemic has been that people are willing to get a little more real. You know, you see their kids crying in the background or the cat jumping on the desk during the zoom call and that’s fine, that’s just real. We’re always that way but instead, we wore these masks depending on what role we were playing and you know business is strictly professional that sort of thing. So for me, it’s really important to kind of activate my whole being, that’s one thing I’m not willing to do anymore is just leave part of myself on the shelf. I don’t care if I’m on a business call or I’m on this podcast with you. I’m basically, more of me more of the time and I think you know you need to have a sense of mission and purpose in life that’s been shown. Actually, it leads to much better life outcomes, health-wise about three years ago. I went through an initiation weekend through a fantastic organization called the mankind project and the weekend was called the new warrior training adventure. It’s essentially an attempt to recreate a sense of male initiation which has been missing from modern societies, to activate all parts of being a good human being and as part of that I came up with a mission statement and so mine is I co-create a world of peace, safety, and love through joyous expression and service.
John: Amazing!
Tim: I think that you know we all need a north star now, that can change it might be different tomorrow or I’ll need to adjust it or throw it out and start over but it’s kind of a north star for values. It’s very easy for me when I’m considering doing something whether I’m on a mission or not. Does it resonate with that mission statement if it doesn’t, I don’t do it, it’s that simple so I care more about less and less I guess is maybe the best way to put it.
John: You know I totally get it and a lot of people put a lot of pressure on themselves and it’s self-detrimental because they believe it’s the best way to go, right? A lot of people hide behind their self-true and you know I came to realize when I first started this company I was like “Look, I’m gonna be different. I’m gonna be me. I’m gonna help people that I want to help and choose to align with my values and morals and anyone else.” They can find other vendors people who resonate with my agency will have the same team, the same family kind of feel and we’re gonna give it all right, that’s what really helps us mold and differentiate from every other SEO agency out there because we didn’t come from SEO skill set we came from I need to give and help those small business owners which were the foundation of our Communities.
Tim: Yes and I think Mark Manson’s got a really good book out, you’ve probably heard of it, it’s called the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Basically, he talks about values and he says “Once you know what your values are, then you only pay attention to the things that are in alignment with those values and everything else you don’t have to spend any thought on.” So, again I think it’s a focusing thing and you put everything through the Prism of your Values and that helps you live a much more meaningful and richer life.
John: I think it also depends on where they’re at in the lifespan of your career right like people are typically more comfortable in their true self later in life right. They come to realize of what they’ve done. They have a lot of perspectives, they look back, they reflect right and they take time to actually do that because even now like I turned 40.
Tim: Congratulations, young man!
John: Thank you. In my 20’s and 30’s, I was always chasing either for a better job, earning more, that new car, that home… Whatever travel but then when I now look back and I’m like I’m so comfortable understanding where I’m at what’s important, who’s important to my life and what my true real mission, aspirations, and goals are in business in life and why I’m here. Yes, once you have that epiphany and realization in your life you have so much more free will and you don’t care anymore.
Tim: Yes and I think you’re absolutely right there. They’re natural stages actually they correspond I mentioned the mankind project so we talk about these four Jungian archetypes that constitute a complete man and so we start with the lover and that’s your emotions and the beauty in the world and the time associated with it is mourning and so on and then you enter the stage of the warrior that gets stuff done mode you were talking about is striving, no compromises, accountability, discipline, all of those things. And then you move into the magician stage where it’s all much more subtle it’s alchemical transformations, it’s not linear thinking, it’s not unit work per unit time, it’s about catalyzing things and then the final stage of life is the king or the sovereign and that’s about justice and setting the direction and blessing others. It’s no longer about doing it’s enabling others to come up and do it’s realizing you’re part of that chain of life so I agree, I think this changes, and the need to mentor and give back probably increases as you get older.
John: That’s what I’ve always been a big advocate of, not just giving but mentoring and contributing volunteering your time. Don’t value every single dollar in your time, I mean understand that if you have children you’re not going to charge people for your time like your child. You do it because of love right, the relationship, and also there’s people out there that need it. They might not have money right and that’s okay they just need support, they need someone that gets them, that guide them to a better state in their life right and it’s fine. It’s so much more rewarding when you’re able to help others that don’t expect it or are in dire need and you don’t expect anything in return because that’s not a part of what you’re all about.
Tim: That’s exactly right! I couldn’t have said it better myself.
John: So Tim, if you don’t mind sharing with us some of the biggest mistakes that you’ve had to endure during the 20-plus years of running your business and some of the challenges that you had to overcome. Maybe share with audience members are maybe starting off or been in business for a while what you could have done differently.
Tim: Well, I think one of the keys is picking the right business partner. It’s really hard to do it alone, there’s evidence that says you know two or three people starting a business much more likely to succeed, and what you have to do is fill in you just look at everything that needs to be done and then figure out what you want to do and are good at because as a single person you’re going to find a reason not to do the stuff you hate. So, you have to actually find complementary people to do the stuff you hate and that they love which is great for them too. I had a business partner who was much more operationally minded detail-oriented that’s not me and so when I handed off the finances to her that’s when the finances in my business finally stabilized. For example, another thing I’d say is don’t get personally invested in conflicts or dramas, we’ve had to on occasion get lawyers involved and I used to pay the lawyers and then also be really angry about these situations that were going on that I thought were unfair. Nowadays, I just let the lawyers do their thing and I don’t get angry anymore because anger as they say, is letting someone live rent-free in your head and I’m not willing to pay that extra price in addition to the hourly rates that I pay the lawyers. And another thing as I mentioned earlier is really aligning, what you do with who you are. Some people try to shore up their weaknesses I say double down on your strengths and get other people to come in and support roles and clean up the messes or whatever minimize the damage but go into your strengths and in my case it’s evangelism, it’s helping people, it’s communication so that’s where I’m gonna live and I’m not gonna do anything that doesn’t align with that, so that was a painful lesson. I’m good enough at a lot of things where I basically went against type if you will for many many years and now it’s all about just putting myself in situations where my best qualities are gonna shine.
John: I love those three examples. I mean I can totally relate like when you’re by yourself I bootstrapped, I kind of wanted to just help and try to figure things out. I learned a lesson to hire smart not just on skill set but more personality values. That was one of my biggest mistakes and then of course that stress, like when people hold on to other people, hold on to a lot of grudges and you get some lawyers involved. Let it go, going to be a lot of decisions that you’re gonna kind of reflect and figure out like you could have done things differently.
Tim: There’s another saying which is that “Anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” and it just doesn’t work that way.
John: I mean just letting go even like I have a little kid and you know he sometimes drives me nuts and I have to have the perspective of what he’s going through right.
Tim: Hey, wait till you get to the teenage years then you’ll really find out what drive you nuts really means.
John: People can’t relate right to the ones that don’t have children so, they don’t understand what’s going on and even themselves at that age, right? So you have to sit in their huge about what do they currently want and you know just understand different people have different reactions for certain things right. Different triggers so sit back, let things go, be less stressed, enjoy the moment, be present, take care of your health mentally and physically so that you have energy.
Tim: Self-care that’s one of the other things I talk about in my book Unleash Your Primal Brain, as I have a whole chapter on being more primal at the end and self-care is critical. By the way for me, that starts with sleep. Sleep it is really foundational there’s no form of life on earth that lives longer in a few days that doesn’t have some form of sleep so we think we can cheat it, we can basically stay up, scroll through our phone binge-watch another episode of something. And in reality, if you’re not getting seven to nine hours of sleep on a regular basis you’re less creative, you’re more paranoid, you misjudge people’s emotional reactions and you can’t learn. Bad things happened in fact I just read the New York Times today and there was a study that came out said “People that short-changed their sleep in middle age in their 50’s, have a 30 percent higher chance of getting dementia.” so just get the sleep. Do the self-care mindfulness stuff, good diet exercise is great but sleep is foundational.
John: That’s amazing. Great advice so as we end this I wanted to ask you. You being such a renowned speaker, Did you have training for that? Was it more about just being yourself? Being you know out there practice like what did you do to start getting on that circuit and do you still enjoy doing that.
Tim: Absolutely, I enjoy it. In fact, it was one of the most enjoyable things in my life. I’m an extrovert as you’ve probably gathered and I love being on stage especially live stages after a year off. I just had a keynote recently and it’s just so good to get that audience feedback because sitting on a zoom keynote no matter how big the audience is you’re getting nothing back. So for me, the fun part of speaking is the audience reaction seeing those light bulbs go off, getting that emotional response from that sort of thing. I basically learned myself, I basically, wasn’t shy I was the class clown back in the day and just popping off with stuff so that helps. But then there’s I went through different stages like I would fire hose people with information death by PowerPoint I call it you know just a bunch of bullet points, how much can I pack in. That was the wrong thing to do, then I figured out how to keep people’s attention and reset it I would throw books at them, money shower the audience with bills I’d throw up in the air. Whatever it took to get their attention, once I figured that out then I moved on to visual storytelling and my slide really changed and after that right now, I’m focusing on the performance aspects part of it. There’s a whole level of being, say a trained theater actor or something like that. Where you go on stage your body gestures, your tone of voice hitting your mark timing all of those things are really really important and you can’t fake that. To go from being a minus speaker to an a plus speaker that’s what I’m focusing on right now.
John: That’s amazing. I mean that’s expertise right, it’s a lot of practice, a lot of trial and error, a lot of listening to your audience members, and wanting to grow and get better. It seems like there’s pivotal moments in your life in this presentation world that want to keep going right.
Tim: You and I want to make the mistakes because if you get too comfortable you’re not leaning into your edge that’s a problem so sometimes I’ll just belly flop into the pool not intentionally, but then I go oh that hurt what can I learn from this and those are really important moments.
John: And that’s probably the next stage of my transition of trying to up-level to get more of an impact, right? Getting in front of more people at one time to elevate my exposure. Not just the books amplifying the message getting more visibility I would say, but just talking is getting more comfortable like I’ve been in sales all my life but it’s more about stepping outside my comfort zone that presentation. I started doing smaller speaking events like hundreds and thousands of people but not at ten thousand level or anything in that means to. I enjoy it like there’s a thrill, there’s a desire that I want to just perform and get better. And yes, that feedback is so rewarding when you get off that stage knowing that you made an impact.
Tim: Yes, it’s very rewarding and like you say it’s leverage. I mean when we think about legacy in the world it’s how many people did you reach, how deeply did you touch them. Those are all very important questions I think, in terms of how does living life and that’s why I wrote this latest book. Actually, Unleash Your Primal Brain demystifies how we think and why we act because as I mentioned you know where I was playing in the sandbox very comfortable for me in digital marketing. And I know what I’m doing there but I wanted to bring this to a much wider audience, so this book is really about what all 8 billion people on the planet have in common. So, retraces the evolutionary arc in a non-scientific way and says where do we pick up various parts of our brain and some stuff we share with very early life forms. Other stuff is uniquely and bizarrely human-like the spread of culture and how culture actually evolved us to be cooperative. So, it’s everything in between. I’m going to cover brain chemistry, memory learning, storytelling, and our cooperative natures. It’s kind of being human 101 and so I didn’t it wasn’t enough for me to play in that marketing sandbox. I wanted to say here understand yourself and that’s my legacy.
John: That’s amazing. I love your passion, I love your purpose. So, to end this off, is there any final words like, what do you want to be known as when you leave this planet? What kind of impact do you want to leave as your legacy? In terms of your brand, your name, when people think of Tim Ash, what do they want to think of?
Tim: Well, I think that ultimately it’s how I made them feel, and again I’ve made my mistakes in life and in the immortal words of Frank Sinatra. I did it my way, that’s probably what they’ll play at my funeral or I hope so. Anyway, I think it’s Maya Angelou’s said “People won’t remember what you said or what you did, they’ll remember how you made them feel.” and so that’s really the key for me and I think is just that having that joy and that service attitude. I like this phrase that service is love in action, so I just want to be of service.
John: That’s amazing. I mean I love your attitude, I love your joy, I love what you stand for and it resonates and that’s why you’re on the show right we get along.
Tim: Well, I thought it was because we’re both members of the streamlined haircut tribe but okay.
John: That as well, I’m working up to the entire hairline all the way through. I mean, it’s been my pleasure I really enjoyed this conversation, Tim. How can some of the listeners get a hold of you and get in touch with you if they have any questions?
Tim: Oh, that’s really easy. If you’re interested in my book and again it’s powerful for business relationships or personal growth go to “Primalbrain.com”. If you go there you can see the table of contents for the book and pick the free sample chapter of your choice and I’ll send it to you and that’s available in ebook as well as an audiobook narrated by me. It makes it a lot of fun and if you’re interested in my public speaking or digital marketing consulting you can find all of that at “Timash.com”.
John: Amazing. Well, thanks a lot Tim it was my pleasure to have you on the show and hopefully you had as much fun as I Did.
Tim: Oh. I certainly did John, it was a blast. Thank you.
John: Thank you.
