Chris:
Paths are never a straight line, but if you embrace the windy road, you’ll eventually find your way. Join us.
Chris:
Another episode of the Get Overit Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Christopher Fasano. Thank you for joining us for another episode. Before we begin, just a reminder, the quickest way to get new episodes of the Get Overit Podcast is to subscribe to your favorite pod player, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, that way the new episodes will push automatically to your phone, you won’t have to go out looking for them. We also do video recordings of this show, so you can find that on YouTube. Give a subscribe if you prefer to watch in video format. But again, please leave us a review, make sure you subscribe, and thank you for joining us.
Chris:
So today’s guest on the Get Overit Podcast is Dan O’Leary. Dan O’Leary is a senior SEO specialist here at Overit. And these shows, for me, when I get to talk to people that I work with at Overit, are really fun, because I don’t really know a lot of my colleagues on a personal level, right? You work with them together, you know things about them, but it’s good to find out about their journey, where they came from, so we’re going to do that today with Dan O’Leary. Dan, welcome to the show, man.
Dan:
Thanks for having us, Chris.
Chris:
So, all right this is fun, like I just said, because I know you now for two to three years, but I only know you to what I know you of.
Dan:
Professionally.
Chris:
And so… Right. And I know some things. I know you have kids, I know you’re married, I know these things. But this is a good opportunity to get to not just know you more personally, but you have a journey and your journey is very similar to mine in that where we both started, in terms of professional career journey, possibly in life, but in professional journey. Where you started wasn’t where you are now, and it’s fairly different. I mean, you… There’s common threads we’ll find, but I think it speaks to this general concept in life is that there are no straight line paths-
Dan:
Hardly ever.
Chris:
… to where you’re going. And so you have that circuitous path.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
So we’re going to talk about that today on the show. So first off, man, you’re from up in this area your whole life?
Dan:
No. So-
Chris:
Okay, now.
Dan:
This is one thing I think we definitely have in common. I am not a Capital Region native. So for those who are listening, we’re based out of Albany, New York. Capital Region is Albany, Schenectady, Troy, the kind of three cities. I’m originally… I was born in the Bronx, in New York City.
Chris:
That’s right. You’re a downstate guy.
Dan:
So I’m a downstate guy. My family is all… Both on my mother and father’s side, they’re Bronx natives. I’m a second-generation Irish American. My parents were the first kids born in America.
Chris:
Oh, okay.
Dan:
Their family’s from Ireland.
Chris:
Ireland.
Dan:
So yeah. So I’m from the Bronx originally. When I was-
Chris:
So you… Before we go any further, you agree that the bagels downstate are better than the ones upstate?
Dan:
Absolutely.
Chris:
Okay. All right. That’s just for the record. Just putting it on the record. Okay.
Dan:
Yeah. No, I’m definitely a bagel snob. Pizza too.
Chris:
Same. Okay.
Dan:
A lot of the New York city classic food staples, yeah. They’re okay.
Chris:
I’m saying that because someone that we work with, another colleague here, I won’t say her name, Lisa Barone, said that there is no difference between bagels downstate and upstate and that’s just something… it’s a nostalgic thing in our minds.
Dan:
No.
Chris:
But I firmly disagree and would put that to the test any day.
Dan:
I had a decent bagel two weeks ago. It’s not nostalgia. It’s empirically better.
Chris:
Yeah, that’s a… All right. Good. All right. Now we got that. Sorry. So when did you leave the city?
Dan:
1990. So I was 10 years old basically.
Chris:
Okay.
Dan:
So right before middle school, I was in elementary school, my parents moved to Orange County, New York, which is still south of here. But coming from New York City-
Chris:
That’s considered upstate.
Dan:
… that was upstate.
Chris:
That’s considered upstate.
Dan:
Anything north of the Tappan Zee Bridge, Cuomo Bridge is, yeah-
Chris:
Is upstate.
Dan:
Yeah. It’s considered upstate. But now I’m up here-
Chris:
Did they go for work or they were just trying to get out of the city? Or…
Dan:
Both.
Chris:
Okay.
Dan:
But actually, no, not for work at all. My father actually continued to work in downtown Manhattan for the next 20 years. He took a bus down there every day.
Chris:
Wow.
Dan:
Took public transportation. Yeah. My father never had a driver’s license because he was a city guy. So many people in New York city don’t even own a vehicle, nevermind-
Chris:
Yeah, because they don’t want to. It’s like very proud.
Dan:
Exactly.
Chris:
I know.
Dan:
So he would take a bus in from… into town. My mother would drive him to the bus stop. He’d go in the morning. He’d just reverse the route and get back every night. And he did that for 20 years. But-
Chris:
Where in Orange County, by the way? What was the town?
Dan:
It’s a little town. I lived in a town outside of Montgomery. So Montgomery is between Newburgh and Middletown.
Chris:
Okay.
Dan:
If you’re going up the Thruway, it’s exit 17, effectively.
Chris:
But you did some New York… Did you New York City public school, elementary school then?
Dan:
Oh, absolutely. Yep. Yeah, yeah. I went PS 95 in the Bronx.
Chris:
And then you went to… you did middle school-
Dan:
In Orange County. And high school.
Chris:
All right.
Dan:
All right. So I lived there, and my family’s still down there. My sister still lives in Orange County. My father still lives in Orange County.
Chris:
Okay.
Dan:
But I came up here because of college. So I went to SUNY Albany my freshman year.
Chris:
Okay.
Dan:
And then I transferred to Union College, which is where I met my wife, where I graduated from.
Chris:
And you graduated when?
Dan:
2002 was my bachelor’s, and then I stayed for my masters and I got that in 2003.
Chris:
Okay. All right. So you-
Dan:
So and I’ve been in here ever since.
Chris:
Where… So you went to SUNY, and then you transferred to Union.
Dan:
Mm-hmm.
Chris:
Why that? You just thought it had a better opportunity? It was… You thought-
Dan:
So I was applying… I applied to both union and SUNY Albany coming out of high school, and I was accepted. I was given scholarships kind of financially to both, but with SUNY Albany, my tuition would’ve been entirely paid for, and the only thing I would’ve had to cover was room and board. So my parents at the time, we didn’t have a ton of money. I won’t say we were poor. Obviously, we’re able to like move out of New York City.
Chris:
Right. Right. But getting that kind of help helps.
Dan:
Yeah, exactly.
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
So for like a year it was like, well, maybe you go to SUNY. And also, Union’s a very small college. SUNY’s like a university
Chris:
Right. It’s like it’s… Right. It’s more of that liberal arts college field.
Dan:
Yeah. Yeah.
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
So I kind of… I went to SUNY Albany for a year. And I liked it, but, one, the architecture of the campus… I don’t know if the audience has ever seen it. It’s a campus that was, as I understand, originally designed the architect for like the Arizona desert, like where there is no wind, right? But we’re up here in Northeast New York… Northeast upstate New York-
Chris:
Where there’s wind.
Dan:
And like… Yeah. And the winters on that campus were brutal.
Chris:
[inaudible 00:06:07].
Dan:
I did one of them. Yeah, very windy to get from where you were and just didn’t really like it. And meanwhile, if you’ve ever seen like Union College, while it’s in the middle of Schenectady, which is a very urban city, the campus itself, it’s one of the most, well manicured-
Chris:
Yeah. It’s very nice. [inaudible 00:06:22].
Dan:
It has like a horticulture garden.
Chris:
It’s a good school.
Dan:
Yeah. It’s a very good school.
Chris:
Awesome sports too. They have like hockey…
Dan:
The hockey program is very, very well known there. It’s our only D1 program.
Chris:
Yeah. That’s right.
Dan:
All the other athletics are D3, but they’ve won that… basically the [inaudible 00:06:36] hockey championship.
Chris:
Oh, yeah. What’s that called?
Dan:
The Frozen Four.
Chris:
The Frozen Four.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
Sorry. Yeah, yeah.
Dan:
So they’ve won the Frozen Four in years past. So…
Chris:
So that was similar to actually my… similar experience. So I went… I started at Siena College, and I went to Siena, and I turned down a lot of other schools, because of the money. Because my thought pro… I wanted to go to medical school, and my thought was like, that’s going to cost me a whole bunch of money and most likely I’m not getting a scholarship to medical school.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
So let me save on the upfront. Because to me, I was like, college doesn’t really matter. I viewed it as like just a check box, which was actually very mature of me back as an 18 year old, now that I think about it. But that turned out to be not true, because I hated it so much. I went to Miami for the fun.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
So I thought I wanted it as a checkbox. Turns out I really wanted a real… a bigger school. But I went for initially for the scholarship. Luckily a lot of them transferred to Miami, but… So what did you go into college for, thinking like this is what I’m doing, this is what I like?
Dan:
So in high school, I was thinking science or engineering. I really enjoyed physics. I really enjoyed, as a teenager, even as a child really, astronomy and things like that. So I didn’t really kind of know, but I thought it may be like physics, astronomy, astrophysics-
Chris:
So you were a STEM guy. You…
Dan:
Yeah, exactly. I was president of the Science Honor Society in high school. But then my junior year of high school, I had a really fantastic English teacher. She was amazing. And I took the SATs, and I ended up getting a fairly high score on SATs, including on the verbal section. And she kind of was like you’re as equally talented as a reader and a writer, frankly, as you are… I know you like the math and science, but you could do that if you wanted.
Chris:
You could that too. Right.
Dan:
So I kind of really fell into this very, I want to say, romanticized notion of college. And it became all of a sudden like Dead Poets Society for me.
Chris:
Right. like-
Dan:
I want to study literature-
Chris:
You were going to be in intensive and whatever.
Dan:
Yeah, and write poems and… And so I eventually became an English and philosophy double major. By the time I was a senior, the double major was just a little too hard. I didn’t enjoy this one philosophy seminar. So literally like five or 10 credit short of the actual true double degree, I dropped philosophy entirely. It was a minor, I had enough credits by that point for it to be my minor.
Chris:
Right. Was the double major a requirement? Or you just did it?
Dan:
No, no. I just was really interested-
Chris:
Sometimes schools with philosophy and/or certain majors require a double major. Yeah.
Dan:
Yeah, no. It really was kind of, again, I couldn’t really pick which I liked either/or. When I was reading English literature, obviously, it’s mostly… it’s fiction. It’s not true, right?
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
It’s not… It obviously explores the world-
Chris:
Correct.
Dan:
… but it doesn’t explore it the way that a philosophy person would do it.
Chris:
Correct.
Dan:
So I kind of liked the straight, hardcore, philosophy classes: Plato, Socrates, logic, epistemology, metaphysics. But then sometimes in literature, it’s just like we are exploring these same topics, but it’s through the lens of a fictional character, right?
Chris:
[inaudible 00:09:33].
Dan:
But eventually, when you get really into it, hardcore philosophy-
Chris:
Yeah, it gets… I know. It gets real-
Dan:
… gets very difficult courses.
Chris:
… gets real difficult.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And see philosophy, for me, people… When you think about a philosophy major or going to school for philosophy, you get that immediate, knee-jerk reaction, like… And I remember taking a lot of philosophy. I remember trying to talk to my parents about philosophy, and their knee-jerk reaction from working people is what are you going to do with philosophy?
Dan:
Do with that, yeah.
Chris:
What I’ve learned about that, getting a doctorate in philosophy… Because PhDs are that. I don’t know if people… You’re in a subject area, but the degree, a PhD, is really a degree in thought. And it’s a philo… it’s learning how to philosophize about a subject that could be anything.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
Mine just happens to be in a neuroscience or biomedical science. But what I learn and appreciate about philosophy is that it really teaches you how to think.
Dan:
Absolutely.
Chris:
And like that… So when I… Out of the PhD now, people are like, oh, so you’re not doing neuroscience now. So what’d you go to school for? And I say to them, I’m like those years in that taught me how to think about things in a way that I would’ve never been able to. Maybe that’s strong, but I think about things in a much different way, being trained in that regard. Because when you get into philosophy, you can’t take it for face value. You really have to think about it. You have to reread it, possibly multiple times. You’re thinking it through. You’re referencing old stuff. You got to go into other people’s stuff and see how they drew their lines of logic. So it’s research, right? And it’s more than just philosophy, now that I think back on it. So I could see how someone in that, though, could use that later in life. Even in the situation where you are now, in numbers-
Dan:
Every day.
Chris:
… you have a thought process that’s different than a lot of other people here. And I’m wondering if you think you got that from that experience.
Dan:
Yeah, no. And even when I took philosophy, again, because I was… I really liked math and science. There are philosophy classes where it’s like very analytical, not just like pie in the sky, what’s the meaning of life?
Chris:
Right. This is a chair. Is it really a chair?
Dan:
Yeah. Is it really a chair? And… But when you take logic, like you learn Boolean logic, and then eventually it becomes basically like first-order logic as like Kurt Godel, the mathematician, kind of like laid it out.
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
And you can kind of understand how syllogisms work, how philosophical proofs, like in premise to conclusion, airtight.
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
We were talking about what are you going to do with philosophy degree? Most people who… if you don’t teach philosophy, the number one profession philosophers go into is law school.
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
They become lawyers.
Chris:
Correct.
Dan:
They become politicians. They become legislatures.
Chris:
Because it’s very logical thought.
Dan:
Exactly. And it’s really the ability to really dive deep into nuance, right?
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
To really delineate the shade of gray and to find out, well, gray is made up of black and whites, though, so where are those-
Chris:
Correct.
Dan:
… kind of things, right? And being tolerant with that kind of-
Chris:
Being tolerant with it is the most important thing. And I think that like-
Dan:
Yeah, of ambiguity.
Chris:
A bigger problem in our world today is that the thought process, the ability to philosophize and think about things, there’s a lot of people that don’t really want to engage in that, I find. I’m sitting… I’m the one that would sit with anyone for hours and just go deep into something and talk about its nuance and where… And a lot of people don’t want to do that nowadays. They like to take things for face value, and I feel like I don’t know… I know you have kids. I watch how my kid has to navigate this world today, and there is just not a lot of opportunity for kids to be pensive…
Dan:
No.
Chris:
… and to think and to question. And I… Concerns me as a human, as a father, just as somebody who appreciates and understands what you can get out of something if you really think through it rather than superficial glance. And I feel like our brains are being told-
Dan:
I feel like…
Chris:
… don’t go too deep anymore.
Dan:
We… Similar age. We just had more downtime as children. I grew up with a computer. My father was a computer programmer. I was one… the first kid in my class that I knew that even had a PC at home. But connecting to the internet in 1986, 88, 1990-
Chris:
Yeah. Got kicked off when somebody called.
Dan:
Yeah. Or if you’re even allowed on, because the cost to dial in-
Chris:
Yeah, the dial in. Yeah.
Dan:
… from a modem, it was like a modem back then, right, was just prohibitive. So yeah.
Chris:
You weren’t void of technology. It was just that we didn’t have the ability to reach into our pocket and be completely occupied.
Dan:
No. Yeah.
Chris:
I remember my mom being, I remember now, like go do something constructive, go figure something out. I remember her saying that to me all the time. And I remember hating hear-
Dan:
You would get kicked outside.
Chris:
I remember hating hearing that-
Dan:
They would lock the doors.
Chris:
And she’d be like, yeah-
Dan:
Stay outside.
Chris:
… get out of the house, come back for dinner. And I would go, and we didn’t know… We didn’t have anything on us, but we knew what time… We were like cats. We rolled in. We always showed up. Right?
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And that’s just… But it was a different lifestyle. And I hope that philosophy maintains and persists these subject areas. And I’m going to try to push my kid to get into that a little bit, because I feel like it does have benefit down the line. So I just want to make sure we go through, all the way through with the time limit.
Dan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s my academic background. Yeah.
Chris:
So that… So now you’re done with college.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
You go to grad school for…
Dan:
I went to grad school for teaching.
Chris:
Okay. So education.
Dan:
Education, yeah.
Chris:
Okay.
Dan:
Because again, it’s like, what are you going to do with-
Chris:
And which area was that?
Dan:
… an English degree? English.
Chris:
So… And was it like secondary ed or…
Dan:
Secondary education, yeah.
Chris:
Okay.
Dan:
So Union has a master’s program that offers actually one of the few full-year internships at a local high school. So even to this day, most people who do like student teaching, they’re studying to be teachers, they may go for six, 12, maybe even up to 18 weeks is their traditional, actual in-school teaching experience before they send them out to the wild, which I find to be crazy. Because I spent a full year doing it, and I wasn’t prepared to like-
Chris:
To be thrown into it.
Dan:
… to really do it, yeah. And in fact, after I finished up my master’s program, even though I had the full year internship, I was having difficulty actually finding a teaching job. So I needed to pay the bills, so I quickly just got a job, and then eventually I was kind of like I don’t-
Chris:
And that job is what?
Dan:
I worked in retail.
Chris:
Okay.
Dan:
So I eventually went into ret… Coming right out of college, I went into retail-
Chris:
Out of your master’s?
Dan:
Yeah. With a master’s. So I’m working at the mall in a store. I eventually got promoted to management, a key-holder, you kind of manage some people. And I did that for a few years because I knew that, fundamentally, the year that I spent teaching at a school kind of, I won’t say left a bad taste in my mouth, but it’s very eye-opening. Again, I mentioned like-
Chris:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dan:
… oh, I thought it was going to be like Dead Poets Society, right?
Chris:
Yeah. It wasn’t that.
Dan:
No, it’s not. And the turnover rate in teaching is very, very high.
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
Other than police officer or maybe air traffic controller, some really like high stress jobs, very few careers have… It’s like well over 50% will drop out and not do it anymore within their first five years. Well, I made that decision within year one.
Chris:
Yeah. Yeah.
Dan:
I still love English, and I still love teaching. I like… I love to teach and train and coach people, but what I found was like 30 14 year olds in an urban environment is not necessarily my cup of tea.
Chris:
That don’t work for me.
Dan:
It’s certainly a lot of more administrative and bureaucratic and kind of paperwork-oriented.
Chris:
Right. Right. It’s not being able to just freewheel teach in there.
Dan:
It’s not.
Chris:
It’s not that.
Dan:
And nor do you want that.
Chris:
No. No.
Dan:
I mean, again, it’s a very romanticized notion of what teaching is.
Chris:
At that level.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
At that level. Right.
Dan:
And those who can really do it, I have the utmost respect for them, those who put in the years, because I find, again, it takes five to 10 years to even really get good at teaching. So the realities are, if you have kids in schools, some of their teachers are going to be fundamentally better at the craft than others.
Chris:
Correct. Correct.
Dan:
Some of them, I think, have native-born talent to teach, but I don’t think… You have to acquire it on the job and experience and really be dedicated to your craft.
Chris:
Right. Right.
Dan:
Because there’s a lot of pitfalls in that profession. And that was one of the first eye-opening things for me is like, I’m no longer a child, I’m becoming a man, an adult, and it’s realizing you can like the subject matter of a job, but if you don’t like the actual day to day realities of the job-
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
… you’re going to be disappointed, and you’re not-
Chris:
Because it’s all-encompassing.
Dan:
Absolutely.
Chris:
And it’ll affect you-
Dan:
And they don’t really tell you that when you’re studying that in college.
Chris:
No. And it gets in your head, it affects your mind, and then you know what happens then, everything else suffers from that.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
I think… I’m married to an elementary school teacher.
Dan:
[inaudible 00:18:04].
Chris:
So I hear all about it. And I taught for the first almost… in my career, for five, six years. But-
Dan:
As like a TA? Or just-
Chris:
No. I was an assistant professor, and I was teaching co… I was teaching graduate students and some college. I picked up some college classes just to teach, because I found it to be a more fun crowd…
Dan:
That’s why I picked teaching back up.
Chris:
… college than… Right. Right.
Dan:
So later on I [inaudible 00:18:29]
Chris:
I taught at… I had an adjunct at Siena. I was teaching there for a little bit, but I just didn’t have the time anymore.
Dan:
Mm-hmm.
Chris:
But what I found was I don’t have patience for kids, like young kids.
Dan:
Yeah, that’s my thing.
Chris:
I don’t… That’s not my game. My… Where I really excel is I know… like grad students, I know that they want to be here. They’re here because they’ve chosen… They could have been done, but they’ve decided to continue their education. They’re adults, they’re in a different place in their life. And I can teach how I want, and you’re either going to pay attention or you’re not, but I don’t have to care. Because my job is less to get you through requirements and standardizations at that point in time.
Dan:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Chris:
You want to get a degree. It’s on you to put the effort in, and I am going to be a little more… I can be tough. I can speak to them like adults. I do much better in that regard. Teaching… I taught college labs, which was really fun, because that gave me-
Dan:
[inaudible 00:19:20].
Chris:
Yeah. And it gave me the opportunity to make science fun. Because science is fun, and in college, you can get real bitter with science, because a lot of kids… And people go in, they think it’s like I’m going to work at body, and it’s going to be human… But a lot of it’s like that hardcore biological stuff. Why are we learning about this? But it’s very fun.
Dan:
Organic chemistry.
Chris:
Correct. Orgo. [inaudible 00:19:39]. But the labs can be really fun. So I love to get kids excited about it. That was really fun for me. So I do love teaching, but there’s a type of kid-
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
… or person that I do better at. So then you’re in retail, and then where do you go from there?
Dan:
Retail. I get back into education, right, but now I’m teaching adult learners for the most part. So then I started… I got an opportunity to teach at a local college, and it was a two-year to four-year degree program. It was a technical school, ITT Tech. They no longer exist. They were kind of-
Chris:
I know ITT Tech. Yeah.
Dan:
They were caught up in a lot of the for-profit kind of predatory loan things. But the programs themselves were, depending on which location you were, fundamentally sound. So I started teaching writing, reading, right, and general education classes at that, and that’s what I found. Some of the students were like… they were traditional college age, but maybe a traditional college was not for them, right, for either academics or personality reasons. So I did teach some 18 to 20 year olds, but I taught just as many people who are like, well, I’m 40 to 50. My old job was like a truck driver, but now I want to be… I want to learn information technology. I want to work with network systems or what have you. Right?
Dan:
So I got… I’ve kind of renewed my passion. Again, it’s like, well, it was the realities of teaching in public schools at a certain age group. But really, again, your passion and enthusiasm for a subject shines through. So I started teaching again, and I learned just as much from that job as I did the first time that I kind of went through it. Because working with adult learners, yeah, they’re far more self-motivated in my experience, because they’re not just going, because they’re being told, oh, it’s something to check off a check box. When you make a decision fundamentally like, oh, I’m-
Chris:
I’m going to pay and go. Right.
Dan:
… a grown adult. I have my own bills and responsibilities. And many cases, they had their own kids. Some of their kids were college age-
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
… and they’re going back. And I’m like, again, hat tip to you because that’s a decision, if I were in your scenario, I don’t know if I could do that.
Chris:
Same.
Dan:
How many roles of the dice do you get in life?
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
I feel like I’ve already made quite a few of those. So I got back into teaching, and then, weirdly enough, one of my students was working for a digital marketing company based out of like Clifton Park, New York, and I was teaching him writing skills. And he was like the company that I work for, they’re always in need of copywriters. Since you’re teaching me to write-
Chris:
So that’s the… that was the bridge.
Dan:
… so you know how to write. So that was the bridge. So yeah. So the thing with ITT and really a lot of colleges these days, for-profit, private, public, they’re all driven by adjuncts, right?
Chris:
Yes.
Dan:
So adjunct scheduling-
Chris:
Another subject for another day, I feel like.
Dan:
The pay is lower-
Chris:
It’s like indentured servants.
Dan:
… it’s often… Yeah. It feels like you’re indenture servitude. And fundamentally, for me, it’s like I was kind of used to like the lower base of pay, which it made sense to me, but the unreliability of term-to-term, what your course load was going to be like, what classes you were going to be teaching, and even fundamentally, what days of the week, how many classes. I wanted… I didn’t have… At that time, I didn’t have like a family yet, but I had a wife, right? So it’s like we want to start a family. Well, it’s no way to have a family.
Chris:
Right. [inaudible 00:22:44].
Dan:
Ever… Literally every 12 to 15 weeks, I have to upend my life or schedule and get my wife to adjust to it. So it’s like I was looking for something a little bit more stable in terms of that. So I was like, well, let me try it.
Chris:
Right. The adjunct faculty is sort of like they’re dating you and they don’t want to commit to you.
Dan:
They don’t.
Chris:
But they really like you a lot because you’re good for them, and you’re good for their-
Dan:
Particularly the lower-level courses.
Chris:
Correct.
Dan:
It’s very cost effective.
Chris:
It’s great. It’s very cost effective. So there’s a good… They really like you, but they’re not willing to commit to you, and you know that they’re not really willing. That’s the basis of it.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And so you’re sort of stuck because you like it or you might think it’ll turn into something, that then they will commit to you. If I get in here, maybe I can get a position, because academic positions-
Dan:
Full-time or tenure, whatever it might be.
Chris:
You have to remember… Yeah, in academics, there are tenured faculty that never leave.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
So the openings there, unless they’re adding new salary lines, is very competitive.
Dan:
Which they very rarely are.
Chris:
They rarely do.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
So then that’s your bridge. So do you jump full-time? Or do you start doing some work there?
Dan:
So I jumped full time to doing the copywriting. So now I’m working at this internet marketing company. It’s 40 hours. It’s got benefits. Pay is actually pretty decent to start. I was very happy moving to there. But I kept actually teaching classes for at least another year or two.
Chris:
Okay. All right.
Dan:
But I cut down on the number of classes.
Chris:
Okay.
Dan:
I said like, I’ll do one a week or something like that, because I still really enjoyed teaching. But then eventually… Then not long after I got into internet marketing. By now I’m over 30, so I’m on my third career now by 30 years old, right. But my wife and I are purchasing a house. We have our first child, right? So I just was like it’s too much, so I’m not even… Even though the little bit of extra money’s nice, the amount of time and commitment it took-
Chris:
Right. [inaudible 00:24:34]
Dan:
… fundamentally wasn’t worth it.
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
So I, at that point, was like, all right, well, I guess now I’m all in-
Chris:
You’re [inaudible 00:24:39].
Dan:
… on digital marketing. And that actually ended up… And I’m still doing it to this day.
Chris:
So then you were in copy and writing. When did you start to transition to what you do now, which is SEO optimization, which for… We had Joe on the show, we were talking about it, a lot of SEO is writing or it’s, at its fundamental core with it, is content, right?
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And getting that.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
So it’s not so far disproportionate, like they’re separate.
Dan:
No.
Chris:
So what happened-
Dan:
Being a copywriter is a very natural jump to being an SEO specialist.
Chris:
Did they enlist… Did they ask you… Did they say, hey, we need you to write this with SEO in mind?
Dan:
Yes.
Chris:
Is that how it’s started?
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
Okay. All right.
Dan:
So the company I worked for, they offered some other services, but their fundamental business model was offering search engine optimization services. So SEO, for those in the audience who don’t know, it stands for search engine optimization, and basically, if you are a business and organization, you want to show up on Google, ideally page one of Google, right?
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
So Google search results are very competitive, and SEO is basically just kind of the art and the science, I think is how Joe Hall described it-
Chris:
Right. Right.
Dan:
… of how do you get on like page one, right?
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
So, yeah, I was first hired to write copy for an SEO company, but then, through a variety of things… Like departments and roles and responsibilities kind of changed there, and they had an opening to a new department that was growing, and they called it like reporting in analytics. So basically it was like we need you to look at client websites, kind of audit them, I learned how to like audit websites and business models, and find opportunities to improve their rankings in search engine. So that probably happened within my first year. I think I w… I probably spent nine to 12 months as just a copywriter, or in that department. But then they moved me over to this other one, and they’re like you’re going to learn and train kind of in this other department. I rapidly progressed, very quickly in terms of understanding the thing. I eventually grew to basically start mentoring kind of people in my own department underneath me, right? So as the department was growing, they’re kind of like, well, Dan, you’re a little bit older than your colleagues-
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
… and you’re over 30. Some of these people are still just coming out of college, they’re in their 20s, so you’re kind of a natural mentor, and you do have like this teaching background.
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
So we want you to kind of bring that to the table. So I kind of even developed, not real curriculum per se, but natural paths of development where we could, one, scale training new hires or new people in the department, right, but also kind of like standardize it. And that’s where the nuts and bolts of like getting a degree in education… Because they teach you fundamentally how to lesson plan. They’re like what you know, your love of the subject matter is kind of even the secondary most important thing to becoming a teacher, which is actually like, one, working with your students-
Chris:
Right. But-
Dan:
… but kind of also fundamentally unit and like lesson planning, which is, again, it’s not a thrill for most teachers to have to do that.
Chris:
No. No, it’s not.
Dan:
But it’s an utmost necessity. And those who put their passion of the subject before the lesson planning, I feel, are the ones who may… like myself, you’re in for a rude awakening, or you’re only going to get so far in your enjoyment of that career-
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
… if you can’t-
Chris:
If you can’t-
Dan:
… if you can’t really, again, tolerate or accept that the realities of the job require planning-
Chris:
Planning.
Dan:
… more than doing.
Chris:
What I found really interesting is that digital marketing is very scientific.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And that’s one of the reasons why I really love it so much and it was a natural progression for me. And it’s… I mean, the basis of digital marketing is you’re putting… you’re doing things and you’re getting a return of data. And then you’re looking at that data, you’re analyzing it, then you’re making drawing conclusion from it, and those conclusions drive hypotheses.
Dan:
Yes.
Chris:
You make a hypothesis, you design an experiment, you test it, you test the hypothesis, it works or it doesn’t, and you have to continue to iterate. It’s the same thing, and science is never static. Just because your hypothesis is correct or you improve your null hypothesis not correct doesn’t mean that you’re now done. It just means you’re one step closer in a puzzle of infinite pieces.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And you have to keep designing experiments. Digital marketing is just like that.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And I think some people would say-
Dan:
And like science, I feel like the… When you watch movies of science, it’s always the positive discovery, the positive breakthrough. Most of actual science is the negative discoveries-
Chris:
The negative.
Dan:
… the like this isn’t the case, right?
Chris:
Correct.
Dan:
And that’s-
Chris:
Because you [inaudible 00:28:53] can prove something true, but you can prove it wasn’t true.
Dan:
Falsifiable, right?
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
Which is something we kind of learned in philosophy-
Chris:
Correct.
Dan:
… Karl Popper, the Falsification Principle, right?
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
So it’s kind of like… Yeah, and digital marketing, I feel, is kind of like that. It’s a laboratory. We get literally millions of data points-
Chris:
So much data points.
Dan:
… every single week and month.
Chris:
Data it is not our problem.
Dan:
Yeah. No. There’s no shortage of it.
Chris:
Generating data is not the problem, but analyzing it and making sense of it is where the money is made.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And that’s really, really important, and that’s why it takes a certain thought process in that.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
So just all the pieces come together, right. It’s the writing, it’s the thought of the philosophy, the English, it’s the love of science.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And when you look at your… When you look at, for example, bringing it a full circle, your journey and you say, well, it wasn’t straight line, it wasn’t. But I can draw a straight line through those curves.
Dan:
Yeah. It’s a circuitous path. Yeah.
Chris:
It’s weird, but there is a common thread, always, through that.
Dan:
And I think when I finally kind of realized that… I’m probably now like three to five years into my digital marketing career, right. I’m in year 11, 12 now. But I think kind of… I got a few years into it, and I was like I think this is really going to stick, and it was because of that. Where it’s like nowadays, we interview even kids coming into college where it’s like they offer digital marketing tracks.
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
It’s not just marketing, it’s digital. And maybe even students come out and they kind of even have an understanding of like SEO. But even when I started, it’s like there was no degree. Maybe you could get a certificate from it, but it would be from like a third-party, private company. It would be basically their kind of like certification, right? People get Google AdWords or they might get Google Analytics certifications, but there is no fundamental one standardized curriculum for it. So it’s like, well, but there’s no shortage of demand for needs of good advice in SEO.
Chris:
No.
Dan:
Regardless of what your budget is, again, if you’re business or organization-
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
… that has a website, you need it to appear in Google results. So I’m finding that there’s no shortage of positions that now have SEO in the title, but it’s like where are you finding these people? And in my experience, it’s like find them from wherever you can find them.
Chris:
Wherever they are.
Dan:
Wherever they are. And you have to kind of meet them that way, because I think, again, it requires a kind of hybrid skillset, so it’s like you kind of need someone who’s like, again, maybe these days are those who are like I just learned that. But I find it’s like, no, you kind of need to find people who maybe did different things. Your previous guest, Joe Hall, he went for school for political science.
Chris:
Yeah, he did.
Dan:
Right?
Chris:
I know.
Dan:
Almost every SEO that I know professionally has a story like that, that they’re like I did this. Many of them ran their own businesses, had websites, had to teach themselves SEO-
Chris:
Yeah, and had to figure it out, yeah.
Dan:
… and then started offering that service. They stopped doing what they were even doing and went into SEO and started selling that services to their own colleagues or former competitors, because they were like I struggled with it so much, I knew that there was going to be a market opportunity for it. Right? But again, it’s kind of like there is no one career path-
Chris:
Career… Yeah.
Dan:
… I would say, these days-
Chris:
No.
Dan:
… for really anything in digital marketing, but particularly for something like search engine optimization. Because yeah, it’s like you need to definitely be able to read, write, report, make a presentation, right? I joke that like what do you do? And it’s like I spend most of my time in a document, a spreadsheet, or a slide deck, PowerPoint, right? I learned Microsoft office.
Chris:
Right. Right. But… Right.
Dan:
But to really use all three of those things particularly well and equally well is… it’s kind of part and parcel of the job description. And to wear those different hats and be able to jump from that… Got to talk to a client today.
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
So I got to brush my teeth and comb my hair.
Chris:
Yeah, yeah.
Dan:
But other days, I spend eight hours on my couch just diving into spreadsheets.
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
And it’s really wonky, analytical work.
Chris:
But again, it’s that broad… I think it’s that broader skillset has then helped with that, in that regard. We have limited time, and I want to get to this subject because we talked about it before. You’re a guy that’s in your head a lot, like me.
Dan:
Maybe too much. Yeah.
Chris:
I’m in my head, and I think it’s just… Some people are… their brains are wired that way. I’m wired to think. I’m in my head. And being in your head and in my being in my head can lead to overthought and being anxious, which I am and I know you and you suffer from it too.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
I have another show, a mental health show that I do this because I just… First of all, it helps me.
Dan:
To talk about it, yeah.
Chris:
It’s sort of like my therapy about it. And I’m concerned for kids nowadays in this world. So I talk about it there. But I’m curious to know, when did that… did you always have that bit of anxiety? Was it-
Dan:
So I-
Chris:
Was it a social’s anxiety? Tell me a little bit about what it is for you.
Dan:
For me, so I was not diagnosed with anxiety… And I also have depression. It’s more seasonal depression in nature, but it’s kind-
Chris:
Yeah, that happens here.
Dan:
Yeah. In the Northeast, right?
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
Yeah. But I wasn’t diagnosed till I was over 40. So again, I’m well into my career, I’m actually working it Overit, and I’m starting to like… It wasn’t any one thing, but I really started to just kind of like-
Chris:
Be down.
Dan:
Yeah. I felt like… Erode was the word I used with my therapist when I talked to her. The ocean is beating at a cliff, and you look at a cliff and it’s like it’s a rock. It’s a rock, right?
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
And it’s like, but even cliffs erode.
Chris:
Even the-
Dan:
But which one wave did it? Anyway, it’s just like I got to a point where it’s like I need to talk to someone and I need to take a step back from work. So I actually went part-time here at Overit for a little bit. Overit’s been very [inaudible 00:34:01]
Chris:
It’s actually when I just came on. Yeah, that’s right.
Dan:
Yeah. When we first met, you had just joined.
Chris:
Yep. That’s right. Yeah.
Dan:
And I was kind of stepping back a little bit. So I ended up talking to a therapist and she was like you basically have generalized anxiety, classic anxiety disorder. And you also have depression to a slight degree, mostly exacerbated by seasonal depression. So when I went, it was fall, winter, right? Miserable, right?
Chris:
Right. Yep.
Dan:
Now it’s spring, and I’m like-
Chris:
You’re like yeah… I know.
Dan:
There’s some pep in my step these days, right?
Chris:
Yep. Yep.
Dan:
But the anxiety… And it’s kind of like I got to a point where like you’re at work, but you can’t think about work. It’s so stressful, and you’re thinking about… When I was at work, I was actually thinking about my personal life and home life and how I was basically failing there. And then when I was at home, instead of connecting with my family-
Chris:
You were…
Dan:
I was think… My head was at work. And it’s just like why aren’t you working when you’re at work and being a father and a husband when you’re at home? And I got myself in a place where I got all twisted and combobulated, and I could not get out of it. I was not sleeping well. I wasn’t eating well. My wife basically is like you’re not present. You’re here, but you’re not present. And that really… It hurt to hear that, but it was fundamentally like true. So it’s like, you need to go talk to someone, you need to get like help. And then you start talking to people, and she’s like… For me, my anxiety’s… it’s very physical. And when we kind of realized the signs and symptoms of when an anxiety attack is creeping up on me, it’s largely tied to like a tightness in my chest-
Chris:
Yep. I get that too.
Dan:
… a pit in my stomach, like a nausea. And kind of through talking about it, I realized, oh, that nausea feeling, pit in my stomach, it goes back to when I was a child. There was-
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
There were certain-
Chris:
You can think back and be like I remember that.
Dan:
Yeah, that… And these are types of things, if you are a parent and your kid’s ever like I got a tummy ache, sometimes you’re just like… you just shake it off like yeah, kids get stomach aches. But if they kind of keep saying it, I think it’s important to kind of put the patterns to it.
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
Like what else-
Chris:
What’s like a trigger or a possible thing.
Dan:
What else was going on with- and now my son, again, because he demonstrates a little bit of these… now that I’m a little bit more familiar with like mental health just at a high level and the vocabulary and ability to kind of verbalize it, give it names, identify specific behaviors for what they are rather than just fundamentally feelings, right? But yeah, I probably, since I was an adolescent, have suffered a little bit from like some signs of anxiety, but it was-
Chris:
It gets worse as you get older.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
Because you become more afraid, in my experience. As you get older, you’re not as headstrong and willing to risk.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And as you get older and you have more responsibility-
Dan:
There’s more chips to lose on the table.
Chris:
Yeah, there’s more chips to lose, so you’re more risk averse. And if you’re in your head a lot and I’m thinking, should I bet 10, should I bet 20, that’s the worst time to be in your head. It’s a feel, it’s a thing, and like… So I get in my head, and I… It really… One of the things that I have learned to do that has really helped me, I’ve worked with a therapist on this, and I teach my kid this too, is to externalize anxiety. Meaning what I do is I put a name to it or I put an image to it. And I did this a lot during the pandemic, which got to me.
Dan:
Mm-hmm. Very stressful, yes.
Chris:
A really healthy person, but I was like with my kid and my family and the structure and how everything worked, I worked on ext… I would give it a name, like a really bizarre name or an image. And whenever I felt it coming on, I would talk to it. I’d be like… I’m making this up now, but here’s Bob. Bob’s here and Bob’s trying to get me, but screw Bob. And what that does is, which is really, really smart is it separate… A lot of times people that are anxious will say I’m anxious, and I hope that it doesn’t limit me. And you make it Chris is an anxious person, not Chris is somebody who experiences anxiety.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
Those are two different things.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And if you make it that’s who you are, it consumes you. So Bob externalized it from me. And now I can say like, sorry, Bob. I can’t deal with you today. And I can… My brain can actually that’s processing that better because I’m like, oh… And for kids, it’s great. Because kids can… Their imagery is better. They want to be more creative. If you’re feeling like you’re feeling afraid, I tell my kid, just tell Bob to go away. It’s… No, it’s fine. And it sounds crazy, but it’s a very good behavioral tactic that I learned in, and it has helped me get through some really tough times. Because you can’t be defined by that.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
Otherwise, you’ll go deeper and deeper and deeper into it.
Dan:
So I found, yeah, talking about what was causing me stress was helpful. But what I found, like you said, give it a name, that’s what I found to be the most breakthrough moment for me in terms of like my mental health journey. Right? That… And my therapist, when she’s talking to me, sometimes she would kind of go into the more like scientific. Again, you come from like a neuroscience background, so you know all about it. It’s like the way anxiety works, it’s like you have the flight or fight response, your amygdala, all this kind of emotional response. There are parts of your nervous system that aren’t necessarily the actually most logical or-
Chris:
It’s just reaction.
Dan:
… [inaudible 00:38:58] conscious part. And then hearing about how serotonin works… Sometimes she’d be like I’m sorry if I’m boring you, and I’m like no-
Chris:
It helps.
Dan:
Because I’m such an imp… Again, I have a science background. It’s like I did go to school for English, but I’m very scientific and data-driven. So it’s kind of like now when I’m having an attack, I can instead… I don’t give it a name like Bob, but what I say is just like your blood pressure is raising now, your pulse is quickening. I start to recognize the symptoms and just physically label them for what they are, right? And then I’m now separating like there’s a physical manifestation of it.
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
But you don’t need to be terrified by it. You don’t need to be confused or worried about is it natural? It’s like now I so fundamentally understand what’s happening.
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
If you… It’s a different disease entirely, but if you have diabetes, you know what you’re like when your blood sugar gets low.
Chris:
Correct. There’s very-
Dan:
What it starts to feel like, right?
Chris:
Yes. Right.
Dan:
So it’s now… It becomes a little bit like that. It becomes much easier to manage for me because now when I have anxiety, I just look at it as like it’s the same way someone who’s blood sugar is falling. It’s like you need to just take specific actions to kind of self-correct. And I no longer go to therapy. I don’t actually take any medication. For a while, I was taking some medication, but I kind of… There was… It was wonderfully effective, but there was cons to some of the medications I was taking. It actually made my brain quite foggy sometimes, I felt, and with my job, I was like I need to be like…
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
I don’t like how this feels.
Chris:
That is the struggle of many a creative or many a smart, a genius, is that the smarter you are, then you’re wiring… Your brain is like a computer. It’s got to be wired to do something really well. And if you’re one of these super high-functioning, incredibly smart humans, your brain is wired different.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
But it tends to then not wire very well for other things. So you tend to possibly be less social. You tend to be less interactive, more normal. You’re in your own world. And that can break them, and the only way to restabilize them is to take medication. But the stabilization kills the ability of them to create and be who they are. So most geniuses are wacky and don’t want the drugs because they can’t create. So they live a wacky life, and a lot of them to their demise. But they make that decision. This isn’t you, obviously. We’re not an extreme.
Dan:
Yeah. No, no, no. No. Yeah.
Chris:
The brains can wire in that way, and-
Dan:
It took me months [inaudible 00:41:21]
Chris:
… you just have to figure out a good balance through it.
Dan:
… what is the balance. Yeah. So for me, cognitive behavioral strategies, I found to be the most effective. So that’s towards the end of my tenure with the therapist, what we were most working on, just strategies and tactics where it’s you need to like… It’s very meta. You need to think about your thinking.
Chris:
Yeah. And then-
Dan:
And again, as it’s happening in real time, talk yourself back and understand this is perfectly natural. You don’t need to feel ashamed or bad or sad about it. But it’s just, it’s reality of my lived life now, that it’s just like when stress levels rise, there’s very predictable kind of patterns of both the behavior-
Chris:
Yep.
Dan:
… but also like physiological feeling.
Chris:
Well I think… And we have a minute left here. I think you’re doing what I think is the best thing to do, and that’s you talk about it.
Dan:
Yeah.
Chris:
And talking about anything in particular is incredibly helpful. It’s the first step of it. If you can’t talk about it or recognize, it’ll just take you over. I mean, you have to be able to step out… I always say you got to be able to step outside yourself and look at yourself and be like, ooh, that’s going to hurt you. We got to figure out a better, a good way to get through it. So I guess in the last minute, I would ask you, you are where you are now. It wasn’t necessarily where you thought you’d be, but that’s okay. And you’re a good example of like you’re good where you are now. Yes, you have your struggles and you whatever, but… Right? What would you say to people who are in this sort of journey and they’re up and they’re down and they’re like winding? What would you say to them in those paths?
Dan:
I think what I would tell them is be open to… The younger you are, the more open you should be to trying different things and have a tolerance for failure or taking two steps back for every one step forward. And then I guess second is just even failures or setbacks, if you treat them properly are data points, right? You need to be able to learn just as much from the things that you like weren’t good at than the things that you really are good at. And there is still to this day, like as I do SEO, there are things that I will draw from like many different decades and aspects of my life and bring to the table. And some of them, looking back on it, was like, well, where did you acquire that skill or that piece of knowledge? And it was like, well, that was a very difficult or painful chapter of my life. But it’s like compost. It’s like you need to turn garbage into nutrients, right?
Chris:
Yeah.
Dan:
Most of your life will be like the rubbage, the… I think even the happiest people… What is true happiness, like the most happy?
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
That’s like one 10% of your life tops.
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
Most of it is boring mundane stuff. And like 20% of it is like, frankly, quite painful
Chris:
It’s the garbage that really makes you…
Dan:
So do you want to just get nothing out of that?
Chris:
Right.
Dan:
Or do you want to get something out of it? So I’m a garden, and I know you garden, so the analogy I use and I try to teach it with my kids, compost everything, because even the worst painful things can sometimes fuel future success.
Chris:
It’s the garbage that really makes you like rich in your life and in a lot of things. Despite what everybody sees on social media, life is not that way. There’s a lot of down, there’s a lot of hard, and that hard is ultimately what’s going to pull you through and get you to be a better person. So I want to thank Dan for this. This is great. This is great for me too, because again, like I get to talk to someone that I nor… I work with on a day to day basis, but we typically talk professionally. But I want to thank Dan for telling us his story. And I also want to thank you guys for listening. I also want to thank Dave and Adam in the Overit studios. If you’re checking this out and you’re watching and there’s any way we can help you with your audio or video if you want to do something like this, please reach out to us. You can go to overitstudios.com. Again, please subscribe, your favorite pod player. We’ll be back with another episode. Dan, thank you so much, man. Appreciate it.
Dan:
Thanks, Chris. Yep.