My #1 Lesson From 2023 - Josiah Mackenzie

Josiah: All right, friends, I hope you've been having a great holiday season. I like to use this time to reflect on the past year. As I've been doing that, I've realized my number one learning has been all about the power of community, working together to accelerate everything from your business to your career to your own personal well-being. Now, I want you to stick with me for a moment because you might hear community and see it as just a buzzword or a feel-good concept that people throw around, but I want you to really kind of get a sense of the power of what's at work here. And to do that, I want to give you a little bit of context on all of this. I've worked in and around digital media for about two decades now, and most of that's been focused on the hospitality industry. You know, first as a blogger and then as someone who is leading teams of people at technology companies that were growing global businesses, serving the hospitality industry. And we did that by creating media that helps people in the hotel and hospitality industry. And for a long time, media meant creating content. articles, videos, social media posts, and so on. Some of it was interesting, but a lot of it across the industry is honestly too much just about checking the box of something that we need to do as part of our marketing or customer service programs. And hopefully we got the attention of people we were looking to serve and grow our businesses in doing so. And so I don't want you to get me wrong. That was very powerful. It is very powerful today. I think it's actually growing in importance. Um, you know, I've kind of seen this play out over the last decades. And if I look at the media landscape, that is increasingly true, but I just share that to give you a little bit of context in terms of how I was looking at the world and to be completely candid with you. I started out 2023 very focused on just creating the media, right? So conducting research, writing articles, sharing interviews, I wanted to do all of that to help others. And I still plan to do that again. I see a lot of value to this, but The thing that I was really missing, I think a year ago, was seeing the power of community at work. And I want to give you just a couple examples of what I've seen since then to show you what I mean. The first one is on LinkedIn. I know many of you are there, you're active there, but LinkedIn is insanely powerful for anyone in hospitality. And I see it only becoming more so. Over the past year, I found inspiration every day when I log in. I see people creating things, doing things, and it shows me what's possible. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of what could be done in the hospitality industry. You know, there's nothing like someone not just talking, but showing how and why they did something and what the results were. And so the community has been incredible. Just over the past year, more than 9,000 people have joined the Hospitality Daily LinkedIn community, and it's been incredible to watch. So if you haven't done so already, I encourage you to follow Hospitality Daily on LinkedIn, but it's incredible to see people building things, doing things, and sharing what they've seen as a result of that. So LinkedIn has been a big way that community has manifested for me and has been really, really cool to see. I think another element of community has been those who are empowering others. So a number of people come to mind here, people like Rachel Humphrey at the Women in Hospitality Leadership Alliance, Emily Goldfisher with hertelier, and Nina Kleveland with Female Founders in Hospitality are just some of the people I've gotten to know this year who are empowering so many others. And what they're demonstrating is that success is not just a zero-sum game, right? You can succeed personally, you can succeed as your organization if you lift others up. So that's been so inspiring to see people inspiring others and empowering others through community. And then another way this has played out over the past year is in-person get-togethers. Of course, many of us attend conferences frequently. I have been going to conferences for decades and plan to go to a lot more in the year ahead. But what I found specifically around kind of in-person connections was meeting up with people like Steve Carren of the Modern Hotelier, Wil Slickers of Hospitality.FM here in Denver, I'm recording this from Denver today, but meeting up with those guys, talking about podcasts, podcasting, creating, and then also getting to know so many other podcasters and creators, such as Zach Busekrus, Michelle Jensen Session, Steve Turk, just to name a few. It's been really cool to kind of get to know these people. And many of these, such as Steve Turk, have done a really good job of building connection online and then using this to create offline gatherings or a connection. Steve's done a number in Miami that has been super cool. I did one in San Francisco where I brought together community leaders and we're talking about kind of how can hospitality shape the future of our city. But I found those to be really, really cool. You know, online communities are very powerful. It's really useful for that daily inspiration is useful for connecting us with each other. But it's also really cool to kind of think about, is there an opportunity to get people together offline, right? And so that's something that has been really cool and exciting for me to see. So all that to say, I'm so grateful to each of you who are listening to this, who have participated in the hospitality daily community in some way, but also the hospitality community at large, right? You've really shown me what's possible and you've made me more excited than ever for what's ahead for us. And so, you know, that's why for me in the year ahead, I'm going to go all in on building the Hospitality Daily Huddle. It's a private membership community for those who are building and making moves in hospitality today. I've just launched a private pilot of this program over the past couple of weeks, and already I'm starting to see the power of what community looks like in real time. Things like learning about new, creative, powerful applications for AI in our work. Right. the world is evolving incredibly quickly. And I've really enjoyed getting on some of these calls with members of the Huddle, talking about how we're experimenting with this, how we're putting it to work in our businesses. And people are supporting each other through developing new concepts in hospitality. I found it incredibly powerful and inspirational for me. So I'm really excited to go all in on this. Um, if it sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to go to hospitality, daily huddle.com. to learn more about this. So I hope this was helpful. I hope you found this helpful. I'm very curious about what you have been reflecting on over the past year, and what you're excited about in the year ahead. Send me an email... Would love to hear from you. Would love to see you in our LinkedIn community. But thank you for listening. And I'm so excited to learn and grow with you in the year ahead. I wish you a very happy new year.