Mark Ersberg, tell me about your vision.
We have so many people in the US, in the world, who have some great capabilities.
They have a lot of domain knowledge.
They're going to be great at whatever it is they do, accounting or medicine
or sales or engineering, but there's a whole bunch of skills that we know are
necessary to really get the most out of someone.
These are skills like leadership, teamwork, communication, networking,
negotiation. We've heard all these skills.
People keep telling us these skills are important, but no one actually stops
to teach us these skills.
Over 20 years ago at MIT, we said, well, we should be teaching these skills.
And we started a program referred to as MIT's Career Success Accelerator.
I was lucky enough to help create parts of that class and to have been teaching
there for over the past 20 years.
Knowing that it's not just people at MIT who need this, it is really widespread,
all professional workers need this and even some non-professional ones.
I wanted to reach a larger audience.
That led to the book, The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success
that No One Taught You, all the other free resources on the Career
Toolkit Books website.
Everything there, other than the book, is completely free.
You can go read the additional articles.
You can download resources.
I don't even ask for an email because I want this to be widespread.
Tools to train up your entire organization.
We give those away for free.
And then of course, the Brain Bump app, also free, is there so we can help
people learn and apply these skills.
Because if all of us got just even a few percent better at what we were capable
of, think about the impact that would have on our own personal success, on the
success of our organizations, on the success of the world as a whole.
Just some small changes can have a massive impact.
Wow.
I have so many thoughts right now.
But I'm going to take off the banner for a second.
I'll show you something.
This is the, I think you get excited about this because you mentioned
about leadership.
I literally today, I shared this with one of my friends.
If it opens up.
Come on, come on.
Oh, they can see right here.
This is what I shared with one of my friends.
Because we are also working on that space, but we're not open and it's not
available to everyone.
It's free, but it's not like it's not that open the way you have it.
So this is one of the things that I like about this app.
I like to talk about it. So this is one of the courses in it's called
Leadership Academy 101.
And today I just gave it to one of my friends who will be learning
leadership skills and applying.
It's a it's a I want to say a 15 day course or a 14 day course per se that you
have to do day by day and you have to do a lot of stuff with it.
It's currently in English.
It's going to get translated to Spanish and it's going to get translated to
Hindi and a few other languages in the future.
But that's what we are also doing.
Everything very similar.
And I would love to introduce you to the creator of this.
If you are, if you want to, you guys can take what you have done and what he has
done and maybe combine it together and see something better comes along with it.
Or or you guys can give you the pointers.
This is what we did. This work.
This is what I did. This worked.
And what's a better way of it?
You know, like two math professors talking about it.
I think that would be amazing.
Yeah. Happy to meet him.
Awesome. That's amazing.
I will make an introduction.
He's also the creator of the show.
His name is Jackson.
Can I mean, I mean, you can search him.
We'll probably find quite a bit of it, but that's awesome.
I just wanted to take a second to give you that and show you that.
Yeah, thank you.
Yeah. And if if the app, I'm assuming I think it's going to be great, but I'm
going to look at the app and if it is, maybe I'll include it in our the helping
people and get my head to just look at this like you want to try to just look at
this app and then try this out.
That'd be awesome.
Please, please.
Yeah, we want to make it as widespread as possible.
Yeah, I hope so.
Awesome. Well, let's go to the next part of the question mark.
What is your why?
Oh, what gets you out of bed every morning?
Why do you do? Why did you quit this app?
And why did you go read the book?
And why are you so invested in the leadership aspects of people?
When we think about where we are today in the world, what we have, it's because
millions of people in our past have said, how do we make the world better?
This comes from inventions, even going back to basic ones like the wheel,
but more modern ones like medicine that keeps us healthy.
It comes from society coming together and saying, let's all contribute and build a
road. And that road helps us create economic prosperity and other opportunities.
All that we have from scientific inventions through societal organization
comes because people have gotten together and said, let's take a step forward
together and make the world better.
And for all the challenges that we might have, and we certainly have some today
and we've had some throughout the 20th century and before, I believe generally
the world is getting better.
And that has incumbent upon us to continue to make it better for the next
generation, for the other people there.
So my contribution, having recognized the shortcoming and knowing that I have the
skills and the knowledge to address that because of the decades I have spent
teaching at MIT, I know not only what we need to teach, but how to effectively
teach it and help others.
This is my small step forward to help make the world a better place.
Wow.
Thank you for sharing that, Mark.
Thank you.
Then goes to the second part of this.
How did you get started on all this?
Like what, what was this transition from I'm teaching this and then, oh, I need
to create an app or I need to create a book and to write this to like, Hey, I
actually need to help do it now.
I fell into this somewhat accidentally.
I've always cared about helping people with their professional efficacy.
And I've done so perhaps on smaller scales, certainly the teaching at MIT,
but also I ran in an old community website.
It was called Java Ranch.
Now it's called Code Ranch.
I used to be the moderator of the job discussion forum, and I volunteered
with certain nonprofits like Streetwise Partners, mentoring people, trying to
help them transition into better opportunities or my work on the board of
techie youth.
So I've been doing this for a while.
I've probably also been boring all my friends, my family dates.
I've been on with my passion about helping people with their professional efficacy.
Now, having taught at MIT for years, I've been pushing MIT to really expand
this program to other universities.
Because we're a university, we're not trying to sell products.
We create ideas and give them away.
I said, well, let's give this away to other schools for various reasons.
MIT just didn't have the capacity to do that.
I also said, because this is a hands-on class, we're not a lecture-based class
for a class where people do, they try these skills, but they're not able to
try these skills.
They sometimes make mistakes quite often, and we're there to help coach and
mentor and guide them in developing the skills.
It's very hands-on, but it means our students aren't always taking notes.
And I worry that they get in the moment, but then they go back to their other
classes and do equations and formulas and forget about this.
So I've said for a while, we have to generate some content that we can give
to our students, give to other universities.
Again, for various reasons, we haven't.
So one day I said, you know what?
I'm traveling a lot for work.
I spending a lot of time sitting on planes and I'm only so productive in my
emails and other work, but let me just start jotting down some notes.
And what I thought was going to be 10, maybe 20 pages of notes for the students
quickly became 40, then 80.
And once it passed a hundred, I said, I don't think these are notes.
I think I'm writing a book.
I turned to a friend of mine who's a wonderful author and she gave me advice.
I said, okay, I'm creating a book.
That's how the book, the career toolkit, essential skills for success that no one
taught you came about very unexpectedly.
But then as I had the book, I thought again, I know when I read books like this,
say, okay, this is great.
I'm learning so much.
And two weeks later, I have forgotten most of it.
Six months later, I've probably forgotten all of it.
And I wanted people to be able to use it, but that means we have to get them
the information when and where they need it.
And it occurred to me, we needed some type of tool to do that.
So I looked around because surely someone must have created this.
Surprisingly, they had not.
And because I'm an engineer and have background in education and other things,
I said, well, I can put this all together.
And I created the brain bump app.
I create a version at first, just for my book, just to try it out,
to see if it worked.
It worked.
We got positive feedback and I checked with other authors.
They said, yes, I'd love this for my content as well.
So we created brain bump, which takes the tips from my book, but also other books,
blogs, podcasts, classes, talks, puts it in there to help people retain it using
the proven mechanism of space repetition and using other techniques to really make
it available.
So you're not just reading.
Just think about you read a book for six, 10 hours.
If you forget most of it, that was a waste.
If you listen to podcasts in the gym or while you're driving to work, but then
you context switch and you forget that episode, how much time are you wasting?
So a little change just by using this completely free app, we can help people
get a much better ROI, learn better and be more effective.
So it was all accidental, but it's turned out well.
So how, what does the app exactly do?
If you could give me the gist of the core of the app, there's a 90 second
explainer video on the brain bump app website, but I'll explain it now.
We take the highlights from this content.
So imagine if you have a book, if someone went through the book with a highlighter,
okay, here's something I remember.
Here's a good point.
This is a good story.
Whatever that is, all those highlights are put into the app by the content
creator, by the author, the podcaster, the speaker, you can add your own.
If you want, if we don't yet have the book or podcasts that you want, many
people like having the one already done for them.
So these were all put in and they're all tagged by topic things like hashtags.
So now you have in your pocket, it's kind of like a Kindle.
We have lots of different content.
There's new content being added every month, but you can say, well, I
like these books or want to check out this podcast, it's all free.
We don't check.
Did you buy the book or do you listen to the podcast?
You download what you want and you'll have hundreds or potentially thousands
of tips sitting in your pocket.
Now you'll use it one of two ways either just in time.
So for example, if you read my book, you read the chapter on networking.
You think, wow, great tips.
This is really useful.
Two months later, when you're at a conference, you're saying, what
were those tips that you were using?
You're saying, what were those tips?
I know they were good, but I forgot them.
So as you're standing in the lobby, about to walk into the conference floor,
you open the app, you tap networking as a topic.
Remember everything's tagged.
And now instead of the thousand tips you have, you get the 30 networking tips.
Or maybe you pull up your favorites because you favorite it.
Here are the ones I want to have really at the top of mind.
So you quickly pulled up the key ideas that you can access it within seconds.
And now you've got those, you flip through them and say, okay,
great, now it's all top of mind.
I am ready to go to that conference and network.
Or you can use it as a daily reminder.
We know space repetition worked.
Remember in school, we used to have flashcards or we'd look at the
book a few times before the test.
That's how we remembered it.
As an adult, if you just read a book once or listen to a podcast once.
You're not reviewing, there's no test and then you forget.
So how can we help you remember, but do so in a way that doesn't take a lot of effort.
Cause no one's creating flashcards on the books they read.
So we've got that content for you.
It's free on the app and you can set up a daily reminder.
Now this is key in our lives.
We get so much thrown at us and we all, this is all these emails and the spam,
these text messages.
That's annoying here.
You decide what you want and when you want it.
So for example, let's say you're a new manager and a new parent, you might want to get a
management tip every day at 8 55 AM right before you walk into the office.
You don't even open the app.
You just get a little pop up on the phone.
All right.
There's a management tip, right?
Yep.
Good idea.
Swipe takes you two seconds, but helps reinforce it.
Keep the top of mind.
Then at six o'clock, right as you go home, you get a parenting tip because now you're
in parenting mode.
What happens are daily lives with social media and emails is they get blasted out at
arbitrary time.
So that parenting tip that comes at two in the afternoon.
Well, I don't have time for that.
I've got meetings.
I've got emails.
This is not what I want to think about parenting, but the key innovation in the app is that
you are in control.
You pull what information is relevant when it is relevant.
Maybe you have a strategy meeting every Wednesday at three PM.
So you want to make sure you get a strategy tip at two 55 PM every Wednesday.
Not all the time.
You say Wednesday, two 55 PM.
I want a tip tagged strategy.
So by controlling the content, it goes from this wave of just annoying, never ending
content blasted at you to saying this is what I need here and now.
It therefore is always relevant and always helpful to you.
And it's a much better experience.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.