Courtney Johnson: Career Cheat Codes to Stand Out, Get Promoted, and Win at Work | Career | E395

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“It is an expensive lie to say you have to pull your head down work hard and everything”

is going to work out for you because the opportunities do not go to the hardest work or the opportunities go to the person who is most visible. Courtney Johnson, a personal brand strategist and content creator. Known for her career cheat codes, she helps professionals build visibility online and turn content into real career opportunities.

I want other people to have a shortcut to where they don't have to go through so many ups and downs and so many problems in their career, they just understand the information that they can go. I got laid off and so I was forced to post every single day for 365 days. And that year completely changed my life, consistency compounds.

The only way to fail the entrepreneur game, the personal brand game, it's to quit. It's to come up with an excuse and say I'm going to come back in two weeks. For somebody who's looking for a job, what do they need to know about how hiring works today in 2026? The biggest tip to getting a job as easy and fastest possible is to build a personal

brand.

“How do you suggest people decide what's the first platform they should focus on?”

I recommend people start with... Hey, young and profiteers, today we are taking a turn from our usual topic of entrepreneurship and we're going to focus on careers. So this episode is especially valuable if you are climbing the corporate ladder, but

of course we're going to touch on entrepreneurship because we always do a young and profiting

podcast. If you're working hard, hitting your goals, staying loyal, but still invisible when promotions raises and big opportunities come around, this episode is for you. Today I'm interviewing Courtney Johnson in the flesh and she's breaking down the real rules of career success.

She's a personal brand, strategicist, entrepreneur, and author of career cheat codes. In her messages clear, opportunities don't go to the hardest worker. They go to the most visible worker. She's sharing exactly how to work out loud, build strategic relationships, and position yourself so opportunities stop passing you by and start coming straight to you.

But before we get into it, if you're just discovering us, I'm so glad you're here, make sure you subscribe and follow us so you never miss a conversation. And by the way, me and Courtney did this interview in real life, so if you like to watch your podcast episodes and feel all that chemistry, go check it out on YouTube. All right, let's get into the conversation.

Courtney, welcome to Young and profiting podcast. I'm so pumped to be here. Me too. I'm so excited for this conversation. I feel like you've got so much to share in terms of career advice for people who are professionals

and then also for entrepreneurs because you're an entrepreneur yourself. Okay. So you've got this new book called Career Cheat Codes, coming out in April this year, which is like super exciting, and in the book, your premise is really like this old, you know, at age saying of, keep her head down, work hard, everything's just going to work

out. Really just isn't true and a lot of high achievers, act this way, they just think they can work hard and good things are going to happen to them. Why is that an expensive lie?

“It is an expensive lie to say, you have to pull your head down, work hard and everything”

is going to work out for you because your work, like nobody's going to go out of their way to find your work, nobody's going to search through your Google Drive and say, oh my God, that report was so good, nobody is going to pluck you out of a crowd. And I think we have this idea, I used to have this same idea. And honestly, I think it goes from hearing those stories of like victorious secret models and

like a South African mall and they're like, you, like we're picking you out of a cloud and you're giving you a career. That just doesn't have been okay. Maybe that worked in like 2008 in this one industry, it doesn't work, right? And Austin Clean says, if your work is not online, it does not exist.

I actually went to a bar one time and that's kind of where this idea came from and the band was really good.

And I went up to the band after and I said, wow, that was amazing, like can I follow you

on Spotify? And they're like, oh, we don't have Spotify. I don't say, okay, YouTube, SoundCloud, like work and I keep up with your work, especially

You know, all the music dreams. Yeah. They're like, oh, we're not online, we're not on Spotify, we're not on Instagram.

But you can come see us at this bar every third Thursday.

Oh my god. And anybody that heard that would say, that is crazy. There's no way that you can have a successful music career just being at this bar every third, third Thursday.

“There's not like music scouts out and about going to give you the golden ticket, right?”

You've got to put in the reps yourself. But a lot of us think like that when it comes to our careers, we're putting in the reps. We're showing up internally. But when we're not making ourselves visible externally, those opportunities just aren't coming to us.

And I'm curious if you got that same advice from your parents. From my parents, no, my parents were from the Middle East. And so they were immigrants. And my dad was a doctor. And so for them, they were just like, you know, study hard, work hard.

But they didn't have much career advice to give me like, I felt growing up like really alone in terms of how to navigate the corporate world and the business world because they

never had corporate jobs, neither of them.

My dad just kind of like studied and went to med school and that was the route that he knew. So, no, I did not, you know, I was like reading your book and I noticed that you had mentioned that a lot of people kind of grow up at the dinner table learning about how to navigate a corporate window that definitely wasn't me. I learned it on my own. Yeah, that did not happen to me either.

“And that's why I wrote this book because I was kind of given the advice, like, you know,”

working class, just keep working hard and you'll get the opportunities. But the opportunities do not go to the hardest work or the opportunities go to the person who is most visible because when when you're looking for someone, when you're looking for a graphic designer to hire, you're looking for someone to book on a stage, you're looking for someone to bring on your podcast, you're looking for the person to give a promotion

to. We're going to choose the easiest choice. We're going to choose the person that is obvious or it makes us look good to our boss. We're going to choose the person that is, that is, is easy to enroll everybody into why we're hiring them, why we're promoting them.

And you want to make it easy for people around you to say yes to you. And when you're hiding because oh, I'm humble or because oh, I, my work speaks for itself, you're really robbing yourself of all of these opportunities. Yeah, I remember I forgot who I interviewed, but they told me that humble literally means low to the ground.

So who wants to look up to somebody who's low to the ground, right?

So you never want to be humble.

Yeah, also like you're robbing the world of your gifts and talents. If you're staying humble, right? Some people are like, well, I don't want to make it all about me, me, me.

“It's not about you, you, you, it's about all the people you impact, right?”

Like, young and profiting's not just about Hala, although you weave in your stories and your experience, young and profiting is about all of the listeners, the millions of people who have listened to this podcast learn something, learn something, implement it, and change our life in some way. And if you, if you were to stay quiet and say, well, I'm going to be humble, I'm not going

to do this podcast. I'm not going to put myself out there. You are robbing those millions of people that have had massive changes in their life, massive improvements in their life, their business, their career, because of you. Yeah, one of the concepts I left in your book was this A player B player concept.

So tell us like, what does an A player look like, what do they do, and what do they not do? Mm-hmm. An A player is someone usually who comes from a family where they were told all of the unwritten rules of work.

And for me, when I got to the workplace, I saw all these A players, and I'm like, why are they talking like that? Why are they doing that? I thought I would just do my work and everything would work out. I come from very much a B player background.

So really, the book is exposing all of the tips and tricks of the A players. And some of the things that the A players do, A players really, really understand psychology, relationships, A players understand that they want to find out their boss's goal and help their boss achieve that goal. A players understand visibility, they understand that visibility is what gets their work

notice. A players also understand, again, relationships, how to build strong relationship across your company, with your clients, et cetera. And the main difference between A players and B players is that A players understand that it's a game and they embrace the game.

And a lot of times, we can be afraid to embrace this corporate game because it's fake, it's bullshit, whatever. But if you don't like the game of corporate, just gain power and change it yourself. So really, A players play the game. They notice that it's a game.

They see it's a game. They play the game. B players say things like, oh, I don't want to play the game. I don't want to pretend to be someone I'm not. They're very resistant to the game.

And we can choose to learn the rules and play the win, or we can choose to be pissy about it and stay stuck. And one of the games that A players play is working out loud.

“Can you give us some examples of how you can work out loud?”

Yeah, working loudly would be something like, when you finish a great project, talk about it in Slack or Teams or whatever your company communication is. Share, hey, I'm super proud of our team and we accomplished this or that. I contributed in this way. Working out loud is also sharing your work publicly.

I know a lot of people can't share their exact work publicly, but you can still share what you're learning. So that means posting on LinkedIn. Working out loud means being open to speaking opportunities to hosting opportunities. Even if it's not external, can you host a tutorial with a different department in your

organization? Can you go to a conference, record a loom video about what you learned, and share that with the team? It's really this idea of like, bragging about our work.

Because again, if our work is invisible, we're not going to be first for the promotion.

We're not going to be first for those opportunities that we really, really like. Another way to flex working loudly is just to update your boss. Hey, boss, these are the things I did today. These are things I accomplished this week and start to make a trail of everything that you've accomplished.

“It makes it a lot easier to get a promotion, and it makes them, honestly, like you”

a lot more and be a little bit less on your ass because they really trust you because they see that your work is invisible. It's visible to them. It's visible to the broader team. So it's not really about necessarily doing the best work.

Of course, you want to do the best work. It's about the perception that you're doing the best work. Totally, totally, and you're exactly right. It's not the best most talented work that gets the promotion or gets the opportunity or signs the deal.

It's the one that's easiest for other people to see, right? And listen, it's helpful if you can do the best work, but the best work just isn't the differentiating factor. Now a lot of people listening to this probably are rock stars at their work.

They're amazing at their work.

It's going to be even easier, but unfortunately, some people are kind of shitty at their work and still get the job in the promotion and the deal. And I'm sure a lot of listeners listening to this right now are like, yeah, I've seen those examples. And I hate that that happens.

Yeah, I wish it went to the best person, but it doesn't. A lot of high performers, I think, fall into this bucket of not wanting to play this game because in school, it's not really about politics. You take the test, you get a good grade, you know, you get honors and you keep getting rewarded. So they end up going into corporate and they think it's the same system when it's really

not. So even if your work does get you shine and you're really talented, it could be the key differentiator where you're going ahead somebody who has really good work and good politics and they're going to get the promotion over you. Totally.

Yeah.

And you don't have to be perfect at either game, like you're never going to be the top

of the top, the best at what you do and you're never going to be the most socially intelligent or aware, right? It's like, how do you plan to your own strengths and really amplify those? I feel like this is also relatable to entrepreneurs working out loud. Okay.

It's a whole concept of like documenting your journey, sharing before you're necessarily ready, like everybody thinks they have to be an expert to share online, but you can actually share what you're learning. Talk to us about how entrepreneurs can use this concept as well. Yeah.

Entrepreneurs can work out loud with their clients.

“So if you want to make sure you're retaining your clients or your users, make sure you're”

reminding them of the impact. Maybe you have a marketing agency. Hey, like we're super proud because we're seeing these results this week. We just had this major win or a small win. You know, you might text your client a screenshot of somebody that said, "Hey, I loved

that presentation. I loved that thing, right? It could be so small. Maybe you have an app. We want to make sure that we're continuously reminding our audience how much time they're

saving or how much money they're making or whatever outcome that you're creating. So constantly remind your clients, remind your users, remind your customers the benefit that they're getting from your service or they might forget because they're not thinking about you all the time. It's like you got to make sure that you're retaining these users as well.

And then also for new users and new opportunity for new clients for new prospects, we want to make sure we're building in public. So we are posting consistently and it doesn't have to be crazy. You don't have to drop everything and become an influencer. Just give your audience routine updates of what you're doing, what you're celebrating,

so you can stay top of mind because when our audience comes to a buying decision, they're going to choose the person that's the most top of mind.

the person that's most top of mind. They're not going to think and sift through and really get in the weeds. I wish they did, but they don't. So constantly remain top of mind. This is so smart.

I love what you're saying about reminding your clients because they will come up with their own narrative about how the service is going. They'll remember a few things from few meetings and kind of piece together and their narrative could end up being a lot more negative than the truth. So your job is to kind of craft the narrative for them and share it with them on going

ly, which I just think is so smart. Exactly. It's so, so important.

“So how can you make a good impression on your boss?”

Because it is usually your boss that is helping you get a promotion or moving you along your careers so how can people better impress their boss?

Yeah, you can better impress your boss first.

You've got to learn what their goal is. Their personal goal and their professional goal is that their goal is to run a marathon this year. Great. What can you take off their plate?

Can you go to that morning meeting to give them time for their marathon training, right? Maybe their personal goal is to buy a house this year. Can you just give them some encouragement? Can you say, oh, great. You're touring with a realtor.

I'll take that over that day. Or, oh, my cousin's a realtor. Here you go. So you want to figure out their personal goal. You also want to figure out their professional goal.

Maybe they want to get promoted, maybe they want to raise, maybe they want to achieve a certain outcome or metric. And you want to create your focus around helping your boss achieve that goal. A lot of times we get caught up in the weeds of what we think we should do. Maybe even what's best for the company, but really if you want your boss to be obsessed

with you, figure out their goals and help them achieve those goals as your very first priority.

“The next thing you want to do if you want to make your boss obsessed with you is to give”

them more updates than you think. I call this the Monday Wednesday Friday rule. So Monday, you're going to tell them, hey, boss, here are my five priorities for the week. Wednesday, you're going to send them a quick update.

Here's how we're progressing on ABCD.

On Friday, you're going to send them a summary of here's what I accomplished.

They are going to feel like a load is lifted off their shoulders if you do this. They are going to be way more hands off, let you run on your own because they are always visible until what you're working on. And this is going to give you a lot more time because now that you have your priorities, you're giving your boss to updates, they're not going to be micromanaging you.

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Yeah, this is fun because you know we have this concept of like iterative wins or iterative surprises, right where if I brought donuts to work in every single day, you would start to expect it from me. But if I bring in fun little surprises at Hawk, you become more addictive as a person. This is actually how toxic relationships work, but we're just using it for good.

So for your coworkers, bring in a little surprise, offer to help somebody, offer to help your boss take something off of their play, but if you don't want to be held to it, do it a little bit more intermittently rather than consistently. But you want to consistently give your boss a Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Got it.

So in terms of these snackable surprises, for my understanding, it was basically like surprise

them with like information or something that can help them that they just weren't expecting. Yeah, totally. Yeah, this can also be information.

“This can be, again, something like, I think you would love this article.”

It could be, again, something like you go to a conference or you attend a webinar that they don't know about and you send them what you learn from it or the three actions that you're taking. Mm-hmm. Again, it's really being proactive and going above and beyond something else.

I think it's super helpful is there is a, I think it's a 1% rule or 10% rule. You just want to go like a tiny percent above what everybody else is doing. So if your boss asks you to do a report, do a report and tell them the three predictions for the next report. If your boss asks you to make a pitch deck, do the pitch deck and drop the pitch deck

email. How can you anticipate and take one extra micro step above everybody else is really going to make you stand out and that also will make you stand out and interviewer. So for all the entrepreneurs listening to this, of like, how do I hire an A player look out for these things in the interview?

“Are they going one extra step in the job application process?”

Did they, you know, email you after to thank you? Did they send you a quick video? Did they share with you three changes they would make or a, you know, high level of a 30, 60, 90 plan? Those are the people we really want to hire because those are the people that are going

even just one tiny step above and beyond. As I was learning about some of these strategies, I kept thinking about my own journey as an entrepreneur and when I heard about this, like, you know, snackable surprises, I realized, like, this is what I do to get mentors now. This is what I do to get, like, really high level clients because people who join my

network have to have, like, a certain amount of downloads, they're typically, like, really famous and I've got to, like, stand out and impress them somehow and so what I'll do is just, like, try to be helpful and not an annoying, like, spammy way, but like, if I have a piece of information that they could, you know, really use or implement, I'll, like, you know, shoot a loom video and, like, send it to them and until finally, like, they want

to have the call with me or they realize that I've got value to share. And so you can also use this strategy to get clients and mentors as an entrepreneur.

So, hey, I would love, like, for a couple of people, I've been, like, I would love to introduce

me to my book agent. I know that'd be really valuable for them. That would deepen the relationship. It could be, hey, I have an extra ticket to this conference. Like, do you want to go?

I'll give you this ticket for free. I love the information. I actually had somebody use this on me last week. They were like, if somebody that worked at LinkedIn, he said, hey, Courtney, here are three things that are kind of under the radar that I've learned.

Like, I would love to come, guess speak and they want to guess speak and the way that they're putting their foot in the door is telling me these, like, kind of three bits of insider information that, that only they would know, which is really, really cool. So, yeah, I love that I love implementing information as a leverage point and as value that you're giving tidbits of value.

Mm-hmm. So, you were just mentioning the hiring process. For somebody who's looking for a job, what do they need to know about how hiring works today in 2026? Yeah, right now, the hiring process, the hiring landscape is completely different than it looked

even one year ago with AI, with massive layoffs, I mean, it is competitive and it is wild. A couple of things I would want somebody to know if they were applying to a job right now.

First, your volume has to be higher than you think.

A lot of people come to me, Courtney, I'm trying, I'm applying and applying and applying

“and I haven't gotten any interviews and I ask them, how many jobs have you applied for?”

They might say, oh, 10, 15, it's going to take a lot more than that. Yeah. You're going to take 100, 200. Second, you want to make sure that you're working with recruiters and that you're connected with a bunch of recruiters on LinkedIn.

So, I actually tell my clients, they are not allowed to complain about not having a job unless they're connected to 200 recruiters on their LinkedIn and people say, oh, of a Courtney, my inbox is going to be annoying. I hope your inbox isn't annoying. Yeah, that's the point.

Like, I hope all these people are fighting to play a seal. So you want to make sure that you are connected with a fuck ton of recruiters.

Next, you want to make sure you're always going one step above and beyond, so you're sending

them an extra message and extra video, you're sending them some things that you would implement or change and the biggest tip to getting a job as easy and fast as possible is to build a personal brand. Yes, the simplest way to do this is just post on LinkedIn, start posting on LinkedIn weekly. It's going to put you above every single other person that's competing for that job because

they're glancing at your LinkedIn profile for maybe a second. If it looks really professional, if you look like a thought leader, you look like you're educating others, you post consistently, you're immediately going to gain higher favor because I have what I call a three second test on LinkedIn and it's really like a one second test.

I'm going to answer your profile for a couple of seconds. What are people thinking? It's not even what they're thinking. It's what is the unconscious biases that start to come out and it's the word biases in neutral term because it could be something like, oh, you have speaker in your bio.

And in my mind, speaker has positive attributes and sounds like you're really qualified.

“So I see speaker, the biases, oh, you're probably really qualified, right?”

Or it might be more negative. I might see polka dots on your shirt and you're wearing a college graduation cap. So I assume my bias is, oh, you're young and inexperienced. So you also want to make sure that your profile is reflecting the positive biases that if somebody just glances at your profile, they're taking away things that are going to

support that hiring decision. And then once you start posting, opportunities are going to come to you. So few people do it and so few people stay consistent with it that if you are posting consistently, it is going to make you stand out. Again, if you're connected, if you've 200 recruiters in your network, you're posting

once a week and they're seeing those posts, their unconscious biases, oh, this person can be really easy to place. Yeah. Like they're hardworking, they're going above and beyond. Like, I'm going to go out of my way for them.

Yeah. And either way, if you don't end up getting a job, your personal brand can help you become an entrepreneur. So either way, you've got to leverage your personal brand. I think to get a job or to become an entrepreneur.

And I feel like a lot of people incorporate, they're kind of scared of creating a personal brand, they feel like because they're in corporate, they don't need one or they even might get in trouble for starting one, talk to us about why it's so important to build a personal brand, whether you're in corporate and you've got a stable job or, you know, you're looking for a job.

Yeah. This is so important. I get the question a lot. I'm in corporate, but I feel weird because what is my boss going to say about me posting on LinkedIn or what if I get fired for posting on LinkedIn?

There is a lot of fear that comes up around this.

“But the truth is, the odds that you're going to be at that company forever are very, very,”

very small. So even if something does go wrong, where you're going to stay there forever, probably

The best way to avoid any negativity from you posting on LinkedIn, one block the people that you're afraid of seeing your stuff, like it's that simple, you can block people. Second, share your mission with your team. So if you're a little afraid of what your boss is going to think, figure out what your underlying mission is and share that with them.

For example, Paula, you're my boss. Paula, I just wanted to let you know, like, I started posting on LinkedIn.

“I'm really excited because first, I think it's really going to help us get more visibility”

into XYZ product, but too, it's always been my passion to inspire young women.

And my posts are, like, my intention for my posts is to inspire more young women to go into engineering. What are you going to say? Oh, you can't inspire young women. I have great not, if you position it in a way that's sharing that your intention is to

elevate the whole company, not just you, and to inspire some group of people, I've never seen that not work because they don't want to look like an asshole. Yeah, and you will actually become more valuable because you're gaining new skills. So let's say, like, you're in finance, but now you're dabbling in LinkedIn and now suddenly you're good at marketing and writing and your boss or your company can find more opportunities

for you. I remember when I started working at HP, that's when I started posting on LinkedIn. And I became a big influencer and I became more popular than the CEO at HP. I love it. And then suddenly they were like, go to every conference, you know, interview the CEO

at the town halls. Can you help train our sales team on LinkedIn? And I was actually getting more opportunities because I was posting on LinkedIn.

“And at first, it was really, my peers, my co-workers were like, what are you doing?”

Like, why are you doing that? But all the executives actually loved it and thought that it was a strength that I was posting on LinkedIn. So I also think there's some benefits to it that people don't necessarily realize right at first.

Maybe at first, they'll be pushed back.

But if you actually start to gain traction, you become more valuable. And I'll see you become more visible to other companies who might coach you for a higher salary or something like that. Totally. Yeah, I think as long as you're getting ahead of the narrative and then again, sharing

those wins. So, hey, a customer DM to me on LinkedIn and they said they really, really liked this feature. That's so cool. Like even these little, broad crumbs of positivity, again, just in the same way, we're

like we're shifting the narrative and we're controlling the narrative of our customers by sharing wins with them. We're going to do that internally.

And we're going to share with our boss, we're going to share our company, wins channel,

even these tiny things as simple as a customer commenting on your LinkedIn posts. But the narrative there is simply, look, I'm fostering relationships with our customers. Like I'm using this as an additional touch point, and we know the more touch points we have with our customers, the longer they retain or whatever it might be. And then also, I would make sure that you have a good mix of things about your company,

but also things about you. So, you're probably talking about HP, but you're also talking about the mentorship you are getting, the books that you were reading, like things outside of that one job, because you definitely don't want to be pinned down to one totally. Derek Job, if you're not going to stay there forever.

I totally agree. Now, something that's not so obvious to people, especially people who haven't built a personal brand before or haven't spent a lot of time with algorithms is that keywords, really, you know, are a big part of strategy online, even a big part of resume strategy. So help us understand why keywords play such a big part of getting your resume found, and

then also how that translates to being entrepreneur and starting an online brand. Totally, we'll both in our resume and in our content. We have AI algorithms that are picking up certain keywords. So if you're really into baking, it's picking up keywords around recipe, around healthy eating, around whatever, in order to feed it to you, because the algorithms want to feed

you content of what you like. So we just want to make sure that our resumes are very keyword rich in whatever job we're searching for. So let's say I'm a general marketer. I'm going to apply to a social media job over here, and I'm going to apply to an email

marketing job over here. I'm definitely going to want to shift my resume a little bit and have more social media keywords over here for the social media job or more email marketing keywords over here for the email marketing job. And you can use AI to do this, you can put your resume and chat to be tea, whatever your

“favorite AI is and say, hey, can you help me optimize this for this specific job?”

One of my favorite things to do is just take that job description, copy it, put it into AI, put it into chat to be tea, and ask chat how to optimize your resume tailored to that specific job application. There's so many tools and resources to optimize your resume. I used to do this manually for hundreds of job applications.

I'm so happy that you can do this on your own, or you can do this automatically.

what keywords to sprinkle in to our content. Although, I find it happens really automatically. Like if you're talking about software engineering, you're probably naturally going to bring up a lot of keywords that people are already consuming and already searching. I would say it's more strategic on your resume.

Yeah. On LinkedIn, the algorithm is so straight forward.

We're basically like every user has two clouds.

One cloud is their like interest, their profile, the keywords that's found in their profile and their content. And then one cloud is like the stuff they engage on. And so the algorithms just matching people, like, okay, what is this person engage on? And who talks about that and it just matches each other.

So the same keywords you're probably putting in your resume. You want to make sure is in your title, your bio, your description, even your description of the past jobs that you've had on LinkedIn, right? All that metadata is fed to the algorithm and then they'll know the algorithm will know like you're an expert in XYZ and creates a keyword cloud for you.

So I feel like the people just understood that they get so much further on LinkedIn.

“Yeah, it's also important to remember that just because your company has this crazy word”

for your job title, that might not work on your resume, right? If you're a job, like I worked at some startups where the social media manager is like the social media guru, like, I don't know, there's some bullshit names. You want to make sure you have a standard job title or elevate it a little bit. Like if you worked in, you know, if you were just a waitress, maybe you're not writing

waitress, maybe you're writing like hospitality associate or something. Yeah, totally. So what do you think about imposter syndrome? You know, this is like a hot topic, everybody talks about imposter syndrome, what's your take on it?

Yeah, so imposter syndrome is when we feel like we're not qualified enough or we don't have all of the information that we need to do a certain task or to do a certain role or get a certain opportunity.

And the truth is, we are literally cyborg, like we have all of the world's information

at the tip of our fingers and right now, in job applications, in career, in entrepreneurship, you do not have to know everything. You just have to be able to figure out the problem.

“Like problem solving is the most important skill, not you know, you already have memorized”

how to do this thing. Like that's so silly. So to what I would say to people dealing with imposter syndrome is you don't have to know the answer, you just have to know how to figure it out. And in terms of getting a raise, how do you suggest that people approach getting a raise

in their job? Yeah, when you want to get a raise, you really need to understand the value that you bring to the company. So most of the times you're either making the company more money or you're saving the company money.

If you're not doing one of those things, you probably wouldn't have a job. And you might think, well, I work in this other department that doesn't have any revenue attached. No, everything has revenue attached to it, or you would not work there. Yeah.

Maybe you're saving the money because you're mitigating some risk, or maybe you're bringing in money, you're bringing in users, et cetera, retaining clients, retaining clients exactly. So the first thing is really understanding whether you're making the company money or saving the company money, and then starting to quantify that, you can just have a conversation

with tragedy T and say, hey, here's my role, here's what I've done, can you help me understand

how I'm saving or making the company money? And you want to really have a raise conversation of tying it back into the money.

“Because honestly, nothing else really matters.”

We think like, oh, well, the client said this nice thing about me, and I accomplished this, and I worked for this long, and I went above and beyond in these ways, and although that's all great, and shows you have a great work ethic, what your company wants to know is a client gave me this compliment, and that led to them retaining, which led to an extra $100,000 whatever.

Or, you know, I instead of taking six months to hire someone, as a HR professional, I took three months. That cut our time to hire in half, which time to hire, you know, is really cost us an extra $10,000 a month. So I saved us $30,000, like you want to really find areas, and again, I coach people

on this, and they might say, well, there's no way. I didn't do anything to make or save the company money, and you absolutely did, or you would be fired. Yeah. I love that.

Such great tips. See, you wrote this book, Career Cheek codes. Why do you feel so passionate about this topic? You also, like, blew up on TikTok, initially talking about careers. Why do you feel so passionate about this topic?

I feel so passionate, because it took me a long time to understand these cheat codes, and I had to figure it out for myself, and I want other people to have a shortcut, to where they don't have to go through so many ups and downs and so many problems in their career.

And I think of this as information, equity.

“I think we talk about a lot of different types of equity and equality in our world, how to”

make the world more equitable. We talk about it in terms of money, in terms of where we come from, et cetera. And the type of equality I've just been really passionate about is information of quality, because I have seen so many stories where somebody comes from a really rough background. Somebody comes without having access to some of these job opportunities, et cetera.

And they can work their way up just by having the information. One of my good friends, she is from the Philippines, and she's from like a very small village where the average salary is like $200 a year. And she, just through watching YouTube videos, she learned how to be a VA, eventually made her own VA agency.

Now she has a seven figure business. She travels the world. She's literally living her dream. Because of information equity, because somebody decided, hey, I'm going to put what I learned on YouTube.

“Hey, I'm going to put what I learned into a book.”

I'm going to put what I learned on social media. And I just think the more we can give out information, the more we can ungate keep, because I know some people like to gate keep shit. Some people like to say, I'm not going to share this with others because I want this to be my own special advantage.

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Talk to us about how you first started as a creator from my understanding you got laid off

and that set back actually turned into an opportunity for you. Tell us how that unfolded. Yeah, so as I actually, most of my career has been being a ghost writer for other people, so building other people's personal brands. So I was posting on and off very inconsistently, but I got laid off.

“I think this was 2019 or 2020 and that's what finally catapulted me because I was like,”

I wish I could say that I bravely quit my job and decided to go on and on myself, but I didn't. It was force. I got laid off and so I was forced to post every day. I was like, fuck, I got to get a job, I got to figure this out and threw that process

of just committing. I'm like, I'm going to post every single day, no matter what, no matter if it's a bad post, no matter if I don't feel like it, no matter if I'm sick, I am posting every single day for 365 days. And that year completely changed my life.

I mean, absolutely insane, but yeah, I mean, that was basically my journey. I had seen so many other people succeed with their personal brand and I was like, I want that for myself. How did you laser in on your niche, like were you testing different topics or were you like, I'm just going to start with careers and land there?

I love this question. I actually started posting about everything. I started posting about my dogs and living in Austin and my house and career and personal brand and all these other topics and I just looked at the data of what are people liking and it was a lot of career and personal brand.

Another way that I would figure out what to post is ask my friends, hey, what advice do ask me for? I would notice what advice my friends are asking me for. I would also ask my friends things like, when you think of me, what do you think of? So a lot of times the arms don't have genius is so obvious to us that we don't even consider

it. But arms don't have genius might be mind blowing to somebody else. And for me, that was career. I thought these career cheat codes were obvious.

And so I was like, I would never post them because like duh, people know this or it's

easily Googleable or there's already a lot of career creators and it wasn't until my friend was asking me throughout her whole job application journey and how to really good for

“soul that she was like, hey, you should share some of this stuff.”

And so I started sharing it. And I know that you're a proponent of like sharing stuff even when it's not perfect. You call it B plus content. Yes. Lies that so because I see people all the time, overthink, overthink, overthink their content

to where they don't actually post or maybe a little post once or twice fall off for a couple months, do it again and never actually get consistent, which that was actually me. I was overthinking. I was trying to make it so perfect that I never actually gained traction because I never actually was consistent.

I actually believe there's two skills in personal red. Well, there's a lot of skills, but there's two main skills. One is the skill of consistency, second is the skill of optimization. You cannot optimize if you're not consistent. So some people, they try to make like a 12 point strategy with their seven content pillars

in the perfect time of day and the perfect whatever before they even get started.

But the truth is that is, that's not, that's going to be completely irrelevant in like a

couple of weeks or a couple of months.

“So I believe you should start posting consistently, even if it's bad, even if it sucks,”

even if it's just an Instagram picture of your dog every day and like what you're feeding them. I don't give a fuck, just start posting consistently every day. Once you have the habit, down of posting is asleep, then optimize. I love the book Atomic Habits and it talks about a similar example of if you really want

to get really fit, build a gym habit, have the best technique. The very first skill is just driving your car to the gym. Can you do that every day? Can you drive your car to the gym and literally sit in the parking work? Okay, now once you master that habit, go into the gym.

It doesn't matter if you're walking on the treadmill for five minutes and you leave, you're just doing something. Yeah. Then you're going to slowly optimize. But the reason why people fail at the gym is because they get this crazy, seven week

program where it's super hard and they're so sore up to the first day. It doesn't integrate into their life, but consistency is more important than anything. Like, there has not been a single person online that has showed up consistently every single day, slowly optimized and not seen success. It just doesn't happen.

It doesn't exist. Yeah. How do you suggest people decide what's the first platform they should focus on? And did you focus on one platform or did you focus on LinkedIn Tik Tok and Instagram at the same time?

I started on LinkedIn and I was only on LinkedIn for about a year before I went to Tik Tok. Then I was on LinkedIn and Tik Tok for like two years before I went to Instagram.

And where they will actually start because then when you move to the next platform, you

“have a lot of content, you can repurpose and make it a lot easier.”

But a mistake I see people make when they're building their personal brand is trying to be on 10 platforms at once. It's best to really understand one platform, optimize for that platform. And then once you're in a good rhythm, once you've built the habit, once you've really

optimized, then pick your second platform in your third platform.

Now if you have a whole team or you're hiring a massive agency, you can skip the step. But most people don't have those resources for most people. It's just them. I totally agree.

And I feel like the other thing that we need to talk about is everybody's strengths are different. So a lot of people are like, you know, I can't do social media because I'm not good at video. And LinkedIn doesn't need video.

Substac is huge. That doesn't need video. School is blowing up. That doesn't really need video. So I feel like there's other avenues for people who don't necessarily want to be on

video. Do you agree? Yeah, totally.

“I've a client right now that's like making a ton of money on Instagram threads and does”

not require any. Wow. Any video at all. Yeah, I mean, first of all, I'm about at video is just not true. It's like saying I'm bad at guitar.

I've never been to a guitar lesson.

I can't say I'm bad at guitar, right? If I go to a guitar lesson three times a week for the next 10 years, I will be good a guitar totally. Same as video. If you create a video every week, three times a week, every day, for the next few years,

you will be good at video. It is a learn skill. However, starting with video can be very scary, very overwhelming. And you might not get very far if it's not something that's sustainable for you. So like I said, I have a client right now that's just absolutely killing it on threads.

But with the thing that's most comfortable for you. So if that's writing great, if that's photos great, if that's LinkedIn, if that's substak, what is the most sustainable start there, build the habit, and then slowly grow. And it's also like our comfort zone, right? Like we got to push the edges of our comfort zone in our nervous system.

And if you overwhelm your nervous system and go straight to like, I need to create all these fancy videos, it's going to be really overwhelming and you're not going to stick with it. Like sometimes you approaching a platform differently. Like everyone's posting reels on Instagram.

But then you have like case Kenny, who posts like little like handwritten quotes. And that's his thing. And he posts a handwritten quote every day and he's got like millions of followers now from doing it. It can also help you stand out to think about what's your strength and how can you apply

that to the platform. Totally. Yeah, it's like what do you obsessed with? Like for him, he's obsessed with like visual art, topography, writing. That's incredible.

Like what is somebody else obsessed with? Maybe you're obsessed with long form content. Maybe you're obsessed with video editing, sunsets, and landscapes. Like that, whatever your obsessed with, your obsession will lead you down the path that's the most authentic to you.

And I love that you bring up that example because there is also no right answer. Everything I have said today about career, about content, there are some people that's not going to apply to. There is some people that a different way is going to suit them by doing it the wrong way is going to be better.

Yeah. So it's also important not to think that I got to find the perfect formula that is proven

to work, that always works, that will work perfectly for me.

That does not exist in anything that we do, not in entrepreneurship, not in career. So figure out what's authentic to you and take baby steps towards that. How did you make your first dollar online? Oh my gosh, the first dollar I made online was freelancing. I started posting on LinkedIn and somebody reached out and said, "Hey, can I get on a call with

you?" To talk about LinkedIn. And I think I charged him 50 bucks. The first dollar I made from something outside of me was from an ebook. I wrote an ebook.

I didn't write a ebook. I wrote LinkedIn blogs and my top performing LinkedIn blog. I copied it, pasted it into a PDF and that became an ebook. Amazing. I listed it on gum road and yeah, that was my first digital product sale.

“And today, how do you, like, what are all your different revenue streams today?”

Yeah, I've narrowed it down a lot. I'm glad you're asking me this today and not a year ago because it's identified. So I have my content club where we meet every single day on Zoom and I give you a content prompt. We work on it together.

I have level up on LinkedIn, which is my LinkedIn cohort. That's very much around mindset of building your personal brand on LinkedIn and overcoming any visibility blocks. I do speaking. I have my book and I do brand deals and that's all.

That's so cool. So what kind of freedom do you get from having all these diversified income streams? Yeah. I mean, it's so helpful because if something isn't going great one month, another income stream

And I even have things outside of my business too.

I have, like, real estate and investments and all that. And it's really helpful because the market can change, social media can change, so to have backups and have that security of multiple income streams just makes me feel so much better. And they're all kind of scaling and compounding on their own independently, which is really really beautiful.

“What's the thing that's like working really incredibly well right now?”

Is there platform-wise or revenue stream-wise? Great question. What's working well right now for recurring revenue is getting people to commit to a year. I've tested a lot in my content club and I just find that when people commit to a year and having really solid offers of, like, yes, this is a month to month subscription, but

when you upgrade to a year, you get all these extra bonuses. Their results are so much better. Just the mindset of them being locked into a year, they're showing up way more committed. They're so much more excited, they're excited to bring in other people. And it's a win-win because that helps my revenue a ton because now I'm creating much larger

ARR. Yeah, inconsistency. Yeah. And then platform-wise in terms of, like, getting leads to your content club, what's working? What's working really well right now is two things.

One on LinkedIn, storytelling, especially sharing personal stories. The more vulnerable I am on LinkedIn, the more people want to work with me. And I find that true for a lot of people around me, it can be really scary to be vulnerable on LinkedIn. Yeah.

But I highly recommend that. It's back to standing out and doing what everybody thinks is the wrong thing to do on LinkedIn. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, the thing that you struggled with is the thing people are going to connect

with you over, right? Something else that's working really well is just giving free resources on Instagram. I love many chat, adding a keyword that goes to a free resource and bringing them into my top of funnel is really valuable right now. Very cool.

So I know one of the things that you're known for is public speaking. And a lot of people who are creating online brands, that's really their end goal. They want to get speaking engagements. Maybe they want to become an author. What is your best guidance for somebody who wants to get started in speaking and get these

gigs?

“If you want to get started speaking, this is a little bit of a problematic tip.”

You start by creating your own events. You want to keynote? Make the event you're keynoteing at. Make your own conference. Put together a get together with others and speak at it.

Make a retreat that you speak at. This is one of the best ways to get speaking gigs because you're guaranteeing it. Last year at South by Southwest, I applied to be a main speaker. I didn't get it. So I made my own self.

I saw the best of that. And I had a ton of people come and I got to keynote my own little mini, I loved it. That I made. So that's how it gets started as far as how to monetize your speaking. You've got to be posting every day, that's so, so important.

And when you're applying to speaking, make sure you're following up with everybody on LinkedIn. You can circumvent like any time you're like a speaking application. You can circumvent the entire application just by reaching out to one of the people that work on staff seems kind of sneaky, it is sneaky. In the same way that if you're job hunting, you've got to be connected to 200 recruiters.

If you're looking for speaking gigs, you've got to be connected to 200 conference organizers. And then they will reach out and it also gets sneaky with the budget. So sometimes they're not going to have, they're going to say they don't have a budget to pay you, but they do have a budget from some other department. They might have a consulting budget, a marketing budget, whatever, and you can offer them

something else, throw in something, there's always a budget that you can find.

So yeah, those are my speaking tips. Okay, so before we go, just a couple of questions for those incorporates. What would you say is like one easy thing they can do today to become more visible at work? Ooh, mm-hmm.

“I mean, if you want to be more visible at work,”

one thing you can do today, go post something on LinkedIn. It really is that simple. Post on LinkedIn and just put yourself out there. Yeah, post something on LinkedIn. What's amazing is that if you haven't posted on LinkedIn in a while,

that initial post is going to remind so many people of you, and LinkedIn often will send out that post more, right? Like, if it's been a while, yeah. Another thing you can do is just share one win on Slack or Teams or whatever today. Just one tiny win, share with your boss, share it with your team,

just elevate your work a little bit. Yeah, well, I loved your book, career, cheat codes. It was awesome. I feel like it's going to be so valuable for those incorporates. I also feel like entrepreneurs can learn a lot from it.

So I and my show with two questions that I ask all my guests.

The first is and this can be related to the episode or whatever you want.

What is one actionable thing? Are young improveders can do today to be more profitable tomorrow?

to be more profitable tomorrow. Love that question.

“Set up a free call with 10 prospects or clients.”

It could be a 15 minute call. What you're going to do is you're going to ask them their problem. So, hello, I know you really want to build a personal brand. Like, what's in the way? Like, what do you struggling with?

I really want to understand your language. I'm going to transcribe all 10 of these interviews on Zoom or order or whatever, put them in a chat GPT and pull out the language of my audience. A lot of times when we're creating our leading pages, we're creating our social content. It's from our perspective and our words.

When you flip that to your customers perspective and words, you're going to get way higher conversions and thus be way more profitable. So, go give out some free interviews, ask people their problems, take their exact language and start to sprinkle that language into your marketing materials.

So smart, you always want to talk like your audience so they feel like you're like my

different. Yeah, they're like, oh, we got how are you in my head right now? Like, that is what you want.

“And what would you say you're secret to profiting in life is?”

Secret to profiting in life is consistency. It's just showing up every single day, even when you don't feel like it. Consistency compounds. The only way to fail the entrepreneur game, the personal brand game is to stop. It's to quit. It's to come up with an excuse and say, I'm going to come back in two weeks, right? Show up with a micro step every single day and it's going to compound and you will be successful. Consistency is everything. It really is. It really is.

Courtney, where can everybody find more about you and everything that you do? Yeah, you can find my book career cheat codes on Amazon and all the places books are sold. You can find me on Instagram @courtlandjonson or TikTok @courtney period periodjonson. If you just Google Courtney Jonson, all my stuff will come up, so I hope to see you all my socials.

Amazing. And I'll put ear links in the show notes. Thank you again for joining us on

Young Improving Podcast. Thank you, Hala. Well, Young Improveders, what a masterclass from Courtney Jonson today. She shattered the biggest mess we've been fed that if you keep her head down and work hard, you'll automatically get rewarded. You won't. Not unless people can see your work. The real differentiator is visibility. Courtney calls it working out loud and it's simpler than you think.

Start with the Monday Wednesday Friday rule. Tell your boss the top five priorities on Monday, give a progress report on Wednesday and send a win summary on Friday. That single habit builds trust, reduces micro management and puts you front of mind when promotions are handed out. Next, stop optimizing for effort and start optimizing for impact, specifically your boss' goals. Know what they're trying to achieve both professionally and personally and align your work to that.

Then add one micro step beyond what's expected. It's not always about being perfect.

It's about being the obvious choice. And finally, build your personal brand now. Yesterday, in fact, post on LinkedIn Weekly, connect with recruiters, strengthen your profile with the right keywords. You don't really need to go viral, but you do need to stay consistent, because consistency compounds and invisible talent stays overlooked, so stop hiding yourself. And if this episode inspired you, help young and profiting get seen too.

Share us, comment on our show, and leave us a five star written review.

“That's how we grow this movement. You can now watch all of our live and in-person interviews”

just like this on Spotify, video, and YouTube. I also love connecting with you guys personally, so come say hi to me on Instagram @yapathala or connect with me on LinkedIn by Search Your My Name, Holla Tahak. This is your host, Holla Tahak aka the podcast princess signing off.