P2B | Power To Become | BYU-Idaho address by John Dye on Passion and Purpose

P2B John Dye Power to Become BYU-Idaho – powered by Happy Scribe

Everybody. How are you? I can see one person, and it’s the tribute that’s the only person I can see. Can we bring house lights up a little or spots down a little? Maybe be not guys, it’s good to be with you. As I start today, you’ll notice on the screen behind me a text number 50500. One thing I’m big into is mentoring. Okay. There’s a lot of people out here. I’m not going to be able to probably personally mentor everyone if you have a question for me, but I would love to hear from you. So text “dyejo” to 50500. You’ll get my personal phone number. You’ll get my personal Twitter account, which is also up on the screen as well as my email address. So feel free to do that. I know that one thing we’re into is mentoring. And those of us that have been blessed by an education at Ricks or BYU Idaho, we should give back. So we definitely want to do that. I am with Boncom, and I’ll discuss Boncom in just a moment. Bonneville Communications, what we do there and why I’m so passionate about that. I love the theme of power to become this year, discovering Your Passion, telling your story specifically, I’ll be talking about how you tell your story online through social media and then, of course, networking with others, building your network out and giving back to other people through the network that you’ve built as well.

Boncom, what do we do? Let’s hear a round of applause. Have you heard of because of him? Because of him. Some of the brother and have told us that was the single most successful campaign outreach campaign of all time for the Church. And I don’t say that to Boast, but I say that to let you know that the Lord is opening doors. Who had heard Elder Bednard. Who has heard Elder Bednard, BYU Education week just about a month ago, talking about flooding the Earth. Okay. Flooding the Earth, sharing goodness through social media. That’s what we do because of him. Did that. 5.2 million video views in one week, 5.2 million that set records of all types for us. We also do the Mormon.org campaign. I’m a Mormon campaign. I’m sure you’ve heard of this as well. And has anyone seen Meet the Mormons?

Yeah.

Okay. That means you weren’t here last night then. So if this is out in theaters, I have something to report. And you guys are the first people to hear this. Box office, 317 screens last night, one point 17 million top ten. And it’s because of people like you sharing this. It just blew up on social media. We’ll talk more about that a little bit later as well. So three things that we’re going to talk about today, passion. That’s where I’m going to begin. I’m going to start with a little story of two stonemasons. Okay. This was a long time ago. A gentleman went up to Stone Mason number one tapped him on the shoulder and he said, how’s your job? What do you think about your job? He said, I’m building a wall. He said, It’s monotonous. The work breaks my back every day. These stones are so heavy, they’re so hard to put into place. I don’t enjoy the people that I work with. They all have issues with attitude. They don’t enjoy what they’re doing either. And you know what? My father did this before me and my son will probably do this after me because this is what we do.

We just add stones to walls. The same gentleman walked about 30ft over Tap stone Mason number two on the shoulder and said, what do you do for a living? How do you enjoy it? He said, I love my job. I’m a stonemason. I’m building a Cathedral. He said, yes, sometimes the work is monotonous. He said, It’s very hard. He said, It’s backbreaking work. It’s not easy. My father did it before me, but I am building a Cathedral. I’m building it so someday I can worship in some place that I want to worship. I can worship my God and my family can as well. My sons, my daughters, my grandchildren. I want them to be able to go to a place where they can worship their God and feel his love for them. As you look at these two, what was the difference? They both did the same type of work, right? They were both stonemasons. It was in the passion. It was in the viewpoint that these two had what they were trying to do and why they were doing that. One had vision. One had a dream, the other. It was just a means to an end.

That was something that they needed to do to get money. And it was an occupation. The other person, it was their passion. It was what they wanted to do. And they did it not only for themselves, but for others as well. Who in here has heard of this gentleman? Samuel Pierpont Langley. Raised hands. That’s what I expected. This is Samuel Pierpont Langley. Okay. Good looking gentlemen. Right around the turn of the century. Let me give you a little context. Around the turn of the century. Similar to probably the space race, right about the time I was born at late 60s, we were up against the Soviets trying to reach the moon first. If you go back to the turn of the century, that’s what this gentleman was trying to do. It was the first individuals who were trying to fly. Okay? Controlled manned flight. This gentleman had the recipe for success. He was extremely well educated. He was very well networked as well. He was a professor at the Naval Academy in mathematics. He was plugged into Washington, DC and had deep pockets. We’ll talk about that. He was also a Secretary for the Smithsonian.

Okay. So very well educated, well connected. He personally knew Alexander Graham Bell, as well as Andrew Carnegie, again, people that are very well known in their field. He was well funded. The Department of Defense, which back then still had money, gave him $50,000, which is the equivalent of a million today. So a lot of money. He was well funded. He was well staffed. Because of that money, he was able to get this dream team of engineers, individuals who knew what they were doing, who knew how to calculate wind and speed, and all these things that you have to take into consideration. The New York Times loved Mr. Langley. They covered every step that he took as he was going along this path toward flight. Very well covered. But there were some issues. The purpose that Mr. Langley had was to be the first one that could accomplish this, the first person to achieve man flight. He wanted to do it for himself because he wanted to be rich and he wanted to be wellknown. He wanted to be famous. An individual who, again, had everything at his fingertips and again, the recipe for success. But there was a big problem, actually.

You’ll notice that he was not successful in his efforts. In 19 three, he attempted twice, the second time in 19 three. And you’ll notice how they covered him. Langley’s carefully planned experiment of failure. Now, let’s move on and talk about some other individuals. About 300 miles away in Ohio, two brothers, not well educated. None of them on the Wright Brothers team were even College educated. Many did not even have high school educations. They had a recipe for failure, right? There was absolutely no funding, okay. All that they had was their bicycle shop, bicycles, no education. I talked about that, right. They did not have any of that education, that official formal education that other individuals had. But their purpose, these were individuals that had vision. They were inspired. They knew that what they could bring to the table would not only affect them individually, but it would affect the whole world. Eventually, they knew that what they could bring would be something that would transform this world, that would forever change the landscape of the way we travel and that fueled their fire. They were passionate about what they did. They were able to inspire those that worked with them and build a team of individuals, though they didn’t have the education, had the vision to do something much bigger than themselves.

They persevered. There are some stories told where they would take five sets of parts with them each day because they knew they would break those specific parts before dinnertime, and they didn’t want to have to shuttle back and forth to get those. So they persevered. They had this vision which carried them through the hard times, and they knew they could make a difference. So it all culminated on December 17, three, the end of the year. You know the place. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They successfully flew for 59 seconds, 59 seconds at about the pace of a person jogging. They lifted about 120ft. Were The New York Times there. Were there any papers there, any press? No. But they realized their vision because, again, they were carried by this vision and by this dream that they had to change the world because of that, they’re on a stamp. And Mr. Langley is not also, Ironically, if you go to the Smithsonian, the gentleman who used to be the Secretary at the Smithsonian is not there. He’s not known for pretty much anything at this point. If you walk in today, guess what? The Wright brothers have their own section, their own room that talks about not only their bicycles, but of course, their flying machines that they created.

So again, a contrast that could also talk about privatization versus getting government subsidies, I guess, too. But vision is what I’m talking about today. One interesting thing, Mr. Langley could also have decided I wasn’t successful. But you know what? That’s going to fuel my fire to outdo the Wright brothers. I want to plus won them in some way. How can I do that? You know what? He folded up? He folded shop. He didn’t continue to seek that vision that he once had because even though he had a passion for flight, he didn’t have a passion for anything else but to selfaggrandize his ego and to Pat himself on the back for what he was doing. I think this talks very well to what the Wright brothers had. Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. That’s Winston Churchill. So again, as we talk about passion, you’ve got to do what you love, find that passion, and then love what you do. You guys are at a point in life. Those of you who are students are still being molded. And I talked about mentoring a little bit earlier.

That is so important, I think to be able to find not only what your passion is, but also find somebody that can help you not only discover that passion, but build upon that passion. So those of you that are a little bit older, please be a mentor to someone else. And those that are younger, look for mentors, people who can help you understand where you want to go in life and what you can do in life. I think success is a myriad of things coming together. Those converging, I think these four things are all important. Passion, action, ideas, and time. Those all come together. I also think your skill set, some of you are innately wired to do things better than others. I’m not good at fixing cars. I realize that. So I don’t try to fix my own car. I don’t try to do a lot of home remodeling. You wouldn’t be pleased with what you saw there. But what I do do well, I really try to focus on so find your passion, find what you’re good at and really focus on that. There’s a book called Start with Y. Has anyone heard of that or read it?

Yeah.

Okay. We’ve got one very ardent supporter. Start with why. There’s something called The Golden Circles. Okay. A lot of us sometimes begin in the outer rungs. And if we look back at those two individuals, Stonemason number one, and Mr. Langley, we’ll see that they started sometimes. With what? Or how do I achieve flight? Or what am I doing? I’m building a wall. If you start with the why, the passion that will by far Trump anything else that you can do, find what you’re passionate about. If you have the why, you will then know why you’re building that wall, because you’re creating that Cathedral. If you have the why, you know that you’re trying to create flights so you can realize your vision, which will transform not only your own personal life, but the lives of others. Discover your why. Okay, I’m going to transform a little bit as I move into the second part, which is telling your story. Who has heard the David Archulette single? The new one he just put out Glorious. Okay, we’re going to play that video. But I was talking to Spence a little bit earlier, and he said as I was preparing my talk, he said I was listening to that song, and he said, that perfectly embodies what we’re trying to talk about when we talk about passion at this conference.

And I took that into account and I said, yeah, I’m going to add that in. Look at some of these words. There are times when you might feel aimless. You can’t see the places where you belong, but you will find that there is a purpose. It’s been there within you all along. And when you’re near it, you can almost hear it. Then it goes into the chorus. So we’re going to go ahead and watch this video and discuss this a little bit after. Before we do that, though, we want to start off with a tweet. Everybody grab your phone. My Twitter handle is Daijo. Okay, I want you to tell me right now you might have multiple passions. Help me understand what your passion is. What are you thinking about right now? Hashtag P two become my passion is what? Put that in 140 characters. Okay. While you do that, I’m going to play this video.

There are times when you might feel aimless and can’t see the places where you belong, but you will find that there is a purpose. It’s been there within you all along. And when you’re near it, you can almost hear it. It’s like a knee. Just keep listening. And pretty soon you’ll start to figure out your part. Everyone plays a piece. You’re in there, each one of us glory us. And you won’t know how to let it ring out as you discover who you are. Others around you will start to wake up to the town in each one of us is glory up.

Yeah, it was interesting. And I won’t go into too many tactical things, but David was the social media lynch pin for us by far the first single he had since he returned from his mission to Chile. And it was really good that way. So the second point we’re going to talk about is telling your story. And I’ll talk specifically about social media, because that’s what I know. What I’m going to do, though, is take you through some of the things that we did with this movie, Meet the Mormon, specifically on social media. And I’m going to align that with some of the things you can do individually to create your personal footprint online. Okay. So as we talk about social media, I believe there’s four Rs in social media. You have to be real. You have to be relevant. The content that you put out there has to be relevant. You have to be responsive. And if you do all those three things, you end up, I believe, with the thing that we’re all looking for is a relationship. Right. That one on one relationship. Social media is great because it’s a one to many broadcast medium.

But at the end of the day, you need that one to one communication to really make a difference. Okay. So, number one, be real. It’s interesting. This movie took the same approach that we take with the Mormon.org or I’m a Mormon campaign. Right. We don’t come from an institutional level and draw down. We start from an individual level and draw up. If you think about it, the Church is made of unique individuals. Right. Who believe the same thing. But how that’s exemplified in their personal life comes out much differently because all of our experiences are different. So you might resonate with someone and I might resonate with someone else. And that, for me, is the beauty of the gospel. So they took an individual approach. We took these six individuals, really zeroed in on them. And the 80 minutes of the movie is really just telling their story. We could have made a very long movie, taken all 15 million plus members of the Church and created a very long video because we all have a story. But what these people do, these are storytellers. They know how to tell their story. And with the help of the film crew, they were able to do that.

So what can you do, number one, to create your own story online, develop your online persona invoice okay, you’re going to want to create that for yourself. Now, how do you do that? You want to be authentic and consistent, not false, fake or fraudulent. Okay. I’m taking these, by the way, these last points directly from what Elder Bednard said at his Education Week in his Education Week talk. So be authentic. Be yourself. Don’t try to be someone else. We should be Truthful, honest and accurate. We shouldn’t exaggerate, embellish or pretend to be something we’re not. Okay. It always amazes me. It seems like some of my Facebook friends are on perpetual vacation. I only see them with the selfies in Hawaii or in some exotic place. Right. I’m not saying that’s bad, but be yourself online. Okay. We sometimes put these personas out that might be a little bit more unrealistic, more unrealistic than they should be. Be relevant. Okay. What we did with the Meet the Mormons campaign is we took many of these characters and we created what we call quote cards for them. These do very well on social media. You can pin them to Pinterest.

They can be dropped onto Twitter, Facebook, or many other platforms. But what this allows us to do is help people get inside the head of these individuals that were spotlighting in the movie. Right? We take a pull quote from them and drop that on. Now, when I talk about being relevant, though, think about timeliness. Okay. The coach was the first character that we revealed. We were able to put him out on the Eve of College football this season starting in 2014. So on the Friday, we put this quote card out, you know who we asked to team up with? Lds youth. Okay. We were trying to bolster LDS youth their Facebook presence. So we gave them this graphic and we said, push this out. And then all of our other channels got around them and shared that for them as well. So number one, it helped LDS youth. Number two, they were on the Eve of playing Ohio State, who at the beginning of the year, we thought they were a big deal. It turns out they’re not that big of a deal. But we put it out at a timely point where this would mean something to people, and we put it in a target audience, the youth who we know would be interested in the season that was about to begin.

The Bishop, the bishops from Atlanta, Georgia. We had a national religious reporters conference of some sort, a Press conference of some sort. And so the week that that happened, we put this out. We debuted the Bishop. Okay? We took the Bishop, brought him to that conference, and that made a lot of sense. So again, timeliness, again with dawn, the mother. She lives in Draper, Utah. And we were able to put her out at a time that really made sense as well. So what I’m saying is be timely and be relevant. Now, when was general conference?

Last week.

Last week. When did the movie debut? We know that there’s a Halo effect, right? Everyone has this spiritual high coming out of Les General Conference, so we made sure we jumped onto that bandwagon. Now, we had a premiere as well. When was the premiere? Anybody know?

Tuesday.

Tuesday. Last Tuesday evening. Okay. So many of the Alisters, and I hate to say that, but you need to do that to get the social push. We brought in many of the not celebrities, but molecules, Mormon celebrities. We got Mitt Romney. He was in town, so he let us know 20 minutes before. I think that he didn’t want to be mobbed. We got Marie in, David in Dan Reynolds. Anybody know Dan Reynolds? Who did he play for? Imagine, yes. So we got him in there. He is with Bishnu and some of Bishnu’s family. Who are these guys? Studio C. I got them upstairs, and they did a special little sketch for us. They’re funny, but they’re more funny on Monday nights than they are in person. They’re great people, though. Salt of the Earth people love them. So we were able to leverage some of these people that we knew had large followings to get them to tweet for us, drop things on Facebook. We were able to pull assets, get videos of them talking about their response once the movie was out, et cetera. So you’ll see those all over social media, I hope, at this point.

So what do you learn from this? How can you take some of the principles that we learned from what we did into your own personal life and creating your own digital footprint? Identify who you want to speak to. We knew that we could leverage some of these celebrities to help us do what we wanted to get done. You need to define your audience. Who do you want to speak to? Where is your passion? Define your passion, and then define who you want to speak to. Then create the content that will speak to that audience. Okay, I know you guys aren’t a brand per say when I say a brand, I mean retail brand. You do have a personal brand. You need to create content around those things that you want to get done that will help you achieve the goals that you have in your life. So create the content. Join the discussion boards and the threads for those things that you want to get done. Continue to tweak your strategy, because guess what you’re passionate about right now may not be your passion in five years. We heard from Amy last night. She did her nonprofit work in India.

She felt at that stage in her life was over and she wanted to change and felt like she had to move in a new direction. So she did. Your passions will continually change. So tweak your strategy by changing your targets as your target again continues to change. Finally, build a relationship of trust. Obviously, we can’t oversell that. Any time you create content and interact with people online, you need to build that relationship. Be responsive. One thing about social media that you learn very quickly is you cannot control a conversation. You can influence the conversation. You cannot control it. So the best thing you can do is respond to individuals. If there’s something that they need, you need to talk to them in real time. If at all possible. If there’s something that they don’t like, respond to that. So it diffuses the situation. So on Facebook, on Twitter, you need to create that dialogue with your target audience. You need to engage with them, react to what they’re doing, and respond to them just as quickly as possible. Finally, if you do all of those first three Rs, you end up with this relationship, which again is the golden if I use the golden circle before as the Y, this is the golden circle of the four Rs.

It’s the relationship. It’s what you’re after. So you’ll see here, look at some of these 111 favorite tweet that you were mentioned in. Three minutes, two minutes, 50 seconds last night. This was something I took yesterday just because it was going bonkers. It was hard to be here and listen to the speaker and follow all this, but we tried to do our best, but this was just off the charts. And thanks to a lot of you, this happened 104,000 likes in about four weeks with zero paid dollars to get likes. It’s because there’s a passion built into us. Right. As members of the Church, we have testimonies. And as we talk about passion that perfectly aligns with what we teach in this Church, about having a testimony. And when you’re passionate about something, you align with those things that you’re passionate about. Meet the Mormons page. Some of the feedback that we got last night as people went to movie. And again, we couldn’t have asked for anything better than what we’re seeing. Justin Sweeney at the top just to Meet the Mormons tonight. Very well done. Showed diverse membership and motivated me to be better.

You will laugh, cry and be inspired. The motivation, that’s one thing we wanted out of this movie. We want to make members better members. And you know what, if Catholics go see it, if Protestants go see it, if Buddhists go see it. We want them to look at the Church differently. We want to dispel myths and misperception, but we want them to become better Catholics and better Protestants and better Buddhists as well. Even if they don’t join the Church, become better. Number two, Jasmine sang along with David Archie at the end of Meeting the Mormons. Hopefully not too loud. She would have drawn attention to herself. But that’s great chat at the bottom. Meet the Mormons was inspiring and humbling. It makes me realize how amazing Church members are and how much better I can be as a Mormon. Again, that inspiration, that passion that’s built within the individual. Here’s one that I found to be extremely interesting. I’m watching a Mormon movie because my best friend is Mormon. Isn’t that awesome? We had a chance down below to continue that conversation with that individual. And again, we’re not being overbearing, but we’re just saying, what did you think of it?

We’re creating this dialogue. Get in a dialogue with that person. The final one that I’ll show. I’m so happy that Meet the Mormons is being sold out in cinemas. I’m proud to say that I’m a Mormon. That’s what we’re looking for. Again, if nothing else, it’s to make people say that. I’m proud to be a Mormon. I know it. I love it. I love it. That’s what we want to do. And why did we go out in theaters? I’ll just tell you this really quick. We need the box office to get onto Netflix and onto digital distribution because the reach vehicle is there. And that’s really where we’ll make an impact, I think, with non members. But when you have your passion and you create the relationships like we see here with Amy and these two fine students, then you have an opportunity again, that mentorship will create something and build that relationship, which will result in something moving forward. So one more tweet I’m going to ask you to do. This won’t necessarily be a Twitter bomb, but I want to go back to Salt Lake City and I want them to say, what is this power to become thing?

We saw this huge mass of tweets that started to come Saturday morning. I want you to tell us again, I want you to drop this to Meet the Mormons to their Twitter handle. Peter, become make sure you use the hashtag. But I want you to tell us, my faith has helped me. What? What is your faith helped you to do? Persevere have a good attitude. What has it helped you to do? Drop that in for a second. I’ve got about eight minutes left, and so I want you to hear from some students as they’re talking about social media. You know what? I’m going to skip this. This is a video, but I think on my slide share presentation, which I pushed out, but I’m going to skip through this because the video actually is a little subpar because of the audio. So I’m going to drop past that. And we’re going to talk about networking in the last seven minutes or so. There’s a few maxims that I want to give you that I personally feel are extremely important in networking with others. Number one, don’t keep score. A lot of times in our marriages and our relationships with others, we’ll keep score.

Well, I did this. I did the laundry. So you need to do the dishes. I took Bobby to soccer practice Tuesday, so you need to take him on Thursday. Don’t keep scoring networking. Okay. You give and you give till you can’t give any more because that will be reciprocated. It naturally is everything comes around back to you. Create a dream with a deadline. Okay. I talked about passion. I talked about telling your story. Dream with a deadline. We often hear that if we have goals. If we don’t write them down, they’re just dreams, right? Add a deadline to that. What do you want to do? How many individuals do you want to meet by a certain date? When you walk into that room this afternoon and you’re able to interact with some of the speakers, but also your fellow students, talk to yourself and say, I don’t want to walk out of that room in 1 hour until I’ve talked to at least three individuals that I didn’t know before and utilize those types of tactics to do some things that you don’t think you can do right now but will make you a better networker.

Number three, build it before you need it. When I say it, I mean a network. I can’t tell you how many times we have individuals that say, I am now a senior and I’m looking for a job and I’m going to start building my network right now. One thing that I love about Steve Davis is he is the LinkedIn Magistrate. He’s the King. He’s awesome at it. You need to build that network before you need it. And LinkedIn is a great tool to do that. Look into that and talk to Steve if you need some help with that. But build it now. Build it in your undergraduate years and continue to add to it because you will always be coming back to that in the future. I can tell you that be audacious. Don’t be afraid to dream. A lot of people won’t even ask questions because they’re afraid of hearing no in return. Don’t be worried about no. If you don’t ask, the answer automatically is no. Right? So ask ask for some of these things. Ask for that informational interview we’ll hear from Christopher right after me. He will tell you how to be audacious.

He exemplifies, he personifies being audacious. This is extremely important. I can’t tell you how many interns and how many people I have hired over the course of my career that probably didn’t have the best hard skills. And their soft skills might have even been a little shaky. But they were Masters at following up. And you know what that told me? They would want the job and that they would do this when they got the job. They would be the people that followed up. Because I really trust people that I can count on. If you can count on someone that covers a multitude of sins, hard skills, soft skills, et cetera, follow up with individuals and show gratitude. Those two kind of go together. I believe you should send little notes of appreciation. Emails are great as well. Send emails to people and say thank you for the time and giving me that informational interview or whatever the case is. I appreciate you talking to me about the product that I’m selling or the service that I’m selling. Send the personalized card, though. There’s something magical about taking a pen and putting it on paper and seeing that somebody took the time to do that and write you a personal note of thanks.

So show that gratitude to them. All right, wizard behind the curtain can you help me out here? There we go. Thank you. So again today we talked a little bit about passion. Discover your passion. Find out what it is. Now is the time when you can do that. Those of you here at BYU Idaho this is a perfect time. You can take a multitude of courses. See what resonates with you. What gets you jazzed. What are you interested in? Find your passion. Thank you. I’ll hit the right side. What’s your story? Discover your story. Tell it. Find a great way to tell it. For some of you that will be social media. You need to create that digital footprint finally network with others. When you do that effectively, you’ll create something that you can come to again and again. Thank you for your time. Enjoy your time at BYU Idaho this is a wonderful time. Something that you’ll never be able to think back upon without fond memories. We often talk about the things that we do here while we’re on campus and those of us that have already spoken, we talk about our affinity for Ricks or BYU Idaho.

It’s a great spot. This is one of the few spots where you can have the spirit with you and you’re you can open up something like this with a prayer. So enjoy your time here. Thank you very much.