The Success Nuggets

Success Nuggets #38 - Transforming Connections Through Authentic Storytelling with Dennis Pitocco

• David Abel • Season 2 • Episode 18

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Join us as visionary guest Dennis Pitocco, the creative force behind Biz Catalyst 360, reveals how authentic storytelling can transform connections and unify communities. 

With a shift toward vulnerability and genuine self-expression, he's seen how personal experiences weave powerful narratives that resonate deeply with audiences. Dennis emphasizes the freedom and creativity that have allowed a network of over 1,200 writers to flourish, creating bonds that span continents.

We also explore the profound journey of rediscovering humanity through intentional choices and community service. Hear how simple acts, like delivering meals to seniors, transform lives on both sides of the door. 

This engaging episode is a testament to the power of storytelling, service, and the relentless pursuit of a meaningful life.

Speaker 2:

Amazing amazing wisdom entrepreneurs success, success around the world.

Speaker 1:

This is the Success Nuggets podcast. Have you ever wondered what you could learn and how inspired you'd be if you asked incredible people from around the world about the patterns that drive progress? Get ready to dive into a world of insights and inspiration, of insights and inspiration. This is the Success Nuggets Podcast, with the founder of the Digital Lightbulb and your host, david.

Speaker 2:

Abel. My next guest is a recognized author, creative writer, who is known for his platforms and contributions to Biz Catalyst 360, often focusing on themes of hope, unity and humanity. My next guest is Dennis Patoko. Are you there, Dennis? I'm here. Could you tell us more about how to craft a compelling story and the process that you use?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely. Let me just say up front, david, I'm not a writer, but I have written. I've thought about this quite a bit because, as you mentioned, I preside over a number of things. One is Biz Catalyst 360, david, and we've got over 1,200 writers across six continents. We've published over 30,000 articles. So, by osmosis, I've been able to deduce from that what works and what doesn't work. And, quite frankly, when people come to our site, they're not new writers but they want to write for us.

Speaker 3:

The number one question seems to be what resonates with your audience, which is kind of what you're talking about storytelling. You know what, what works and what doesn't work. What's interesting about that is the answers changed over the years and it's almost like drawing a line when the pandemic happened, the writing that came since that time and what is that? That's authentic storytelling from the heart period. That's where it begins. The same people, david, that you and I might know would have been writing about Leadership 101 or sales and marketing and business. It doesn't mean they stopped writing about that, but they personalized it, which means, if I'm telling somebody giving advice on Leadership 101, rather than talking about some company I'm talking about, well, when I met with that company. When I went in there, what happened? How did it go? What didn't go well, so I'm bringing myself into the story now, still keeping it in business, but not necessarily.

Speaker 3:

It's amazing, though, david, how many people moved over to pure personal storytelling as kind of an addition to their writing skills. They wanted to perfect telling more about them, and that's what resonates with the audience. There's much more to that, but it all started with a shift and authentic storytelling, I emphasize, from the audience. There's much more to that, but it all started with a shift, and authentic storytelling, I emphasize, from the heart. It doesn't mean you can't write from your head, but what that means is be candid, be vulnerable, be your real self. People will respond to that, because, guess what, when you start telling your story, they see slices of their life in there and it says to them'm not alone. And if david's brave enough or courageous enough to open his kimono a bit, wow, maybe I should do that. It's amazing how many people turn into writers because they read stories like that.

Speaker 2:

You've actually built a really successful, thriving online community with regular meetups and I don't know how many great solutions over many years. What are the key lessons you can learn from your approach and what are the great things that are happening within your community? Wow, wow.

Speaker 3:

That's a tough one, let me say. I'd like to tell you I was brilliant and when we launched this thing 13 years ago, david, we had a plan for doing exactly what you just said. We didn't, david, we had a plan for doing exactly what you just said we didn't. But what we learned? And the one benefit? People say, why do you do what you do? Because, as you know, everything we do is for good. There's no profits. We don't sell things, we don't market, we don't advertise. I'm blessed to be able to say that, of course. But people said well then, what's in it for you? I said what's interesting is?

Speaker 3:

It started out as a theory saying if we build something from scratch and invite people like you, david, and others around the world, to share themselves within what we're building, which means write stories, write poetry, whatever you want to send to us, send it to us, just share who you are. And if we took off all the handcuffs, which means you can write whenever you want, some publications that we know say you gotta write every two weeks. Look, we don't care what you write about, as long as it's respectful and not mean-spirited. It can be 10 words, it can be 2 000 words, it can be about life, it can be about culture, it can be like business. We've learned if we take the shackles off and say that to you, guess what? You now have the freedom to just create when you're inspired. So I've learned that if you give the community the ability to do when it surfaces not because dennis said you got to do this that's amazing. And that when I say we have over 1200 writers that's where they came from they tasted a little bit of that freedom doesn't mean they don't write for other places, but they like to come to us because the david that last week may have been writing about leadership is this week he's writing poetry. It's. It just comes out of nowhere.

Speaker 3:

And around that then came the relationships. You know, people like you and I, david, talking today wouldn't be talking because of that, because we don't just say, all right, now you're a writer. We'd like to invest in a conversation, like we're doing today and with all of our writers, and over the years that just kept growing and growing. I do, and my wife and I do, a whole lot of travel around the world. That's our other passion. But we've learned through that wherever we go there are people we now know that we can sit and have a beer with, have a coffee with, because they write for us. We got so many of them, oh I love that.

Speaker 2:

That's so excellent. A little bit like me, you transitioned from quite a long, sensible career. I think you're in banking for 30 years.

Speaker 3:

I was in banking for 30 years, absolutely, and I'm the accidental publisher, for lack of a better term. I'll put some meat on that a little bit, david, if you'd like. That's kind of where we got our start and this goes back about. Well, we launched 13 years ago. This story starts a little before that. I was 30 years in banking.

Speaker 3:

My wife, who's British from the United Kingdom, spent a lot of years in another field related to banking. We met over there in the United Kingdom, got married, came back to Tampa. I was running a number of businesses. I was fortunate One of my businesses were in the UK, happened to sell it at the right time, came back and, as I think I've said to you, you before, we're like the dog that was chasing the car. We caught the car. We're relatively young.

Speaker 3:

Now what are we going to do if we're blessed with something very few people have and that's the ability to make choices? Saying, what would you do if you really could do whatever you wanted to do? And we sat, we took a lot of walks and we finally decided that, uh, we were going to do travel intentional travel versus business travel. We all know the difference there. Um, we wanted to do is spend a lot more time truly giving back to non-profits. And I don't mean just writing checks, I mean rolling up our sleeve and delivering meals and working, and we've done a lot of that. And then the website came because we got to keep our minds active. So let's create something. And I don't mean go out and hire a bunch of people to build a website. It was more like I wanted to build it from scratch. What would it be like? What would it do? And I wanted something selfishly, and we wanted something that we wouldn't mind visiting in the morning, without the pop-ups, without the sales pitches, without the subscribe. We've been blessed to be able to make a lot of choices. One of the best choices we've made was giving back. And people say, wow, what do you mean? I can donate. Well, no, no, not donation, it's rolling up our sleeves.

Speaker 3:

We started delivering meals to seniors here in tampa 13 years ago. We still do that. We've never lost it. I've gone on to boards of directors to help run that organization. My wife's done the same. But we didn't want to lose sight of the on the ground impact.

Speaker 3:

When you deliver a meal to a house and it's a senior, people like, oh, that's great You're feeding them. No, no, no, no. It's not about the food. We realized very quickly. It was about the fact that if Dennis is delivering a meal to Betsy, one of our longest recipients is Betsy she's 98 years old. It's not about the food. She takes the food and puts it on the counter. She wants that personal interaction. She wants 15 minutes to sit with Dennis and his wife Allie, because we're the only people she may see that day or the next day or the next day. So long answer, but my advice is find a way to give back. You don't have to deliver meals. It doesn't have to be a nonprofit. There's so many things you can do to put light in other people's lives. And I think when you get to the age in the 50s, 60s, you start thinking about your legacy. How can I make a difference? Well, if you want to truly make a difference, talk to me write to me.

Speaker 2:

I love that, dennis. And the importance of collective human experience serving others. Reflection Did that come over time, after the corporate career, or was it something you were-? Oh, it did Well.

Speaker 3:

I've worked for some of the most brilliant, best bosses in the world. I've also worked for some of the most horrible bosses in the year. I've learned from both. But, what's interesting, somewhere in between, I was faced with at least three circumstances over that 30 years where I had to define who I was, which means I found something within the banking world it could have been the books being cooked something that wasn't right, and there's a famous quote out there. I forget who said it. I wish I did, and it was.

Speaker 3:

Integrity is doing the right thing when no one else is watching. I had the chance to define my integrity three times and in all three cases I did the right thing and over time I began to see the benefit of that, and some of that came with me when I had this thinking of rediscovering humanity. It's not just about integrity in business. It's about all those other words that you and I can use compassion, empathy, geez, the things that have left business years ago. We've watched some of the surveys here in America, and this is more particularly to the younger generation. After the pandemic, yeah, they want to go back to work, but it ain't just about money, as they said. It's about the culture they're working in and they will take a culture that they look forward to participating in over a higher salary and boy, that is powerful, which puts the ownership on the business. Now to say, how do you respond and retain those kind of people? Well, guess what Starts with humanity.

Speaker 2:

Okay, you got that, and I believe that when you get that bit bit right, the salary will take care of itself because it will become a high performing business absolutely exactly.

Speaker 3:

And the people retention, to start retaining more people. And then the people that are happy. Guess who they're going to talk to? People that are looking for a job for their friends. They come work here. Yeah, you may not be making a fortune on day one, but you won't mind coming in here every day. And you know what happens when people are happy to job their productivity goes up. It just goes on and on.

Speaker 2:

But if there's any books out there that you recommend, what's?

Speaker 3:

Here's one I recommend. I'm going to be selfish here. Last year, from May until July, my wife and I were lucky enough to walk the entire Camino de Santiago. It's over there in France and Spain. It's a sacred walk. It's been around over a thousand years. It's 510 miles, starting in France and going all the way to Santiago, spain.

Speaker 3:

It's a pilgrimage. People have been doing it for spiritual reasons and God knows how many reasons. It's whatever you want to do, We've been talking about it for years and so we did that. We walked 510 miles, as my wife will tell you. It was 1.3 million steps. We kept a journal.

Speaker 3:

I came back and you know all the events we have and all this and everybody wanted to know well how'd it go. So we did. You know you've been to our friendship bench. We want to know well how to go. So we did. You know you've been to our friendship bench. We did a friendship bench just about our experience.

Speaker 3:

So I spoke, answered questions and then I wrote an article. It was about 1500 words and I said to my wife I just can't put into words what a life changing experience was. People like, oh, it was grueling, it was nothing to do with the physical. That was the easy part, so I did what I said would do. I wrote, we wrote a book to rights of passage, our camino de santiago pilgrimage, and it is 200 pages of just an absolutely life-changing experience, wow.

Speaker 3:

And it was average of about 15 miles a day roughly. I mean, give or take, some days are 20, 12. The physical challenge was there, don't get me wrong, because you are going up and you're going down and there's the weather, the best part about it. When people say, well, what's the most striking part, I said it's something my wife and I discovered that we didn't know we were looking for In the book. We call it Symphony of Silence. Picture David walking for hours upon hours up in the hills and the vineyards of nature with absolute silence, no phones, no music, no talking, no noise. We would talk to each other occasionally, but we'd go for hours and not say a word and you're just kind of taking all this in and saying, wow, talk about humanity, take all that crap out of your lives.

Speaker 2:

It's incredible. That's a really fascinating story.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's a remarkable experience Blessed to be able to do it. I would just wish more people had an opportunity and if you don't do it for two months, like we did, but do it for a couple of weeks and just see what it's like.

Speaker 2:

We have TED Talks. They have a sort of a theme, don't they? They're a monologue. Yes, I don't know if it was maybe us or someone else was looking at a monologue from a seven-year-old. I don't know if you've seen that one, but it was almost the perfect ted talk and, in a way, do I need to do a ted talk? What's your latest venture? What I talk about?

Speaker 3:

we took a look at that because a friend of mine who's an just an eloquent speaker was struggling with putting together a TED Talk a few years back and I said what's the struggle? You can walk into a room and start talking and people stop and listen. She said, well, the structure and the bureaucracy. And I said what do you mean? She said well, she sent me the guidelines. There were 13 pages, and she said it was dawning on her that it seemed like the style was more important than the substance. I said, well, send that over to me.

Speaker 3:

And we came out two weeks later with what we call Instead Talks. It is a TED Talk with the missing link. The missing link is number one, not 13 pages of guidelines. Anybody can do it anywhere in the world, virtually like you and I are doing, David, but the big missing link was an audience. So now we bolted on an audience virtually, and so it ain't about David or Dennis standing up there for 18 minutes, which is the TED Talk time. It's about David or Dennis talking for a few minutes and then letting the audience probe and David walks away happier because now he's kind of tested his thinking with a live audience and the audience walk away saying I now know david do you have a one golden nugget for life well, I may have mentioned it be yourself.

Speaker 3:

Everyone else is taken, and what I mean by that is the authentic. I've said this to so many people in so many discussions, personally and professionally. Given the world around us, given a lot of darkness, given a lot of politics, given a lot of stuff going on and the pandemic really accelerated this people became very uncomfortable in their own shoes when it came to opening doors to certain discussions and they've kind of built a shell and what we've been trying to do through our humanity effort is break through, which means get comfortable, being authentic and I noticed that because if I'm talking to people and they're being authentic, you know, you recognize that immediately because you don't see it very often versus canned responses and given your world and the media stuff, you, david, you know when somebody's telling you how it really is versus what you want to hear. So we see it, we grab it, we compliment people on it and we try to spread that joy. So just be yourself. When it's writing right from the heart, again canned or vulnerability, all those things are okay because you're not alone.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much. That's awesome. Where can anyone get on board and follow you? Or 360 Nation? What would you like them to look at?

Speaker 3:

Come to us, Come to our main website. Everything I talk about is there. It's bizcatalyst360.com. You'll learn more about 360 Nation. You'll learn more about 360 Nation. You'll learn more about the writing If you are a writer or, better yet, if you'd like to be a writer. Unlike many other major media organizations, we will give you a shot. So just come see us. You can figure it out once you get there and next thing you know, you might be the person sitting there writing poetry next weekend.

Speaker 2:

Wonderful stuff, guys. Go and check it out. I've been to a few sessions and I can vouch it's a very warm, safe and creative environment. So, dennis, thank you for coming on. It's been a pleasure having you on.

Speaker 1:

Thanks, david, and for our audience, we shall see you again join david and his incredible guests next time on the Success Nuggets podcast and to find out more, visit OneGoldenNuggetcom. Thank you for listening.