Meredith Fineman – Media Expert, Entrepreneur, and Author of Brag Better

Episode 59

My guest Meredith Fineman is the CEO and Founder of FinePoint and author of the new book, *Brag Better*. Her company, FinePoint, is a leadership and communications company that utilizes public relations tactics to help founders, CEOs, and visible people hone their message and get into the public eye. Meredith's new book, Brag Better, is a guide to the kind of self promotion that will enhance your career. Meredith has written for *Harvard Business Review*, *Forbes*, *Fast Company* and *Elle*. She is also the host of the podcast *It Never Gets Old* about the second-hand economy. On this show, Meredith talks about her new book and she gives some great tips on how you can brag better and rise above the noise. She talks about how to show up online, why women need to get more comfortable talking about themselves, how to get people to listen, and much more.

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Transcript

 

 

Kara Goldin: Hi everybody. It’s Kara at Unstoppable, and I’m so, so excited to have Meredith Fineman here. Hi, Meredith.

Meredith Fineman: Hi. It’s so lovely to see you, and I guess if you’re watching this video, seeing all of you. But yeah, I haven’t seen you in a minute and it’s lovely to see your long red hair and face.

Kara Goldin: I know. Where are you right now?

Meredith Fineman: I am in my apartment in Washington, DC.

Kara Goldin: Ah. It’s a very nice apartment, actually. I’m excited to have video here where I can see your home in the background. It’s very beautiful.

Well, Meredith, as maybe you could tell, I’ve known Meredith for a little while. We’re both part of this incredible group run by two women, Rachel and Glennis. It’s called The List, and we met on The List, I don’t know, probably four or five years ago, I’m guessing?

Meredith Fineman: I think longer. I would have to look into our emails, but it’s been a minute, like I’ve known you for a minute.

Kara Goldin: Yeah. It’s super, super fun. So anyway, a little bit about Meredith. Meredith is an entrepreneur, a writer and media expert. She’s the founder of a group called FinePoint, which is this incredible group about leadership and professional development, and basically looking at individuals, mostly working with CEOs and senior leadership founders and women in positions on how to actually speak more about you and your company. We’ll talk a little bit more about Brag Better, as well, but she’s done lots of amazing stuff with Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fast Company and Elle, so you may recognize her name. She also runs workshops. We’ll talk about where to find Meredith, but you should definitely check out her workshops because they’re super, super helpful. And now we’re here today to talk about this new, incredible book that’s coming out in June called Brag Better. I’m so excited to have her here, so let’s just talk just for a few minutes, about first of all FinePoint. How did you get started? How did you decide to sort of jump in to actually founding this group?

Meredith Fineman: So thank you for that beautiful wind-up. I didn’t. A lot of people ask me, they’re like, “Oh, your business plan…” Whatever. Oh boy. I am a millennial who graduated at the height of the recession in 2009. I lived in South America and Argentina, working in advertising at Young & Rubicam for almost a year and a half, and then I came back to Washington, DC where I’m from and lasted about five months working at an agency. And I’ve been a freelance writer since I was about 18 years old. I’ve always had varying side hustles, so I left my job without having another job, which in retrospect was only something someone who was like 23 and clueless would do. I had just a lot of balls.

I was always writing on the side and throwing parties and doing stuff. So I started FinePoint, now about nine plus years ago, and I was doing more digital strategy, and then I became more of a public relations person. PR person people would hire. And I was always developing my own writing and speaking and television and stuff like that, and I became the go-to for individual representation, which meant that people in positions of power or just people that wanted to make names for themselves would come to me. And so I took FinePoint from more of a PR firm company to a leadership and professional development one, which is to say that I help teach people how to be out there, whether that means they want a corporate board seat or they want actual praise very outwardly, whether it’s speaking gigs or television, or whether it’s within a company. I will train people in a company about asking for what they want, talking about their work.

So when I was representing individuals, I started to realize that nobody knew how to talk about themselves or how to tout their work, and that was especially difficult for women. So in 2013, I started speaking and training on bragging and why touting your accomplishments is essential. Brag Better is not only for women. My demographic is what I call the qualified quiet, which are people that have done the work, but don’t know how to talk about it. So that’s irrespective of gender, race, sexual identity, and irrespective of point in career. So I wrote this book. I’ve been working on this concept since about 2013. It’s out June 16, 2020 with Portfolio at Penguin Random House, and it’s all about how to use PR to leverage the skills of publicists to tout your work and ask for what you want and get recognition. And recognition can mean very different things for people, but to advance your career, more or less.

Kara Goldin: That’s awesome. So, you talked a little bit about that this is not just for women. It’s also for men. But let’s talk about women for a minute. Why do you think women have an issue actually talking about themselves?

Meredith Fineman: Yeah, I mean, before I start to do this, it was something I noticed when I was representing women in particular, but also I was watching the trajectory. I’d have really young women that wanted to intern or work for me that had trouble touting and bragging about their past background, and then I’d be in networking situations with friends or colleagues or contemporaries, rather, and I’d hop in and play publicist. And then I was seeing it at the very, very high level where nobody could brag about what they’d done, own their accomplishments, say, “I did this, I did that.” And my thing is that bragging is about stating true facts, but it’s a systemic problem that comes from the oppression and suppression of women’s voices. Women being in more positions of power than ever and the difficulties that come with being a woman in public, being judged on metrics that men are not, positive attributes being associated with passive behaviors, particularly around voice.

I mean, in the book, I talk about how in The Odyssey, there’s references to women shutting up. So it’s this message of be quiet and shut up, and women also either giving credit to other people or… We don’t have a lot of role models for this. We didn’t have a vocabulary to talk positively about professional accomplishment, which is what Brag Better is is that vocabulary that I’ve worked on and refined through exercises and being a writer and finding those words. But it’s of zero surprise to me that this is difficult for women. People tell you to shut up, people tell you to do things in a million different contradictory ways, your policed from your voice, your ankles, as I’m sure Kara, you can attest to, and putting yourself out there is really scary.

And there’s real danger to being a woman in public, like actual physical danger. And we don’t have the right words for it and the skills for it, and so that’s what Brag Better aims to do for all of the qualified quiet, but specifically for women. It’s hard to be listened to, as a woman. We listen to the default voices of men, literally. You know, a lot of scientific research, and so it’s certainly not about getting men to shut up. I always want to be very, very clear about that. It’s about getting men to echo the sentiments of women and voices of women, and just everyone who’s in a position of power and privilege to pass the mic to someone whose voice we might not hear. A huge part of bragging better is also uplifting the voices of everyone around you because there’s space for everyone.

Kara Goldin: Yeah, absolutely. I feel like, when people are talking about their accomplishments, so often they talk about where they worked. Right? That is a go-to like, “Oh, well I was the founder of this or I was the VP of this or whatever.” And I feel like that’s not even necessarily what people are looking for out of that kind of question when they ask you, “What have you accomplished?” How do you help people kind of drill down on what those pieces are? How do they, if you’re sitting at home and trying to figure out… I mean, in some ways I feel like it’s not about your resume. It’s really about what have you accomplished and what…

Meredith Fineman: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I want to be clear too, that you don’t have to have founded a company to be able to brag. It’s never about reinventing the wheel. I say this with my clients and I say it in the book. I say to everyone. Everyone has things to brag about. It’s not the what, it’s the how you’re delivering it. And one thing too is, you have to tell people what you want. You have to tell people who you are over and over and over again in order to advance to whatever you’re trying to do, but sharing those accomplishments, humans grasp storytelling and your energy and what you’re excited about, so when you’re making an introduction, I talk a lot about the importance of introductions and saying, “Oh, I was a VP at X, Y, and Z,” or you could say, “Oh, I was a VP at X, Y, and Z and I led this big team and we just did this awesome project.”

If you’re excited and you’re bragging about what you’ve done, then other people can latch onto it and support you also. And yeah, I mean, titles and certain workplaces mean so many different things to so many different people, so talking about some of the things you’ve accomplished that you’re proud of, but also that other people are able to understand, I think that’s one thing that publicists and other communications people do is help sort of translate people’s specialties and areas of expertise into things that anyone can grasp onto, that if you’re… Bragging can… You know, this book is for professional use, but there are a lot of personal applications, and it’s just about being proud of what you’ve done and realizing what you’ve done is enough and worthy of sharing and praise.

Kara Goldin: So do you think that, when people are reading this, my take is it’s not just about what you could say about yourself, but what you can get your publicist to say about you. Is that accurate? I mean, it’s not just about…

Meredith Fineman: Well so, yeah, bragging better is about being able to talk positively about the work you’ve done, but also being able to talk positively about the work of those around you.

Kara Goldin: Mm-hmm (affirmative), I love it.

Meredith Fineman: A lot of this stems from also being in and around the media for a really long time, our really intense, inverse relationship between volume and merit. We reward loud. And as much as I’d like to be optimistic and say that we can get the loud people to be quiet and listen, I just don’t think that’s going to happen. I think it’s a matter of getting that qualified quiet to start talking, and it’s scary and it’s uncomfortable and you’re worried people are going to call you obnoxious. I’ve worked on this idea for almost a decade; I understand what that means and why it’s scary, but it’s also, if you don’t tell people what you do, it’s a huge part of doing the work.

People have this idea that they’d rather put their head down and do the work than talk about it, but talking about your work is an essential part of work. I mean, Kara you know with the brands that you run, you do a tremendous amount of work, but it’s also how you talk about them and package them, literally or figuratively, in showing people what you’ve accomplished.

Kara Goldin: Totally.

Meredith Fineman: So I think that, at a sheer baseline, I care that we get better experts, particularly in media, and I’m sure if you’re listening to this, no matter what industry you’re in, you can probably think to yourself that you can think of someone in your subject area or your industry that gets all the praise, but it’s certainly either you’ve done more or you know more, and I think that people are worried about either bragging too much or being… I think that what the delineation there is really the self-awareness to be worried about those sorts of things. I just want everyone to start talking. If you know this stuff, I think in a year like 2020, in an election year, it’s really also somewhat civic responsibility to, if you know the stuff and have done the work, please start talking about it so that other people can be inspired and learn from you.

Kara Goldin:
Well, I think, as you and I were talking as we were getting on this podcast, we’re actually taping it in the midst of the CORONA crisis right now, and I think that there’s no better time to start thinking about how do people actually talk about what they’ve accomplished, because I’ve even talked to some people who have not lost their job that are actually thinking about, through this break, that maybe they want to go out and do something else. So as you start thinking about what are all the things that you’ve accomplished, I think it’s not just about what are the things that you’ve accomplished that you don’t like, but that you also like, allow you to really view what you ultimately want to do. So I think there’s no better time for this as well.

Meredith Fineman: I hope so. I really hope so. I mean, who on earth… Can I swear on this podcast?

Kara Goldin: Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Meredith Fineman: Oh, who could have fucking predicted this? I mean, virologists or whatever will be like, “We did,” but for us laypeople that don’t study viruses, yeah. My book was postponed by a month. I’m thrilled it’s coming out June 16th. We just made the best choice, and my publisher has been incredible. It’s a totally unprecedented time. It’s a really scary time. And maybe this idea that I’m asking you to do something scary on top of a scary time, either maybe they’ll cancel themselves out or you’ll just do it anyway. But we live in a really, really uncertain time. I’m writing an extra chapter on how to brag better from home and how to brag better online, which will be free, and that will be released before the comes out, as soon as I finish it, and all of that will be readily available in any place you can find me, which we’ll obviously get to later.

But I really wanted that because I was like, “Oh, oh no. Now people really need to communicate their value in their work because you also can’t get in front of someone’s face.” I mean, you and I are doing this over the Zoom because also we live on opposite coasts, but so much of work or business is being able to be with people, that it’s totally you’re going to have to be even more, more outspoken about the work that you’ve done. And also because I mean, I am insanely fortunate and privileged and be able to stay at home and all those things, but the nature of work is going to shift and so more than ever, you have to tell people what you need and what you want professionally in such a time of uncertainty as well.

Kara Goldin: It’s a really interesting topic too, because how do you do that through this new world? I guess Zoom is one aspect of it, but I’m also thinking about, how do you show up on LinkedIn? How do you show up on Twitter? How do you… I mean, all of these different social media platforms, and do you need to show up on all of them either? I think that’s a whole other topic, but how do you present yourself? I think in so many places, it’s not about what your title is, it’s really about can people relate to you? Can people sort of hear you through these platforms?

Meredith Fineman: Yeah, titles, and I talk about this in the book. Titles mean nothing because, especially since we’re in an economy where so many people do their own thing, they just give themselves titles, and one thing that I’ve done with clients is, they’re a VP at a company and it’s actually an incredibly big deal to be a VP at wherever they are, but only other people who maybe work directly with them understand how big of a deal it is to be a VP at that company, so it is about communicating projects you’ve led, value you’ve brought in for your company, what you’re good at in your job. And yeah, so we’re now in this extreme situation where we can’t gather, and so your online presence and your consistency of presence of how you present yourself. So like what are some things you can do right now, because this is a lot of big ideas. I want anyone listening to feel like they can have tangible things.

Kara Goldin: Yeah.

Meredith Fineman: So let’s start somewhere simple that I talk about all the time, which is your bio. Your bio is one of the ultimate, I would say like the ultimate bragging spots, and I see a lot of people miss it. I think that’s one place where it is totally acceptable and encouraged to brag. Every award, every accomplishment, full kitchen sink. So one thing you can do right now online is make sure, first thing first, all of your bios are consistent across wherever. If a conference booker or a recruiter or someone can’t figure out who you are and what you’ve done in a cohesive package in a short amount of time, then they will move on to someone who’s better packaged, which that person might be way less qualified than you. So I tell people to do a quarterly calendar reminder to update their bio. Keep it in one Google document or One Note or whatever you use, and everyone needs a long, a short, and a two-line bio.

Long bio, kitchen sink, everything. I want every award. I want you to remove silly, fun references. I think I don’t see the bio changing in terms of something that all professionals have a need. If it’s something quirky that relates to your business or relates to your brand, then that’s fine. But otherwise I would kill it. And then a short bio paragraph. Two-line bio goes on all your social media. I think that’s a great place to just start. If you’re having trouble thinking about things you’ve done, ask people close to you to jog your memory, or people you’ve worked with, and do it every quarter so that you don’t have to go back every two years. Like Kara, you’re always winning awards or on X, Y, and Z lists. I would want you, and I’m sure you keep a running tally of all of that so that it can be presented. The key is to presenting yourself, and the keys to getting people to listen are repetition and consistency. So those are the two cornerstones right now, I would say. Repetition and consistency.

Kara Goldin: I love that. So two ways to get people to listen, repetition and consistency.

Meredith Fineman: Yeah, that’s… That’s good. I’m writing that down.

Kara Goldin: I love it. I love it. I love it. So in the book, Brag Better, you talk about a technique that helps people get past anxiety. Can you give us a little preview of that?

Meredith Fineman: Yeah, of course.

Kara Goldin:[crosstalk] preordering your book.

Meredith Fineman: I know. I want to do like story time and just start reading my book to people, but I feel like my publisher might have a problem with that. So yeah. Bragging about yourself elicits… So first of all, blanket you’re so not alone in your discomfort with these feelings that this is what I do for a living. If it were easy, if everyone was good at it, I wouldn’t have a job. We also have this mixed up idea that you should know how to do these things, maybe because it falls along soft skills or whatever you want to call it, but you should know how to do these things. I have spoken to thousands of people, and there are two people I can think of, maybe one, in the thousands I’ve spoken to about this concept over the past decade that have said to me, “Oh, I’m fine.” Everyone else is like, “Oh, I’m so bad at that.”

Like household names, like, “Oh my God, I’m so bad at that.” I’m like, “Well yeah, but that’s okay.” What I’m teaching is not rocket science. What’s much harder is taking the time to put in the work, get the degrees, you know, make sure you know your stuff, which you definitely do if you identify with the qualified, quiet, which I would say most of us are to some degree. So it’s a learned skill set and it’s scary and it’s hard, but it is about dipping a toe in. So, I hope that the whole thing reduces anxiety. When you’re doing new hard things, they often create anxiety and it’s scary to put yourself out there, but I would say, one thing I really cared about with Brag Better was it wasn’t just sentiment. I care that you feel better, but also these are all deeply tangible skillsets and techniques and things that you can do.

So one small thing, depending on where you are, whether it’s… I’ll use an extreme example, but I talk in the book about how I counseled a whole firm and there were a bunch of junior members, and one in particular, she needed to speak up more in meetings. So whether that is genuinely… And not all this is for entrepreneurs. We’re entrepreneurs and know how to ask for certain things, but if you’re in a large organization, maybe it’s writing down one question to contribute to the all-hands meeting or your pod’s meeting once a week and being able to raise your hand and do it. It can be a very small action. I’m not asking you to go on TV. I’m asking you to at least just, even if you say to your coworker at the end of the week, “Hey, I’m really proud of that X, Y, and Z call I had with the client. I think it went really well.”

Even that, interpersonally, and then starting to brag better for others, like saying to that coworker, “Hey, I noticed you really killed that presentation. I’d love to tell our boss about it if you need me to.” Or, there’s so much we can do together that’s really important as well. So, in terms of the anxiety factor, I understand it. This will go into why it feels anxiety provoking. It all makes complete sense. The anxiety is incredibly normal with all of these activities. That’s why I do this. That’s why I wrote this book. So I think one thing that alleviates it though is, everyone feels scared about this. It’s pretty universal.

Even people that are on TV all the time or speaking all the time will tell you they still get nervous. Like I want to throw up at the beginning of every speech, but I still get on a plane and do the speech. I don’t know how you… At this point you’ve given so many speeches, Kara, and done so much TV and all of those things, but I mean, still to some degree you get probably a little bit, because you give a shit.

Kara Goldin: Well, it’s interesting. I actually always tell people that I was always a very social person, but actually much to many people’s surprise. And maybe as I looked deeply at myself, I was really afraid of public speaking. And I think for me, it touches on many things that you talk about in this book too, but it was just my own probably confidence somewhere in there too, that I just thought like, “I’m on stage. I’m in front of these people and I’m being judged in some way.” And so I finally decided that I would do a talk, and what’s interesting, the thing that I never really knew was the issue that I was most afraid of was following a deck. That was the thing for me, that was just… And again, I used to think that it actually was about public speaking, but it was really less about that. It was more about the-

Meredith Fineman: I don’t use decks at all because of that.

Kara Goldin: Right. And so, and so it was interesting because I did a deck for the first kind of big talk that I did. And then I got called, there was somebody in the audience, the saw me speak, and they reached out and they wanted me to do this presentation. And I said, “I just don’t really have time to kind of prepare, and it’s a little bit different than the presentation that you saw me give.” And they said, “Oh, well, there’s no decks.” And I said, “Wait, what? There’s no deck?” And so part of it really terrified me, but then the other part of me I thought, “Well, okay, there’s no deck, so I’ll just get up there and go do it.” And like you said, I felt super nauseous right before I got up there and did it, and it was my best talk, because what I realized about me was that, and I think this is really true for lots of people, but I’m good at reading audiences.

And so when I would get up and no matter how much people had prepared me about who I was going to be speaking to, whether that was a group of tech people, a group of at-home mothers, like whatever was, they really didn’t get the same kind of perception that I got from that audience.

So what I really felt was the key thing was that I had to have the ability to change a little bit once I got up there, and if I had this thing written in stone, it was really, really hard for me. So by the third time I got called to do a presentation I said, “Well, I don’t really have time to do a deck, so would it be okay if I did it without a deck?” And they said, “Oh no, we actually need a deck.” And I said, “You know, the only way that I’ll be able to do it is, because I have a full time job as a CEO, is to actually do it without the deck.” And they said, “Okay, we’ll see how it goes.” And then after that, the conference, now they don’t do decks at all because they were like, “It was so much better. It was real. It was…”

Meredith Fineman: Yeah. Decks make me… I don’t speak with decks for a similar reason, but also it’s just so much extra consideration. I am very savvy, but I’m very, very technologically challenged, so I will fuck it up. I guess I’ll have like one slide, cause they’ll be like, “Oh, do you need AV?” I’m like, “No, I never need AV.” but I even do… I give out paper handouts. I mean, that sort of stuff is more memorable to me than looking at a deck. I’ve never sat at a talk and been like, “Man, you know what really made that person’s speech? That deck.” Like, no. It never did. If anything, everyone’s distracted looking at this deck. People look at the deck, not the speaker. So, there are situations where decks are required and then I will get my clicker and deal with it, but I talk a lot about public speaking in the book and a fear of public speaking is more common than a fear of death.

Kara Goldin: I can see that.

Meredith Fineman: And Susan Cain, who wrote Quiet, talks about her crippling fear of public speaking. For me, I avoided it for a really long time until someone wanted to pay me a chunk of money and I was like, “Oh no, I’ve got to figure this out.” So I got a speaking coach and she helped me. I used to noodle for days, and now I’m like, “Oh, sorry, what am I speaking in? What is it? Oh, here we go.” But the preparation really matters. That part, it’s easy to put it off, but that stuff is scary and it requires practice and time and energy, and everyone’s scared by it. For someone to hear that, like you would be freaked out or whatever, they’d be like, “What are you talking about? She runs this company.” So these universal feelings that we don’t acknowledge, we’re all in them together.

Kara Goldin: Yeah. Well, and I think it’s just-

Meredith Fineman: The theme of everything right now.

Kara Goldin: What I learned for that too, and you have a great quote that I read out there somewhere, “If it’s a great opportunity, you’ll figure it out.” I think that, if you actually go and do that and figure it out, you may learn something about yourself. For example, you may learn, in really sitting down with Brag Better, but potentially also going to some of your events that you host, that there’s other things about you that you didn’t even think were necessarily things that you wanted to brag about or should brag about. And again, that’s the key. That’s the key thing.

Meredith Fineman: Yeah.

Kara Goldin: I love it. I love it. I love it.

Meredith Fineman: Well and something you can do that’s easy too is, I tell people to, here’s another quick action you can do, email five people. A colleague, somebody in your professional circle, a friend, a family member, a loose tie, someone you sort of know through association, and just someone you only know through social media, and ask all five of them to describe what you do. If they’re not similar, then it’s also about thinking about how you’re communicating your output.

Kara Goldin: That’s a great piece. Yep.

Meredith Fineman: It doesn’t all have to come from you, because a family member loves you and supports you, but oftentimes they don’t know what you do. Or a friend sees you as a friend and doesn’t know what you do professionally. And like vice versa for someone who sees you professionally, but not personally. And you want to be able to sort of blend all those together so that everyone can understand your work and what you’ve done that’s great. But also getting… You can do some of that, like sort of testing out in the world of what you’re putting out there, and there’s so many people that can help you.

I love it. Love it, love it, love it. That’s awesome. So I always ask people what makes you unstoppable? And You’ve said a few things, but what would you say is what comes to mind? What makes Meredith unstoppable?

I would say my humor is one thing that makes me unstoppable.

Kara Goldin: I love that.

Meredith Fineman: And then I guess, just my sheer force of will and a desire to wear great secondhand clothing. So I got to work to be able to dress that, and my dog, I make her wear t-shirts. But they’re not designer t-shirts.

Kara Goldin: And we were talking a little bit about this. So the other side of your business, you have a podcast on that whole topic, so tell us a little bit about it.

Meredith Fineman: Yeah, I have a podcast called It Never Gets Old, a firsthand account of all things secondhand and sustainable. It stems from my ferociously buying and selling clothing secondhand for about 20 years or longer. I have consistently made money on my wardrobe. I wear almost all designer clothing, 95% of which was owned by someone else first, and it is a multi multibillion dollar industry that now I advise VCs or other people in and around the area, it’s going to be a $24 billion business by, I think they’re saying 2022? And Gen Z really, really gives a shit about the climate, and it’s the most sustainable option is wearing stuff that already exists.

So whether it’s a deep dive on Chanel or about thrifting, it’s just a really, really fun world and hobby for me that, talking about one thing, sometimes we don’t acknowledge things we’re really good at because we see them as not work necessarily, and forever I just sort of was like, “Oh yeah, I have this insane well of knowledge about secondhand, like not photo… Photographic memory is wrong, but I just have cataloged so much, way more than 10,000 hours on this stuff. So it’s been really, really fun to share. And it’s obviously different from the brag better topic, but something that’s fun and interesting and good for the planet.

Kara Goldin: I love it. I love it. So where can people find you and Meredith?

Meredith Fineman: Yes. So you can find me everywhere @MeredithFineman on all the social medias and please order Brag Better. If you go to brag-better.com, you can order it from the big guy or one of your local bookstores. Audio book just finished recording, Kindle, skywriting version, however you can get it to you. I really hope you like it. I interviewed so many people in this book with many, many different points of view, whether that’s gender, age, level of seniority, ability, sexuality, all those things just really, I care. The most important thing to leave people with is just to pass the mic. When someone listens to you, then use that to help someone else get listened to as well.

Kara Goldin: I love that. I love that. So this is really, really awesome. Very last question. Favorite Hint flavor?

Meredith Fineman: I remember there was one summer when I lived in… This was before I knew you.

Kara Goldin: Yeah.

Meredith Fineman: And I remember when I first… I think I’ve known you for like seven… I need to look at the emails, but I want to say it’s like six or seven years.

Kara Goldin: I think that that’s right.

Meredith Fineman: And I remember the first I ever saw Hint, I was living in New York and I was like, “This is watermelon water?”

Kara Goldin: Watermelon’s great. It’s amazing.

Meredith Fineman: And then I went back and bought another one. And then that whole summer, it was a particularly hot summer in New York City, and I just drank the watermelon Hints. That was before I knew you. And then I remember, I was like, “Oh my gosh, she’s that watermelon water lady.”

Kara Goldin: I love it. I love it, I love it. So well, this is awesome. I’m so excited for your book and don’t forget to pre-order.

Meredith Fineman: Thank you

Kara Goldin: Brag-better.com, right?

Meredith Fineman: Yes. Yes.

Kara Goldin: Okay, and then also on Amazon, as well, right?

Meredith Fineman: Yes. Yes. So brag. I always have to say brag hyphen better because bragbetter.com. I think I didn’t spring for, which at this point, I should fucking spring for it, but that has also more about the book, more about me, little snippets of content, et cetera, et cetera.

Kara Goldin: Awesome. I’m so excited. So very, very excited.

Meredith Fineman: Thank you.

Kara Goldin: Congratulations and everybody get on and start ordering and learn how to brag better. Thanks so much, Meredith. Thank you so much, Kara.

Meredith Fineman: Yeah, thanks!