Conspicuous’ Post

Transcript

Maybe 21 Who's listening? Who would like to become an MVP? How does that process work? And maybe what the advantages of being an MVP as well? Yeah, so it's an interesting program. You know, I got asked to do it back when Directions and A was at Las Vegas. Steve Endo, who's been a good colleague and friend in the GP space for quite a long time. He had attended MVP Summit in Redmond. And while he was there, he was noticing just the disparity of the amount of women that were in the room versus men. Maybe at a major MVP tech conference. You've got people from all over the world. Now, considering this was probably 2018 when he was, you know, MVP Summit, so things might have changed. I wasn't able to go this year. But it just, you know, it was overwhelmingly men. And he knew a few of us that were in this space that were women that were, you know, speaking at Summit, speaking at different conferences and really involved. And so he had approached me in a couple others and said, hey, I nominate you for MVP. And I said, well, you know, I don't know if I'm good enough. Uh, what does that even mean? Like, what do I have to do? And you know, he explained how you've got to be social. You've got to be writing blogs. Back then, I was not anybody on social media. I mean, I just, I wasn't doing anything. I just was doing my conferences and working. And so he was like, you got to have, you got to start doing these things. And I was like, oh gosh, she's like, I'm a mom. I'm. Yeah, I'm busy, like I don't have time to do that. He's like, will you consider doing it? And so I did think about it a little bit and then decided, you know, to have him help me. And so he did. So we walked through it. You know, the, the nerve wracking piece about coming MVP is when you have to be nominated by an MVP and things that people don't realize, you know, there's a lot of people that come to me and they're like, these people are, you know, smarter than most MVP's. They should be an MVP. That's not what being an MVP's about. Or they're doing more than you are. They should be MVP. OK, well, you know, I think the thing about being an MVP is people will see you in the community. They see what you're doing for the community. And this is what MVP is about. It's not about who's the smartest, who's the brightest. I, I will tell you, the people that are in our group on the DC side, brilliant minds. I mean, when you get all of us together, you can't shut us up. But just so much talent, you know, it's, it's mind blowing. But every single one of those people would bend over backwards for the community or do something for the community's hands. You know, you see what they're doing. And so people will come to me and they're like, how do I become an MVP? Well, the first thing you want to be doing is doing things for the community. And that the thing that people don't understand is your work stuff. This account, this is an unpaid job that you're essentially doing from Microsoft. So, you know, if you go and blog for your company doesn't help, you go and speak at a conference on behalf of your company to get leads doesn't count. I mean, this is all stuff that you're doing directly for the community to teach the community. And there was stuff I was already doing, you know. And, and that's really why it made sense for me outside of the social media and blogging, I was doing all these things. And so I'm like, OK, like, that's fine. But what people don't understand is that you don't get renewed every year, just automatically every year in March, we have to get a consensus of everything we did over the year. So we have an online application, we have to fill it out, takes a couple hours, at least allow you submit everything. And then you wait until July for Microsoft to make a decision.