Meet Dkeith Wilson

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Dkeith Wilson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with DKeith below.

DKeith, first a big thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and insights with us today. I’m sure many of our readers will benefit from your wisdom, and one of the areas where we think your insight might be most helpful is related to imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is holding so many people back from reaching their true and highest potential and so we’d love to hear about your journey and how you overcame imposter syndrome.

I’m not sure one overcomes it, at least not over the long term. You reach a point where your talent and competence in an area sometimes catch up with your perception of your talent and competence. We call that confidence; if the two are crazy out of sync, we call it call it over-confidence, but it’s a fleeting feeling and should be. Suppose you’re pushing forward and challenging yourself. In that case, you’re continuously creating space for “imposter syndrome”, but calling it that is probably the wrong approach. I see that feeling as the door charge for whatever new room (opportunity) you find yourself in. Embrace it, and more importantly, evaluate it to find out what you need to know to be comfortable in this new room. Then, get to work closing that gap.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

We help companies build systems to connect with and support their customers and smooth the feast/famine nature of growth into something more manageable. Like most things today, that’s coupled with processes and technology, but what sets us apart from competitors is where we focus our passions. We love business problems, and customer challenges more than the creative stuff. Not that it’s not important sometimes. It can be. But our customers care more about the pragmatic stuff: return on investment, time to value, etc. That’s our niche: figuring out what works and helping customers build it.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Not that I knew any of this beforehand, but looking back, I’ll say curiosity, adaptability, and the ability to think again. Curiosity has helped me in a few ways. One thing is that it can be a tool for broadening perspectives and opening up your options. People often trap themselves in faulty mental models of how things work without realizing it. Sometimes, people give us their wrong mental models, and we accept them without confirming them. Someone tells you there’s a spider in the box, and you spend your whole life avoiding the spider in that box, but what if that person was wrong and there was an invaluable treasure in that box? How much did you miss out on because it was easy to ignore or maintain the status quo and not be curious about that box? It’s a simple metaphor, but it makes my point. This world is full of interesting things; the day you have it all figured out is when growth stops for you. After curiosity comes adaptability, say you take the chance to look into the “spider box” and learn something new. You learn that you have a limited perspective, have not considered all the consequences, or were flat-out wrong. How quickly would you change course? Are you an airplane banking to the left and shooting off in another direction at supersonic speeds, the Titanic, or worse, a statue? This matters a lot from my perspective. The clock is always ticking in life; how long are you willing to travel down the wrong road? Lastly, the ability to think again means not attaching your ego to your thoughts or perspectives so tightly that they become your identity. It’s hard enough that the world is so keen to tie you to who they think you were (i.e., people going back a decade on your social media thread to pull out some perspective you had then to hold you to it now. What even is that? LOL). You can’t afford to do it to yourself. You should always be thinking and reconsidering your stance on a topic. There may be new information available; you may have grown or matured on the subject, and it may be that you may not care as much. The important thing is to revisit what you think or believe and why continuously. In an ever-changing world where people are so focused on standing still, it’s your most significant competitive advantage. Use it.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, hands down. I read it early in life and missed all the important stuff, but I revisited it during COVID in a reading group. I gained two new friends and gained much perspective. Let’s be honest: when do you get to hear the honest thoughts of anyone historically significant, let alone a Roman emperor? I’m getting hyped talking about it. LOL. The easiest way to describe how it impacted me was this: I had many of the lessons of stoicism ingrained in me from my dad and others as a kid. I rejected some of them for various reasons. Still, looking back at my age on what I did right and what I did wrong, all of the things I did wrong were tied to not having a stoic mindset: reacting to what people said or did versus controlling my responses, doing what felt “good” at the moment versus what was the highest good. Living life like I had all the time in the world when the clock was running out on all of us. I could go on, but you get my drift. This book is worth putting some time into- even if you’ve lived all the “wrong” ways.

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