Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Chris Do - Emmy Award-Winning Designer | Stop Hiding Behind Your Work

Transcript

Chris Do - Emmy Award-Winning Designer | Stop Hiding Behind Your Work · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  You said that most creative people are children who've survived.
• 0:04
  In childhood, we're taught to follow a very specific path in life and that all the
• 0:09
  individuality, all the quirkiness gets beaten out of us. We learn how to go along to get along.
• 0:14
  What if design could change everything? Not just how we see the world, but how we live in it.
• 0:18
  Chris do started with a simple idea. Use creativity to unlock real value.
• 0:23
  I think humans are hardwired to be social animals. You can feel very lonely, very depressing,
• 0:28
  to feel, no one understands you, no one gets you. So we go that path. Entrepreneurship is not
• 0:32
  for the faint of heart. There's all kinds of things baked into entrepreneurship. It seems
• 0:37
  awesome to be able to have that, to be a master of your own time, but the reality is it's
• 0:41
  fraught with risk. Safe is risky and risky is safe. There's only so much you can do to remove
• 0:45
  the risk but entrepreneurship. I'm teaching design to building an empire that shapes the future
• 0:50
  of branding and business education. His work has touched millions, turning art into action,
• 0:55
  ideas into impact, but it wasn't always clear. There were moments of doubt, struggles that
• 0:59
  tested his purpose, a relentless pursuit of clarity in a noisy world. Pricing is positioning.
• 1:04
  Anything that has a higher price has a perceived higher value. Personal branding is not what you do.
• 1:08
  It's who you are and drilling into who you are and reflecting that into the world in the most
• 1:13
  unvarnished, real and raw, authentic way that you can. So very few people can actually do that.
• 1:28
  I want to unpack one of your ideas just to kick this off. So you said that most creative people
• 1:34
  are children who've survived. So explain what that idea means. Yeah, I think the thing is in childhood
• 1:43
  we're taught to follow a very specific path in life and that all the individuality, all the
• 1:49
  quirkiness gets beaten out of us in one way or the other. We learn how to go along to get along.
• 1:54
  If you remember back into your early primary school days, the kid who was like painting and
• 2:01
  getting stuff on his face was the outcast and was shunned and kind of left to be alone and it
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  can be a very sad place to be. And we're pretty quick to pick up on these social cues and we're
• 2:12
  socialized to learn how to create a persona so that we can get along and be accepted within
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  culture and society because I think humans are hardwired, most of us are hardwired to be social
• 2:22
  animals. And so it can feel very lonely, very depressing to feel that no one understands you,
• 2:28
  no one gets you. So we go that path. And so the creative people are the misfits who didn't see
• 2:34
  that or could not follow along despite their best efforts and and it survived through adulthood
• 2:41
  to kind of retain that curiosity. The ability to continue to ask what if and try weird things
• 2:47
  to live in their imagination. When you look at those people that have survived childhood,
• 2:53
  what allowed them to survive, what allowed them to step outside of traditional school, education,
• 2:59
  framework, society, and maintain that creativity, which obviously serves them very well in adulthood.
• 3:05
  I think there's a term that Brian Collins has been using. I like a lot.
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  It's their gifted misfits. They can't follow the plan for whatever reason. When the instructors
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  had raised your hand first, they didn't raise their hand or color inside the box, they just couldn't
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  do it for whatever reason. Maybe they're no divergent or they're divergent thinkers and they see
• 3:27
  multitudes or multiple possible options for the future and they like to explore that. I'll give
• 3:32
  you an example. So in world civilization, I think I'm in junior high, John Steinbeck middle school,
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  Mr. Thompson was always talking about things and he's a very engaging speaker and he would teach
• 3:43
  us about world history and civilizations, but I was constantly just doodling characters in my notebook.
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  I was listening, but I was doodling. And Mr. Thompson, thank God for him because he allowed me to express
• 3:55
  myself in the way that I wanted to and knowing very well if he asked a question, I wasn't daydreaming,
• 4:00
  I wasn't not paying attention. I was very much paying attention. I just happened to find some
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  activity for my right hand to do. And it was funny because there was a woman next to me, a girl
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  and her name is Heather and Heather's like, how can you give me a hard time when he's drawing all the
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  time? He goes, watch, I'll ask him a question. He'll know the answer and you won't. That's the
• 4:20
  difference. And so I think we have a couple of people who see something in us who are our champions,
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  whether they explicitly say it to us or not, they're rooting for us to succeed and they give us
• 4:32
  just enough space to explore our creative side. Sometimes it's apparent or sibling and I've had
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  a lot of that in my life. My mom would buy me an airbrush and a compressor because she saw me
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  staring at the people at the fairgrounds, airbrushing names on t-shirts and she just knew there was
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  something there. My older brother got me a credit card to help me start my first business and he just
• 4:51
  encouraged everything that I did like in metal shop. I would build wire sculptures and he'd go, that's
• 4:56
  really neat piece of art. I'm like, that's not art. That's just some junk I made.
• 5:00
  Is there a way to architect creativity or if you've not had that support growing up and you find
• 5:08
  yourself in a nine to five job and you're listening to this podcast and you consume the future and
• 5:13
  you consume your content and your show and your YouTube channel and you're like, damn, like I want
• 5:16
  to break out of what I know. I want to be creative. I want to be a builder, but this is not the
• 5:23
  environment I came from, so I don't want to just throw in the towel. How do you architect creativity?
• 5:30
  Very good question, Scott. I like that question very much. I feel like there's a frequency that's
• 5:35
  being transmitted that only some people can hear it. I suspect that anybody who's watching this
• 5:41
  on our channel or your channel listening to our own podcasts, they're already tuning themselves
• 5:45
  into hear this. So maybe we don't need so much to reverse engineer or architect it so much as to
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  give them permission to explore this other side that they've repressed for a really long time.
• 5:57
  There's this itch and it's been sitting there and they know it and they follow someone else's
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  game plan on how to live a successful life. They went to the proper school study, the proper
• 6:06
  subject and got the grades and the diplomas to prove it. And then they're in this grind and
• 6:10
  they're just sitting there thinking, and daydreaming, is there more to it? I find some parallels to
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  the matrix and the matrix is one of my favorite films of all time, probably the top film of all time
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  for me. And in it, the character, the main character, Neo knows in his heart and his soul,
• 6:25
  there's something more to this, but he can't quite put his finger on it. And so when he gets his
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  message on his on his tell his screen, his terminal, it says something follow the white rabbit.
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  And that's all it is. It's not very clear what that means. And some people are encouraging to go
• 6:42
  to a party or something. He doesn't want to go, but when she turns around, there's like a little rabbit
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  tattoo on her back or something and he follows the rabbit. And so maybe they're listening to this
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  and saying, is this my moment? And it might not be the moment for you, but I suspect it is. And if
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  you're listening to this, you're really picking up on the frequency. Now, I want to provide a broader
• 7:02
  definition of what it means to be a designer or creative person so that you're not thinking, oh,
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  I don't draw. I don't paint. I don't sing. I don't play music. I'm excluded from this conversation.
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  In his book, the brand gap, Marty knew my quotes Herbert Simon, I think his name, who's a Nobel laureate
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  on his definition of what a designer is. And if I can remember correctly, it's something like this.
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  A designer is one who devices courses of action to go from an existing condition or situation to
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  preferred one. And I really like that. That means the world is the way it is. And we seek to improve it
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  in small or big ways. And anyone who does that is the designer.
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  You, I mean, you've gone, you've gone out and you sort of stated that your current season of
• 7:50
  your life or your current version of yourself started at a later age, started at 42 when you
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  started creating content. Did you consider yourself a creative before that? Or was this like this,
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  was there some sort of inflection point that pushed you down this, this path that you're on right
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  now? I gave myself permission to be a creative person, I think, in senior year in high school.
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  I'd always been drawing and making things, thinking about building businesses and building them
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  and failed spectacularly. And it wasn't until I met a real life graphic designer when I was 18 years
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  old that I thought this can be a possible career path for me. And so I think this is a very important
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  thing to share with people until we see someone that we can relate to doing the thing that is that
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  what we want to do, we don't allow ourselves to dream that hard. And that's the sad part of
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  like real life. So when I meet this real life graphic designer, working in his home studio,
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  his name is Dean Walker, he has the early Macintosh 512k, you know, monochrome monitor. And he's
• 8:50
  doing professional design work with his mouse and hands. I was like, this is so cool. I've seen
• 8:56
  this on TV, but I have not met anyone who does this. You know, all we see are like Mac paint and
• 9:01
  like really rudimentary illustration tools, which didn't interest me at all. But here he was drawing
• 9:07
  letter forms and building complete logo systems. And I was thinking, this is really, really cool.
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  I knew then and there that I was a creative person. I mean, I always knew, but it'd give myself
• 9:17
  permission to do that. And it's very easy to spot. If you ask people who are listening to this
• 9:22
  podcast or watching this, retrace back into your childhood, the fondest memories that you have.
• 9:28
  They're almost always run play and imagination. Whether you put on a costume and pretended to act
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  out a scene, you built a fort, you might have designed a go cart or a soapbox derby thing.
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  There's something that you did and I brought joy to your heart. And then you were told,
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  that's not a serious thing. That's play and we have to work now and you put those things away.
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  And just just try to recall those moments. Those are clues as to who you're supposed to be before
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  that idea or dream was snuffed out. So I already knew that that, you know, at an early age,
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  I was a creative person, but I didn't allow myself to pursue it on a professional level.
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  First of all, I want your story to be a lesson people that are later on in their career.
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  Obviously, I think that's a very important message because I think that those people feel
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  pigeonholed and stuck in what they're doing, especially when they've been doing it since they were
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  20. So I think that's a great story that I want you to talk about. But what was that thing
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  that gave you the permission to do this radical shift?
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  For context, so from about 2000 to 2018, I worked and studied as a professional graphic designer.
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  I went to a prestigious art and design school. I got my degree in design. I started working
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  commercials and music videos and that's where I stayed for almost 25 years. Something significant
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  happened in 2014 that would change the course of my life. So I met, there's a couple of things
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  I have to mention because they're kind of important for people to understand and unpack.
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  Number one, I had been working pretty much solidly as an entrepreneur for 20 some
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  bought years. 1995 is when I started my company. And so that's almost 20 years at that point,
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  I think. And I've built up enough financial reserves such that I started to think about what I
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  want to do with the rest of my life. It's not a midlife crisis, but it's when we remove the need
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  to make money, it's start, we start to ask ourselves, who am I supposed to be in this world?
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  And it was a confluence, a couple different things happening within close proximity in terms of
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  a timeline that got me to shift in a very different direction. I'm teaching at Art Center,
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  I'm teaching sequential design, and my wife is hanging out with me and she's a designer too.
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  And in class, she's kind of asking me this question, which is, I think you were destined to do more
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  and to be more that your genius needs to be shared with more than just eight students at a time.
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  Private Art School, very small classroom, good student to teach a ratio. And I was like,
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  shoot, how do I do this? Because I felt that I needed the institution, I needed their enrollment
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  process, I needed the curriculum, I needed the credentials, I needed all these things. And I
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  didn't have an answer for it. But just like less than six months later, I get reintroduced an old
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  friend from art school, his name is Jose Caballet. And we're meeting at like the AIGA boardroom
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  talking about the future of design. And I was asking him questions about web design. And that
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  began a chain of events that led us to this conclusion that we're both very passionate about
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  education. He was already teaching using YouTube. And I was teaching like in brick and mortar
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  schools. And he was challenging me. Why don't we make content together? And at first, I rejected
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  the idea. I thought that only pretenders near to do wells, people who don't have any real skill
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  get on to YouTube and babble on about things I don't know anything about. Because that's kind of
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  how the landscape was back in 2014. And some things have not changed too. But now you see lawyers,
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  you see therapists, you see people with people that really do know what they're talking about.
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  Multiple degrees. And people who are serious entrepreneurs creating content on YouTube,
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  people who've exited out of companies for a hundred million dollars doing content on YouTube,
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  because they see the opportunity. But back then, it was kind of dark. But he insisted I do this.
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  And he gave me a very generous offer that one that I could not refuse. And so I started making
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  content. It took a couple years for it to click for me. Like this is going to work. There's
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  a real business here and it allowed me to transition from doing client service work to doing just
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  peer content and education. And that's what I've been doing for the last, I guess 10 years now.
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  Do you think that that is the ideal version of entrepreneurship where you build up this safety net
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  so you can or should, so you can take more risk or should people maybe work in nine to five,
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  not have complete financial safety, but start to build that at a much younger age. Well,
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  if you could just give somebody the perfect playbook for de-risked and highest chance of success
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  entrepreneurship, what would that look like? I'm going to say things that may be controversial.
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  So if I say him, you want to push back, I encourage you to entrepreneurship is not for the faint of
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  heart. There's all kinds of things baked into entrepreneurship. There's a side that people share
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  about like being your own boss, having your own ability to to write your future, so to speak.
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  And to make the money and manage people and it seems awesome to be able to have that to be a
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  master of your own time. But the reality is it's fraught with risk and entrepreneurship is risk
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  and it's risky to to to be able to do that. But there's an ad man who said safe is risky and risky is
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  safe. So if you want to go to safe route, you're going to have a very predictable job, but those
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  jobs can go away and you're kind of at the whim of whatever corporations want to do with your life.
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  And so that's problematic, right? They downsize, they merge, they sell, they they go in a bad
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  management spiral and you're kind of just stuck and you don't know what else to do.
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  So when what people know, there's only so much you can do to remove the risk about entrepreneurship
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  because entrepreneurship rewards people who want to take risk. I think that's a great thing about
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  America, which is where capitalistic society and we reward people with with patents and IP things
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  that they can trademark or copyright. We give them special tax incentives so that they can build
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  businesses because they know that's a pretty high percentage of failure. And I think if that sounds
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  like you, then you might consider this, but I don't think I can make you like more risk tolerant.
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  People are averse to risk or people are tolerant to risk. I'll give you an example. My wife is very
• 15:29
  risk averse. She doesn't want to take risk. She wants to have a very stable life, especially as
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  we're kind of getting up there in years, she doesn't want this. And I get that, but I thrive in the
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  kind of pool of stress and the unknowns. And I think that's the first sign you know you're
• 15:46
  right for entrepreneurship. Number two is to realize this one thing, which is your life is
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  relatively short for the moment in which you're born, you're counting down the days in which you're
• 15:56
  going to expire either by natural causes or unnatural causes. You're going to die. And if you come
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  to that realization, if you get one spin at this, one play, why not make the play the biggest
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  boldest thing that you can do in your lifetime so that it fills you with joy and it gives your
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  life meaning and purpose. Because I know no one sits there and wakes up one day and it's like,
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  my big dream is to work nine to five helping to contribute to somebody else's wealth.
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  When you look at first time entrepreneurs, you speak about this a lot. And I think this is one of
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  your your most viral posts. It's about pricing. It's about it's about what you should charge and
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  what you are worth. I think there was something like 64 million views on this one post, but the
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  the the concept of starving artist of solopreneur of not charging enough is a very hot topic because I
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  think that for first time entrepreneurs, it's it's very nerve wracking to ask somebody for money
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  and ask somebody for a lot of money. I think that I think that we generally default to imposter syndrome
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  and not asking for enough. So maybe just walk me through some of the some of the arguments you make
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  for charging more for knowing your worth for knowing your value and maybe even talk through it
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  in terms of like a timeline of as you're building out your solopreneur venture. Like,
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  do you adopt these ideas of charging premium in month one or is it like this is just like a month
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  12 or or year two conversation. Okay. I'm going to make some analogies if I get lost amount of
• 17:29
  analogy, pull me back. Okay. Just wave at me like, yo, we don't know what the heck you're talking
• 17:33
  about anymore. All right. Here's to how I want to look at this. I don't know if you've ever played
• 17:38
  the game battleship battleship where there's a little screen. You kind of what you do in battleship
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  is you don't try to just sink the battleship. You you do something called range finding. You put
• 17:48
  a couple like targets on the board and you kind of eliminate whole areas of where the battleship
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  can't be. And if you're out in the field, maybe before computers and AI assisted weaponry was
• 18:00
  available, you'd fire shot like a catapult, right? A trebuchet and you'd fire shot. You're like,
• 18:05
  okay, that was way too far. And then you fire the next one. You don't just make small movements
• 18:10
  there. You'll then go really short. So you know, somewhere between those two markings is where
• 18:14
  you're going to hit. And based on that, the third shot will get you really close. Now what some people
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  do is they just fire shot and then I go ahead and work and they just do wild things. There's no
• 18:23
  strategy for it. And I want you to think of your value as a game and the pricing is a game.
• 18:29
  So we don't know where the target's going to be. So what people tend to do is they say, okay,
• 18:34
  what did Jimmy or Mary make on that job? All right. Okay. It's 30 bucks an hour.
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  Well, based on their portfolio, I'm not as good as them or not as fast or experiences them. So
• 18:45
  I'll do 25. So we compare to that benchmark. But we're using pretty bad data because how do we
• 18:51
  know that Mary or Bob putting the good price to begin with? And then we start to adjust ever so
• 18:58
  slightly, well, we'll do $26 and we'll do $28. So we slowly work our way up after years of
• 19:04
  working saying, now I feel like I'm ready to charge with Bob and Mary charge.
• 19:08
  My game is I know that what I do is good because I put in the time and work when I was in school
• 19:14
  and I knew where I stood relative to my classmates. So when I went on to the professional world,
• 19:23
  I started putting out a price and they said, yes. And that got me to think, well, it's at the
• 19:29
  ceiling because I always want some tension in the conversation. I generally avoid tension,
• 19:34
  but in the pricing game, I love to have tension. So I want to raise that price again and see like
• 19:40
  what they say to the next client or to the same client. Because I know whatever they paid me to do,
• 19:45
  I'm going to do a better job. I create more value than what I charge. And I always know that I'm
• 19:51
  the right side of that equation. Because in my mind, even at that time, there's no amount that
• 19:56
  you could pay me where I wouldn't work harder to earn that business and make you feel good about
• 20:00
  it. Right. And if you don't feel good, we don't have to work together again. And that'll be a bad
• 20:05
  mark on me. And I know that a lot of creative people feel this way. So I just keep asking for more
• 20:11
  money until they start to say, no, but I don't stop there. I'm like, why did they say no this time?
• 20:17
  I wonder why? Because the perception of the value I've created in the prospects or the client's
• 20:22
  mind doesn't exceed the pain it costs for them to give me that money. Good news is if you sell
• 20:28
  to affluent buyers, people who have serious problems, their pain threshold is very high
• 20:34
  relative to the price they're willing to pay to get rid of that problem. Let's put in a different
• 20:40
  context now. If you're in a boat and the boat is sinking and you're out at sea and you don't
• 20:44
  want to swim and you have a family of four in there and you're going to perish, anybody who pulls
• 20:49
  up to you who offers you an emergency vessel or life jackets or a beacon or instant repair to your
• 20:58
  boat, you will pay just about anything because it's worth a lot to you. But the problem is the
• 21:04
  person who pulls up on that boat to save you and your family of four, they're like, well, it only
• 21:09
  costs this much materials and this much time. And they're pricing based on what it costs them
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  versus the value to you. Now, that might not be a very good analogy because you know, now you're
• 21:19
  charging money to save people's lives and so maybe that's a bad analogy, but I think I've made
• 21:24
  the point there. So what you do then is you need to understand the other person has a pain point,
• 21:31
  can't afford this and it would give them pleasure to give you money to make that problem go away.
• 21:36
  We don't want to deny them that that process of figuring out what the value is to them. And so
• 21:42
  that's why I just kept playing the game. So I went from doing probably $250 a day, which is about
• 21:47
  $30 an hour for an eight hour day to 300 to 400 to 600 to 800. And I was starting to feel like I'm
• 21:53
  hitting a ceiling here. So in my mind, it wasn't there was a problem. It was just the problem to
• 21:59
  solve was how do I create greater perceived value and what I do? Who do I need to sell to such that
• 22:05
  they would see the value and what it is that I do and I kept finding more buyers for the work.
• 22:10
  So here's the first lesson. Pricing is positioning. Whenever we look at comparable objects,
• 22:16
  anything that has a higher price has a perceived higher value. That's the bottom line. So if we look
• 22:21
  at t-shirts, we look at sneakers, we look at cars, I'll give you the example. I'm really into
• 22:27
  limited drops, sneakers. And I'm not talking about Air Force ones, which everybody knows about.
• 22:32
  I'm talking about like there are like these weird ones that come out that no one seems to like,
• 22:36
  but there's only so many of them that are made and I was late to the game. You get like a text
• 22:40
  when they drop. I'm too late to the game. It's like, it's an eight year old shoe and I'm
• 22:46
  making sure I really want that shoe and I'm trying to figure out what the price point to that is
• 22:50
  and the value it is to me, right? So when I see a sneaker that's $7800 and that's a way above
• 22:58
  retail, I'm like, that's the real one. And then because of targeting, somebody sends me, not
• 23:04
  somebody, like a some company starts target me and says, Oh, you want that limited edition shoe?
• 23:09
  Hours is 150. My media thought is that's a fake. Because I know the market price everywhere,
• 23:17
  I've looked, it's between six to eight hundred dollars. So when it comes to 115, sure enough,
• 23:21
  when I dig into the details, they don't use a brand's name. They say like that kind of shoe.
• 23:28
  So they get all the SEO stuff, but they can't say it's that same shoe. And I like many people
• 23:33
  don't want to buy a knockoff because buying a knockoff says something about me and my values.
• 23:38
  I'm not a counterfeit buyer. I don't want to support counterfeit companies. So pricing is
• 23:43
  positioning. So many of you, if you want better clients, what you have to do is you have to charge more
• 23:48
  because you're going to track the different kind of buyer. One who has a bigger problem,
• 23:52
  one who thinks whatever it is that you do is a solution to something that they feel is urgent to solve.
• 23:58
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• 28:34
  Why do you think because when you say it makes so much sense? Common sense is never common.
• 28:40
  That's sort of like my rule that I live by. But again, so I was just looking at my notes. 64
• 28:47
  million views on this one particular topic. Why do you think this is such a viral topic? Why do
• 28:53
  you think that people have such a hard time with this when it seems like it should be yes,
• 28:58
  charge more. It makes sense. If they say no, then figure out why they're saying no.
• 29:02
  I think that video has the most views because there are two sides this argument. And whenever you can
• 29:09
  find that, whenever you can find something that both sides will argue on, I think you get a video
• 29:17
  that gets a lot of views. Because if we all agreed, we're like, well, that's a plata too. We all
• 29:20
  think breathing is necessary and love is good in the world and kindness, right? So if you make videos
• 29:25
  about generosity and kindness and love, you get some views, but they're hardly anybody who's going to
• 29:30
  say, well, that's a terrible idea. So where we get a lot of views on this is we touch the nerve.
• 29:35
  So for all the creatives and I'm talking about now, it's expanded way beyond graphic designers and
• 29:41
  people will make logos. I have people who work at airports who see that video, who serve behind
• 29:47
  kitchen counters at fast casual restaurants or people who do plumbing and tile or electrical work,
• 29:52
  saying, I'll watch your video. That changed the game for me. So what I'm doing is I'm giving them
• 29:58
  a logical argument about why charging based on time, time-based pricing punishes you for being good,
• 30:07
  for being efficient and for being experienced because you could do a job two, three, four,
• 30:12
  five times faster and better than some rookie. And if the rookie knew where to charge similar
• 30:17
  hourly rates, they would make more money. So you're being punished for your efficiency and for
• 30:21
  being good. Conversely, there's other people who take the other side, which is you're just an idiot
• 30:28
  trying to raise prices on people with no foundation. I have no idea what I'm talking about because
• 30:32
  this is not how it works in the real world based on their experience. So you're getting both sides
• 30:37
  coming at this from the side of the buyer and the seller arguing with each other and myself included
• 30:42
  saying either I don't know what I'm talking about or Chris preach. And that's why that video has so
• 30:47
  many views. It's interesting. And it's funny that people say this isn't how the real world works
• 30:52
  because I've in past companies, I think I've spent about 50 grand for a PowerPoint from Deloitte
• 30:59
  or a agency. So this world definitely does work like this. And that is a cheap PowerPoint. That
• 31:05
  was for a pre-revenue company. That was the most willing to spend pre-revenue. But I mean,
• 31:10
  there's endless amounts that you can charge if you can find a way to quantify the value.
• 31:15
  If you look at even, I mean, we can sort of talk about content for a second. I know that you
• 31:20
  actually, I don't want to talk about content yet. It's a fun topic. You talk about it a lot.
• 31:25
  But I was listening to a couple of the podcasts you were on and I liked this position that you took.
• 31:29
  So on on brand and personal brand. So everybody's trying to build a personal brand. And I think
• 31:36
  you were talking to Eric Sue if not mistaken about this. And your position was, are you really
• 31:42
  building a personal brand? And a lot of people that think they have brands do not have brands.
• 31:47
  So please explain that to me because I love these spiky points of view that you don't hear a lot.
• 31:52
  And I think that's something that hopefully people that are listening to this audience again.
• 31:55
  There's entrepreneurs in the audience. There's entrepreneurs that are still trying to build. But
• 31:59
  ultimately, I think what's ironic is even though I don't think people should just build a personal
• 32:03
  brand just to have it, I think that's a vanity metric they're chasing. The biggest question I get
• 32:09
  is how do I grow my Instagram audience, which I actually find to be the most useful measure of
• 32:14
  a useless measure of my success. Excuse me. Like I mean, it doesn't actually benefit me to any
• 32:19
  significant degree. Downloads from the podcast don't come from Instagram. I can grow an Instagram.
• 32:24
  But if you're talking about where I monetize my actual brand and my actual audience, it's not on
• 32:29
  Instagram. So for me, it's silly that people want to do this. But I get that people are just trying
• 32:33
  to chase fame or followers or vanity, whatever. Talk to me about personal brand.
• 32:40
  There's a lot to unpack here. So I just made some notes here. I think we need to get into a
• 32:45
  spirited conversation. So here's a warning for everybody. It's going to get a little spicy. You
• 32:50
  might feel triggered or called out in this conversation. And Scott, I'm going to have to rely on you
• 32:55
  to represent the side of the scene because I'm going to go insane in the membrane right now.
• 32:59
  First, the words words matter. We have to agree that words matter and the definitions of words
• 33:05
  and having a common shared definition of words do matter too. Because otherwise anybody can use
• 33:10
  any word to mean something other than what it really means. And when we talk about brand,
• 33:16
  brand has become an elevated term and it's become so popular in the creative culture that people
• 33:21
  misuse that word so much. So there are people who design logos and say, well, I do branding.
• 33:27
  No, you design a logo. Well, I design an identity system. No, you're an identity system designer.
• 33:34
  The people who can legitimately claim that are doing branding or brand design are the people who
• 33:39
  understand the entirety of the company, the culture, the mission, the vision, the purpose,
• 33:44
  understand its customers, their wants and needs and develop a complete 360 degree approach
• 33:50
  to communicating and sharing an experience with their customers. So that doesn't sound like a whole
• 33:56
  lot of people. But because they feel denigrated that they're calling themselves a logo designer,
• 34:01
  they start to call themselves a branding expert, which they're not. And this is not to diminish the
• 34:06
  value of a really great mark. I will pay a lot of money for people who understand how to design a
• 34:11
  great logo type or word mark or a combination mark or something like that or symbol because there's
• 34:17
  not that many people who can do a really great logo. But there's this false connection that if you
• 34:24
  make a mark or if they're you pick colors, then you're doing branding because branding is much
• 34:29
  bigger than that. So if we look at the entire customer experience around branding, then we start
• 34:33
  to get a sense of what it means. So Marty Numer has already done a great job of this. He defines
• 34:37
  brand in his books, multiple books, brand as a gut feeling, a person's gut feeling about a product
• 34:44
  service organization. And it's a feeling. So the feeling is generated through a lot of different
• 34:50
  touch points. And it can come from how you're greeted at the door, how they respond to a customer
• 34:55
  service problem to the very smallest details of the packaging experience. Apple does it on levels
• 35:02
  way above everyone else. If you've ever purchased an Apple product, the entire experience from walking
• 35:07
  into the store to leaving is unlike most experiences that you've had anywhere else. They've been
• 35:13
  doing this for decades, yet companies still cannot copy the the experience that one has, right?
• 35:21
  Can I add one thing to that just so you to understand how detailed Apple is in their overall brand
• 35:27
  experience? If you hold up any of their phone boxes, they've timed the friction on their phone
• 35:33
  box. So it takes only so many seconds for that phone to open on its own. So every time that you
• 35:39
  pull up a phone from like the counter or whatever and you're just holding that box, I can't remember
• 35:43
  how long it is. It could be three seconds or four seconds, but every single box will open at the
• 35:47
  exact same moment. That's the exact amount of friction that they put between the upper portion of
• 35:52
  the box and the lower portion of the box. So the attention to detail, that's like a master class
• 35:58
  in brand. Even the way that you pull one little tab and the whole plastic thing comes off because
• 36:03
  those are points of frustration for most products when you get them. Like you got to get a knife
• 36:07
  in there, you get a dig at your tearing it away with your teeth. Sometimes they just fall out
• 36:12
  and it feels like, whoa, I could have broken that or just there's too much friction. Like now
• 36:16
  can get it out and it's making me really angry. So the level of detail that they pay attention to
• 36:23
  is incredible. And that's what we talk about when we talk about branding, okay? So now we move
• 36:29
  away from branding to personal branding. And there are some differences here. So we still understand
• 36:34
  as the person's got feeling, it's about the entire experience. And there are many definitions
• 36:39
  of branding like people will say it's a person's what they say about you when you're not in the room,
• 36:43
  it's your reputation. But sometimes I think those things are a little too reductive. And I prefer
• 36:48
  to use the definition from people who spend a lifetime developing brands, okay? Now a corporate
• 36:55
  brand is very different than a personal brand. And that a corporate brand is the culmination of a
• 37:00
  lot of different people's opinions and ideas. It's it's kind of doesn't represent a person
• 37:05
  it represents the entire culture of a company. Although one person starts it, it grows way beyond
• 37:11
  that in terms of like how it exists today. So Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in the
• 37:17
  Cupertino garage. But neither of them are connected to this company more, but Apple yet still has
• 37:22
  a very strong brand. The problem with this is there's a whole group of people from copyrighter
• 37:29
  strategist, art directors, designers, legal department, HR kind of filtering out the experience
• 37:36
  for people. And so it becomes an amalgamation of a lot of different inputs. And we know that anything
• 37:42
  designed by committee is not the sharpest thing. It's because it's the lowest common denominator versus
• 37:47
  the one outlier. If you contrast that with a personal brand, a personal brand is representative
• 37:53
  of exactly one person, you or me, Scott Chris. And here's the problem. And this ties back to
• 38:00
  where this conversation began. If we've been socialized to create a persona to get along,
• 38:06
  we've created a alternate version of ourselves that we have lived in this suit for so long
• 38:13
  that we forgot what our individual voice and point of view is. And we're also fearful that if we
• 38:18
  really say what it is that we think that we will get hashtag canceled that people will find what
• 38:25
  our thoughts are so repulsive that those shut us down and it will eliminate future opportunities
• 38:30
  for us for work, for clients, for partners. And I was listening to this one program where there's
• 38:36
  two people went on a first date. And she's like, I'm never going out with him again. Why is that?
• 38:40
  Well, because he's a ex-supportor, some, some president on general candidate. And that was
• 38:46
  enough for her to say, I'm not interested in you. So that's why we have good reason to be scared.
• 38:51
  So what is happening is you have a lot of people out there who say they have this personal brand.
• 38:57
  But what they're putting out there is not a reflection of their real true identity.
• 39:02
  They're not really being authentic. They're they're they're manicuring or curating all the things
• 39:08
  around in their lives. Like they go to one nice hotel and like, this is my life. They rent a car
• 39:13
  and it's like, this is my car. They they hire models and say, these are who I'm dating. You know,
• 39:18
  and it's all manufactured and fabricated. That's one type of personal brand. The other type of
• 39:24
  personal brand, which I'm not for either, is what people are using to get clients. Okay. So they
• 39:31
  look at personal branding as a form of marketing and advertising to talk about what they do.
• 39:37
  The kinds of benefits or features or outcomes that they're able to create for other people.
• 39:43
  Again, none of that is about who you are as a person. So for me, and I think I'm alone minority
• 39:50
  in this world when I talk about personal brand, personal branding is not what you do. It's who you are.
• 39:57
  And drilling into who you are and reflecting that into the world in the most unvarnished,
• 40:02
  real and raw authentic way that you can. So very few people can actually do that.
• 40:08
  The first I can never get on board with. I can't get on board with renting cars or renting
• 40:14
  models to pretend to be their girlfriend or renting a private jet and saying that you own it.
• 40:19
  Like, that's just ridiculous. The second, I understand what they're trying to accomplish.
• 40:24
  They're trying to build a business and they're not trying to do it maliciously. They're just
• 40:27
  trying to figure out, okay, how do I use my insight of my experience to sell a product or service
• 40:33
  that I'm fully qualified to sell. And I feel like if I'm injecting like my political views into
• 40:39
  this, it's only going to hurt me. It's not going to accomplish in that positive. So let's focus on
• 40:44
  that second person because I think there's a lot more. I would hope there's a lot more of that
• 40:47
  second person listening to this podcast and the person who's renting models and posting them on
• 40:52
  Instagram. So the person is trying to achieve an actual business objective through their content.
• 40:57
  And they that's what they speak about and they don't bring their whole self into it. What's the
• 41:00
  advice for them? Because I don't think they're doing anything wrong. I just don't think they know
• 41:04
  how else to act because they're scared of hurting their income. So let's let's try and unpack that.
• 41:08
  First of all, I gave extreme examples of like the fake persona. But if you dial that back to like
• 41:13
  how people really show up, for example, filters on their face, you know, only one corner of the house
• 41:18
  looks immaculate. Everything else looks like a total pick, pickstie, right? And so we do these things.
• 41:24
  We curate all the time and it's natural for us to do some of that to the extent of which you can
• 41:29
  start to say that's fake AF, right? Now here's the problem in corporations. The way we go get
• 41:35
  new business is we do something called marketing advertising and public relations. But we don't call
• 41:40
  that personal branding. So if you act like a corporation, we just got to call a duck a duck.
• 41:46
  That's not personal brand building. It's just another tool for you to get clients. And that's why
• 41:50
  corporations don't talk about politics or strong points of view because they have to tow that
• 41:55
  middle line. They run it through HR and strategy and copywriting and legal and they figure out what
• 42:00
  we need to say to get more customers. But no one wakes up and says, Oh, I just love that corporate
• 42:06
  faceless entity. They might like their products or how it makes them feel, right? Like,
• 42:12
  unfortunately, that most of these fashion houses, the person who who originated or created that
• 42:18
  brand in the first place were no longer connected. They've been out sit from their own company.
• 42:22
  So when we say we love Gucci, it's like, no one from the Gucci family is actually associated
• 42:26
  with Gucci anymore. If you believe the film, right? Now here's what's happening. Corporations are
• 42:32
  trying to be more personal. My friend, Yo Santos says people don't fall in love with corporations.
• 42:37
  They fall in love with personality. So they're trying to act like a person. Here's the ironic
• 42:44
  twist to all of this. People are trying to act more like corporations, which is really weird.
• 42:49
  So you guys just want to meet in the middle and have a weird party. That's cool. You guys go do
• 42:54
  that, right? So I think it's important. When you have a business brand for you to do exactly what
• 43:01
  you're talking about, you don't say too many inflammatory things. You're not polarizing and you're
• 43:07
  very careful with what you produce. No one really connects with that content except for clients,
• 43:13
  which I understand. You write case studies and you do PR releases about some cool project you've
• 43:19
  worked on. And you're very careful. Like you reread it. You send it through legal, all that kind
• 43:23
  of stuff. What I'm talking about now is something totally different, which is there's a business
• 43:28
  brand. Scott's created business and Scott as the human. Those two believe it or not can co-exist
• 43:36
  in the world. And in fact, the more you are you, Scott, the more you're going to you're going to
• 43:42
  drive interest around Scott's company. And we can see this happening. If you look at Virgin versus
• 43:48
  Richard Branson in terms of the follower count, if you look at Elon Musk versus Tesla Tim Cook versus
• 43:53
  Apple, you just go down the list. Basically, people want to connect to real people. And yeah, we'll
• 44:00
  follow the corporate accounts, but we're not really paying that careful attention to it because we know
• 44:03
  almost everything they put out in terms of content. It's designed for one purpose to control our
• 44:10
  thinking into influences or nudges towards behavior that benefits them. Maybe not so much us.
• 44:17
  When you look at what you've built, I think most people objectively would say that you've
• 44:20
  built a personal brand by the by the classic definition or by the definition that I think the
• 44:25
  majority of people would define a personal brand going into this podcast before they just listen
• 44:31
  to how you broke it down. But would you consider yourself to be somebody who's built a personal
• 44:35
  if yes, why if no, why? And I'll tell you for sure. So in the early ages or the dawn of social
• 44:42
  media, I didn't really understand social media. So we were creating things for my services on
• 44:46
  company blind. And so I was always worried like, what are right? Because there's there's a lot of
• 44:50
  people creative directors who are on the front line. And I don't want to create a situation where
• 44:54
  they have to explain themselves. And there's 10, 20 years between me and them in terms of age
• 44:59
  difference. So we're into different things. They're much more inclusive and softer in their language.
• 45:04
  And I'm a little bit brashier and kind of more direct and blunt. And I don't want to have them
• 45:09
  apologizing and on every new business call. So I find it really difficult to write in any kind of
• 45:15
  real way with passion and with energy and emotion. So they wound up becoming very boring. So when I
• 45:21
  created the future, by circumstance or by design, it was just me. I had one volunteer who was
• 45:28
  an unpaid volunteer at the beginning. And so it wasn't like I was going to write we everything was
• 45:33
  in I. I'm thinking this I like this. And some people would push back their Chris, you're supposed
• 45:39
  to always write the we. I'm like, I don't know what school you want to you write the way you want.
• 45:43
  I'm going to write the way I want because I'm spending all of my money to do this. And I don't
• 45:48
  even need to make money. I'm just going to do what I want. So please don't tell me what to do. I felt
• 45:53
  it as inauthentic to write in the we because there's no we there's just me. I'm not pretending to be
• 45:58
  anything but to be myself. And I say, right, here's the thing that's going to maybe shock some people.
• 46:05
  My personal account grew faster than the corporate account.
• 46:11
  Because it's got keeping in line with the data that we already see today. And there's no
• 46:15
  surprise there because people want to show up for a person. And we understand that I can alienate
• 46:20
  people. I can be off putting to many people. And that's totally okay. Because here's a really
• 46:25
  cool part. The stronger you are as who you're supposed to be in this world, the stronger it creates
• 46:30
  this filter to attract the right kind of people and repel the wrong kind of people. We told
• 46:35
  to get that right. So we were talking about certain political figures before we went on air.
• 46:40
  They attract certain kinds of people and they repel other kinds of people because they're
• 46:44
  speaking from who they are. And our frustration with American politics is people show up. And we
• 46:51
  don't know who the heck is there. It's like some corporate puppet that's backed by billion
• 46:56
  dollar investors or something and they have zero personality. They can't speak clearly or directly.
• 47:02
  And we're really frustrated. Hence why I think we got the result we got. Okay. So for me, I believe
• 47:09
  I have a very strong personal brand. People know what I stand for. I'm saying things that I believe
• 47:14
  in my heart to be true. I'm very passionate about it. And it will piss people off.
• 47:19
  But it will attract more people to the conversation than it will drive them away. And I'm okay with
• 47:25
  that. If you were going to give somebody a tactical guide on how to adopt this ideology into their
• 47:32
  own personal brand, would you say that there is something, some sort of framework that you
• 47:38
  abide by 20% talking about my kids and my wife, 80% talking about my business? Like I'm sure
• 47:44
  you've thought through this because there there can be probably over indexing on your views.
• 47:51
  So just for somebody who wants to get into this, what's the playbook? There's a very specific
• 47:55
  way that I found that has worked for me. It might work for them. Okay. Initially, if you just talk
• 47:59
  about you, unless you're like a lifestyle brand, no one's going to care. No one will care about your
• 48:04
  life, your story, your history or anything like that. The first arc of this and maybe it's multiple
• 48:09
  phases is for you to give tremendous value to the people that you want to serve. So find a customer
• 48:14
  that's passionate about something that has a problem that you'd like to help them solve.
• 48:19
  This is not advertising, by the way. This is just me showing up to try to help people. Initially,
• 48:23
  it was design content. I thought I'll help you teach you about typography and logo design and
• 48:28
  corporate design. Cool. I kind of got bored with that. I'm like, I want to do something different.
• 48:32
  When I found that people were really hungry for business information and insight,
• 48:36
  despite not having any product to serve that audience, I just created content for this community.
• 48:43
  Later on, I found products because they would ask me, Chris, you have something on X, Y, or Z.
• 48:48
  Now people are asking, do you have a course or a workbook or anything on personal branding?
• 48:53
  Because we love your perspective on it. So first, you serve the audience and the community.
• 48:58
  Now, here's the thing. When you teach, you're really just giving value upfront.
• 49:04
  At some point, I don't know where the tipping point is, people want to see you in the content.
• 49:10
  So it's described as faceless content. Now, I'll write posts and mostly typographic and design
• 49:15
  driven. A couple of photos, but it's really not me speaking or doing anything.
• 49:19
  And that brings in an audience. And then this is question mark. Who is this? Is this a team of
• 49:24
  people writing? Or is this a person I can relate to and connect with and share some kind of cultural
• 49:30
  currency with? And so then you have to start to put yourself in there because if you just
• 49:35
  lead with all value, it just becomes like a robot account. This is kind of important. And this
• 49:40
  is where I want to warn everybody. It's my opinion. Stay away from faceless AI content. I don't know
• 49:46
  what you're building there. You're just taking shortcuts, right? So now that you're creating content,
• 49:51
  you're delivering tremendous amounts of value, people want to know a little bit about who you are
• 49:55
  so that they can get into the story. And this is very important now because if it's purely
• 50:00
  education based, there's no, there are no emotional hooks there, right? Like somebody's going
• 50:07
  to tune into this content. They're going to see my face, my glasses, my hat, or hear my voice and
• 50:12
  say, Hey, there's somebody that resonates that frequency connects with me. And we're kind of
• 50:17
  in sync. We're we're drawn, we're drawn towards each other. If I were to come on this show and
• 50:24
  be very professorial, which I could not be, to be very careful, my wording of things to speak
• 50:29
  without a lot of passion to be kind of cold in my delivery, people are like, well, some people
• 50:35
  love that. And so people hate that. And I find that when I speak with passion, more people will
• 50:39
  tune in. Hence that one viral video that you're mentioning. One thing that I think is a great
• 50:44
  exercise is if you look at your favorite creator and you look at their content and video contents
• 50:50
  great for this and go to their YouTube and go to all these videos and look at how much of a robot
• 50:53
  they are versus who they are now. And you can see that, listen, being comfortable putting
• 50:59
  yourself out there and being comfortable having spiky points of view and opinions, it's not
• 51:04
  something that I would ever expect something to be okay with day one. I don't think it's easy
• 51:08
  to say it's very hard to do. But I think that if you, you know, you put yourself into the arena,
• 51:13
  you do enough reps, you start to realize that showing up as yourself authentically on camera or
• 51:18
  in your posts or tweets or Instagram stories or whatever, it starts to become second nature.
• 51:23
  And I think there's a positive feedback loop from your, you'll get negative for sure. And I think
• 51:27
  that that could actually be a barometer of whether or not you're doing it properly, but there will
• 51:31
  be some sort of positive feedback loop that I think outweighs the negative in almost every
• 51:35
  situation I've seen. I mean, even the most, I think outspoken personal brands,
• 51:42
  they usually, that's usually in that positive for whatever objective they're trying to accomplish,
• 51:46
  whether or not you love them or hate them, like if they're still doing it and they're still online,
• 51:49
  there's a reason why. I have one last question about personal brand. We did not have time to go into
• 51:54
  like a whole bunch of content today that we do that for another, another, another episode, but just
• 51:58
  one last question because I'm happy when we went into this. You have a very specific look. And I'm
• 52:04
  sure that that is like curated to a degree. I know that Seth Godin has his glasses. I know you have,
• 52:09
  you have glasses as well. What is, what is that factor in personal brand? Because I don't really
• 52:14
  know many people that evolve personal brand to that level. Is that on purpose? Or is it just,
• 52:21
  is just by chance? I want to say a couple things. Do you know who Mark Manson is? Of course,
• 52:25
  yeah. Okay. He wrote the book, the subtle art of not giving enough, right? I follow him. And he
• 52:30
  said something that I thought was really good. He goes, you know, if you want to be a one percenter
• 52:33
  to stand out and to achieve what the one percenters achieve, he says you have to be a contrarian.
• 52:39
  To say what everyone else is saying is not really contributing to the dialogue, right? We understand
• 52:44
  that. But any fool can say the moon is made from cheese or the ocean is pink and be a contrarian.
• 52:49
  We get that. So he goes, the trick is you have to be a correct contrarian. I don't say things to
• 52:55
  be controversial or to be polarizing. I just have thoughts that oftentimes rubs against
• 53:01
  popular belief. I will argue with people because I'm so convicted in what it is I'm thinking
• 53:06
  that if I hear a better argument from the other side, I will adopt their point of view. But most
• 53:10
  often it doesn't happen that way. So I always say things that will be a little bit shocking to
• 53:15
  people and people will say, Oh, I never thought of it that way. So then I know that that's a piece
• 53:22
  of content that I can double down on and how I'm talking about personal branding is quite contrarian
• 53:27
  to how I think 99% of the people who quote unquote are personal branding experts talk about it.
• 53:33
  They're talking about marketing and advertising and building funnels to grow your business,
• 53:37
  which I find nothing wrong with. I just don't think that's personal branding. That's everything
• 53:42
  from the corporate world and we borrow from the things we know the most about to get that part.
• 53:46
  Now I want to get into the second part to this. The aesthetic part is I'm a designer. And so
• 53:52
  meaning like I used to design layouts, interior signage, all that kind of stuff. I'm that kind of
• 53:57
  designer and I'm obsessed with lots of different things. And fashion is one thing that I have become
• 54:03
  very aware of. Now in my previous life, I used to make commercials and music videos. One thing
• 54:08
  that you learn about character design for an animated film is before they really design the
• 54:13
  character, they design design shapes and silhouettes. So if you look at Kung Fu Panda, which is one of
• 54:18
  the best examples of this, there's Paul who's like bubbly and round because he's the lovable panda.
• 54:24
  And it kind of feels as if that's jack black in a panda form. There's mantis, there's snake,
• 54:30
  and there is shifu, which is like, I don't know what he is, but he's small. And so, and there's
• 54:36
  the orangutan, I believe, who's like, they all have different shapes. And so when you turn off all
• 54:42
  the lights and it just shapes, you can tell them apart from each other. And so I'm designing the
• 54:48
  character of me. And so if we're all strip naked, we have slightly different shapes, but for the
• 54:53
  most part, we're human. What's real interesting is if you look at the world of fashion, I think
• 54:57
  Alexander McQueen said this, the late Alexander McQueen said, if you want to design in fashion,
• 55:04
  change the silhouette, you change the silhouette, you change everything. And I see two parallels now
• 55:10
  when you're designing characters for animated films, you look at the silhouette and when designing
• 55:14
  fashion, you change the silhouette. And so it's really important. So I think, okay, I'm a designer,
• 55:19
  I'm going to design me. I'm going to design the way I look to represent who I am in this world.
• 55:25
  So that I'm not just in a brown paper bag. Right. So this is the packaging of Chris. And so
• 55:32
  there's certain pieces of jewelry that I'm wearing now or funky glasses that are statement pieces
• 55:37
  that really bring this kind of, hey, I don't know what that guy does, but he's probably creative
• 55:42
  artistic or something like that. And it's been real interesting as an experiment as I'm showing up
• 55:48
  and being more adventurous with how I come across with my the way I look. People automatically
• 55:53
  assume I'm a fashion designer. And it's pretty wild because that is actually where I'm moving
• 55:59
  because I want to design my own fashion line. And it's wild that you can signal to someone else
• 56:04
  without words from old people to young people to people on airplanes and people at restaurants and
• 56:09
  cafes are like, oh, you look really interesting. You must be a fashion designer. And it's wild. So
• 56:14
  when I'm signaling to others, they're receiving. And that's really important to me. So what I want
• 56:19
  to communicate is I'm a person who's very particular about certain things. But there's another
• 56:24
  thing to note here. In the sea of same, the last thing you want is to blend in. You need to stand
• 56:32
  out in your perspective. You need to stand out in the kinds of things you have to offer the way
• 56:36
  that you teach and the way you speak and the way you create content. But you also want to stand out
• 56:39
  like physically. Now me dressing and looking at certain ways, very intentional because I'm a
• 56:45
  really socially awkward guy. I don't know what to do at parties when no one, I don't know anybody.
• 56:50
  I always feel like, oh, what am I doing here? I'm plotting my exit. Scott, I'm looking for like
• 56:55
  where, how long do I need to stay at this thing to say? I'm the same. But yes, I totally get it.
• 57:01
  Yeah. Yeah. So if you dress a certain way, if you have purple hair or you have like bright shoes
• 57:06
  or weird tie or an interesting dress, when you walk into that room, people find a reason to talk
• 57:12
  to you because they look across. Everyone looks the same duck, duck, duck, duck. There's a goose
• 57:16
  right there. Let me go talk to the goose. They might have an interesting perspective. So I rely on
• 57:22
  this wardrobe or this look or the silhouette to help invite people to come and talk to me.
• 57:27
  But also for people to be able to recognize me in the street because I love talking to people
• 57:32
  and they're afraid to talk to me. And I just want to make it easy for them to know that is Chris.
• 57:37
  And if you've gotten some value for you to be encouraged to come up and talk to me because
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• 57:56
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• 58:00
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• 58:04
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• 58:08
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• 58:13
  It's about all these little promises that we as founders, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders,
• 58:18
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• 58:22
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• 58:26
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• 58:30
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• 1:00:35
  There's a couple other things that I said. I don't know if you wanted to talk about them or comment
• 1:00:38
  on them. I mentioned using failure as a barometer of successful personal branding or not failure,
• 1:00:45
  excuse me, negative comments as a barometer of successful personal branding. That was one idea.
• 1:00:50
  I can't remember. I think we covered most everything else about brand. I was going to say,
• 1:00:55
  like, is there any other factors that you consider when you are putting yourself out into the world
• 1:01:00
  that somebody else should think about? Whether or not it's looking for negative comments as,
• 1:01:04
  yes, I have a spikey point of view check. Or is there some other X factor that you include in
• 1:01:10
  the way you speak and the way you present in the type of content you put out? I don't know,
• 1:01:14
  you're the expert. There's probably some a lot of things, but what would be another thing that
• 1:01:18
  stands out that people should just take a note of? You now have reminded me what I wanted to talk
• 1:01:22
  about. Okay, good. And this was cool. I forget who said this, but I would rather be hated for being
• 1:01:28
  me than to be loved for not being me. And this is going to cut deep for a lot of people, right?
• 1:01:33
  We're too entirely focused on what other people want. You can't be an influencer if you're chasing
• 1:01:40
  followers. It doesn't work that way. I'll give you a prime example. People will make weird comments
• 1:01:47
  about like, oh, this guy's a douchebag. Look at the way he's dressing. Oh, dress your age. I'm like,
• 1:01:51
  you dress your age. You know, I'm 52. You want to dress like grandpa and wear your pants really high
• 1:01:56
  up and ill-fitted suits like an accountant. You do you. And I'm of the mind that I'm going to do
• 1:02:02
  me. I don't really care what you think or have to say. And eventually, like I said, the people
• 1:02:07
  who like you will follow you and the people don't want. Like artists don't sit around and take polls
• 1:02:13
  about what they should paint or sculpt. They just make it and the people don't like it. They
• 1:02:16
  suffer the consequences. They can change or they don't have to. It's entirely up to them.
• 1:02:21
  So people will literally say, never trust a guy who wears a baseball cap inside.
• 1:02:28
  Okay, I don't know where you got that story from, but I'm not going to change me for you.
• 1:02:33
  That doesn't make sense. So again, we're so conditioned to create a persona or conformer
• 1:02:41
  ourselves based on acceptance from others that we don't even know. It's funny how we chase all
• 1:02:46
  these vanity metrics. We do. I mean, we just chase all these and I or just acceptance. I wouldn't
• 1:02:52
  even put that as vanity metrics, just acceptance. Sometimes it manifests as vanity metrics, but I'll
• 1:02:57
  talk about that too. Okay. So you have to ask yourself, am I leading or am I following?
• 1:03:04
  And if you're leading, if you're the thought leader, if you're the influencer, if an influencer has
• 1:03:10
  a bad taste in people's mouths, but people write articles who make films who design fashion and
• 1:03:16
  build buildings, they are influencers. They nudge people's behavior depending on how they do certain
• 1:03:23
  things and they start trends or they create movements of both political and social. And that's
• 1:03:29
  the kind of an important thing to think about. Now, this whole idea of like vanity metrics, as
• 1:03:36
  you mentioned it like three times now. I want to talk about a little bit. You know why it bugs me
• 1:03:40
  so much. And I think I mentioned it too. It's because again, it is not the things that people ask
• 1:03:45
  me to help them solve for. And listen, I'm not even a consultant. These are just DMs and replies to
• 1:03:50
  my my newsletters. The things that people ask me to solve for to help them out with
• 1:03:58
  have no bearing on my actual business. Like they are the they are not my my KPI that I try and
• 1:04:04
  optimize for when I'm building my business. And I mean, I'm in it. So I understand that I
• 1:04:11
  understand like what moves the needle on the podcast and what moves the needle on newsletter
• 1:04:15
  subscribers. And those are sort of precursors because, you know, I can tie a subscriber down to
• 1:04:20
  an advertising dollar. I can tie a I can tie an additional podcast download down to an advertising
• 1:04:26
  dollar. And then if I'm going to try and sell a product, it would probably be coming through a
• 1:04:30
  newsletter subscriber. So I can follow that funnel. But ultimately, followers are not a
• 1:04:35
  metric of success. There's a lot of other metrics that I look for that are sort of leading
• 1:04:38
  indicators, not even just lagging indicators. But again, when I put out into the world,
• 1:04:44
  hey, what would you like me to speak about? Because I pull the audience and I pull on my newsletter
• 1:04:48
  and I pull in stories. And I'll say, what do you want me to speak about? What do you want me to do
• 1:04:52
  more content around or create more content around? It's always about how do I grow my Instagram?
• 1:04:56
  How do I grow my Instagram? And it's just frustrating. And I don't know why people think that
• 1:05:01
  that's a useful skill. Okay, I'm going to help shine some light on that. Okay, so here's a hot take.
• 1:05:06
  Here we go, buckle in. This is probably the second most explosive thing I'm about to say.
• 1:05:12
  There's this rejection of followers and vanity metrics. And the term vanity is not a good term.
• 1:05:19
  There's a negative association with that. It's about appearances and nothing meaningful. And a
• 1:05:24
  friend of mine who is an influencer herself would say followers don't equal dollars. And that's
• 1:05:30
  fine. When you look at social media and content as a means to go make more money, like I've
• 1:05:36
  already established that idea that for me, it's not about that at all. But when you create things
• 1:05:42
  Scott that help your community, you're doing something wonderful. You're creating good will.
• 1:05:47
  And goodwill goes a long freaking way. So that when you have something to sell to them,
• 1:05:52
  when you need their support because of whatever reason like your accounts being banned or
• 1:05:56
  some weirdos are stealing your identity, the people that you created all this good will for
• 1:06:01
  will show up and fight for you because they've said in their mind, this guy fights for us. So we got
• 1:06:07
  your back. However, if you make the relationship transactional, this is really important concept
• 1:06:12
  to understand. When I give somebody 10 bucks or 12 bucks to buy a burger, the relationship is kind
• 1:06:18
  of over. You give me the burger. I give you the money. It's a transaction. I don't owe you anything.
• 1:06:22
  You don't owe me anything. I don't feel compelled to go on social media and say,
• 1:06:26
  Oh, best burger of every in my life. Please go here. Now some people do because they're trying to
• 1:06:30
  build influence in that space. But regular people don't. Okay. Now here's the thing. And this is
• 1:06:36
  kind of an interesting shift in like how people perceive things. There's something called social
• 1:06:42
  proof and social proof is very valuable. And some people now are shifting of their mindset that
• 1:06:49
  social media has become the new resume. So let's unpack that. Okay. The resume is something that's
• 1:06:55
  fabricated that most people don't actually dig much deeper. And so there's all forms of puffery
• 1:07:01
  and exaggeration that are used in resumes. I'll give you an example. I was working with this one
• 1:07:06
  person who was helping me with some marketing stuff. And it said they went to Stanford on their
• 1:07:10
  LinkedIn profile. It's Stanford. But when I talk to them, I dug a little deeper and like,
• 1:07:15
  Oh, when did you graduate? How long? You know, they went to Stanford for one semester and dropped out.
• 1:07:22
  That is a very misleading thing to say you went to Stanford. Now they're not lying, but they just
• 1:07:26
  say went to Stanford, right? But they know how people are going to interpret that. And people give
• 1:07:31
  themselves all kinds of crazy titles. Head of product design and development. You did a sketch
• 1:07:36
  that so people exaggerate. We know this about resumes. So I think resumes are worthless.
• 1:07:42
  Now work product matters a lot if you're in a creative space to show me your portfolio,
• 1:07:47
  but there aren't as many industries or verticals that you can be in that there's work product
• 1:07:51
  that you can prove you know what you're doing. So we go to the next available thing. We go into
• 1:07:55
  the realm of social proof, testimonials, awards, certificates, things that you've accomplished.
• 1:08:01
  And we all know this. When you go and find two people who speak on a similar subject,
• 1:08:06
  the one that has 10 million followers versus one that has 10,000, you automatically associate
• 1:08:12
  the person with 10 million followers as having greater presence reach depth of knowledge,
• 1:08:16
  charisma and all the kinds of things because humans are lazy. We use heuristics to help us not
• 1:08:22
  have to think so much. Go to bed. That's an important thing to note. Now I will say this and this is
• 1:08:28
  where I'm willing to kind of fight on the hill and die on the sword on my sword on this,
• 1:08:33
  which is everything that you do Scott, everything that your audience does benefits on a exponential
• 1:08:41
  level if they have a really strong personal brand that is backed by a lot of social proof.
• 1:08:46
  Period. So let me land that part. So if you sell donuts and you're the donut king on Instagram,
• 1:08:54
  your business will explode. If you are like an IT professional who helps people deal with
• 1:09:01
  cybersecurity and you're the foremost expert or a prolific content creator about cybersecurity
• 1:09:08
  and patches and things that people need to do, your IT security business will blow up in the
• 1:09:12
  positive direction. And so you do what we what people don't understand is and it's being proven
• 1:09:19
  again and again, people who have a strong tribe in community can make dumb simple commodities
• 1:09:26
  very, very valuable. So you take Ryan Reynolds with aviation. You take the rock with Terramana
• 1:09:32
  and you take all these people or even previously Logan Paul and forget the other guy's name.
• 1:09:38
  So he's pumping prime and prime became like the fastest growing energy drink company in the
• 1:09:44
  world because of the association that they can drive. I get way better public speaking gigs and
• 1:09:52
  rates and speaking slots, not because I'm a better speaker, not because I've written bestselling
• 1:09:57
  book or have been included in fast company or any of these ink magazine or entrepreneur magazine,
• 1:10:03
  it's mostly because I have a large social following. So the social following is the new currency
• 1:10:11
  in the 21st century. And this is going to shatter people's heads because they're like,
• 1:10:16
  no, it's not crazy. They're going to argue with me. They're all vanity. And I'll tell you right now
• 1:10:21
  because of the social following, I get better book deals. I'm literally negotiating a deal with
• 1:10:26
  a publisher because they're looking at the social following. I get better sponsor rates or brand
• 1:10:30
  deals where people will open doors that even know existed. Forget about like me trying to open the
• 1:10:38
  door and you're getting invited to meetings and events and you're being brought into the room,
• 1:10:43
  the room where it happens. According to Hamilton, you're getting brought into the room where there
• 1:10:49
  people there that you've looked up to all of your life because of the perceived authority that
• 1:10:54
  you have because of your social following. I just got back from a trip from Ireland as a business
• 1:10:59
  retreat with 20 other very accomplished individuals. And the first thing that they say when I'm
• 1:11:06
  introduced is Chris, how many followers do you have again? Not you want an Emmy or you worked on
• 1:11:12
  this account or you grew your business to XY million dollars. They just say, how many followers
• 1:11:16
  you got again? Like you're saying, they're incessantly chasing after you Scott saying, how do I grow my
• 1:11:21
  Instagram account? Because instinctively, they also know something that you may or may not have
• 1:11:26
  accepted yet that in the 21st century, the attention economy is the economy. I'll tell two things.
• 1:11:33
  KSI is his business partner. I just looked it up. Got it. Somebody's doing the research.
• 1:11:38
  Fact check. And the second thing is I don't disagree with you. I think my frustration comes not from
• 1:11:44
  because yes, the following has given me incredible opportunity and put me on stage is that it would
• 1:11:49
  that I would not have had the opportunity to go on without that following. I think what frustrates me
• 1:11:54
  is people substitute audience building for building a profitable business from the ground up and
• 1:12:00
  figuring out a product that has product market fit and then and and and traditional entrepreneurship.
• 1:12:05
  They think that if they just build an audience similar to what your friend said,
• 1:12:10
  well, actually counter to what your friend said, actually, they think if they build an audience,
• 1:12:13
  it's going to lead to dollars. And that is that is what I'm trying to push back against. I'm trying
• 1:12:19
  to say, hey, I know this crowd is entrepreneurial. I don't know the I don't know the ambitions or the
• 1:12:23
  the financial status of every single person that follows me. But if you are trying to build a
• 1:12:27
  business, let's focus on the business fundamentals first. Let's focus on solving a problem that people
• 1:12:32
  actually need solved. And then an audience will just make that a little bit easier. But just collecting
• 1:12:37
  followers with with no rhyme or reason is really not going to solve what you're trying to accomplish.
• 1:12:43
  I think that's probably a better way of saying it. That's why I get frustrated. Let's let's
• 1:12:47
  let's weave this these two ideas together, right? If you're trying to run a business and in your
• 1:12:52
  entrepreneur, you have to focus on the fundamentals, marketing, sales, customer service, those kinds of
• 1:12:57
  things, product delivery, that's a paramount to you being able to play this game. So once you have
• 1:13:03
  your house in order or in parallel, you can develop your personal brand such that both these things
• 1:13:09
  help each other. Here's the example. If you're an unreached person, you've got no experience and
• 1:13:14
  you're trying to say, I've done things. Where are the receipts? The people on the social will say
• 1:13:18
  where the receipts you've done nothing. You don't know anything about what you're talking about,
• 1:13:21
  which is the criticism I get a lot. I'm like, okay, I have receipts. Do you want to look at them or
• 1:13:26
  do you just want to dig your head into the ground and say, blah, blah, blah, you don't know what you're
• 1:13:30
  talking about, right? So I had the receipts. So people are saying to me, Chris, you wouldn't have been
• 1:13:35
  able to launch or create such a large following if you didn't have this business that backs up
• 1:13:41
  everything you're saying. I think some of that is fair. However, now on the opposite side,
• 1:13:45
  because I've been able to grow my social following to the to the sides that it is today,
• 1:13:50
  whatever business I want to get into is going to be fueled by that. I'll give you the example
• 1:13:54
  right now. I'm at a conference. It's called reframe. It's for a bunch of accountants. There are
• 1:14:00
  a bunch of sponsors that are sitting along the wall to support this event. So there's a guy who's
• 1:14:07
  in the app development space. He and his entire family is super successful. Multiple IPOs between
• 1:14:12
  his siblings. He says, Chris, it's very easy to get you money if you want to get venture capital.
• 1:14:20
  I'm like, really? He goes, well, most people, most entrepreneurs get venture capital to build a
• 1:14:24
  product. And then they spend all the energy trying to build an audience so that somebody will use
• 1:14:28
  their products and their tools. He goes, you already got that. I will help you go get venture
• 1:14:33
  capital. And once you build your product, there will be immense anticipation or build up for it
• 1:14:40
  because you just tell your community, I'm working on this product for you guys. I've solved the
• 1:14:44
  problem that I think you will find that makes your life easier or better. And because of that,
• 1:14:52
  a person who has never launched an app or a digital product like that has not only access.
• 1:15:00
  So the conversation is being had with me and another serial entrepreneur who's very successful,
• 1:15:05
  who says, we can get your capital. I can partner with you to build some of this. And we know it's
• 1:15:09
  going to be successful. And then we can create a whole bidding war for a second, like series B
• 1:15:14
  venture capital. That is built almost primarily off the social following that I have and the good
• 1:15:22
  will that's been created. Nobody's talking about blind. The company I spent twice as much time
• 1:15:27
  building. Almost no one's talking about that today. So I want to balance those two things. Right?
• 1:15:32
  So it is foolish to go out there and be a life coach at 17. You haven't lived life enough
• 1:15:38
  or to say like you've done X number of conversions or you're a sales expert when you've you've
• 1:15:42
  not done anything. You're a kid in a bedroom, which, you know, maybe there's some ageism there.
• 1:15:48
  I get that. If you have experience and you know what you're doing, it's a great time for you to
• 1:15:53
  start creating content. And Scott, I understand your frustration because people have holes in the ship.
• 1:15:58
  Let's plug those holes up real quick while they spend 10 to 20% of the energy building their
• 1:16:03
  personal brand because those things work in concert to help each other. If you have built a brand
• 1:16:09
  and you you have built an audience, excuse me, should creators, we can we can adopt a generalized
• 1:16:16
  view to this to this idea. Obviously, we can make arguments for either, but should creators
• 1:16:22
  try and build a company or should creators leverage their audience and take equity positions in
• 1:16:27
  startups or small companies where their product aligns with the audience avatar. What do you think
• 1:16:31
  in most cases is a better use of their audience is a more leverageable option. Yeah, we have to
• 1:16:38
  kind of be real careful here. This goodwill that you've been building up, trust is hard to build.
• 1:16:43
  It's easy to lose. And once you lose trust, it's really hard to come back from. Okay. So as the
• 1:16:48
  general rule, I don't promote or leverage my audience for anything that I personally don't like
• 1:16:52
  use or I'm in love with. Otherwise, I have a real problem because I've become a pitchman
• 1:16:58
  for other people's products and I'm trading on the goodwill to make a quick buck and you can do
• 1:17:02
  that, but I know that's not the game I'm playing. There is an interesting trend that's happening
• 1:17:06
  right now. There are a lot of SaaS companies out there who are looking for that very thing we just
• 1:17:10
  talked about, a large audience to seed their software or their tools, right? So what they're doing
• 1:17:16
  now is I have two such deals, equity deals, where I'm helping to promote a product that I like and
• 1:17:22
  use that we've been using to our community, to our audience and offering value to them in
• 1:17:28
  better deals and exchange for equity in these companies. This is an amazing time to be alive if
• 1:17:35
  you have a powerful personal brand with a good community, a strong following. And it's awesome
• 1:17:41
  because not only, here's what I think, if anyone of these companies that have equity in
• 1:17:46
  our sold or go IPO, I think instead of my community getting upset at me, they're going to just be
• 1:17:52
  saying good for you, Chris. They're going to be so proud to say we're here to support you 1,000
• 1:17:57
  percent. And because that's the culture in which I've cultivated in the community that we have,
• 1:18:03
  right? They want, we want to see each other win. I'm there rooting for you. I'm there supporting
• 1:18:08
  you with content with educational material so that you can build a life built around your passion.
• 1:18:15
  So when I'm also rewarded, our community stands up and it's like this is freaking amazing,
• 1:18:20
  we're so happy, we're proud, we're here for you. What else do we need to do? And I'll tell you
• 1:18:25
  something, something really remarkable has happened in this whole content game that we started
• 1:18:31
  in 2014, which is people out of the goodness of their own heart just give us money.
• 1:18:38
  Nothing to buy, just as reciprocity, right? So I ask people who are marketers,
• 1:18:43
  who are building brands out there, how much do you pay to acquire a customer? And do you pay a
• 1:18:49
  dollar, $10,000, $100,000? It depends on how big your offer is, you'll pay a lot because your
• 1:18:55
  lifetime customer value is quite high. And then I said, how great would it be if your customers actually
• 1:19:00
  paid you to market to them? And that's the rare position that we're in right now because we've
• 1:19:06
  been doing this for 10 years, creating goodwill. And we've been honest and we've been doing it with
• 1:19:11
  integrity. And I have stayed away from anything that's made me cringe. So it's like people are in
• 1:19:15
  it for the long haul. If you're building an audience and you don't want to take bad brand deals
• 1:19:24
  right away, you just want to you want to you want to stay in integrity with your audience. And
• 1:19:31
  you want to monetize the audience in some way because you are fully set on becoming a full-time
• 1:19:38
  creator. What do you think is the most integrous way to monetize an audience when you're first
• 1:19:44
  starting out and you don't have a massive amount of people to sell into or you don't have a massive
• 1:19:50
  pool of trust? Like how do you monetize it when you're starting? Way I'm going to answer this question
• 1:19:54
  is delay the ask or monetization for as long as you can. This is why if creating content is your
• 1:20:02
  primary source of income, you're not going to be able to do this. And this is why I'm going to back
• 1:20:06
  you on your let's build a business first because that gives you more runway. And what happens is there's
• 1:20:11
  this like idea of karmic equity, right? The more I do good for the world, the more I make a deposit
• 1:20:18
  in the equity bank and it compounds interest over time, especially if you consistently. They say
• 1:20:23
  something like the minute your child is born or your your partner's pregnant, you make a deposit
• 1:20:28
  and you keep adding money to this account such that by the time they go to college, especially
• 1:20:32
  here in America, they have a college tuition ready to go. And we were very responsible as parents.
• 1:20:38
  So both my kids, the college tuition fund was already built. So both of them can have all their tuition
• 1:20:43
  money now or whenever they want so that they can figure out if they want to go to school or they want
• 1:20:47
  to travel the world and be a student of life. And so if we put these deposits in, but we're asking
• 1:20:54
  or doing monetization or doing deals or ask and running ads all the time, we empty the account out.
• 1:21:00
  It never has enough momentum to build into something substantial. There's this thing that people,
• 1:21:05
  there's this thing that Darren Hardy wrote about in the compound effect. He goes, would you rather have
• 1:21:10
  a million dollars or a penny that doubles in value every single day for 30 days? It's quite
• 1:21:17
  fascinating. So most people, I'll take the million dollars. I must be more. How can a penny be
• 1:21:21
  worth more than that? So what gets really interesting by day 28, it's still less than a million dollars.
• 1:21:26
  By day 29, it surpasses it by day 30 becomes a much bigger number. And so you can look at karma
• 1:21:33
  or goodwill or helping others or the active generosity as that penny that keeps compounding
• 1:21:40
  in doubles every single day. And so I want to warn people, don't be so quick to monetize.
• 1:21:48
  Stay away from that because what's going to happen is you can do much bigger deals.
• 1:21:53
  Two, three, four, five years into this that are going to feel really like it's like you're going
• 1:22:01
  to get better terms and the kind of money you're going to be paid is going to surpass all of what
• 1:22:05
  you could have done, came another really in one deal. So some of the biggest deals I've done are
• 1:22:12
  six figures, 120, 140 thousand dollars for one social media brand deal. And if I sat there and
• 1:22:20
  tried to take a thousand dollars out each time, I'm going to wear my audience down. I'm not going
• 1:22:24
  to feel good about myself and I'm shilling products that I shouldn't be associated with because they
• 1:22:28
  can't afford to pay what one will pay to work with somebody like myself. Out of all the things
• 1:22:33
  that we've spoken about, what would be the last major misconception or red flag that you'd like to
• 1:22:40
  sort of like, you know, put a stake in when it comes to somebody building their personal brand.
• 1:22:46
  Building a personal brand is not advertising because as far as I know, this is a South Godin
• 1:22:50
  thing. I think it's in permission marketing, almost no one opens their email to find spam,
• 1:22:56
  almost no one listens to radio watches TV to listen to an ad. In fact, we pay money to get the
• 1:23:02
  premium subscription service such that we don't have to listen to ads, whether it's on Apple music,
• 1:23:06
  Spotify, Amazon or whatever else. We just pay money to get rid of the ads. Ask yourself this
• 1:23:12
  question. This is the quick smell test. Does it smell like an ad? Because if it does, your audience
• 1:23:17
  is much smarter than you give them credit for. So be genuine when you're advertising to them,
• 1:23:23
  don't try to disguise it and be real when you're creating content and don't ask for anything.
• 1:23:28
  And what people do a lot, and I see it all over social, whether it's on LinkedIn, on Twitter,
• 1:23:33
  on Instagram or on YouTube, it's an ad with the very sloppy package as value.
• 1:23:39
  And what what happens is it turns people off. No one watches it, no one shares it. And they know
• 1:23:46
  that, okay, you're here to sell me something. I'll give my teeth and bear through this painful
• 1:23:51
  experience so that I can pick up one or two pieces of information from you. But that's not a
• 1:23:55
  positive sentiment that they're feeling. It's quite negative. I don't know how many webinars you've
• 1:24:00
  been on, but the ones that seem to be successful, quote unquote, follow very specific formula.
• 1:24:06
  Promise three things. Take forever to deliver those three things and wait to the very end to
• 1:24:10
  deliver it while you're pitching to them every 10 or 15 minutes. That's pretty rough. By the way,
• 1:24:15
  I would say that the webinars that I actually appreciate are webinars that are actually so in-depth
• 1:24:21
  and teach so much that it actually makes me by the there's actually no pitching. And this is just
• 1:24:27
  subjective to me. I don't know the science of webinars and not an expert. But when somebody comes
• 1:24:31
  on and basically teaches me the exact same thing that they'd be selling me anyways for free,
• 1:24:36
  but I know that I'm not accountable enough or have the will to do it myself. And they're saying,
• 1:24:44
  hey, this is what you do. By the way, pay me $20,000 and I'll do it for you. And I'm like, you know
• 1:24:49
  what? Yeah. Because you've already told me what you're exactly going to do. And you haven't tried
• 1:24:53
  to sell me. And now I believe you can do it. And I probably could with enough energy and effort
• 1:24:57
  to do it myself, but I don't really want to. So yes, here's the $20,000 or the $5,000 or whatever,
• 1:25:03
  it doesn't matter. But those are the webinars that actually resonate with me as a customer. And I
• 1:25:08
  hate the ones that sell every five minutes or the, oh my God, or the events where they just put
• 1:25:13
  the sponsors on stage and the sponsors can't have like an educated conversation. They're just
• 1:25:17
  pitching their product. It's an immediate turn off. It's an immediate turn off. So don't create
• 1:25:21
  that experience. I like to end our podcast today with a story and a question that was shared
• 1:25:27
  with me. And I want hopefully for you to think about it, feel free to do a follow-up to this.
• 1:25:31
  There's a buddy of mine. His name is Trevor. And Trevor is like Chris. And he hosts events with his
• 1:25:36
  his boss, Neil, right? They they've hosted most multiple events throughout the year for a bunch
• 1:25:42
  of real estate professionals. And he goes, what's your game, man? I'm like, what do you mean? What's my
• 1:25:47
  game? He goes, what is it that you're trying to sell when you speak? Like, and I really had to think
• 1:25:53
  about it. I say, I don't think I'm trying to sell anything. He goes, see, I thought the same
• 1:25:58
  thing because every other speaker who goes on stage is selling a book. They want you to roll
• 1:26:02
  their mastermind or hire them to do your personal branding or whatever it is. They're always selling
• 1:26:07
  something. You're one of the few people who speak on stage and you don't sell anything. But I don't
• 1:26:13
  believe that to be true. There must be something you're selling. Otherwise, why are you doing it?
• 1:26:18
  It's quite simple. Number one is I do it to honor you guys as the people who've chose me to speak
• 1:26:24
  today. I want to make sure I bring value to you to validate the decision to bring me in. It was a good
• 1:26:31
  one. Number two, and as a co-host number two, I do it to give value to the people who spent their
• 1:26:37
  time, energy and resources to be here rather than be with their family or to spend their money
• 1:26:42
  time on something else. That's what I'm trying to do. That's my agenda. I said that people are
• 1:26:48
  a much smarter than you think. When you come in with an agenda, they can smell it a mile away.
• 1:26:57
  No matter what you say, you're undermining the value that you're giving because you're making it,
• 1:27:03
  you're making it transactional. You see them as a dollar sign in a bank account. I don't want to
• 1:27:09
  do that. He goes, I get it. People think they're so clever with their not-so-hidden agenda.
• 1:27:18
  I don't know why people keep doing that. It's like you've been paid to speak.
• 1:27:24
  These people have paid good money for you not to be a commercial. Again, I'm fairly
• 1:27:32
  like the minority in this versus the norm, and I'm okay with that because it allows me to shine.
• 1:27:40
  And so what happens afterwards, Scott, is people will come up to me. What are you buying?
• 1:27:44
  I'm sorry. What are you selling? I want to buy something from you. I'm like, I don't know. What
• 1:27:48
  do you need? I'll look at my catalog. No, I don't think I have anything for you.
• 1:27:53
  But I appreciate you wanting to buy something from me. And the really cool thing here is,
• 1:27:59
  I don't know if you know this, but I do one-on-one coaching. It's very expensive to hire me.
• 1:28:05
  And so I think all this goodwill that I'm building up, people are like, shut up, take my money.
• 1:28:09
  I want to hire you on one-on-one, and they just sign up for it. So when you're so good at
• 1:28:14
  delivering value, they will find a way to give you money. The good ones always do.
• 1:28:20
  Chris, where should people connect with you, consume your content, all the socials, your website,
• 1:28:26
  all of that? For following me on almost all social platforms, I'm at the Chris Doe. Doe is
• 1:28:32
  spelled D-O. And if you want to find out more about our programs, just look into the future.
• 1:28:36
  So if you go to thefuture.com, you can find us there. The future is spelled without an E at
• 1:28:41
  then. So it's F-U-T-U-R, or if you're French, you say Future. So that's who we are.
• 1:28:46
  But you've had an incredible life, multiple seasons to your life. If you could go back and tell
• 1:28:50
  your 20-year-old self one thing, what would that thing be? I'm going to tell myself, it's going
• 1:28:54
  to be really uncomfortable. You're not going to want to do it. There's no proof that it's going
• 1:28:58
  to work, but create content as soon as you can, even when you don't know what you're doing. Because
• 1:29:03
  those early years are very important to help you become the person that you're supposed to be
• 1:29:08
  in this world. And my life has transformed the relationships I have have transformed. And I have
• 1:29:13
  now, when I'm so proud of this, friends that are from all over the world who will fly and meet me
• 1:29:19
  wherever we're going to be. And we travel like a pack of wolves. And it's an amazing thing to have
• 1:29:24
  adult friends that kind of we do like adult camp. And it's the most fun I've ever had with
• 1:29:30
  people that I genuinely like and we want to see each other win. So that's the byproduct of
• 1:29:36
  showing up and creating content, building community.