How To Build Your Expertise And Become The Expert

This is called number 116. This is the late night edition of the group, and today we're going to talk a little bit about the business of expertise. Some things that I picked up from the book The business of expertise by David Baker. You guys are seeing the screen right and something that we talked about this morning. And I want to reemphasize with you because I think a lot of us are hung up on this idea of expertise that we're afraid to say experts or to pick a lane to build expertise because it's really scary. And I just want to let you guys know this is just my feeling on this is that it's a journey. The journey never ends. As you hit one peak, you realize you're at the base of another peak and you just keep climbing and climbing. But it shouldn't stop you from taking those very necessary critical first steps onwards towards your journey to developing expertise. And oftentimes, all we see is what's in front of us, not what's behind us. And there are many people on that same path that are behind us that are asking for help. And so when we don't see ourselves as an expert, we don't take a direction, we don't move in that direction. And then we don't turn around to help those behind us because we feel like we're a fraud. We're a fake. So the way to combat this is to realize something. At one point, everyone in their career is an imposter once they claim some level of expertise, and this happens for a little while until you build the necessary skills, fill that gap and gain credibility. And the reason why we don't want to say that we're experts is because we have a deep fear of appearing incompetent. This is heavy into the impostor syndrome. So David Baker did this himself because he was invited to. Present an idea that he sold to a client and he started to panic immediately after they had approved. So he made a get to list. The get to list is something that I want you guys to do, so we'll do this together at some point. On today's call, I want you to sit down and write things you don't know. Now, there are a lot of things you don't know, so we want to limit this to the field of expertise that we're on. And I'll give you an example. I want to be a vital business coach to people, so there are holes in my knowledge. I've done a lot of reading on sales. I think I know how to do that really well. I know how to have the price conversation. I know how to ask Socratic questions. But the one thing I didn't know enough about was about positioning and marketing. What is that? How is it different from branding? So I did my a little deep dive, which you guys are about to kind of get all that information unleashed on you. So I knew I wanted to learn more about positioning, so I literally bought a book called positioning and I read it. And then I started to think about what other books are related to this, well, the book this is marketing. I read that book and then I'm reading the brand, flip the brand gap. The business expertise and there's massive overlap, and I'll share with you why it's necessary for us to pick a direction, because when we start to study the same subject over and over again from different points of view, we start to see patterns and intelligence is pattern recognition pattern matching. If we do something once our ability and pattern match is very low, so we need to do it over and over again and we start to see like, wow, I'm noticing this happens at this period in time or I'm seeing so much overlap between Chris Voss book Never Split the difference. It's a Socratic selling, and to some of these other books that I'm reading, they just and the one page marketing plan. All these things are just overlapping, so much so that I feel like now I'm starting to develop my own voice in this. So what I want you to do is make a list of things that you don't know. Now, you would think this would make you even more insecure. And it's not designed to do that, something about writing down the things you don't know and admitting it out loud and not having to fake it in front of a client gives you your power back. You take it back. Conversely, writing down what you don't know also highlights what you do know. So if I'm going about and I'm going to jump on a stage, I'm going to say, guys, I've been in business for 24 years. There's lots of things I know. Thanks to my list and there's some things I don't know, and I may be just filling in gaps of knowledge. So if you guys know better, let me know. And then all that fear of them discovering that I don't know what I'm talking about goes away real quick. And that's what I'm trying to get you guys to get into the groove of. I want you to be able to do that. OK, so make a list. Think about what it is that you want to be better at and figure out what you don't know about that. So I don't know a lot about copywriting, either. So that's probably something I want to study next because I talk so much about crafting the language of a brand is a critical part to branding. And words don't come easy to me. So once you do this, once you pick a lane of expertise, what you want to do is you want to start to write and you want to write somewhere between 2,400 to 3,600 words how David Baker came up with that number. I do not know, but it sounds like a good number. It's not too daunting, but basically you're synthesizing and processing everything you've learned and you're going to write an article or something on positioning, on expertise or whatever it is that you want to write on. And then what you want to do is put this up for peer review. Share it with people. See what they think. And then you just iterate on this process. So things that don't resonate with people you get rid of. That's the filler content, the stuff that it's really powerful, impactful. It's not really moving the needle in some kind of platitude. Everybody already knows this stuff. Move on. And through that process, you're going to start to develop your own expertise and a voice in the world. And I've been thinking about this a lot. And this is quote in the book from Joan didion, and she says, I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking. What an interesting concept I write to find out what I'm thinking. So I've had this discussion a lot with my wife where she's like, why do you volunteer to get yourself into a super stressful, stressful situations where you're doing public speaking on topics that you're not prepared to talk about? I said that stress, the pressure of needing to do something with a very fixed deadline and the fear of embarrassing myself creates this kind of pressure that I need to be able to read, write and put ideas together. And even though I don't think it's that great, the people that show up for these things, I'm not saying they think it's great, but they think it's helpful. Some people think it's great. And I say to her, I need a springboard so that I can generate more ideas, and it sounds crazy. It doesn't seem logical. It seems counterintuitive that I would go somewhere to share something that don't yet know, to then emerge from that, to know something, and it directly reflects this quote. So when I go and teach people, I don't know yet what I know until they ask me for help. And then somewhere deep inside of me, I've heard this problem before, and then I articulate it to them. It's kind of this weird phenomenon, right? So this is David Baker exact quote from the book. Demonstrating your expertise is how you strengthen it. And your best ideas will come from the Battle of application. So again, many people in this group suffer paralysis by analysis. And you're sitting there thinking, oh, I don't know, I just don't know if I'm good enough. I feel like I'm being a fraud and we know that we don't like people who BS who claim to things that they don't know. We know that already. So we are wary of these bsa's, these snake oil salesman. These fakers and so we don't want to be like them. But the difference between the way you're going to do it and the way they're going to do it is you're not going to authentically represent that, you know, something that you don't. Because now you've really made your list, I don't know these things, so don't pretend to people these things. And all will be forgiven. So what we all need to do is we need to start writing a lot more. So yeah, I've been telling you guys post on Instagram posts on Twitter, make a video before you do any of that stuff. I think you have to have a place to collect your ideas to start writing and putting it out in public. As long as the medium allows you to make edits. I wouldn't fear it too much. The problem with print and the reason why it's taken me so long to write a book is because I can't undo that. I can't publish a book, as Blair said. But you can do it in social media. So we want to demonstrate our thinking or writing and find our best ideas in the Battle of application, so writing is one way. It's the easiest way because you don't need an invitation to write, whereas the next level up is speaking. You do need an invitation, you need a stage and now you're incorporating a lot more. And you have to be able to do a little bit of performance and delivery. And generally speaking, you have to prepare a slide deck, so when you speak, it requires more skill, so maybe that's not the first step. And the beautiful thing is, your clarity comes from the articulation of your ideas and your thought process. So it's been very interesting for me to see some of you guys share your 10 slide carousel about one insight that you have. What it's telling me, a lot of you guys still need a lot of work because what you're saying is pretty fricking generic. We have to go deeper on those inside, so that's good news, that's good news to tell us. We have a little bit more work to do. And that's OK. But the brave act of putting it out there allows us now to work on it together for you to step back and say, was that really helpful with somebody paid for this? How do I expand on this? Another tip he has is to bring an assistant or a coworker or somebody with you to take notes. During a client meeting, he says you will be your smartest in front of a client and you won't realize all the things that you're saying that are valuable to someone else. So if you bring an objective person who sits next to you, whose only task is to record the things that you talk about that are smart. That might help you out a lot. Now, a lot of us fear from our previous conversation, but niching down, even though we know it's something that we need to do, that this is how you develop expertise. And this is how you develop focus and we all want to be focused, not unfocused. Most of us. Is that it begins on a journey like this. It's kind of a funnel and that we all start off in our life and career is undifferentiated, like totally interchangeable somebody else. Right, I posted it within the timeline that if you. Get fired from your client, start to stop, watch and see how long it takes you, them to replace you. That's how undifferentiated you are. If it takes them a really, really long time. Then your positioning is really strong, and your only leverage in a client transaction is to withhold your services from them, meaning if they don't pay for your services, they don't get the benefit of your particular brand of thinking. And design or whatever it is that you make. So your only power is to withhold your services, so if it's easily replaced, if you're interchangeable, you have almost no power. So when you want to buy a Prada or Louis Vuitton bag, if they don't want to sell it to you, you're kind of soul. If they don't want to put on a discount and you can't find any other way, you're screwed. Whereas bottles of water for one brand isn't there, I'm pretty sure it won't take that much effort for you to find another brand somewhat interchangeable there, right? So the reason why we fear this is because if we niche down so much, we fear that there will be not enough client base, not enough revenue sources. So there's insufficient opportunity for us. So what we need to do is we have to sum up the courage, find our focus and move towards this ideal sweet spot and not stop too early. Many of us are confused as where to stop. I'll get into that slide in a second. So his thinking is you need about 10 to 20 competitors in your niche. If you can't find 10 to 20 competitors, that means that either you're on to something brand new, which is good news, bad news, meaning it's wide open, but it's going to take a lot of work for you to develop that market. Or more likely, the scenario is other people have looked into it and nobody finds it to be profitable. It's too narrow. That's when you've overshot your niching, so it's so narrow that there's not enough opportunity for you to apply your expertise. Now, what's really cool about? Narrowing your position is your ability to focus you narrow the sphere of observation. So if you say to people, I'm a branding expert. Oh, OK. Maybe that means you have to learn a lot of different skills, right? You have to learn about identity design, logo making, you have to learn about copywriting, user experience, design, and I think you have to learn a bit about marketing and business design all wrapped up into one. So when your focus is. So wide, so is your sphere of observation. I've noticed that many, many successful people, celebrated authors and influencers tend to have one talk. One focus, but they've gone really deep and they provide the world with what everyone believes is to be the definitive word on that, whatever that might be. So if you think about Ted Talks. Sean Parker talks about positive psychology. Guy Guy Kawasaki talks about innovations in Silicon Valley and what we can learn, so each person has their own lane. Rich dad, poor dad Robert osaki, same thing. As I mentioned before, intelligence is pattern matching. And the only way you can pattern match is to have exposure to repeated applications. This is what specialization allows you to do. This is what the benefit of having a narrow focus allows you to spot those patterns. And if you were on the call this morning, this idea of specialization has been around since the beginning of time. As soon as we started to have cooperation and community and civilization when we stop acting alone, which I think is almost at the very, very beginning. What we realize in each other is that we're not all built the same. Some are faster, some are more muscular, some are more artistic. And so different roles and responsibilities developed almost instantly. The strongest and fastest wound up being the hunters, the protectors of the tribe, the community, while other people were the shaman, the mystics, the doctors. Some people carry the oral traditions of the culture, while others tended to the farm, the children house building, carpentry, tool making, et cetera. So this has worked well for us because we're built differently to go against that specialization, I think, is an odd move to do. How do we do this? Well, there's two ways to specialize to find your focus. You can do it by vertical or by horizontal or a combination of both. I'm going to share with you what that looks like. If you want to specialize, the recommended path is to do vertical specialization, vertical positioning, and that is to focus on industry. So what industry do you serve? So when we talk about the basic framework for positioning its service for industry. What do you do for what industry that's the horizontal and the vertical service for industry? And there's a simple way that you can test to see if you're actually doing a vertical positioning is can you buy a list of customers? Makes nix, the North American Industry Classification System lists something like 20,000 or 30,000 or some gigantic amount of different industries. What you're looking for here that's common to industry is that do they have a trade organization? Do they run a trade show? Is there a newsletter that goes out to their members? Is there a conference or summit that they put on? The reason why is because they share a common problem, and they're looking to gain knowledge from one another, as in a mastermind. You can target them. This is critical for your success. So the problem here is when you are specialize into a vertical one or one, one company may say, well, there's a conflict of interest. You work for the same automotive repair shop. That is a direct competition from us. And that's a natural fear. But he says a greater fear is companies are more terrified of its incompetence. People who don't know what they're doing. So there's a kind of an interesting observation he made here is when you have one client in a vertical, you're learning. When you have two clients, you have a conflict like, well, we don't want to share our trade secrets with that other company. If you have three clients, you're an expert. And here's the funny one. If you have four clients, there are no conflicts because smart, successful companies realize expertise comes from repeated exposure to the same kinds of problems. That's the benchmark there. And it's interesting how this has worked out in real time for us. I had one client in real estate, the multibillion real estate development company Hudson Pacific. Awesome somebody else called, they're like, we don't want you to work with them. See the conflict right away. They're like, well, you can work with anybody else except for them because we have some rivalry with them. OK, fine, we won't work with them. Picked on a different client. No problem. Different market doesn't compete with us three or four developers in. We don't have any more conflicts. It's pretty awesome. Let's talk about positioning of a horizontal. This is really to focus on a demographic or a service like a practice, an area of practice. Right you can also talk about this in geography, like we work with people in Fresno. We only work with farmers. Maybe that's an industry, I'm sorry. Black men under 20 years old. That's a demographic. So there are some advantages to having horizontal positioning in that there's greater variety because you're not working with an industry, it eliminates conflict of interest. And generally speaking, you're protected from an economic downturn because. One industry collapses, there's other industries that you're going to service. No problem, right? Also, you're able to work for a much larger clients than your expertise. That's because other people hire in the vertical will hire you. It works something like that. Ideally, what you want to do is to move the vertical, the positioning and the horizontal to find that sweet spot the ideal spot where you have 10 to 20 competitors and all of this is to help you fight against. Increased competition. You want your best to reduce, if not eliminate, competition down to 10 or 20 players. And there's a lot of different tests that you can perform. Are people willing to fly or travel more than 50 miles to see you? So that whole idea of just working with a local community? That's a sign that you're not an expert. Because anybody that's willing to travel, we'll hire someone else. OK, so from the pro group already, you've seen me talk about this, if you're new to the group, you'll need to check this out is one of the tests is if you're an expert and you've claim an area of expertise. Can you? Right down 20 insights that you've gained, so have you been in business for five, 10, 15, 20 years? You've read so many books, you've worked on so many projects you should be able to pattern match. You should be able to say, here are 20 things that somebody outside of my area of expertise should find to be really valuable. So do a little test. Go look at what people have written as their 20 insights. Would you be willing to pay for that? How much? How many of those are valuable to you? Now, granted, when you write it in this format, like in a bullet point, you can't explain everything. But are the bullet points intriguing enough for you to like? That's really interesting. So when I read in the book rework and they said that an audience is greater than customers. That's an interesting concept, one that I've now perpetuated by telling other people the same thing. So think about that. Start scraping your brain to say, I'm an expert at this. What are my 20 insights? Can you write 20 if you can't? It means you're not narrow enough or you're pretending at this point, and that's totally OK. Put that in your don't list or need to list. I don't know why I have this bullet point next design topography, crit. I have no idea what this slide is. I'll skip that. OK that's it for this part. Mo had asked me within the Titans group, there were some questions about, OK, OK, yes, there's so many things I need to do. I get it, I want to niche down and some days I get really frazzled. How do I know what I should focus on in earlier today, we did a prioritization exercise, right? It started off with a global business objective. I'm going to exit out of this. I'm going to show you the exercise in a second, but I need a problem to solve like somebody who is struggling with. What they should be focused on, let me know, like somebody scrambled, I got too many different ideas. I need some help on focusing and prioritizing. I'm going to teach it to you and then you can apply it to whatever it is that you're doing. Does anybody have such a problem or before I do that, does anybody have a question about the things that just covered? Daniel? I mean, I don't have a question for what you say. I think that's pretty clear with the last four calls that we had. But I definitely feel what you're saying that I feel like my ideas are so spread that I know where to focus. Yeah well, Daniel, how old are you, man? 20 five, you're still pretty young. Yeah how long have you been doing the thing that you're doing today? So for graphic design, the Pa have been doing like for years, I for my country, but what I've been trying to do for film, for music, for all these things, I trying to get together about a year or two years. OK, so you're not talking about a ton of years put behind this. So that's very natural in the place that you are. So I have good news. Bad news, right? You still need a lot more experience, but you're in the right place because you're getting such a head start on everybody else, because I didn't even know about these concepts up until a few years ago. So you have a major advantage already, but let's keep working on this idea of graphic design, if that's your area of expertise, ok? Got it. All right. I don't think that's an issue at all. I think that I'm going to question will be what are that? What will be the essential hard skills or skills to become a graphic designer? Or maybe a visual strategies? OK, so you need what did you say? Hard skills, maybe a skills, maybe a skills. Yeah, not necessarily hard skills, right? OK what are the skills you need to be a strategist, baseball strategist or either a graphic designer? Those are two very different things. How so? Well, I would not consider most graphic designers, visual strategists. Once you introduce the word strategy, all kinds of new cans of warm open up. OK, now I know, I know, I know this, that a lot of people want to use the word strategy as part of their dialogue. It sounds smarter, it sounds more powerful, more valuable. But really, they don't even know what the hell the word strategy means. And they're not willing to invest the time into learning what strategy is. Strategy is big picture thinking. I think graphic design is the tactics, which is on the opposite end of strategic thinking. The byproduct of strategic thinking is usually words that you write down, the byproduct of graphic design is an application like a website, a logo, something that you make and craft. You need those two to work together. But you can see now they're kind of at the ends of the spectrum. So the word visual strategies means that, oh, I'm specializing in only strategies that apply to design. So I'm a little confused by that term. OK so let's just think about that for a little bit. OK my feeling is unless you feel like you're already at the top of the graphic design game, which would be remarkable at the age of 25. So here's what I think. Do more people look up to you or do you look up to more people? That's generally kind of the idea, right? So like when you're starting out, I look up to all these people. But then as you start to move towards building expertise and reputation notoriety from your focus, then more people look to you. Right, because a lot of people ask me this like, who are the influencers to you? I'm like, I don't know, because I don't really look at that anymore. What design books are you reading? I don't read any of that anymore because that part isn't interesting to me, and it's not. I'm not learning anything new there. You see what happened there, there's a shift like I remember and I'm not going to, I'm not going to lie to you. I used to pore over those design books. I would be able to name every illustrator, photographer, designer, director that I thought was amazing. It's been a long time since I've done that. I used to collect the DVDs from shots to look at the best commercial work being made in the world and study those like, oh, that's Tarsem. And you can see the distinctive style that people are doing. But today, I don't look at all. I'm mostly reading books on psychology, philosophy, business sales, marketing, totally different books. I'm expanding my mind in the horizontal part, and I'll talk about why that may or may not be a conflict to some of you. OK all right. Anybody have any questions about what I just talked about. And then I'll show you how to prioritize. Anybody? kde breath, everything's cool. OK now who here is? Kind of confused by what they want to focus in on in terms of prioritization like next task. What is it? Anybody want to share? I need something to work off of. Otherwise, I'll just show you the exercise as a conceptual framework and then I can open it up to questions. Chris, I think we're all just really intimidated, so we don't want to mess this up. How could you? Well, Tina is like about to give birth, right? Three days away, she's about ready to pop. Yes, I saw that video like, I'm ready to go in 4 days. I'm so over this. Get out of my day. I'm just we're trying. We're trying to absorb everything you just said. And like, I don't think I don't think anyone has anything meaningful to add, so OK. OK you know, you're not talking to dead air here. Yeah yeah, that's cool. Thanks I appreciate it. So I'll give it two more seconds. Nobody wants to say anything. Thanks, Chris. Yes beautiful. Yeah hey, how are you? Good good. Hey Yeah. One of the things that I'm struggling with is I listen to you a lot and some of your free stuff, and I'm a new member here. One of the things I want to try to do more of is right, and I want to post more content, and I know the importance of that. And for whatever reason, I'm getting bogged down with the minutia of other things, like putting together a website or putting together. You know, I have a lot of work from when I was a graphic designer only, and all of this stuff is old and I want to refresh that. So it's just taking so much time to do that. And I don't have clients that I'm necessarily working with right now where I can build work out. And so I'm having a hard time prioritizing where to go first. You've you've become my first victim volunteer. This is going to be awesome. OK, Jason, where are you right now? Where in the country are you? I'm in Kansas City. I'm actually in Overland park, Kansas. Beautiful OK, so you are. What is it? 11? 30. It is 11. 31 Yes, sir. Beautiful OK. A late night person jamming with us. I love it. It's like after hours. But with the pro group, I was with you this morning to double dip in on this thing. Man, I'm so excited to be a part of this. Man, OK, we're all good to go. OK, here we go. So I'm going to share my deck here. And it's the same deck from this morning, so share this deck. Here we go. OK, so Jason, your global business objective is to do what? To probably increase opportunities. Yes, sir. By becoming an expert, I'll put expert in quotes. OK, because people get mad at me if I don't. Because that's my goal. Yeah, all right, that's a good goal, it's good goal. OK, so let's then make a list of things that we need to do. OK, so I'm going get rid of all these crazy things in here. All right. How so we're going to keep? We're going to remember that. So I'm going to ask the question via the design sprint process. How might you increase opportunities by becoming perceived as an expert? OK, so you've already said you would need to, right? Right and so what do we need to right? We need to write blog posts or things on medium, something like that? Or you want to write a book or do you want to write? Jason? don't lose everybody. What happened? We're still here, here, here. Oh, you scared me, I'm like the internet broke. My kids are home and now they're just sucking up all the juice from the internet. So he wants to write. OK, you guys are going to participate. Anybody wants to participate. That's not in too noisy, of a background because you're all in the same boat with me, right? We need to increase opportunities. That's the net result of us becoming perceived as an expert, so we know we can write, what else can we do? Um, Instagram carousels. Yes, Yes. OK, so Ig carousel, OK, there's going to be fantastic conversation. I already know where this is going because it just had this conversation with somebody else earlier today. What else? Content, what content that's too broad, dude, just be more specific. Was that more? Write articles for medium, OK, medium post, beautiful white pages, yes, white paper, right? Yes, what else does somebody say, speak his letter, speak? Yes, yes, yes, yes, let me do speak speaking. Newsletter yeah, keep going. Keep books, e-books, perfect, beautiful. I love that e-books. I'm all. Yes, yes, knowledge products, OK. OK keep going, guys. I promise you, this is not a trap. Online course, Yes. Is not a trap like last time in the debate. You're not going to get fooled like he did it to us again. OK, what else? But some kind of proof, like from another expert or other people in the area, almost like by proxy endorsements, testimony, yes, testimonials. OK, we're heading right back into the area that we were last time by accident. Basically, if what is that called like if you write something that's featured on the Wall Street journal, what is that called like? Your validated source? Something Frankie, what's it called credibility? Or I don't know, man. All right. Well, nobody said it yet, but I'm going to say it. You need to do video. Oh, you're excited, that's what it means. Yes, Yes. Thank you. Excited, yeah, excited is good. So you can make videos. You can do slideshare, right? That's pretty good, right? We have a bunch of things. Anybody else want to add anything they're thinking about doing? Workshops oh, yeah, of course, workshop. Yeah, coaching. Teaching yes, Yes. Yes, OK. Coaching, teaching. Both are very good coaching, teaching. When you say community, what do you mean? Like a kind of like the future program? OK when does add that in there? But like a free community? Yeah what is that called like peer group coaching? Yeah, I guess. OK, so that would be here coaching, right? Well, I'll just leave it here. OK, fine. So from this morning, I'm going to duplicate this and I'm going to get rid of all these things, right? And then I'm going to take these things and then select all of them. Copy, we apparently missed out on a stunt. What's that? I don't know. I know you had to be had from this morning, you had one of the pieces of paper, said stunt. That's right. To do a stunt right to draw traffic. So here's how we do it from. I'm going to Zoom out a little bit. I'm going to paste it in here not to jam you guys with too much stuff. move it to the side so you guys can see now. The first thing is, we're going need to write, it's not super specific. What the heck we're writing, right? So let's just say write 2000 words or something, right? OK and all we need to do is say, if our goal is to become an expert increase opportunity and through writing and content creation, then we have to just measure this on the graph of is it easy? Is it hard? And what kind of impact will it have towards our global business objective? And that's really what we're going to do. So a lot of us are sitting there like, Oh my god, OK, being sighted, it's pretty hard. So that's the same as writing, so whatever impact this is going to have, this will have more impact, right? So it's more impactful, but it's harder to do. So this is just a relative scale. It's not important that this lives exactly here or here, but the relationship they have with each other. That's the only important part. So getting testimonials for us, depending on what we do, so we would just go through and we place all of these on here. Writing an e-book has to be harder, right? Then writing 2000 words or is it? Will you guys tell me, where do you guys want to put this? Where does the book live? Harder, easier than writing 2000 words, the e-book can often be something that happens as a product of your other writing. You collect it and it becomes a book. So but the word e-book Bob sounds, the more serious. It would be a little bit harder, though, because you're collecting more information. Yeah, that's true. And it's going to be taken a little bit more seriously, I think, because as word book in it. But you're right, a lot of the work has already been done because you can collect some of these, right? So maybe you make two of those. And now, right, so then the e-book can live on top of that. Yeah, it's going to be a little bit harder, but it might have a little bit more impact. So maybe it lives there cited is even harder. So this is all we do. We're just going to do. This medium post doesn't seem like so. A lot of these are just pretty much the same thing and we're going have this giant cluster over here now. My post-it notes are relatively large for this diagram, so you're posting notes in real life are small, whereas this board can be quite big. And so you could really be more nuance, right? So if I were to collect all these things and scale them down, which I can, but I'm not going to do right now unless you really want me to. Community rights, a white paper, white paper has got to be a little easier than the e-book, so you just keep doing this and then what you want to do. Once you get rid of I mean, not really, but you place all these things on the board, let's just say they're on the board. Is then you start tackling the things in this quadrant if it's easy. Let me let me make another shape here. And if anybody has any questions about what that I'm doing, just ask and I'll be more happy to help you there. So I'm going to color the screen in a second because I want to say these things get the green light. OK these things get the red like the heart, and they're inconsequential, you should pretty much just throw those away. You should shoot whoever came up with. I'm just kidding, right? So the ones that are inconsequential but easy sometimes are the shiny object syndrome, the things that you get distracted by. So I'm going to call it. I'm going to call it that yellow. It's like just Warning green go, red Stop. And the ones that are impactful but hard go into our mid to long term planning. We know we need to do them like for the future. What we have to do is build an app. We have to build our own custom map because we're running into all kinds of problems using third party. So based on that, now we have a way to prioritize this is the lightning decision jam that you may or may not have seen on AJ and Smart's channel lightning decision jam teaching, all this stuff. So what we realize is that the foundation, if I remove all these things away. Writing is at the core of it all. We began by writing to know what it is that we're thinking. So I'm going to make a more concerted effort, as you're already seeing that I'm writing more, I'm posting more frequently. And I'm seeing what sticks in both short and kind of I wouldn't even call a mid medium length post, but I'm doing that. You know who's good at that is Matt Silverman, because he's a content marketing guy. I think will antena also do content marketing, so you probably want to talk to them as well, whereas I'm kind of new to this world. Does anybody have any questions on how to prioritize based on this simple graph? And a simple graph like this can be used for many, many things, not just this kind of thing. OK, so I'm going to remove these things here, right? If you just take, let me duplicate this. If you just take this graph. I don't know if you guys have used this for lots of different things before and you map out, say, look where to eat, right? So this is $3. This $1. I'm going to make this $4.01 more here. And like, this is really like tasty or. I don't really popular, and this is like me, right? Like, where do you want to eat today? And you would just do the same thing. Well, if it's cheap and it's met, so some ideal form is just really super tasty and it's cheap. And if you think about it, that's exactly how Yelp is done. What it is, do. I think Taco Bell would win every time. Oh, come on. Agreed you guys. OK, so Taco Bell is cheap, and, you know, somewhere here, I know a lot of people like stoners like it, so I'm I'll leave it there for you, ok? But for me, like 10 degrees. Live somewhere there and recently from my trip to Fresno, heirloom is freaking awesome. And I'm going to be in Vancouver soon, so meat and bread is here somewhere. So I'm usually avoiding these places. I'm not that kind of she-she kind of guy, I don't like that 5, 4 course meal with the whole service. It's just. I'm not that fussy. I like tasty. I don't mind paying a little bit more, but I don't want super fancy meat and bread is not there. What kind of places like the dining car? That's one that's up there somewhere, probably. OK, so this is the way to make decisions, so another variant to this, and I'm going off the rails here, guys. Sorry gone off the rails. Oops! forgot that a group this, ok? Check this out, this is pretty cool. You can use this as a branding graph. Name any kind of property for a brand like what kind of qualitative thing can you use to describe a brand, any brand that you want anybody throw out one property? Luxury luxury, OK. So I usually put the positive attribute to the right and the negative attributes that are left. Fungible would probably be that said, what's that? OK yeah, that works, right. Cheap and luxury. All right. Something like that. So then what we can do is duplicate this. It's why I love, you know, just as I said, I was about to mess it up. So let's take a brand, any brand and let's just keep going and adding some attributes there. Let's do more attributes. Give me one attribute, and we'll map the opposite attribute on the other side. And you'll what happens. Let's say for a design firm, say that word again. Fungible what does that mean? It just means a basic commodity commoditized. Oh, OK. So OK, so let me just first do commodity. OK, so what's the word for quality like the extreme version of quality, what does that? Excellence, I can't think. Premium premium is better, premiums better, Yeah. So this would be economy, right? So unfortunately, all these things are almost the same words. We're like looking for different attributes. Let's do this. Let's just change this up. Let's say we're doing this for, I don't know, an up and coming design firm. or better. We want to position. What's that going to say, urban versus? rural. Yeah, suburban. OK OK, so if we're talking about Mo, what's the name of your company again? Mox mox are these enough? No, they're not. We need to work on this, right? So let's come up with some parameters and you'll see really soon how we can dial this in. So here's how we can think about this. Mox makes high quality video productions, right? Max what is the best known competitor in your category? Who are they? They're called Mad genius. OK how would you describe mad genius? Give me four attributes to describe mad genius. Established OK, good, that's a good word. What's another word? And versatile. OK um, respected, maybe not the best word. That's fine. Don't worry about the words, she said. Go ahead. One more generalist. OK, it's kind of like versatile. How about we say expensive? Are they expensive? Oh Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Put down. All right. So inexpensive. Right, respected, what's the opposite of respected then? Disrespected, I know, I know, but there's got to be another word. Maybe, maybe well known instead of respected versus unknown. Or maybe newcomer. OK, so what's the opposite of versatile specialize? Yeah OK and established, so established and well known are kind of the same, right? Yeah or is well known about publicity. Yeah, I think that's it, I think well-known is about publicity established can be about time and business. Right so establish versus rookie or something like that, right? Yeah Yes. We OK with this. So you would create as many dimensions, as you can think since we struggled with four. I'm not going to bother with trying to come up with more. So then I'm just going to add a little triangle in here. I'm going to cover this triangle read, so you guys, hopefully you can see that. Of course, I don't want shadow. Let's get this thing down. OK, so in the world of this is. Who is this is genius, you said. I do this brand exercise with my client sometimes because they can't commit to anything and they start using crazy terms like intimate epic, I'm like, what? How can we do that? They seem to be on opposite, and it's like, oh, no, when we say intimate epic, we went more epic, less intimate, like, oh, I got it. Got it. OK so in a scale relative scale here, how would you consider them? They must be the most established players if they're the most famous. Is that ok? OK And you said they're versatile. Are they really that versatile? Yeah, there are full scale marketing agency, but they have bomb video work too, which is just disrespectful, honestly. OK and they must be very expensive, right? Yeah, they have national spots easily 50 to 100,000. OK all right. If not more. OK, it's got to be more than that. OK, so let's go to mox. Is that right? Mosques, bro. Sorry, dude, I thought it's like for moxie. OK, now how many years? Like, where do you want to put this triangle? Let's be let's be real, let's be real. Probably like at the 40 percent, so like if establish was 100 are you specialized or versatile? Now we want to be specialized. We don't want to be versatile, but you're not there yet, right? You're on your way there. OK and where are you on this one? Oh, probably also 40 were well known in the community, but we're also regional, so the rookie, yeah, so I think you must be here if they're there. Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, we're not commanding, we're not commanding 100,000 gigs right now, here's the cool thing. It doesn't always mean that to the right is the best. Because Walmart exists here and there. One of the world's biggest companies, right? The what is it, the Walmart family, the Waltons or whatever they're called? Yeah, they're like the children. They're like the five most richest people in the world. That whole family, so being inexpensive is not necessary, but we now need to know that we're positioned well. So if we were positioned near these guys that we're just a little less versatile than them, we're going get slaughtered. That was the only differentiator, so you can actually play to this, that instead of saying we're established because you can't establish the established company, you can say we bring a fresh perspective. You start to look at this and then you can do this as a branding, oops. You can do this as an exercise on positioning. How does mocs compared to Mad genius? So that's a variant to this graph, right? So these graphs are good for us to map what we think because we can take very intangible qualitative values and move them along until it hits the sweet spot for us. So this is where Jonathan stark talks about this, he said just because it's difficult to measure doesn't mean it's impossible to measure. And there's a big difference there. You can establish a baseline for just about anything. That's a variant to that, so I'm going to stop on this and I want to tell you a story a little bit, but let me hit stop. OK, back to the conversation. OK, now what do you guys want to talk about that I can answer for you or we can open this up to anything you want? You know what, I forgot? I didn't really answer. Is it, jason? I didn't answer this question. He was like, it's not that I'm contemplating about writing or writing even more. I got other things to do like other things that are taking me away from writing. We realize writing is really important. I think for me, it's like one of the most important things I need to do right now. Yeah, and I recognize that, but I also know that I have a need to rush to market with some of these other items, and I don't know how to prioritize. I mean, you only have a finite amount of time every single day. Yes and I've got a family like you. I've got a family. And you know, it's really difficult to manage that time around, family and other things that are going on. So I just I'm having a difficult time with that. OK, now I think you agree with me when I say this is that creativity expands and contracts to meet a deadline. It's a miracle. Yeah, three months to finish the project. Guess what, you finish in 3 months, you have two days to finish project, you get it done in two days. So the way is to trick your mind and your body to say, and this is quite interesting in some parts of the world, they only work four days a week. They just work a little harder, a little bit more focused each one of those days. So they have a three day weekend to spend with their family. How could they do that? And then they're finding that productivity actually increases because they know don't talk around on those four days because you're going to have to lose your third day into your weekend. So I can't remember who asked me this in the program, it was like, Chris, how are you reading and writing and doing this when you have other things to do? Well, I have a few advantages, but let's take away the advantages I have and just focus on some time saving time compression ideas. Some concepts time hacks, ok? One schedule date where you're going to read or write. Just today, I'm going to read and write. That's all I'm going to do. Give yourself permission that it's OK for you to do something that doesn't seem to solve a short term problem. Do that. See what happens? And then the four remaining days for you to work, just bust your butts, stay really focused, and I'm starting to do this now and it's working out really well. I'm not checking anymore emails, I'm not on Instagram, I'm not on these things. I've stopped checking my phone for messages, all those disruptions. So I can get clean, one hour focused sprints and then I can take a break and then I do another hour and I can get so much done. It also forces me at the beginning of those days to write down what I need to do and live by my calendar or my to do list and so that I don't stray, we will stray. I start moving on to Pinterest to look for one reference. An hour and a half later, I'm like, what the heck happened? You guys know that, so this is how you manage yourself, you become your own boss and your task master next time productivity savings hack thing is, this is what Jim Rohn talks about. Like when you're at work, be at work, when you're at home, be at home, do not mix those two things up. When you're working, you're thinking about home, you're less productive when you're at home and you're thinking about work, you're an absent parent and you don't want to do that either. OK, have an agreement with your partner and say, look, here's the deal. You know, I'm going to work, I'm going to rage. But then on the weekends, I'm clean because I need. So I don't want hopefully to get guilt tripped or I don't want to feel bad about this. Can we work this out as our partnership? And this is the agreement we have is two adults that we're going to divide and conquer? Yes fantastic. Now I know some guys like Andrew Kramer, where he works all day, he goes home to eat dinner with his family. He spent some time with his wife and his kids. When they go to sleep, he goes back to work and he sleeps at the office. This is insane. That's how he's doing it, and I think. This is not sustainable how he's been able to pull this off for as long as he's pulled off, I just don't even know. And somewhere in there, it gets time to work out to which is bananas to me. Insane I think he's starting to ease up a little bit, is he? Do you know him? Yeah OK. Because when he told me this, we had dinner or lunch or whatever he was saying to us, I'm like, Oh my god, Andrew, you have four kids, man. Oh, Yeah. When I say ease up, I'm saying he might go home to get sleep now at three rather than just saying, you know, Andrew might go home to take it. Ok? that's him easing up because look, I'm telling you right now, check on him in five 10 years. He'll look like he's 6' years old. Your body needs some rest, you might need some rest to do that thinking. Who is this? Andrew Kramer, the co-pilot, the very well known, very well known. Probably the best after effects tutorials out there. Great plug. Yeah, great educator. Good guy, funny, smart like really brilliant tips and tricks on how to hack everything. It's like, Wow. And he works on Star Wars films and Star Trek and Star Trek. Yeah and fringe killer. Yeah, killer. Yeah, he has a remarkable story, so I'm lucky enough to have collaborated with him on a couple of little things here and there for the channel, and I've gotten to know him well. OK, so that's the insanity. So for me, Jason, what I would do is to say, you know what it's important to schedule, say, Friday night at 6 o'clock. It's daytime with the wife. That's really important. So you guys are synced up. Everything works. Work must end. Kids are with grandparents or somebody else with a nanny so that you guys have that and that's important for your relationship. Saturday's dad day or something and then dad just takes everybody out, gives mom a break. And that's fantastic because mom's been stuck with the kids for some time. Sunday is maybe your self-care day. I don't know what you work out day hiking, tennis, whatever it is that you like to do. You need a day for yourself to recharge those batteries. And at first, I was fighting my own system, my own calendar. But here's the cool thing. Like what David Baker is talking about is once you commit to something, say publicly so that you will hold yourself accountable in the eyes of your community and the people that you care the most about. So I put out this stupid calendar and I'm like, damn, I'm not living up to my own calendar and people are cool, dude. That's awesome. How are you able to do this? I'm like, well, I'm not doing it yet. It's just an idea. And now, I don't know if you can tell, but I'm reading books like really fast now because it's maybe I just saved time for it. I told myself, I have to finish this book today. I'm not I don't feel like I'm cheating the process by reading faster, I'm just more focused what I'm doing it. And then I go into full content beast mode. And it's working out really well. Somebody had asked me earlier today, how can you make these carousels, these keynotes. So fast? Like, how are you doing this? Let me tell you how in a second, OK, any other questions? I have a quick question. Yeah, fire away, man. So on that scale, I think the brand scale that you did, the diagrams like, let's say you found your niche, you found your 10 to 20 competitors and you've made one of those scales for each one of them. Like, where would you? How would you decide where you want to stand? Because you said that being necessary being on the far right or the far left is not inherently good or bad thing? Yep how do you decide where to proceed? Yeah being different? Would you just look for like places that are empty? Yeah OK, because here's the thing. Positioning is the art of placing yourself to appear unique amongst the competitors. That's really critical. If you walk into a department store and there's 35 brands of jeans, you're like, Oh my God. Which one do I pick, whichever one is cheapest? I don't know. It's hard to tell, right, but then let's see, back in the days when somebody had like a cool acid wash. I know that's not cool. But I was like, wow, that's different. Let me do that one. Or Japanese denims like super stiff and you're like, wow, I don't know what Japanese denim is, but that looks different to me. You got to just stand out, that's the key. And you got when you stand out, you want to make sure the market is big enough to support you with enough opportunities. So you remember when David Baker was talking about or as I was reciting a big oops. Was that OK when David Baker was talking about this? And he said that your only real power is to withhold your service from a client, your ability to say no when your capacity. Exceeds opportunity, your ability to say no is nonexistent, you have to say Yes. So the best way is to increase opportunity and you achieve that by being more specialized and being less replaceable. OK, so you want more opportunities and less capacity. The other way you do it is if you don't have more opportunities, if you scale down capacity is like do not scale capacity to meet opportunity. It should always be a little bit less like 80% less, which gives you power to say no. This is a really critical concept, I hope you guys understand that. So if you're not getting enough opportunities, you are overstaffed. Bring that down so that the opportunity and the capacity are in alignment, their alignment being less capacity than opportunity. Gives you all the power in the world. This is one of the major advantages that we have, that we have multiple sources of income, so much. So now that we don't have to do any client work. So only the best clients we're going to say Yes to and best we can define in any which way we want. Like, I feel like doing work today, that could be the best. Kiss you all this power. You know what? To sponsor our video, it's going to be this much or we're not interested because we're not dependent on the money to do that. That's the power you want to have. OK the questions. It's all been very helpful, thank you. OK, awesome. Thanks, Darren. You know, daryn, I have to just say this, everybody. Do you guys know Darren rose Brooke is he's the one person who's been on our video that people attack me more than they attack him. It's quite brilliant to watch. I actually really love it, but they're just tearing me apart. And I read them like, OK, sure, you guys are all superior designers. What do I know? The internet? They're very talented. Tongue in cheek. So I love reading all those comments, and it's a high performing video, as much as people hate it, it's still a high performing video, which as long as it's a positive subscriber, we just leave it out. Yeah and one of the few designs where I did something and people were like, oh, we like the original, not just a little bit better, but you're stupid. OK, Thanks. Gee, Thanks. It was a great learning point for myself, though, so thank you for all that. Sure OK. Anybody else? Quick question. Hey, Chris, I have a quick question. This is Marshall. So two days ago, before I joined, I was all in on building a small community. That's why I mentioned it earlier, because I have a lot of people who follow me who are always in my DMs asking me questions about how I got into this field. How did they follow you in the first place, though, marshall? How did they follow me? Meaning like, why did they follow you? I don't know. I guess we've been in similar online communities, mostly. Um, and they, I guess, connect with me. You're doing something, dude. You're doing something. Are you commenting, are you posting a post from time to time? And that's usually when they reach out to me. Mm-hmm And I also got like a shout out on a pretty big podcast. So a lot of people have been in my DMs. So I'm like, Yo, is now a good time to start a little free community and give like tips and stuff like that. Or should I just do that on my public page outside of a community because I want it to be free, at least initially, I have an idea for a course that I'm going to do later on, like a group video coaching course. OK, but here's what I'm hearing from you, Marshall. You've somehow picked up a community of people who are reaching out to you for feedback. You see a path forward in terms of creating some kind of knowledge product. So what are the next steps? Did I get that right? Yep. OK. And I'm wondering mainly wondering, is now the right time to do that? Or should I just wait? Because of course, I was talking to Kat a couple of days ago. She told me about this group. So all the information, I'm like, oh, maybe I need to slow down and just absorb all of this and apply this before I even think about a community. Yeah so all I can tell you is this is that for each one of us, the tipping point is going to be a different point in the fulcrum, right? Some of us wait until we have so much knowledge and experience, then we start making content. Some of us start with like almost no knowledge to make content, and we're the yahoos and people look at us and say, you frickin' idiot, you don't know anything. So I don't know where that is for each person, and you have to make that decision. Some crazy people start off making stuff and they don't even know what they're talking about, but eventually they do. And there's a bunch of those people on YouTube who have really sizable following, so it obviously doesn't hurt if you're persistent. I'll tell you what I've done once I figured out that has something to say, I've been writing and teaching now. Mind you, I've been teaching for 15 years, ok? Like in a classroom teaching. Once I created my own business designer page and having a page on Facebook is a lot different than posting as yourself, because when you post this yourself, you have no metrics you can't boost. You can't do anything because they treat you like a real human. And so you may start to create a page that's open, that's public, and then you start to write and start to kind of figure out what your thoughts are. As you develop some kind of consistency and a big enough following that might signal to you. Time to create a knowledge product and I would start small. So this is all scaffolding. Take small steps. Maybe you create a simple three to five page white paper PDF tutorial template guidelines, some free downloadable start building up an email database. So you're just trying to take lots of little steps to see what works and what sticks and not trying to create one giant thing. When you find something that really resonates with people, go deeper and deeper into that. Because you've now found it. So to me, it's kind of like if you're digging for oil, you might send a couple like preliminary drill tests or something and see like kind of why we think it's kind of here. Before you go all in on one, so try a few things out, and it's not always what you think it is. When I post things on Instagram, I think, oh, this will do really well, and sometimes it doesn't. Whereas something else that didn't even take me a lot of effort performs really well, and I use that to test ideas to say, oh, this is what the world wants from me. And if I give it to them, they reward me by giving me their time and attention. So give it a shot. I don't think it's ever too early. You have to figure that point out for yourself and do it within an open Facebook page. That's not your personal account. Jim Marshall, golden, I appreciate it, I didn't even think about the Facebook page, I was mainly thinking about Instagram and then maybe a private Facebook group, but that's good. I'm definitely going to do that because I have a business Facebook page outside of the design studio, but I have a personal business page that makes sense that I'm not a guy that. Thank you. Yeah, like I have my own business designer page, which I don't update that often, I think I'm up to 20,000 or 30,000 followers on that page already. So it's like, oh, that's a great place for me to just put stuff and see what happens. Without adversely impacting what the future wants to do. OK any other thoughts or questions? Chris, do you have your hand up? Chris S. Chris? going once, twice. Oops, you unmute it for a second. Can Chris say something? Microphone not working, ok? All right, well, Melvin Melvin, you're back for a second helping. So, yeah, I am. Just give me a second. OK you just set up. Yeah so I was listening to. Sorry, I forgot his name, but he was talking about whether he should go out there and start building community and how to leverage that. Yeah, I think we all feel that we are not there yet and we need to build up to a certain level. And frankly, from my own experience, as long as you are just one or 2-step ahead of the community and you are able to provide value, I think we should just go out there and start contributing. The beauty of that is that as we start creating content and we start communicating with the people, we also start listening to what are the problems that we may not be aware of. And over time, you know, that kind of surveys the kind of problems that they have and the kind of issues that they are facing. And that gives us even more input into what kind of content we can create. So I think there is a fear or a concern or that imposter syndrome that you know, oh, I'm not good enough. I'm not there yet. I've not worked with the big strand or I've got this, but as long as we are just two, two or three steps ahead and we're giving good value, I think you should just go for it. That's it. Go for it. Good I agree as well because I run a community of 100 designers, a paid community, and I'm only a couple of years into my own work as well. But what I turned it into was a way that people get feedback on their work. It didn't mean that I was the resident expert because I was learning along with them, but being a few steps ahead helped me be able to teach exactly what I had learned right back to the people that was in the community as well. And so we kind of Fed each other our own expertise. Perfect I love just talking to people because listening to their challenges and hearing their stories. Really, if anything helps me to generate more ideas on what to write and produce. And you guys can see that, I mean, we're feeding off each other like Melvin said, something I'm like, I shared it. And it got a lot of attention. I'm like, OK, that's cool. And then Melvin share something. It's like, this is how we do it. This is our ecosystem, right? We need to talk to people. The friction that exists between what you think and what I think helps me to either crystallize what it is that I'm thinking and form some more to be able to articulate my thoughts and form an opinion or a position. Then now I know how I feel about something and it works really, really well. OK, Abby, is it abby? Tejada, Yes. Hello Hello. Hey I have a question. I have created this Facebook group right in 2012 or 13. And now it has grown up to 23,000 people. And they are all from New Zealand, right? So the group is called as United Indians in New Zealand. OK I just created that as a for fun, you know, just to commit content to the community. And I told a couple of business people here and then they said, why don't you convert this into the living? So that means, like, why don't you make some money out of it, you know, because a lot of business people post to add on that. Like anything, you know, products, services, anything. So how can I convert this group into the living so that I can earn money from it? Those are like real people, like 23,000 people, but I have no idea how to proceed. Ok? once you build up a strong enough community that shares a common psychographic demographic profile, you can look for opportunities to influence those people and bring on board. Probably the easiest thing is due to an affiliate deal with somebody who makes content. The classic example is Jonathan Rudolph, who has now up to a million followers on Instagram doing local inspirations. So when you follow him back to his website, he recommends a course called Logo core. And that, of course, sells for like 50 or 60 bucks, I think. And it's not by this other guy. So this other guy started noticing he's got this really big following, so he offered Jonathan a deal. He would pay him 50% of every sale that came through a link that he provided Jonathan. So for a long time, Jonathan started earning extra income until that income surpassed the income he was making from doing work. To a point in which he quit his job, so his whole thing is he just shares logos that he likes built up a big enough following is doing affiliate. Actually, some of you guys in this group are doing an affiliate deal with us. So when you sell products for us as other people, do you get a percentage of the sale? OK you see, so that's how you do it. You can also leverage it to get stuff that you want from companies and eventually if you show that you can move the needle. Then you're going to get in command a lot more money. All right. You guys all the time. Oh, are you are you on an affiliate deal with us? I should really look into that. Yes, you should. Now I'll tell you something. I'll tell you something right now. Because we're here. I just had lunch with Matthew earlier today, and we were talking about like, who's the biggest performer for affiliates? He said, well, logo is you guys no logo geek Ian in Paget, Paget. I'm like, OK, yeah, he has a big community. A couple of 100,000 people following him, right? It's got a podcast. I'm like, naturally. And who's? Who's the next biggest person? They said, Melinda livesey, like Melinda, little Melinda are Melinda and who's got like a little bit more, and they're about the same. They're about neck and neck. Look, what the heck? How is Melinda suddenly, as much as logique when her following is that big compared to his? Well, I don't know if you guys know this, but she does something like a cohort, which is her private group. And what she helps people do is Coach them through to launch their business, and she requires. This is what he told me. I'm not sure that this is true. Somebody verified for me. She requires in order for you to join that group, you have to buy her a class. Mike, this is genius. It's genius for her, genius for us, so they have to buy whatever classes she recommends, she's like, you have to take these three classes, then you can join this group and then I'll help coach you to the next level. She also has 2,500 on her email newsletter, and she plugs you guys all the time. That's why she's doing it, but compared to Ian Paget's 100,000 followers on Twitter and however big his email list is, his email list must be at least 10,000 or 20,000 right. It's got to be pretty big. She's doing really well because she's super focused. That's it, so it's working for her, so hey, if we get rich, she gets rich, it all works out. I'm happy to do that. So Darren, reach out to Ben. Ben burns and get on the program. Hello, dear. Thank you. There's no reason why you should not make money off doing whatever it is you're doing out of goodwill. I'm all for that. OK Abby, is your hand back up? Or did I forget to lower it? Yeah, actually. So should I. Should I start charging these businesses? Who who are posting haiku? Yes, you should not let them advertise in your group. First of all, it's super spammy to your followers. Super spammy. So you've got to prove this. OK, I have like, I'm just looking. I have 50 posts to go right now. And apart from that, what else I can do? Can I? Can I use that to start a podcast? Can I use that card? Yeah test your audience. You know, affiliate deals is the easiest low hanging fruit that you can get. You can do Amazon affiliates. You can do kit. I think Matthew is seen as making quite a bit of money on kit. He's making a couple of thousand of passive income because he has this viral hit this month or $2 million viewed YouTube video. A company that makes super awesome death sent him a $2000 desk because they're like, will you feature this? And he hardball negotiated them and said, only if I get a percentage of sales. I'm not that cheap, so he's like, whoa, what a negotiator. That's good. Yes Matthew nCino. He comes across as a nice guy, but he's a tough negotiator. Don't let that smile fool you. Savage, he is savage. OK anybody else? I got to wrap up here, guys. Like I ran along this morning. I'm running long here too, and I'm going to turn into a pumpkin pretty soon. Anybody that wants to participate as part of the affiliate, there's a little application, you have to go through, you have to demonstrate that you actually do influence and have a community reach out to Ben burns. We'd love to have all of you on it, especially people who have found our things to be valuable and can speak to it on a firsthand basis. We like that it's genuine, it's authentic, you found value, so you're sharing with other people. OK anybody else, so that's the story. Yes who creates fire? Daniel, go. What about content in spanish? I do have a follow in Spanish like people in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina, so I don't know. Well, I have a friend, I'm spacing on her name. She was a fan. She's from Taiwan. She has a fairly small following, relatively speaking, fairly little viewed videos. But she's super active in the Taiwanese market, so she's getting big brand sponsor deals that I'm like, I can't believe you're getting that well compared to the rest of the world, but Taiwan, those are relatively good numbers for whoever wants to penetrate in the Taiwanese market. Right so we're competing against, unfortunately, people like Logan Paul, PewDiePie and all these other people that have hundreds of millions of followers. So we're nothing but for her and her numbers relative to where she's at. She's doing really well, and she's leveraging all kinds of things and something that I'm realizing. And I think as one era is ending the era of paid advertising because we don't want to be marketed to that way. I think advertisers are starting to become really sophisticated and they're going to start doing branded content and giving us either money or a piece of the action. It's much, much cheaper for them. It's very measurable and that's really how we're going to do it now. They're looking for ambassadors who are naturally already love their brand, can articulate why they love it and share it in an organic way with their community. And that's a much better way of doing it. So instead of spending it all on some programming that's happening at 8 o'clock on CBS, they're taking that money and they're spreading across 1,000 influencers, and it still does same amount of money for them. But they're getting much better targeting. Tonight, the A list better engagement. OK, somehow we've turned this into how to monetize a social following. That is definitely not the agenda, the objective of today's call, but that's totally OK. I think I started. I'm sorry about that. No, that's all right. It's all right. It's your lighting, bro. It's the mood of the evening call that leads us down this rabbit hole. OK, so we're going to do this. We're going to do this. I opened up with this question. We're going to end on hopefully your answer to this. Has is the lighting affecting the vibe of the call? Is it my energy? Is it your energy? Is your focus? Isn't my focus? Is there anything that's different that you can perceive from the morning call to now? And can you pinpoint, can you put your finger on it or not? Let me know, please. I think it's our willingness to open up and talk a little bit, I think that helped a lot. I've only been on two calls, but the one this morning was crickets, unfortunately, but this has been a little bit better. Why are you more willing to open up? Mo has a theory. I just want to see if he's right. I had time during the day to think about what I wanted to talk about this evening. That's just preparation then. Yes Yeah. OK, what else? It's got to be the mood lighting that you've got there. That is one of his theories. Yeah oh, I can't believe it. I can't believe it made me. It's made me very comfortable. And no, I don't. I don't know. Yeah I think I've had a good part of the day to think about some things and prepare for this evening. But I will say the lighting is killer, do. It's great. I'll make it a very positive vibe from it over here. Oh, thank you. You do realize it's the exact same lighting. It's just it's dark outside, so I'm not getting any ambient light. So that tells me I need to get some really dark curtains for that window that's up there. Same exact light. Same exact setup. I think that a lot of people show up from the morning calls to so they've had a lot to a lot of time to stew over what you've talked about in the morning. OK I think that's what was just said right there, right with Jason. Yeah, Yeah. And another thing, Chris, you talked this morning about. You had a question for us and you ask if we'd be open to you teaching us how to do some graphic design. I don't know if that's something I do, but topography I'm very interested in. And if that's something that you could do in later meetings, that's something I personally, I don't know if everybody else would, but I personally would enjoy that. OK, Jason, here's what we're going to do. I don't think I have anything that I'm not willing to share with you. I just don't if people are interested. So what we have to do is if you have an idea of format, a request for a topic or anything, I'm open to lots of things. All you have to do is post it and get enough momentum behind it so that I say, oh, OK, enough people want to do this. I will do it OK because I've been thinking about this. I design all the time right for my, my slides, my carousel. So sometimes if we just want to have a late night jam session where I kind of just work with you guys and you can see and you can ask questions, I can critique your work or whatever it is in a way you guys are kind of witnessing and kind of riding shotgun with me as I diagnose and ask Socratic questions to people who are on the call. Well, that's not any different than saying, why don't we design something together and we'll just work together? It might be a beautiful group study session, I don't know. But I remember in school when I was learning how to draw and Steve Houston, who was our illustration teacher, he would just sit there and draw a bicep and then an arm, the deltoids. I'm like, god, that's fucking awesome. Just to see him carve that out of a blank piece of paper with his pencil. And I felt smarter and more informed. I know when I went to draw, I didn't look the same, but enough of those sessions, it started to look a little bit like it. So I'm happy to do it. You got to just build momentum. OK, so make some noise about it. If enough people will say, yeah, we want that, I will do it.