Show Us What You Love to Do
Excuse me for being very brash as I start, but I don’t think you and I have that much time to fuck around right now. I can feel the weight of every decision that you are trying to make and it sucks to wake up at 2am because your anxiety is continuously rocking your boat. It keeps pecking at you and asking the same damn questions over and over again…
How the hell did I get here?
Where am I going?
Am I okay?
Is my family okay?
Should I have quit my job?
Should I quit my job?
Where am I going to find more money right now?
I am not judging you at all. These are the same things I ask myself on a weekly or sometimes daily basis. 2023 has been one of the hardest years for a lot of us. Not just because the current economy is shivering cold, but also because of the major successes and the rapid changes in technology that have happened. If you're feeling behind right now, you are not alone.
You’re being DM’d, texted, and emailed about 50 brand new A.I. tools that you have to have. You’ve signed up for this thing called Zapier and you don’t really know what to do with it yet. You now have to be a content creator even though you just want to run your business. You now have to run your own media company to be a content creator when you just want to get paid, and shoot the shit behind a microphone and camera.
We have to learn a ton on the fly and it has been pretty god damn overwhelming.
We just went through and are going through a MASSIVE wind tunnel of change and we need to start recognizing that a little better. I don’t know if you know this yet, but you are currently living in a revolutionary period of time that has just gotten started. Whatever generation you are in, you are going to be in history books now. Well… if they still make books in 3023.
Everything is being decentralized in terms of communication, marketing, and to some degree I would even say gathering places. It’s forcing all of us, creators and entrepreneurs, to become “direct to consumer” companies. TV and radio didn’t EVER think that there would be a time where we could all have our own Ham radios that could broadcast to the entire world. Well guess what assholes, the basement podcasters and vloggers won. (thank you TikTok, sorta).
I was just saying to myself the other day that if I went and told my media employers back in 2010 that I would rather binge watch someone that cuts overgrown lawns 30 mins at a time vs. watching the 1:00p slate of NFL games on Sunday afternoon, they would have LAUGHED ME OUT OF THE BUILDING. But here we are in 2023, and would rather watch SB Mowing and many others like them instead of ruining my afternoon with the Packers vs Broncos. Maybe I am a true sicko for doing that, but everyone 40 and under probably understands what I am saying.
You are SO powerful right now and I bet you didn’t even know it. I use the SB Mowing guys as a perfect example of this. I just enjoy what they do, they cut lawns. That’s it. 1.6 million people watch that crew do landscaping. Erikca Kullberg literally just reads the fine print of contracts, talks about it, informs her community, and has gained 20+ million followers because of it.
I am never against creators and entrepreneurs making a persona of themselves for their marketing or content. Sometimes being your true self doesn’t really fit the personality of the message that you’re trying to convey. I welcome that type of creativity all of the time, but I do think it can get in the way of the low hanging fruit that it’s front of you. Just show people who you really are and what you really love to do. You’re going to attract the community you’re looking for a lot faster than you think.
The payoff for your bank account isn’t to get a massive social or YouTube following and automate your workflow, it’s letting people in on the journey you're on right now. They want to be on it with you because they aren’t doing what you’re doing. People love your imperfections and honesty, even though you probably might hate that at first. If they know you and resonate with you, they are going to want to support you in many different ways. The money you are seeking is with the people who all just left corporate America like you and I did. We’re all tired of giving our money and time to a lifeless corporate product. We want to support humans, because no one seems to want to do that right now. I do and you do, and that’s a good enough start for me.
You can talk to me anytime, if you just need someone to listen to you.
If you're in Philly, let's have lunch. It's always on me.
- John Barchard
