B (50:17)
Yeah, you raised a good point there. So, so I'm going to hit this three different ways. One is with a metaphor, two is with logic, and then three is maybe a few things that people can do. So, so first and foremost, like, I guess the metaphor here is like if you're starting, essentially you have to kind of imagine yourself like coming of age, right? So like it's like moving out from your parents house for the first time. It's. It's terrifying. Like, I gotta pay rent, I gotta organize food, I gotta do my own dishes, gonna do my washing. Like, it's overwhelming the amount of stuff you have to do do to like have a social channel that starts to get traction. But what you have to do is get obsessed with like finding ways to enjoy it. That's the first step. But to get over the fear, it's almost like I liken it to stepping out to the wilderness with a survival pack and going, I'm just going to go trudge out into the wilderness that is social media and find a spot to set up, right? My initial spot, camp, I metaphorically set up. I was like, I'm going to set up a camp and a little campfire here, which was like, I'm going to teach people how to make Instagram content. I thought I was a genius. I'm going to teach Instagram content and how to do it on Instagram. Like, who on Instagram doesn't want to learn this stuff? I was like, I'm a genius, let's do it. And it worked, but it didn't get the reaction that I wanted. We'll come back to this when I go into, I guess breaking into logic. So back to the metaphor. You're stepping out into the wilderness, you're setting up a campfire. We talk about this in the book and it's like, well, every campfire that you create one day could become an empire. But for sure, every empire that exists once upon a time was a campfire. So if you look at the great city of Rome, once upon a time, people showed up, put a little campfire in the ground and were like, this is a great place to hang out. And then that turned into Rome. So. So if you're trying to create your Rome, understand that it always starts with literally a campfire. Maybe in the modern age, maybe not. But like, if we use the medieval concept, let's just stay there. So for. For the sake of this, imagine building a personal brand, like stepping out to the wilderness, picking a spot, just anywhere, just pick a camp to be like, this is good enough for now. Let's just set up. We might move later. Let's just try this. Set up a little campfire. The metaphor of the campfire is you producing heat to attract people to go, oh, this is kind of cool. This is entertaining. This is exciting. What's going on over here? A little bit of content. And every time you put a log on the fire, that's a piece of content. And the only way to stoke the brand fire is to put a log on the fire consistently. You stop putting logs on the fire, you stop producing content, you're never going to produce enough heat to build an audience, to build a tribe, to build an empire. So if you could just get comfortable just going, hey, man, I'm alone. I'm just going to keep adding logs to the fire. No one sees it. So what? I'm learning how to chop wood. I'm learning what types of wood I want to use. I'm learning how it kind of creates a reaction. Different wood creates different heat. Different wood lasts longer than others. You just getting comfortable with the process. Before long, people start to show up and go, hey, we're kind of lost out here in the wilderness. This is kind of cool. Can we hang out here? You're like, sure. They grab a seat. What happens is, the bigger the campfire gets, the more heat it produces, the more entertaining you are. The more, I guess, bells and whistles your brand has, the more attractive your campsite becomes. And you can amplify your campsite by collaborating with others. We're collaborating, collaborating right now. Like your campfire. Your audience that are listening to this, who love you, who love hanging around your campfire getting nourishment and insights and entertainment. Entertainment from you. Like, who the hell's this Dane guy? Now, there's a pathway between the listeners of this podcast back to potentially my podcast or my event or my book or whatever I'm doing. We're creating a pathway between us. And you have to look at building a personal brand, like building a business. You have to find other people to collaborate with. You have to find events to go to and collect a new audience to say, I got a campfire. If you want to come hang out at it before long. If you get good at building a campfire, you can turn it into a business. And the metaphor here is like, essentially, build a campfire. First, get good at making content. Get good at creating a social contract and emotionally engaging with your audience. And then they'll tell you, we're hungry. Like, great, I can sell you. I can sell you something. What do you want? You want a burger? You know what I mean? So, like, do you want to sell a book? Do you want to sell a course? Do you want to, like, don't start with the sale. Don't get out there in the wilderness and be like, what am I going to sell? There's no one out there. Like, start a campfire first. Build an audience first and allow the audience to tell you, dude, we would really like it if you, like, wrote us a book, Dane. We'd really like it if you created a podcast. All right, here you go. We would really like it, Dane, if you created us a course about how to build a personal brand. Okay, well, here you go. Hey, Dane, we'd really like it if, like, you could come out to the US and, like, do some speaking and some events. All right, here you go. So, like, I've never decided. I've just allowed my audience to decide, demand what they wanted, and I just give it to them. Christo does the exact same thing. He's like, I just make content. I wait till the audience react. I give what they want. So that's the metaphor. The logic to this is that when you start making content, you're just trying to get data. Like, don't worry about going viral or getting a fan base. Just, like, produce a piece of content. Look at the data. The data is. They like this piece. They didn't like that piece. They commented on this, they shared that, but they didn't like this. You just collecting data, then you try to build enough data. One week of content isn't a lot of data. Two weeks of content is a lot of data. Too much content isn't really a lot of data. I think the reason I chose 90 days for the book was it's enough time to create enough data and create enough momentum. The data is, well, how many people followed? How many people engage? What do they engage with? You just start to look at the. The numbers and the statistics. Then the information above that is like, well, okay, they like this. What are the actionable insights? Well, the actionable insights of, you know, the data to the information to the insights is, if I make more of that, I get a better outcome. Okay, cool, let's do more of that. Then you learn. Okay, well, out of doing more of that, this one did even better. So the only way to go from data to wisdom is to look at the data, copy the information, get insights from that information, do something about it, and go through the cycle of, like, action, learn, action, learn, action, learn. If you do that for 90 days, at the end of it, you'll have a little bit of wisdom. You're like, okay, like, I think my audience kind of like this. I got some wisdom about how to solve their problem. I got some wisdom about what products I could create next. But you can't go from nothing to wisdom. You have to go through these layers of collecting data, making sense of the information, choosing the insights that matter, taking action of those insights, learning what doesn't, doesn't work. That's the only way to get to wisdom.
