Transcription
Okay, ladies and gentlemen, this week’s episode on Behind a Diary is…
In this episode, I’m going to do two things. The first is I’m going to tell you how to make a lot of money. And the second thing is I’m going to tell you how to get noticed. Really, really simple framework that I think will improve your chance of getting a response by about a 1,000%. And I’ll explain that to you in this episode. I have looked at 60,000 CVs. I actually have 45,000 CVs still sat in my CV inbox. The crazy thing that happens when you look at 60,000 CVs is you start to notice the little subtleties that make someone stand out, but also the things that people write that make them totally invisible. And I’ve written down four things that make someone stand out when they apply for a job or apply for an investment or just send me an email about anything. And I’m going to talk you through those four things to make sure that the next time you send an email, you stand out from a crowd because I know what it’s like to feel invisible digitally.
And I saw this clip going viral on social media this week that said a girl applied for like 600 jobs before she got a role. That is a crime. That is a tragedy. She has an economics degree and she still can’t get a job. Caitlyn, I’m a university graduate and I applied to 647 roles before I got one. And lastly, uh, your boy was in Forbes this week, and in Forbes, they released the highest earning creators in the world. So, I thought this was a good time to tell you the two most important things if any of you want to start growing your social media following. We’re going to do a big sit-down session in this episode, and I’m going to talk you through exactly what to do in the next 5 to 10 years if you want to join us on the Forbes top-earning creators list.
Let’s get into the episode, ladies and gentlemen. And sorry for missing last week. We wanted to make sure it was good. We worked for two weeks to make this one. I hope you enjoy it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m hiring one of the most important roles I think we’ve hired in the company’s history. We’re hiring a head of happiness and health. The reason I’m doing this is because when a company hits the size we’re at now, where we have about 100 people in Flight Story, things start to change a little bit if you’re not incredibly intentional about it. So, I did a post on my LinkedIn which went pretty viral. And the lady that’s just got the job is called Harry Walsh. And I’m going to show you what she did to stand out from 16,000 applicants. And this feeds into this idea of medium and message. This framework I’ve made so that you can stand out which I’ll show you after our phone call.
Hello. You right. How you doing?
I’m really good. How are you?
Yeah, good. Thank you. Yeah. I guess my question is like how are you planning on staying in with the culture and how involved do you want to be in that sort of moving forward?
So I think that the like most important thing the company will do is find people and bind them with a culture that makes them do the best work of their life. The third sort of foundational principle there is setting a vision that is inherently worthwhile. So the reason why I said I’m head of culture and head of people is because those the first two responsibilities of anyone that founds a company. So ultimately my objective is to get the team to a point where I’m obviously needed less and we’re all very ideologically aligned where we’re not just accepting culture and happiness and these kinds of things and recruitment the way that it’s been done but we’re as you said through experimentation through thinking about the way that the world is changing. We’re creating a new blueprint for how to get people to love their work to do the best work of their life, etc. Um, so to answer your question like super directly, it will always be the most important thing for me, but my involvement in it naturally should reduce as I get more like ideologically aligned with the people that run that department.
Yeah. No, thank you so much. It was really great to speak to you as well. And yeah, thank you so much.
No worries. Speak to you soon.
Okay, Harry.
All right, see you later. Bye.
So Harry has been given the job as our head of happiness and the reason why she stood out amongst 16,000 applications is because of this very, very simple framework which all of you should think about every time you send a message or email to anybody that you want something from. On one axis we have the medium which is the channel you’re using to contact them. And at the top we have a high-signal medium. So this is a channel that is rarely used, that is less noisy, more likely to be opened, more direct, and more emotionally disarming. So for example, sending a letter in the post is rarely used. It’s less noisy, it’s more likely to be opened because most important people still open their own post. It’s incredibly direct and it’s less emotionally disarming. A very, very noisy medium is just sending someone an email in the recruitment inbox. Signal is good. It’s something that cuts through. But the opposite of that is something that is noise. And if you use a channel to contact somebody that is high noise, that means it’s saturated. It’s often filtered or ignored. It’s full of noise. And it’s easier to dismiss. And the problem most of you face is you’re focusing on high-noise channels. But the other axis you have to think about is the impact of the message. Now, I’m going to tell you through this framework, this Rice framework, how to write a high-impact message. But the opposite of a high-impact message is apathy; when people just don’t care, when it’s unemotionally resonant. Harry sent a seven-minute personalized video which was emotional, it was funny, explaining exactly why she was the perfect person for the role. So, she was very, very high impact, but also she didn’t send it through the typical recruitment inboxes. She didn’t apply for the job through the proper channels. She emailed executives at the company privately on LinkedIn and in other ways. One of them saw it because it was high impact and they sent it to me. So Harry landed up here. A high-impact message that was delivered through a high-signal channel. The reason why so many of your messages get ignored is because they end up in the bottom left of this quadrant. You send them through noisy channels and you’re sending generic, boring CVs. If you end up here with the messages you send, you will have a hard life. So every time you go to send someone a message, think about this framework and focus on channels that are high in signal and write messages that are high impact.
What do I remember thinking when I first got sent the job application? I’d already seen how many people had liked uh Steven’s post. So I was like, well, I need to do something to stand out. And I think well, I’ve worked around recruiters, you know, I can see that they just they’re skimming through CVs and things like that. you need to show that you know what you’re talking about and just do something a little bit different that isn’t just like loads of words on a page. So, I thought I’ll make a video.
And if you’ve been paying attention, I know what question you’ve probably been asking yourself, which is, Stephen, how do I write a message that is high impact? Well, there’s a skill to that so you don’t have to guess, which is exactly where this Rice framework comes in. People have four basic motivations. And we call those four basic motivations RICE. R I C E stands for reward, ideology, coercion, and ego. Reward is anything that you want. Money, free vacations, pat on the back. People do lots of crazy things for rewards. And these rewards change over time and by based on person. Okay. Right. The second primary motivator is ideology. Ideology is the things that you believe in. People do crazy things for the things they believe in. Whether it’s their religion, whether it’s their country, whether it’s family, whether it’s what they believe is morally correct. Right? So if you can assign, if you can speak to somebody through the lens of their ideology, you can get them to do incredible things. C is coercion. Coercion is all the negative things; guilt, shame, blackmail, anything that you do to force someone to take certain action by leaning into the negative element of motivation, which is also known as manipulation, that falls under the C or coercion. And then E, ego, is everything that has to do with how the person views themselves. So often times ego gets oversimplified into thinking that it’s just people who have a big ego, right? somebody like Donald Trump who has a big ego or you name the famous actor who has a big ego. Ego is also people who don’t have big egos. Mother Teresa had an ego. She wanted to sacrifice for other people. She wanted other people to see her sacrificing for other people. That is also ego. So with these four core motivations, you have a rubric, a process to understand why other people do what they do. If you understand why other people do what they do, all you have to do is connect what they care about with what you want them to do and you just increase the probability of them doing what you want them to do.
This is really cool. Really, really, really cool. Um, every year they release a list of the fastest-growing companies in the land. And this year, the fastest-growing company that is founder-led is Perfect TED, which is the matcher company we’ve invested about a million dollars into. And they’re actually a part of our building. They’re upstairs right now. Um, I’m going to go upstairs, congratulate them, and chat to them about all things business. They stay very, very late in this building. They’re often here till midnight at night, and we have lots of late-night conversations about random things. So, it’s probably going to be another one of those. Upstairs is Levi and Teddy, who are brothers. They’re founders of the company. Marissa is the other founder. She’s married to Levi, but Marissa isn’t here. So, let’s go upstairs and chat to them and congratulate them on their win. Come with me.
That’s your personal question. Yeah. Does Mel like how ambitious you are?
She likes how ambitious I am. Yes. But what comes with that is not necessarily conducive with with her needs all the time.
Yeah. Like just with you not being there.
Yeah. Like you not being there, but even when you’re there sometimes not being present is the is the is the cost.
Were you dating while you were at social channel?
Yeah. just just near the just at the tail end of it. So, I was living in New York when when I met her. And even for my relationship with Marissa, it’s like we go home, we’re super trained. All we do is talk about work. Like, it’s not healthy. You need to find time for a romance. And also, it’s hard to have sexual um connection. If your cortisol levels are high, you’re stressed or exhausted. And as a founder, you’re going to be high. You’re going to be like high cortisol, stressed, and exhausted.
Having two of us in a room tonight and leave our come in and be like, “Seen Amazon, it’s popping off.” We do like maybe 50% more work because we’re always working.
Yeah, it’s mad. The output is insane. It’s not sustainable though. That’s the problem. It’s not 100%.
Ladies and gentlemen, it’s bank holiday. We are in Flight Stories HQ. Look at this over here. Bank holiday. 7:00 p.m. Cristiana Money Maker is in the office smashing it. She is the hardest-working person I think I’ve ever met in my life. And she’s the woman that makes all the money.
Oh, can you hear me? Can you hear me?
What the… You got headphones on then?
Oh, so no one bo… No one bothers you. What’s going on?
Uh, right now I’m responding to a new lead for a new brand partnership request, catching up on the commercial pipeline, reforcasting revenue for the next six months, and working on be one of our three-year business plans.
How you feeling about our chances of hitting our goals?
Yeah, we’ll I feel very confident we’ll hit 30 million this year. We’ve had some delays in hiring, which has really impacted the progress, particularly with our speaking revenues.
Have we found someone yet that can run the speaking business?
No. It’s been one of the most difficult roles to hire for. I was thinking about this the other day, um cuz I find myself telling people all the time that we have a hiring problem and… Um, it doesn’t really make sense because we have tens of thousands of people apply for jobs and that inbox has like 50,000 applicants in it now and we still can’t find good people. Of those 10,000 on the balance of probabilities, 1% is going to be the psychos that we need. Only 1% are going to be psychos that we need. We’re looking for the top, let’s say, let’s say 5%. We’re looking for the top 5% people in the world that have the necessary skills, experience, mindset, commitment levels, urgency, appetite, entrepreneurial spirit, obsession, investment in our purpose and our mission. It really makes me realize that maybe we need to spend more time on hiring like as if I’m saying that. For a company that says our most valuable asset is finding and nurturing these A players, is our resource, both money and time, actually being spent where we’re saying it’s the most valuable? And in all cases, the answer to that is no. And for some reason, it keeps us getting washed over.
So you’re saying we need more people in-house doing recruiting. More people that fit our prototype than recruiting the next wave beyond Andrew.
Beyond Andrew. Yeah. We need, let’s say, an army of Andrews.
Yeah. Know, it’s funny. Sometimes you just got to say it out loud for you to go hell.
Yeah. Um it makes a lot of sense. Haven’t we got this guy that Amy mentioned coming into your team? There was a guy that used to work with she recommended. You’ve interviewed him.
Hi go. She’s got a pretty good track record.
I agree. So I think that’s worth conversation. Georgie, one of the best ways to hire new people into your company is by asking your team members, especially your best team members, who is the best person they’ve ever worked with. And in fact, a lot of the great people that now work here at Flight Story are a consequence of me asking that question. So actually Cristiana, he just met then and Georgie when they joined, I sat them down and I was like, “Who’s the best person you’ve ever worked with?” And they said Austin. So we hired Austin. When Amy joined, I said, “Who are the best people that you’ve worked with?” And and Amy said, “Maz.” So we hired Maz. Obviously, all of them have to pass the interview process. But one of the things that’s held to be true is that exceptional team members of yours in your company tend to know exceptional people and they tend to have worked with exceptional people. So one of the best things you can do is go and ask everybody in your team the question who is the best person you’ve ever worked with and then go and try and get that person into the interview process and convince them that their career should be spent on this mission on this team.
It’s hard finding. It’s really, really hard finding um great people for your company. And uh I spend a ridiculous amount of time just hunting for these unicorns. And you probably should, too. By contrast, blue ocean or market-creating strategy is about how to create and capture unknown markets where demand is created rather than fought over.
You’re like an eye patch at a restaurant. You know, I think all the time I have I actually recorded this last time. I thought like people watch Behind the Diary and I think a lot of them watch it because maybe they want to like walk in your footsteps in their own lives. So they might want to start a business or a project or a podcast, whatever. But I always think if they actually knew what my life looked like, they wouldn’t want to do it.
No, trust trust me. There’s no way. There’s no they wouldn’t want to do… I think they think if you become like successful or you’re a millionaire or whatever, you’re like, you know, like Barbados and like Hawaii and stuff. Like, sure, some people do that, but I think the possession, the self-possession that gets you here keeps you here at midnight. And I think that’s the the kind of paradox of this game is like you get freedom, but the thing that gets you the freedom is also the thing that stops you to using the freedom to go to Hawaii. I spend so many nights here alone or if not here some like somewhere else just completely alone working on some little piece of…
Why? Why?
Yeah. This is just the thing I want to be doing for whatever reason. I want to be doing this. So um but you think it’s it’s really ugly. That’s what I want people to know that if you think working hard and becoming successful is going to result in a beautiful, wonderful, glamorous life, maybe think again. Because the very thing that will get you there will keep you away from the beautiful, wonderful, glamorous life. Cuz the type of person that would have wanted the beautiful, wonderful, glamorous life never would have done the thing that got them the beautiful, wonderful, glamorous life. They probably would have had a much easier life, a much easier job, much more certainty, much more safety, and five holidays a year. and weekends and evenings. So maybe that’s… I’d love to know like the math on that.
It is 1:00 a.m. on Friday as you can see here and I’m just having a moment which I characterize as the reality of entrepreneurship. I am in the office. I’ve just been cleaning up a little bit. I’m going to be locking up the office. I’ve been working every single day this week super late struggling to get to the gym. My girlfriend’s back in town now. And we were we were going to do something tonight, but I’ve overworked and deadlines have got on top of me and it’s 1:00 a.m. and I’m in this big, dark, cold, lonely office alone with my thoughts. And this is entrepreneurship. This is the 99% of entrepreneurship. Being self-possessed through drudgery on your own when no one is watching. And I started behind a diary to show you more of that stuff because that’s the reality of it. Boredom tolerance. Drudgery tolerance. Are you the type of person that is willing to work extremely hard in a way that most people aren’t? And are you willing to do it with a religious belief that it will be worth it even when the signs of it being worth it are potentially 5 or 10 years away? If you are, then you will probably be a successful entrepreneur. If you aren’t willing, then you’re going to find it extremely difficult and you’re going to feel like an unlucky person. I feel like a lucky person. Um because drudgery has paid off for me.
Are you from the diary of CEO?
I am from the diary of a CEO. How are you? You okay?
Good. Yeah, I do watch a lot of your videos. Inspiration.
Thank you so much.
Nice to meet you.
Very nice to meet you as well. There was something quite ironic about me saying how if you’re willing to commit then you’ll be successful and then you’ll get results. And just as I stepped out of here, the first person on the street was someone that um listens to the show and gave us gave me a great compliment about how the show’s impacted his life. But it’s those moments, right? Like that’s given me enough energy to last me another week or maybe another month or maybe another year. Like hearing those things that you guys leave in the comments and when I come outside and you know I go for a walk or I meet people is why all the drudgery suddenly feels meaningful, suddenly feels worthwhile and it really is worth it. It really is worth it. So when people say, “Oh, like you you you’re a workaholic. You work too hard and why did you do it?” Like that’s why… aren’t isn’t that what we’re all looking for in our work? Aren’t we all looking for like the feeling that our work is worthwhile and that it’s having an impact? And I’m so glad I’m so lucky that I get that I get that, you know, in the work that I do. So yeah, very, very grateful.
Hello. You’re right. How do you think about mental health? I’ve heard you speak about your mental health before and I’ve…
Yeah. I don’t… Well, the thing is, here’s the problem. Like, it’s uh if my mental health was a priority, I wouldn’t be as successful as I am. I mean, and that’s just like a sad fact. Um like I obviously never would have buried myself alive for 7…
Days. Seven days of solitary, seven days on a desert island, seven days blah blah blah. Um, it's like, you know, being consistently uncomfortable and like, consistently suffering over long periods is like arguably one of the deepest modes. Like there's a reason no one makes videos like me.
One year I was flying like 200 days. Like I was on a plane. I mean, it was it was a fest. It's like, you know, when I when I wake up tomorrow and I'm going to be pretty tired and feel like I want to go, you know, I something I always tell myself is how you feel right now is why no one else does what you want to do or does what you do. And if you push through this, that's just even, you know, more of a reason why no one will ever be who you are. And so it's like I think being able to push through unhappiness and do things you don't want to do consistently year after year over the course of a decade is like the ultimate advantage.
[Music] Somebody brought this to the car for you and I thought I'll bring it up. Could you like stand over there? Open it. If it's edible, eat. If it's drinkable, drink. Wait 1 hour. If you feel fine, but you're going to love this. Bring it to me.
[Applause] Oh my god, it's counting down. Such a bad. But here we go. And when you open it, there's a drink in there for you. Oh, it's We just thought it was that. No, no, no, no, no. That's a champagne in there. Says diary of a co 10 million. Sorry. It's come all the way from France. I told him to leave the number. He said, "No, no, no. He's just a friend of the diary of a CEO." Champ goal, sorry, was born to accompany you from the grind to the celebration. Success isn't about destination. It's about the journey and the effort you put in. Drink your goals. So, I think it is either to help you achieve your goal or to celebrate a goal. Oh, okay. So, you set a goal, then you reward yourself.
Way what you just saw there with that bottle of champagne that some guy just gave to my driver is a prime example of that framework that I was talking about 2 seconds ago. He delivered a high-impact message which was a bottle of champagne with some LED lights on it congratulating us on hitting 10 million subscribers and he did it through a medium that was high signal. He literally handed it in person to my driver as we were going through the street. He cut through the noise, found a high-signal channel and delivered a high-impact emotionally resonant message which means he was successful. Prime example. Prime example. Please copy this. Steal this. Use this.
You know, I sat down with Paul Brunson last week. Couple of reasons why I wanted to catch up with him just to give him some advice on some things with this podcast. But the other thing I was I just want to get like a gauge on like how he's feeling as a podcaster. One of the things he said to me was every I have a ritual. No, every Tuesday come out at 6:00 a.m. I watch the pot at 6:00 a.m. on Spotify. He's like, "If I I wake up in the morning and I look at them their numbers, I look to see what the response is and I know immediately from their where it's going." He was like, "I've had like two episodes in a row that came out and like didn't go well." And he's like, "It ruins my entire day." If the numbers are there, it's like scored. It's good. It's going to be a good day. If the numbers are if if the numbers are not, I'm demoralized for the rest of the day. I can relate. But then you you do get perspective. And this is what I was trying to give Paul is like it is a really long game. You're playing a long game and you're going to go like this. Then you're going to go like this. You're going to go through Death Valley for three months and you're going to randomly go way higher than you've ever been. Then you're going to go back into Death Valley for 3 months. And it just keeps going like that. So you have to when you have your bad days, it's learn. When you have your good days, feel happy. But on the bad days, when the numbers aren't quite them, it's all just learning. And you got to realize that no single episode is is fatal. But it feels like that. You've got to detach from it. You got to you got to really have a framework for not not getting caught up in the numbers too much.
I realized though that there's so many moments where it was tempting to give up give up the fight of care. What I mean by that is the level in which we care and how long we've cared for can take a toll on you. And there's moments where I've realized that other people would give up here because it's tough. And um I've in that moment what comes to mind is if I keep going at this moment I'm leaving like 5% people people behind that like hit that hurdle and fell. I fully believe part of the game is just staying who can outlast you know and that's the game that's the same principle in most facets of life. It's like much of it which would be who can last the longest and then how do you build a team? How do you build a culture? How do you build your own mentality for longevity? If that's like a big part of the game and if it's taking emotionally taking a toll on you like this you won't be able to last long.
Senior perspective. One of the biggest insights I've had in the last, I'd say three to four months about creating great company culture or team culture has been that company culture is not the thing that you come up with on your team off-site day. It's not the thing that you've written on the walls. It's not what the CEO says it is. It's none of those things. Culture is behavior. It is how your team behave. Culture is seen in the moment when one of your clients sends a text message on Sunday night and they need the login details to their account and the person that has them is on their honeymoon. What you do in that moment, how you behave is your company culture. But because organizations think it's the like strategy offsite values that they wrote on the whiteboard thing, what ends up happening is you have just a culture of contradiction. You wrote that you're this, but everybody knows you're something else. So for me um the first thing is getting exceptionally clear which is never been harder on exactly the behaviors that you want from your team and then really linking that to the mission which is paramount because sometimes it's like it's like linked to the founders' trauma because they're like insecure or whatever but to sell the story to your team and to get their buy-in it needs to actually be reverse engineered from what we're trying to achieve in the world. We are trying to be the best podcast in the world. So, in order to become that, the behaviors we're going going to need are we're going to need a high rate of failure because the platforms are changing every week. We're going to need to be open-minded because we're going to speak to Elon Musk sometimes and then we're going to speak to Boris Johnson and then Michelle Obama. So, we're going to need a team that are like open-minded. We codify those into values and then we hire based on that. We install our processes, our incentives, our trophies, our awards to incentivize those values, those behaviors so we achieve our mission.
Thank you so much for sticking around. Thank you. Thank you so much.
As I was walking out of my talk, a lady came up to me and said she spent weeks trying to find a software developer for the tech idea that she has. This is a question I get asked all the time. How do you find a software developer or technical co-founder to help you build your business? And I think people think there's a complicated answer. Of course, it comes back to what I said earlier about the medium and message, but there's two other things you need to know about. The first is persistence, and the second is this rice framework, which I'll tell you about now. So, obviously, there's two roots. You don't do it, but if you're going to do it, then exactly what you're doing is the only way. And find people. And I remember when I was um starting my career, I had a similar challenge where I wanted to build a piece of software. I was broke. I was in Manchester, dropped out of university, and never bought software on my life before. Yeah. So, what did I do? I went on Google and I went down three pages of everyone that was a software developer and I emailed them all a really good email with that framework, that reward ideology coercion framework. And one guy called Chris Williams who was building a uh web design business responded and was like, I'm interested in having a call. I'd sent so many emails and then Chris Williams became my co-founder, right? That's like the game. It's just just keep knocking on the door. Yeah. Okay. And then also when you find the person, don't judge them based on your own opinion because you don't know what good looks like in that regard. Yeah. So you need to find a software developer that you you know and trust and get them to check them before you commit to anything. There's like no secrets to it. It's just just keep going. It's just knock knock. Every conversation you have, try see it as a seed you're planting. That's what I did.
So nice to meet you. Nice to meet you very much.
Today Forbes published a list of the highest-earning creators and I was 11th on the list and the ninth highest-earning creator in the world. So if I'm speaking to you and you're a founder and you're stuck at a certain level at the moment or if you're a corporate executive or you're someone that's working a 9 to 5 or you're a parent that's looking for an entrepreneurial opportunity, this is it. This is the opportunity and I'm going to tell you exactly how to do it. I'm going to give you a very, very simple 90-day challenge that's going to set you on your way to landing yourself on this list in 2030. Forbes got a lot of things right actually to put you on these lists. They email you and they ask you for your documentation. So, they ask to see your contracts, um, documents around who's paying you, how much they're paying you, what brand advertisers you have. But the thing about these lists is they only look at creator revenues. They don't look at the companies you've built. They don't look at the equity you have and they don't look at how much money the companies you've built are making. So when they say Mr. Beast is making $85 million, they're actually a little bit way off because I know because I invest in Mr. Beast company that he's going to make almost a billion dollars this year. I know that his holding company is worth more than $5 billion. I think half of this list are going to end up being billionaires over the next 10 years. If if I can just persuade you in the next 10 minutes to start making content, I think it could be life-changing.
Part of why I really have grown to believe this is like one of the biggest opportunities is because everything that's going on with AI at the moment means that building stuff, whether it's software or content, is going to become easier and easier and easier and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. So the moat, which is the thing that offers defense, it's no longer that you have a 100 developers or a massive production team. The great moat of the next 10 years is content and audience and community and trust. So really like this is the game guys. I know this sounds like a crazy thing to say because like the whole world of entrepreneurship used to be you make a product and then you go out and market it. But actually it's inverted now where you build an audience and then you make products for that audience. I read the comments. I've like I've actually made these like personas of who I think is listening and I've I've got your names written down and who you are and what you do from that video where I asked you to comment. My job is to try and tell you what's happening. And this is me shouting at you to make some content and build a community. Like from the bottom of my heart, I think it's a big opportunity for you. AI is changing a lot of but it ain't getting rid of relationships. It ain't getting rid of the value of human connection and trust. And it ain't getting rid of the fact that we're innately um at the very fundamental Maslovian level of our basic needs. Very very very obsessed with each other and social connections.
If you want to come on this journey and become a content creator, if you want to get yourself on the list in 2015, no matter who you are or where you're starting, whether you're starting with 10 followers or 10,000 followers today, I need you to commit to something. Not tomorrow, not next week, not Monday, not when the time is right because the time is never going to be right. There's never going to be a perfect time. So, we have to pick an imperfect time. And now, today is an imperfect time. It's a perfectly imperfect time. So, today, step one is pick one platform, just one platform, and make it a platform where you think your target market probably spend a lot of time hanging out based on what you do, based on the skills that you have. Step two is you're going to commit for the next 90 days. Not if you feel like it. Every single day for the next 90 days, including weekends, you're going to commit to post once a day. And this is what I did when I started. I said to myself that I'd post every single day at 700 p.m. on Instagram or Twitter for years. And I know what you're thinking. You're probably still thinking, "But Steven, I don't know where to start. I'm not good at speaking to camera. I get nervous. I procrastinate. Um, I don't have a big network of followers. I only have 100 followers, Stephen. Um, the market is too saturated. All of that is All All of that is absolute Every single person that's on this list, every single person on this list had either equal or less content making experience than you do before they started. And I tell you what, I don't need to know who they are to know that they felt embarrassed, too. I remember feeling absolutely pathetic the first time I wrote one of those cliche motivational business quotes on my Instagram page. Like, who the do you think you are? And the truth is, it was terrible. It was objectively terrible. But that is the price you pay for any accomplishment you'll achieve in your life. Embarrassment is the cost of entry. And the market isn't saturated because the market is growing. So that means there's more and more space for more and more people. And these numbers that you see on this list are getting bigger every single year. There's more room for you in this market every single day because the pie is expanding. And listen, the game isn't to be the next Allan Chicken Chow making $4 million. The game is to be the next you. I'm not saying that's easy because there's no blueprint for you. There's a there's now a blueprint for Alan Chicken Chow. Alan Chicken Chow. There's no way that's his Alan Chicken channel has 93 million subscribers. This guy's dropping 30 million views a video. He's doing scary comedy skits. hell. I'm out here doing 3-hour podcasts with scientists and flying to America to interview them. And this guy's dressing up as a zombie for 15 minutes and dropping 30 million views. He's dressing up as a vampire and running around chasing a girl for 15 minutes. I'm in the wrong niche. I need to order a vampire costume. Well done, Alan Chicken Chow. Unbelievable.
Anyway, when you commit to that level of consistency, there's three magical things that happen. And the first is you kill the debate. And the debate is up your life and you don't even know it. There's a gap between every idea you have and the execution of that idea. And in that gap exists a debate. And the debate sounds like, should I do it? Am I good enough? What are people going to think? That girl in work that I'm attracted to, she's going to think I'm strange. my family, they're going to think I'm strange. They're going to criticize me. I'm going to be bad at it. That is the debate. I'm not as good as Mr. Beast. I don't know how to podcast. The Dio is better. Blah blah blah blah blah. You're going to lose the debate. But when you commit to posting every day for 90 days, you only have to win that debate once, which is at the very start, which is now, which is today. And the really incredible second thing that happens, and this might be the second most important point that I'm going to say in this video is the minute you start getting consistent is when compounding returns begin. And compounding returns are the eighth wonder of the world. Every investor knows this. Every successful person knows this. When you do something consistently, compounding returns begin. And compounding on a graph looks slow and then it's fast. It's always like that. It begins slow and then it's fast. And and just to give you one more push, let me share something with you that absolutely blew my mind. It blew my mind so much that I had to check 10 times that this was actually true. And it is true. You can do the math yourself. If you take two people and they both start with a,000 followers each and person A posts once a week and person B posts once a day. If we assume that every single post will grow their audience by 0.5%. In 10 years time, how many followers do you think person A is going to have versus person B? The answer is person A who posted weekly will have a respectable 12,000 followers. probably still in their day job because you can't do a ton with that. Person B who posted once a day for the same period of time will have over a million followers. They'll have 8,500% more followers in the same period of time. And the other magical thing that happens when you post frequently is you learn way faster than someone that's posting infrequently. In the analogy I gave, person B who posts daily learns 600% more than person A at the end of the 10 years. But, and this is a big butt, this only happens if you follow the three Ps when you post, which is you produce, you publish, and then you pay attention. Every single post is data. And the information exists in the back end of every single platform. And that information tells you why people watched, what they clicked, when they stopped watching, what they said. All of that is information that can feed into your next post. So, you have to produce, publish, and then pay attention and repeat that cycle. I guarantee you, every single person on this Forbes list, I guarantee they follow the three Ps. They produce, they publish, and then they pay attention. So much of the game is just increasing your level of consistency. So, if you take me up on this challenge for 90 days and you follow the three Ps, you're going to have 90 laps around the produce, publish, pay attention course, and you will learn something every single lap. This is why Alan Chicken Cow has got 100 million YouTube subscribers. He has run more laps around that track than you have. That is how they get on the list. And that is how you can get on the list. So, I guess it's a question for you. Will you commit today? Will you commit down below in the comments section to posting every single day? And will you commit that when you do post, you'll make sure every single post is an attempt at giving the audience value. I'm not trying to see selfies. I'm not trying to see what you had for lunch. I don't care what your dog is called. I'm trying to see you post things that are an attempt at giving value to your audience. It's only 90 posts for 90 days. Will you commit? If you do commit to me, let's take a let's do a symbolic physical gesture. How about we hit the like button on this video to lock it in. How about we comment below, I'm in. If you're committing, how about we hit the subscribe button? How about all three? How about we hit the subscribe button? We leave a comment and we like the video. You win, I win, we win together. How does that sound? I need to go to the gym. It is 11:00 p.m. My gym shuts at midnight. If I
Leave now, I'll get a 20, 30, 40 minute workout in. But it will be worth it. That will be a good 20, 30 minutes. Let's go to the gym, ladies and gentlemen.
Listen, I owe you an explanation, and I'm going to give it to you. I know what you're thinking, Steve. Why didn't you upload an episode of Behind the Diary this week? Let's just be honest with each other for a second. Um, it's not what you probably think. It's not because we were busy or because we are lazy or any of those things. It's actually very much the opposite. Me, Will, and Alex, who now work on this channel, came to the conclusion after days and days of really going to war with the edit and trying to figure out how to do it, that it wasn't good enough to publish. And one thing I want you to know, if you watch this channel, is that we will only publish if we believe it is truly worth the time that you give it. Cuz there's a real responsibility in asking you guys to give us 30 minutes or 40 minutes of your time. And that weighs on us heavy. And we are in the early innings of this channel. This channel will live for decades in the same way that Dire of Co does. So, we're still hiring the team. We're still figuring it out. Wish you could see the amount of pain and obsession that goes into this channel. Like, I wish I could show you it. We took all of your comments. We read thousands of them. And we shaped these four personas that we now use to decide what to post on this channel.
So, now every single second and every minute of what you watch on this channel has to link to one of those four personas. And in those personas, just because I know some of you will be wondering, we have everyone. Everyone that watches this channel, we have the person who's running a hundred billion dollar company, and we know who you are because we actually know you by name. And then on the other side of the spectrum, we have someone who is currently working a normal job, but they have ideas and they have dreams, and we have everything in between. And every second behind the diary must serve at least one of those four personas. And the reason we didn't publish last week is we came to the very difficult, very painful decision that we didn't do a good enough job with the selection of clips we had and what I had recorded to serve you. So, we didn't publish, which is hard, you know, and there is like an economic impact to not publishing. But, we want to play long. And the long game here is making great content that serves you. That's the long game. That will win out over time. Of course, we want to publish every single week. We actually want to publish twice a week. We're actually intending to have Thursdays as a day where we do a little bit of a documentary and focus really, really deep on one story and one topic and then Sundays just being these casual behind-the-scenes vlogs.
So, thank you for being on this ride with us. Give us grace, give us patience, and uh um and give us feedback, and we're going to build this channel together, and we're having so much fun doing it, even though it's painful. It wouldn't be worth it if it wasn't painful, right? So, thank you. Uh, like and subscribe if you can. If you liked what you saw today, please hit the subscribe button. Just check if you have. You know, some of you you often comment say, "Steve, I didn't even realize I didn't subscribe." Just please just check. I'm not going to do the whole thing. Just thank you so much. I want you to be my tutor. So, I'm going to come back here every day and you're going to test me. Okay. This is day one. Let's get going. We've got 1,400 days ahead of us. Brilliant. Let's get started. For day one, we'll begin with some essentials. Vocabulary. Bonjour. Bonjour. Excellent start. Your pronunciation is already sounding good. Was was bonjour good? I really be critical. I really want to progress. Your bonjour was quite good. To refine it even further, focus on making the sound a bit more nasal. Slightly off. Yeah, it wasn't I wasn't it wasn't great, was it?