More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
February 13 - March 29, 2018
you can use your personal brand—who you are—to market your business, or your personal brand can actually be the business.
the secret to their success (and mine) had nothing to do with where they came from, whom they knew, where they went to school, or what field they were in. Rather, it had everything to do with their appreciation for the platforms at their disposal and their willingness to do whatever it took to make these social-media tools work to their utmost potential.
Most started out with modest ambitions of earning enough to enjoy the good things in life, finding stability, supporting themselves and their families, and living on their own terms. Achieve that kind of wealth, and you won’t need riches. And who knows, maybe in the process of getting there you, like John Lee Dumas and his cohorts, will discover that you do have the talent and marketing savvy to become a millionaire.
When it comes to professional opportunities, this is the best time to be alive in the history of humankind. I don’t want anyone to waste it.
I’m an entrepreneur who built a $150 million media company in part because of my personal brand, which I developed by first creating valuable content that grew my influence.
The Internet is an entrepreneur’s oyster, and you can use its pearly platforms to build a personal brand so powerful that the world is not only willing to pay you for your products or services or to promote other people’s products and services, but also it might even be willing to pay you to just be you.
It’s a matter of survival to think beyond your current successes and constantly look for ways to create new ones so that you’re never limited to any one platform or even one topic. How do you do that? By creating a personal brand so powerful that it transcends platforms, products, and even your passion.
A strong personal brand is your ticket to complete personal and professional freedom.
Several of the people interviewed for this book said that the experiences and skills they gained in their former jobs—even the ones they hated—were essential to helping them become the entrepreneurs they are today.
What this should tell you is that if you’re not crushing it, it’s not because you’re too old or poor or have too many other responsibilities. It’s because you haven’t fully committed to making the leap yet.
I also promise that once you’ve developed a robust personal brand, you will be able to enjoy as much or as little leisure as you want—because
it’s not about how much you know; it’s about how much you care.
I know many people working in jobs that make them heaps of money who aren’t happy, but I don’t know anyone who works around their passion every day who isn’t loving life.
When you’re passionate about what you’re offering the world, whether it’s a sales training method or vintage toys, the quality of both your product and your content will more likely be what it needs to be to get noticed, valued, and talked about.
you don’t even have to be passionate about the product or service you’re offering. What’s imperative is that you are passionate about giving.
I decided to stop chasing numbers and focus more on creating content that brought more value to our customers. A thousand views and a hundred comments are much better than ten thousand views and one comment.”
You have no reason to start acting like something special until you actually have something special to show for it. Even then, don’t act special; the moment you do, you’ll start moving in the opposite direction.
“Put it on one person, take a picture, you take it off. Put it on another person, take a picture, take it off. Because you don’t have money so you can’t give shirts to everyone, but if you can post pictures on Facebook and Twitter and make it seem like everyone has a shirt, maybe other people will want it, too.
You need to constantly be in do mode.
When you first start out, there is no time for leisure—if you want to crush it.
Do things! Create content daily. Biz-dev daily. Meet with two or three people per day who can get you awareness, distribution, or sales—somehow closer to your goals.
A successful entrepreneur is one who puts in enough energy to move the gears and executes well enough so the work isn’t wasted.
Knowing how to spot underpriced or underappreciated attention is a key influencer skill.
There’s a psychological quality to branding and marketing that’s sometimes hard to quantify. You have to care and show people the quality of who you are and what you do.”
“You can brand yourself all you want, but if you don’t have credibility or have not done anything, it’s almost worthless. You can only sell something that’s actually good.”
to have a prayer of becoming even the eighty-eighth best whiskey Instagrammer, you’re going to have to make sure that you are constantly updating your knowledge and providing information and insight that people can’t find easily anywhere else.
the learning process should be your content.
It’s true that great content hinges on great storytelling and that every story in the universe has already been told. But not by you.
you don’t just have the ability to generate unique pieces of creative—you are the unique piece of creative.
use every platform available to document your actual life and speak your truth. Let people learn who you are, then let them watch you develop into who you want to become.
Use Snapchat, Instagram Stories, YouTube videos, and Facebook Live three, four, five times per day to share the world through your eyes.
Let your audience meet your cranky uncle, let them see what you’re eating for lunch, let them follow you as you slog through the workout you love to hate. Invite them in when you move into your first postdivorce apartment or your college dorm. Take them along on your vacations and business trips. Think of yourself as the star of this show and the production company.
You don’t get to call yourself an expert until you’ve put in the work—and the market decides, not you.
Documenting isn’t valuable because it captures how interesting (or not) you are now; it’s about preparing for how people will watch you ten years from now.
But the Internet plays the middleman role now, and the Internet can’t stop you from putting your work out there. Put your stuff up and see what the market has to say about it.
If enough of us start to document, we could completely destroy the myth of the overnight success.
Put your stuff out in public so you have to live up to it. As long as it’s valuable and you know it’s true, don’t judge it. Let the market show you whether you’re good or not.
Perfection doesn’t exist; it’s totally subjective.
Rich’s story has a fairy-tale happy ending, but he’s quick to reiterate that the only reason he is where he is today is because he went all in and had a spouse who was willing to go all in with him.
“The main thing is realizing that even if you feel terrible for a while, that’s not how you’re going to feel the whole time. . . . Things change if you just keep moving.”
Align all eight of the essentials—intent, authenticity, passion, patience, speed, work ethic, ability to track consumer attention and master social platforms, and content—and you have the closest thing to a formula for crushing it that I can offer.
Misogyny, racism, and bigotry are very real problems, but they are not the reason why you’re not crushing it yet.
Commit to ignoring every single voice that threatens to undermine you.
The only person you can’t ignore is your spouse if you have one. The way around that is to work with your husband or wife to come up with a plan that you can both live with. There will always be people around you to tell you not to do things.
Then, no matter how they respond, start. Just like that. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can work when you’re no longer tethered by the tyranny of other people’s opinions. People who are afraid to fail will always set their goals far lower than they need to, much to the delight of their competitors.
No one who played it safe ever made it big.
Be clear-eyed and strategic, be willing to work harder and longer than you ever have in your life, and you won’t disappoint anyone. In fact, I predict you’ll surprise everyone.
People are so scared they’ll be wasting time if they try to build a business, even when their time isn’t valuable.
If you’re not 100 percent happy with your life today, it is never a waste of time to try something that could get you there.
When you really own it, and you put yourself out there and be you, your vibe is going to attract your tribe, and you’re going to be able to make change in this world.”
