I take the position that entrepreneurship is just as much about managing one's business as it is managing one's mind in order to manage the business. So as much as I try not to make general/broad "mindset" content, the spillover becomes sometimes necessary. That said... what do you do when you have a repeated, nagging negative thought that won't go away? A one-star review. Someone attempts blackmail and tries forcing you to do unethical and disrespectful things to great people. You get threatened to be sued by the same someone lol Or someone close to you posts content made to make fun of you and what you do/sell. The number of examples of painful things you have to endure in entrepreneurship is endless, and the number of ways to solve them is significantly more limited. So I thought I'd share one with you that has helped me a lot, which is answering a single question: WHAT HAS THIS ACTUALLY CHANGED ABOUT MY LIFE? What's powerful about this question is that instead of getting yourself worked up over hypotheticals of the future that haven't happened, it focuses you and grounds you in the present of what's actually happened. And nine times out of ten, the answer is nothing. Your customers are more or less the same. Your employees are more or less the same. Sales and revenue and profit are more or less the same. And that creates a second relatively comforting finding: Most people just don't care that much about you. At least, certainly less than you care about yourself. So as much as it might be keeping you up at night and giving you stomach aches...The worst-case scenario is that you're a two-minute water cooler conversation between two strangers, neither of whom know you. And if it's a conversation between two strangers, neither of whom know you, the likelihood that it changes your life is virtually zero. Which brings us to that which matters most: What do you do about it? Though it might surprise people to hear this answer, the answer is not a stoic "Do nothing and grit your teeth."

Every day across my newsfeed I see scary headlines about how the algorithm has changed and that we are all cooked. That social media platforms are doing XYZ new thing that is going to destroy strategies for advertising and marketing. To be clear...I am by no means a or the longest marketer in the world, but I have been at this for almost 3 years and have been absorbing everything from people who've been in the game for 15 years. And I have continually outperformed the majority of my competitors across multiple businesses. I believe I’ve been able to do that from many significant decisions, and four of them are below: 1. To replace the word "algorithm" with "audience": People love to give social media platforms a personality, like there's a big bad boogeyman that we refer to as “the algorithm” that we are all enslaved to, but if we replace the term algorithm with audience, a lot of “performance” makes a lot more sense. 2. Under the assumption of us talking to an audience, not an algorithm, it has been much less useful for me to say..."I wonder if people like this" and just simply ask myself..."Do I like this?" If I like it, other people will like it too. Make more stuff you like, not that you think other people will like. 3. No over-obsession on metrics, or rather a fresh dose of skepticism around things like click-through rates and watch times, because the reporting we get from these platforms does not differentiate the most important qualifier, which is W-H-O. WHO is clicking? WHO is watching? I know for sure that I can make a video that will get millions of views if I talk about how to get rich quick in the 3rd world, but the majority of people who click on that video are not going to be good customers. It’s the content equivalent of running a flash sale or a deep discount. You can for sure get more clicks, but it is unlikely that you will get the best customers. The same is true for content. 4. I've almost never believed in short-term “algo hacks” because short-term hacks tend to be exactly that...short-term. Almost all of my social media and marketing strategies have been with one North Star, which is alignment with the platform's long term objectives. Most platforms' objectives are the same as a human's objectives, which is...To curate content that the user will find valuable to keep them on the platform. If you make that your North Star, then the changes they make to the math equation that they use to approximate what people want...Every algorithm improvement only benefits you and never hurts you.

Had a talk with someone who wanted to start a personal brand but had no clue how to build it because they didn't know what a brand actually was. So now I'm writing this. Words I Like: Brand is a deliberate pairing of 2 things through an outcome. Minute Read: WTH IS BRANDING Most people treat branding like a design project. New logo. New colors. Better fonts. Cleaner grid. Nice. Wrong target. Branding is not a design project first. It is a memory project first. The market you choose to monetize is always pairing your name with something. Your content gets paired with a feeling. Your product gets paired with an experience. Your price gets paired with a level of trust. Your results get paired with a level of belief. Then the market remembers those pairings the next time it sees you. That is branding. Period. Here’s the fast way to build one. A brand is built through four things: the thing, the action, the outcome, and the memory. The thing is what people recognize. Your name. Your page. Your logo. Your product.The action is what they do with it. Watch the video. Walk into the gym. Drink the coffee. Book the call.The outcome is what they get. Clarity. Confidence. Relief. Skill. Energy. Trust.The memory is what sticks. “This guy makes business simple.” “This gym builds confident kids.” “This cafe is my reset spot.” That is the machine. Thing + action + outcome = memory. Memory repeated enough times = brand. So if you want to build a strong brand fast, do these three things. First, pick the customer. Not "everyone who likes going to the gym" if you want to be a fitness brand. Everyone is NOT a customer. Everyone is a hiding place. Pick one real person with one real problem. If you're a girl in the fitness niche, an customer would be: "full time working 18 - 25 year olds who are trying to make time for the matcha + gym girlie lifestyle" This is not to say you can't post other tings, you absolutely can but understand that you won't sell to those numbers. Trade offs must be made, 200k views but only 1-2k are maybe to buy OR only 40k views but 15k have their cards out ready to buy and the other 25k are incredibly warm viewers who'll follow and buy when you post on your story.

Over my years working I've had a lot of different working styles and habits. Whenever I see success across the time period but different behaviors, it just tells me that there are far fewer things that matter than people argue over. For example, you'll have some people talk about how it's very important to wake up early. Some people talk about how it's important to be a night owl. Some people say that routine matters. Some people say that routine is the enemy. But when I have people asking me how I "locked in"...I almost always get questions about my work habits. So I figured I'd just give them to you: 1. Have at least 1 empty day per week. As in 0 calls. 0 anything. Give yourself time for unstructured thinking and finding solutions. When I looked back at my calendar year and saw what I accomplished during those days, I made more progress during my empty days than I did during my “planned” days. To be clear, it's not that I wasn't working those days. It just allowed me to work on the thing that mattered most in that precise moment. I'm just always willing to bet that present me knows whats most important more than me weeks earlier when I was planning. Our predictions are notoriously bad, so i plan for maximum flexibility. I currently have ~2 open days per workweek (not including weekends). 2. Not allowing for gaps in your calendar. It's fine to have meetings or calls to make, but have them all grouped together so that you can work as long as possible on the days that you cannot have empty. 3. I prefer taking Saturdays off to Sundays. Sundays, I prefer to think about what is coming the next week. Saturdays, I usually could benefit from a half day or full day off. 4. Not feeling guilty for the one to two hours of work in the morning. Sometimes I just like to clear things off so that I can actually be free to relax. 5. A list system of some kind to keep track of activities. Some people use tech. Some people use sticky notes. I tend to like writing things with a pen for whatever reason, and so I have continued to stick with that for years. I have a list for long term projects and one for short term stuff. I like both.