Watch This If You’re Afraid of Creating Content

All right, so you know that there is an infinite, infinite universe of potential upside in creating content for your business, right? You understand that you’re here consuming a piece of content right now. You see the upside of it. But when I’m working with students and entrepreneurs who have maybe built up their businesses without really putting out organic content on social media, inevitably the thing that holds them back, the big obstacle that they’re facing is nothing more than themselves. The them putting themselves in the path of their own progress and then gatekeeping themselves because they’re so concerned about the fact that they’ve never done it before. They’re afraid what people are going to think. They’re afraid what if the quality of the content isn’t very good? And all these things that we get inside of our heads and we fear the judgment of people who aren’t even necessarily thinking about us in the first place. And we let those judgments that people don’t even have because they don’t actually think about us as much as we think they do, we let that hold us back from taking the first step and putting ourselves out there and taking the steps necessary to grow our business. Right? And when I’m working with students, the very first thing I recommend, if you’re in that place and you’re struggling to get out of your own way and put out content into the Internet, is twofold.

There’s two things. There’s strategies I want to share with you that are going to unlock this for you. Number one is I want you to take all those people that you look up to, you know, those people who have very large following, people whose content you consume, maybe mine, for example. If you’re listening to this podcast, then you are, you know, following along for the journey. Very cool. Go check out the content that I put out three, five, six years ago. And you can do this by going to YouTube and searching for the oldest. You can go to my instagram, you can scroll to the bottom.

You can go to my twitter, you can scroll to the bottom, right? Go look at the content that I was putting out six, seven, eight years ago and then ask yourself, how the hell did he ever get to this place? That guy sucked. He was horrible. And it’s the same thing. If you look at anybody, anybody, any content creator that you look up to, if you just go back far enough to where they were, you know, an inn of one, they were putting out their very first piece of content for the very first time. You look at that, that very first video and you’re like, oh, my God, they were terrible. That’s what you’re competing against. It’s so easy to think that your quality, that your delivery has to be on this higher standard, measuring against where people are currently, right? You look at Gary Vee, you look at Alex Hormones, and you think, that’s where the content has to be. The truth is, like, you’re comparing your chapter one to their chapter 50.

And so go back to the beginning and use that as inspiration to realize, holy crap, Mister Beast, when he was like twelve years old in his little bedroom, putting out content, those were terrible videos. But through consistency in time, putting out the quantity that leads to the quality, he becomes the largest youtuber in the world. That’s the path. Number one is Russia. Realize where you’re at right now. If you’re comparing your chapter one to somebody else’s chapter 50, of course you’re going to feel shitty. Go back and do an apples to apples comparison and actually look at the content that they were putting out in the very beginning. I think that’s going to give you a lot of inspiration to realize, okay, I can’t do any worse than that, because truly, all those big creators that you look up to, all those entrepreneurs, all those brands, they all started with that first piece of content, and that first piece was probably really abysmal.

The second thing that I really recommend, this is a great way to get outside of your own head and just get into the momentum of creating content consistently, because it’s a muscle that you have to develop, is to just go and create a fake social media account that you don’t even plan on telling anybody about. I did this back in 2021 because I really wanted to get good at taking an idea and trying to distill it in under a minute. So what I did is I created an Instagram account, and all I did every single day for one year was I’d sit down. Every day I take one concept and I try to distill it in under a minute, and that is actually quite difficult. It would take me like 10, 15, 20 takes sometimes to get it distilled under a minute, because that’s not a lot of time, and I like to ramble, right. But after that year of doing that, I got really comfortable on camera, taking concepts, distilling them, creating sound bites. And that’s very helpful when you’re on stage, when you’re on a podcast, you know, talking to somebody who has a massive audience. Right.

Is that ability to speak clearly and succinctly? And that’s a skill that I wanted to develop. And so I just created a throwaway account. I didn’t tell anybody about it. If you guys want to go check it out, actually, you can. It’s, what is the handle is just, I think Anthony Vasino one, it seems like one of those fake bot accounts that are trying to scam and be like, hey, come to my crypto forex. It’s like one of those types of handles. So go check that out. You can see a whole year’s worth of content there.

That’s absolutely abysmal. But it was developing a skill without the fear of judgment because nobody knew that it was existing. And Instagram was still pushing it out, and it was getting traction and gaining some, some engagements and some visibility. But that wasn’t the objective. The objective was just to build the muscle, to say, I’m the type of person who shows up every day and creates a new piece of content and puts it out there. And if you can do that for one year, then you can throw it all away. Start again now with this higher level of skill, because that quantity leads to a quality of its own right. We want to get to that place where we’re putting out high quality content, but the only way to do that is to make some headlong progress through a whole lot of garbage.

That’s just the truth. So the quicker you can get through that garbage, the faster you can get to the quality. And the best way to do that, if you’re really afraid of the judgments of people, you’re afraid of wrecking your brand and thinking like, oh, what if people, they see this content for the first time, and then they write me off because they think I’m just like this idiot who can’t speak on camera, then go ahead and just do your fake account. Don’t tell anybody about it. Build the reps, build the confidence, and then when you’re ready, start on your main channel. And in a very real way, that’s still what I do to this day. So we have the main YouTube channel, which has, you know, 215,000 subscribers, right? A little bit larger of a platform, but we still have the amplified impact. This podcast is a great example of it, where I use this with lower expectations, lower barrier to entry.

There’s no editing here. This is just me speaking stream of consciousness to you, trying to deliver value. And in the process, I’m still developing as a speaker, as a communicator, as a distiller of ideas. And so this right now, what you’re seeing is both a form of practice and, and performance, whereas on the main channel, when I really want that content to do well and be seen a million, 2 million times, that’s when it goes into pure performance mode, and we put a lot of time and energy into it. So different mindset. But hopefully that helps you get over that initial hurdle, which is the one that you have put in front of yourself and says, like, I’m afraid to put myself out there. Because on the other side of that, on the other side of getting outside of your own way, is unlimited opportunity to grow your business in a way that could transform your life. And I hope you take that opportunity.

So that’s going to do it for me. Guys and gals, I appreciate you as always. We’ll see you in the next episode. But until then, Stafford folks, my friends.