Today I am discussing:
- How content can be the perfect training ground for the future you’re building
- How to triage your creation process to attract ideal clients
- Update on The Voldemort Project
I have been very focused on bringing a more masculine approach to all areas of my life the last month and a half.
Per my last newsletter, “It’s the masculine structure that protects the feminine magic. The riverbed that guides the water to flow faster.”
I started implementing more masculine in the two places I have had the most practice being more masculine in: fitness and sports.
Already I have seen some powerful correlations to how I can approach my business and content to make $150,000 by the end of the year (re: The Voldemort Project)
Fitness
I have scheduled M/W/F lifting sessions in the gym as well as beach workouts on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s while in Cabo so I can work on my speed and explosiveness to become a 4.5 tennis by next summer.
I was on the beach doing suicide drills (fucking exhausting in the sand) and during the huffing of puffing between sets I was considering the effectiveness of these suicides and how long my rest breaks should be.
Tennis is an interesting mix of sprint intervals between serves and a 2 hour endurance match.
I have done a great job of building up my endurance from the last 5 years of training for ultra marathons and doing 2+ hour long runs.
What I feel I could be losing at my age (35) is the speed needed to sprint from the baseline to the net to return a drop shot. Or running from left to right, back hand to forehand at a fast and strong pace without loosing steam.
If you were to time these individual points, at worst they may look something like: 1-2 minute exhausting rally, then about 30 seconds to set up for the next serve and then another 1-2 exhausting rally.
So it was clear what I am training for which makes it clear what the training need to look like on the beach.
Let’s call it 90 seconds of 80-100% sprint effort from left to right and front to back with 30 second rest breaks.
That’s only one point. So I’ll do that 4-6 times to get in shape for what would be one of the most exhausting games* of tennis.
(*one “game” of tennis is the scoring of 15-15 or 40-15, etc. Let’s say a person wins that first game, that will makes the score 1-0. If they win three more games, it makes it 4-0. If they win 6 games, they win the set. You must win 2 out of 3 sets to win the match)
Since I know the outcome I am trying to achieve it makes training more effective.
Do I need to be doing full depth barbell back squats at 245 pounds any more?
I’ve never seen any tennis player in a full depth squat while hitting a tennis ball.
So, no.
Do I need to be doing kipping pull-ups at CrossFit Cabo?
Every tennis swing start from the legs, not the shoulders or lats.
So, no.
Do I need to be scheduling in 1-2 hour slow runs?
Matches are typically 1-2 hours in duration with very short rests.
So, yes. I will also keep up my long runs to increase my zone 2 heart rate which will increase my stamina for longer matches.
May even be good to mix in some sprints every 10-15 minutes during these long runs.
I believe a lot of people can grasp this concept.
Train for the sport you’re playing.
What’s this have to do with business?
Most content creators struggle because they are training for the wrong game.
The game most of us are playing with our business looks like this:
- This is your souls work and you can see yourself doing this work or something close to it for the next 30, 40, 50 years
- You want to build a deeply engaged community that is on this growth journey with you for the decades to come
- You want to call in aligned and thoughtful clients who stick around for the long term
The game you’re set up to play is a marathon of intimacy.
But your content would have me guessing your training for sprints and one night stands.
You’re so focused on making content that gets more reach so you can gain more followers every single day. It’s the quick grab of a new follower, then you forget you even gained 10 followers last week because you don’t see it reflected in your income so you’re out for more followers.
It’s sprint after sprint after sprint.
A collection of one night stands with a few last minute “WYD?” texts as you go to launch your next offer.
Compared this to a content game of nurturing the people who are already following you, and have been here for a while and would even like to stay for a decade if you just invited them inside for dinner without trying to fuck.
What kind of content would you make if you knew you weren’t allowed to gain any new followers?
I bet you’ve also made content “just to get it done.”
WTF does that tell these “thoughtful clients” you’re trying to call in?
You’re not embodying the thoughtfulness you hope to receive.
You’re showing the world that you’d just like to quickly get things done.
Then you get upset that you attract followers who never comment and never buy. You attract the thoughtless, not the thoughtful.
What would content look like if you treated it as a training ground for the sport you are playing?
Let’s talk about it.
The Sport
I was just practicing my serve today and realized that I’ll have a specific focus going into practice, then realize another fault in my swing, then try to implement that, and so on until I’m trying to implement 10 things at once.
You already know the problem with this.
Today, I was only focused on the legs and driving up. Nothing else mattered. Not even where the ball went.
Legs are the most important thing because your whole swing starts ground up.
I am triaging my entire serve motion.
Just locking in this one thing until I get it.
Then I can move on to another focus.
Furthermore, when I was watching slow mo video replay of the best tennis players’ serves, I realized it was far less overwhelming. I wasn’t trying to grasp every aspect and movement of their serve, I was simply focused on what their legs were doing and mimicking that.
This can feel like a much slower approach, but where am I rushing off to? There’s no deadline to perfect my serve… and even if there were, this is actually the fastest way to get there.
What’s this have to do with business?
Triage your content.
You cannot get the most views and likes and followers and comments and saves and shares in one video.
You just can’t
(we’re not talking about viral content—because none of us are consistently going viral and, if it wasn’t obvious from the previous section, this mindset is what’s not working)
Different content has different purposes.
My content that gets the most likes isn’t always the one with the most comments.
Personally, I want more comments.
Why comments?
Because I am trying to build a tight community that wants to grow together for the next 50 years and community is not a one way street where I post stuff and never engage with my community.
The more comments, the more intimate our relationship gets.
And what I’ve noticed, people who comment once are also the people who have commented 10 times before (anecdote, not data).
So I analyzed my most ‘commented on’ content and looked to see if there is one thing I notice that I can implement in the next video.
Was it the topic? Recreate a video on that topic.
Was it asking a question at the end? Ask a better question in the next video.
Was it using a metaphor that expanded people’s vision? Use that metaphor again and explain it even better.
Was it because I was vulnerable? Can I soften into more vulnerable?
I want to pick one of these things that I believe is resulting in the most comments and focus on that for the next 15 videos.
Until I nail that, don’t move on to anything else.
**Two notes:
- I look at comment ratio. Meaning # of comments divided by # of views. A video that has 10,000 views and 20 comments (0.2%) isn’t as good as a video that got 1,000 views at 19 comments (1.9%)
- I also look at quality of comments. Some of my top comments are because I had a ManyChat automation set up (which is great!) and I don’t really value comments that are full of emoji’s or single word adjectives like “cool!” and “beautiful!”
Like I said, a very masculine approach. But worth the time investment because that’s what it looks like to train effectively, not passively.
This works for business overall.
What’s the bottle neck stopping your business growth?
If it’s leads, then what’s the ONE thing you can nail down and do nothing else until it’s nailed down.
It’s not as “fun” but far more effective and in the end will get your further than constantly jumping around.
At the end of the day, I think it’s more fun to be successful than to be distracted by new shiny things just because this one thing got hard and starting new things is fun.
The Voldemort Project: Update
Harry Potter was the only one to say Voldemort’s name and was the only one to defeat him. The Voldemort Project is naming my fear and facing it head on so I can defeat it. My fear is publicly failing at reaching a financial goal and having the world perceive me as a worthless little boy. So my commitment: I will make $150,000 by the end of the year and publicly share the journey getting there.
Total income = $2,792
I’ve had a 3 sales calls and pending commitments and another* sales call booked.
*As of editing this on Saturday, I just booked two more sales calls.
For the offer I have been mulling over this summer. It’s beginning to become more clear and will for sure include a retreat in February (oh fuck this is me committing to that 😬 LFG!)
The new offer won’t be far off from what some of you already know about: The StoryGrowth Framework inside my community Growth (I will probably just lock in one name and have it all be one thing)
The timeline of StoryGrowth will be extended from it’s 6-week container and I will be including more personal growth & mindset strategies, plus a deeper focus on community and working together to achieve your business and content goals.
I don’t think I’ll put a limit on sign-ups for the online offer, but the retreat will of course have a cut off.
If you want to get on the waitlist and be the first to know about it, join the waitlist here.
With love,
Matt
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