You attract people based on the value you bring. – AUDIO NSFW
What’s up guys? I hope you’re having a wonderful day today. Today, I would love to talk with you guys about the audience of zero. You see, last night, I had an awesome opportunity to hang out with one of my best friends. We went out to the sauna. As you guys well know, I love going out to the sauna. It’s a great place to just rip off all your skin. Make sure that you shed all the dead weight you possibly can and make sure that you burn it all off with fire.
You know what I mean. Burning off all the day’s grime, all the days ickiness, all the bullshit in life. Also one of the great things about going to the sauna with a friend is that this friend being that you guys are close and you don’t mind seeing each other naked, what’s great about it is he can literally scrub my entire body down and get all the dead skin cells in all the places I can’t reach—on my back, on my shoulders, and all that stuff. Man, I’ll tell you, I slept last night on fire. It’s a good fire. Your skin is trying to heal. It’s trying to grow back the first layer of skin.
One of the conversations that we had and it was really, really awesome was this idea of starting over, maybe not necessarily the idea of starting over, but starting something new. One of the things that popped into my mind during this conversation was this idea of the audience of zero. The audience of zero.
I think it’s easy for us, and certainly easy for me, to lose perspective when it comes to this idea of the audience of zero especially in the context of starting something new or starting some new hustles, some new grind, some new projects, even a new job, a new occupation of sorts. If you are an entrepreneur, if you are an individual that has an idea and no one else around you can support that, you must begin with the audience of zero. That I think is a scary thought for many people.
For me, it’s something that I quickly breezed through, but the conversations that we had last night really brought this home to me. About this really powerful fear that people have when it comes to beginning. No one’s listening to me. No one’s watching me. No one knows that I exist. And I think this even pulls from a deeper need, a deeper you know need that we have psychologically of a need to feel validated, a need to feel like we actually exist, a need to feel like we’re belonging to some group or some culture or some community of sorts.
I think we have to get over that. I think we have to get over this idea that that people want to listen to you on day one. They don’t. They don’t know you exist. So you must persevere with an audience of zero. Part of the conversation that were that we had around this idea, in his idea of starting anew or starting again is I said, “You attract people based on the value you bring and the connection that people feel to your message.”
Now, it doesn’t have to be a message on YouTube or a podcast or anything. It could be a marketing message if you’re in services or it could be your sales message or it could be the marketing message of what value you can provide to people. Let’s not be under any illusion here. We are now in the digital age and if you are an entrepreneur then part and parcel of your job is to spam. Not in a negative way, but spam. Get your voice out there.
Get your message out there so people can connect. But at the end of the day, you attract people. You attract people based on the value that you bring and the connection that they feel with the message. Now, I can give you guys many, many examples of experiments and projects that I’ve done where my audience of zero ended up becoming an audience of 15, an audience of 20, an audience of 100. That right there pretty much was the cap. No one else above a hundred.
And you say well, Peter, how long do you do it for? Years. I’ve done it for years. That the audience is small. So one of the questions you have to ask yourself is if you’re stuck growing this audience of zero to an audience of one, an audience of two, an audience of 10, 15, 20, 50, whatever, is that you have to continue to experiment through this. If no one is listening now, stay the course, stay disciplined, keep working towards your goals.
One thing that we ended up talking about here when it comes two goals is that your goals at the end of the day really don’t care how you feel. They never care about your feelings. You’ve set this goal. It’s stamped. It’s stamped in the ether that this is a goal that you had and you’re starting over with zero and you have an audience of zero and the days that you’re not getting the validation. The days that you’re not getting the feedback you want. Those are the days that you want to quit.
There’s one rule, there really is one rule when you’re beginning anything in life, a new project, a new hustle, a new career, a new job. The key idea, the one rule here is don’t stop. Don’t quit. Don’t abort. Don’t ever stop.
One of the things that I talk a lot about when it comes to beginning any type of project or any type of new hustle is you got to do it long enough. You have to do it long enough to learn what the aesthetics and nuances are of that for your own sanity, for your own edification, for your own education.
I always like to say that you should go at least 90 days. Ninety days is enough of the time. I was talking about this before, but I think it’s important to remind you guys. That doing any type of new project for 90 days is an awesome time box. It’s an awesome time box to start with.
Let me tell you simply why. The reason I have chosen 90 days for many, many, many years of my life whenever I start any type of side hustle or new project or new idea or new anything is 90 days gives me two distinct outcomes.
Number one, at the 90-day mark, especially for me as I deliver content daily to the web, this is easier for me at least to construct and time box to sit by because I’m delivering five days a week every week up to 90 days.
The first outcome is I absolutely despise what I’m doing. It sounds negative, but let’s read between the lines. That within these 90 days, I completely understand the good and the bad of this experiment. I understand what I enjoy about this new hustle, this new project, and I figure out what I dislike, more than dislike, I despise parts of this. Obviously, these are opportunities for me to pivot, to change my workflow, to change my message, to tweak what I’m doing so that it can be more enjoyable.
But secondly, and this is the most important, I learn how valuable this time box really is. Not only a 90-day experiment do I learn that I absolutely despise certain parts of this experiment, but I finally, number two, begin to really appreciate really, really appreciate the value of that discipline of not quitting, of not stopping, of continuing to move forward.
Yeah, within those 90 days, you’ll have some winds, you’ll have some highs, you’ll also have some lows. You’ll have some days when nobody shows up. But you have to be your own motivation here. You have to be your own inspiration here. Use the law of attraction. We’ve talked about that in previous podcasts. Go back and search for The Law Of Attraction or Peter’s Law Of Attraction.
I’ll give you TL;DR, the short version right here. It’s simply this. Focus on your goals and view the world through the lens of those goals. If you view the world through the lens of those goals, you will be able to see opportunities to engage, to see, engage and leverage those individuals and situations and things around you that can help you add one more building block to your goal. Does that make sense? Starve out your distractions. Starve your distractions. Feed your focus, especially in this crucial time when you have an audience of zero.
I know that it when it comes to beginning anything, there can be so many different fears, different anxieties. The reason is we’re thinking way too much into the future. I can completely admit to the fact that I struggle with this in many different situations. I’ve struggled with this in many different situations and I still struggle with this today. I can admit even today.
After I had my gym workout, I thought about all the things that I needed to do today. I thought about the individuals that I needed to drive to downtown Atlanta to see and engage with a talk with. I had these other follow-ups that I had deal with email, with getting some car and some track and some racing stuff ready. There’s just so much to do and it began to boil up in my stomach and made me think about all this stuff that’s in the future and it made me anxious.
So I reminded myself especially as I was driving home from my workout, I reminded myself to be present, to allow the world to be exactly how it is. The future doesn’t exist just yet. It doesn’t exist because the present is always present.
When you have this audience of zero, when you are starting out, gird yourself, prepare yourself for those trials, those tribulations. I can’t tell you how many people I have met who have quit on day 30 or quit on day 40 or quit on day 50 or quit on day 60. You’re almost there. Be a man of your word. Be a woman of your word. If you have the goal and you’ve set out the time box of when you want to execute this experiment so you can execute to learn, you can learn as fast as possible through this experimentation, not quitting, staying disciplined. You will win in life. You will win as you move towards your goals.
Let’s be intellectually honest, you might not even like what you’re doing at the end of the experiment. That’s okay. You might not even like it, but you’ve learned enough to know that this is something that you don’t want to do. I find it fascinating how many people talk about what they want to do, what they don’t want to do, and I often will sometimes given the right context and right opportunity, I’ll say, well have you ever done that for very long before? They’ll often say no.
Then I’ll say to them simply, well, how the hell do you know? How do you know whether that’s something that you really can do? How do you know whether that’s something that you’re capable of? How do you know if that’s something that through the act of executing on it and learning about it, that you will actually emergently find facets of this new project that you really, really, really enjoy?
You see your first conception, your first idea around a project or a new side hustle or a new grind or a new career or a new job is that you have all these assumptions, all these perceptions and assumptions around what you think it’s supposed to be. You have all these assumptions around what you’re supposed to feel after getting all these. These are all internal. They move so quickly through your brain.
But the end of the day, we know very little about the trueness of anything, until we really do it. I remember talking with my son from one example, but we were we were talking simply about how he might not like this upgraded motor it’s LO206 motor from a two-stroke engine to a four-stroke engine. He was wondering about “Hey, maybe I’m not ready for this new engine.” I said, “Well, you have you ever driven a four-stroke?” His simple answer was no. My answer to him was simply, “Well then, let’s try it.”
Let’s try it. You’ve already maxed out your ability on the two-stroke engine. You’ve been slamming the accelerator all the way down and you’ve pretty much bled everything that you can out of this two-stroke engine. He was a little anxious about upgrading to this new engine. He was a little nervous about it and I can understand maybe at his age, he’s just thinking it’s change, it’s new, it’s something I’ve have never experienced. Yeah I’m not going as fast as I want to go in this go-kart, but you know I’d rather be in what is known than an opportunity to challenge myself and grow.
Now, maybe I’m digging too deeply into this and maybe I’m just an overreaching father who’s speaking too much into my son’s enjoyment of his go-karting life, but this was a real opportunity for him to listen to me and say let’s try it. Let’s not make assumptions about what the outcomes going to be, what the feelings are going to be, what the experience is going to be. All we know is that you’re at a level of comfort right now and we want to continue this journey. We want to continue moving towards the greater goal of being a better race car driver, a better go-kart driver, and better whatever. Maybe it’s just gonna be a hobby. That’s fine! But let’s continue pushing forward.
Right now, for example in my my son’s karting life, he really has an audience of like five. It’s just him and the family, maybe even less, an audience of three. But he doesn’t worry about that. He’s enjoying the process. He’s certainly not going to quit because he has the eyes on the goal of being a great race car driver, maybe even a Formula driver.
Let’s get back to the beginning of all this. I went all over the place in today’s little podcast of sorts. An audience of zero, just remember whenever your beginning anything, you’re going to have an audience of zero. Your goals don’t care about your feelings. Starve those distractions. Feed your focus. That focus is going to drive you to continue to persevere when you have an audience of zero, when you have an audience of one or two or five and it feels depressing that no one’s taking on what your interests are.
Let’s just be quickly reminded, no one’s thinking about you anyway, which is why it’s important to remember, and I told this to my friend. You attract people based on the value you bring. So with your audience of zero, how are you considering, how are you thinking about the value that you bring to the world so that people are willing to listen to you—number one. Secondly, if possible, they might even be willing to pay you for your services or pay you for the value that you bring. But make sure you have them be able to connect to you through the feeling of that message.
If you’re listening to this podcast right now and you’re stuck and no one is listening to you, let me ask you three questions.
- How long have you been persevering on this and has it been long enough for you to extract lessons?
How long have you persevered on this endeavor? How long have you gone? How long has the experiment been? Has it been two weeks? Not enough time. Has it been a month? Not enough time. Has it been two months? Not enough time in my opinion. Three months? Maybe. Four months? Now, we might be cooking with fire.
The first question is how long have you been persevering on this and has it been long enough for you to extract lessons? Are you learning? Are you learning about what your market likes and dislikes? Are you learning about your message or becoming a better communicator?
- Don’t quit.
Don’t quit. You don’t know yet what the outcome could be. You don’t know yet who you can meet.
- Are you using the law of attraction?
Are you looking around the world and having your goals become the filter for your world? Are you in constantly seeing, engaging, and leveraging those around you and situations around you so that you can add building blocks to your hustle?
I’ll end with this. I often find that people and I think this is just the nature of the beast. I don’t want to sound negative here. But I think this is just the reality. That most people don’t ever spend enough time getting to a point where they really can master what they’re trying to do. I mean let’s be honest. No one’s going to pay you when you’re a novice. No one’s going to pay you for your services when you’re mediocre. They’re only going to pay you when you have some semblance of mastery. It’s at the mastery level that you value the quality of your work, the quality of all the effort that you’ve put into it is really at a point where people are willing to pay.
So don’t be deceived here. Don’t miss my message. My message is when you have an audience of zero, your goal now is to focus on how long of a time box do you need to create, to persevere on this so you can gain some semblance of mastery? So you can get feedback, so you can improve, pivot, change your messaging, change your strategy, change your tactics, so that people feel a connection to your message and they are more attracted to you because you provide even more value.
Simply put in a simple equation. The more mastery you have over a subject or an idea, the more value you create. Let me say that again. The more mastery that you have over something, which mastery can only be gained through time and experience and improvement in that area, the more mastery you have, the more value you create, the more opportunities for people to feel connected to your message and be willing to pay for said services.
Are you iterating enough? Are you pivoting enough? Are you changing your messaging enough? Are you experimenting enough? If you’re not doing any of that, it’s hard to have any excuse around why you’re not improving.
I have found in my short life that those who simply don’t quit and continue to inspect and adapt and improve that which they are doing will attend to get to a higher level of mastery faster. These individuals will start getting paid faster.
Let me ask you. Where is your audience? Do you have an audience of zero? How long have you been persevering? Is it time for you to inspect and adapt and see new ways to improve your message, to improve your hustle? Let me know in the comments, guys.
Thanks so much for hanging out with me in today’s podcast, guys. If you enjoyed it, smash the like button, subscribe, and let other people know about this.