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I'm going through a thing right now where I'm becoming hyper-aware of how many judgments I have about people's behavior and how much fear I have of expressing those judgments. I suspect it's why I don't make money. I hide all the good stuff behind cryptic, abstract bullshit. I've become a little more obnoxious recently, starting around the beginning of the year.

Could you sketch out what it would look like if I had enough influence to get someone to move from social media onto my mailing list, and then pay money? Like, what would the next step be? If I wanted to convert someone who just sees me as a weird friend who posts weird things on social media into a paying client, what would have to happen?

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If I were you, I would run an experiment:

Just fucking teach piano and tell fun/funny stories for a few months. Fuck all that boundary, confrontational "abstract bullshit."

Focus.

I understand it can be boring and you know I love being a provocateur, but be more of a scientist for a while...

If you do this for a couple of months and you still haven't made any money (or added some people to your list), we could have a more productive conversation about how to move forward.

I had a hard time monetizing my weird, cryptic/abstract performance art. This isn't to say i wouldn't have been able to figure it out eventually... nor am I saying that I didn't make money during that time.

But I would have made a lot more money, and added a lot more people to my list if I stopped myself earlier.

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Thanks for your replies. Let me clarify that by "abstract bullshit", I didn't mean the obnoxious performance art, but rather the boring intellectual stuff with lots of expert jargon.

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Got you. Well, again, it sounds like you know what the problem is ("boring intellectual stuff with lots of expert jargon"). What would happen if you tried not doing this?

You build influence by simplifying things -- not by explaining them.

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Haha, well, when I simplify things, that's when I get obnoxious because I'm literally calling people out on their bullshit using words they understand. Which is why, I suspect, I learned to talk in the abstract way to begin with. But I don't think this is the real problem I'm wondering about right now. I think I'll get better at this one with more exposure.

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It sounds like you already know you're hiding the "good stuff" behind "cryptic, abstract bullshit."

What would it look like if you didn't do this? Am I missing something?

What if you stopped being obnoxious for a while to see what happens?

Obviously, I haven't seen your stuff lately -- but your demo/instructional videos were fucking cool, man. Are you not doing that anymore?

I'd like to think that if I played piano, and I had an interest in teaching others, I could pretty easily build a list doing things like you were doing. I would definitely spend a little money on ads and doing some of the retargeting stuff I showed in the LOL prereq videos, but even without that, you're probably not far off the mark bro.

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