The dangers of wanting more followers...

I knew a guy that spent about a decade on the road as a musician, and, you know, the thing he said that he wanted to do was support his family and just be able to do the things that he loved. Like, he never wanted to be famous, never wanted to be rich. That was not what he wanted. He just wanted to support what he loved to do and to be able to be seen and heard in the work that he did. And what ended up happening is after doing this for about 10 years.

He ended up having to step away from the touring lifestyle. He made the choice. It wasn't a have to. He made the choice to do that. And this guy just, like, it rubs me the wrong way to talk about him now because he started to dive into this next thing, and the next thing was building something online. And he started with the same passion that he did his music career. He started by.

Wanting to build something that he knew meant something in here. And then somewhere along the line, he started getting caught up in the idea of, like, subscribers and followers, because he saw these other people showing up and they had less experience than him. They had less real life experience. They didn't have the friends that were doing all this cool stuff. They didn't have, like, real life opportunities to play at major festivals and to, like, you know, be on records that had done cool, successful things. But they had subscribers, they had followers on Instagram. And he started to get clouded by this idea, and he started to feel like this was, you know, maybe he needed to look at what they were doing order to do the thing that he wanted. He lost sight of what the real goal was. The real goal here, as I remind you, was to support his family, to make enough living to, like, be able to continue to do the creative work that he wanted to do. But he started to see all the people offering up these shortcuts for more followers, more subscribers, all that kind of stuff. And sure enough, he started following those tactics and lost sight of the heart behind what he did. And while his follower count grew, the business that he was building never really did anything. It never grew much. He's able to get another job that supported what he loved to do, but his own thing didn't grow like he wanted because he lost sight of that vision.

And.

You know, this guy, like, really hits home for me. And it's really frustrating to talk about this because, you know, he spent 10 years making something that was his passion and that built this thing for him. And then he walked away from it, and then he lost sight of it. He lost Sight of it in the second draft because he felt the fear of, what if I do this wrong? What if I have a misstep here? What if I fail? What if somebody laughs at me? What if somebody from this other world thinks that it's just not working right? And he started to doubt his own capabilities and turn to shortcuts and really just chase the numbers, to put it frankly. And the reason that this story is so hard for me is because it's me, is because that was me. That was exactly what I did.

I wish I could just.

I wish I could say it easier. I wish that I could just come out and.

Express to you fully what the. Like, how frustrating it is to tell that story and know that it's my own. But I am so grateful for that story because it's shown me so much in this time.

I started doing these videos where they're now unedited and more just, like, throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks kind of vibes. About two weeks ago, I think I'm going into my third week, and I have learned so much in such a short amount of time, arguably way more than I have in the last six or eight months by doing this exercise. And it's going to take a lot of guts for me to say this, because all that fear still exists, and I've been this guy for so long, and I still get caught up in it. I still want more followers. I still want more subscribers. I still want do this thing. But ultimately, what I realized is that I don't want to get more followers. I want to build more leaders. I want to build more leaders in the artist community. I want to build more leaders in the creativity space, more photographers and filmmakers and creatives and poets and musicians and whoever that's there that's wanting to make something that really get somebody to feel something on the inside. The people that are ready to show up and be more vulnerable. That's what I want to. Have you heard me talk about it before? We don't need more followers. We need better ones. And to have better ones, we have to define what better looks like. And what I've been reminded of over this time, over all that big, like, year and a half of failure of me losing sight of what it was I was trying to do is that I was hiding behind a follower count, hiding behind this thing. And I can hear some of you, and you're like, well, Lennon, how can you. Like, how can you hide behind a follower count when, like, you don't really have any followers? Yet. And maybe this is where you are and you're like, well, I can't be hiding behind this thing because I don't have that number yet. But what I want to say is, like, hiding behind that number still is a possibility because it's an opportunity for us to make an excus Right. It's an opportunity for us to say that we're not ready for something, that we're not ready to start trying to sell something because we don't have a big enough following yet. We're not ready to start to share this thing because it's not going to get us more followers. It's not going to get our biggest return on our investment. How often do we hear that in the marketing space? Right? It's not ready. We're not ready because, you know, to ask for collaborations because we're still too small. Nobody's going to want to be a part of what we're doing. Right. And what's ironic about that mindset, because I've been this person recently too, is that the people that I've worked with along the way, what I learned in those moments of success over 10 year, a 10 year span, is that the friends that I built, that I came up with were the ones that helped me the most. They're the ones that got me the biggest opportunities that I ever had. And again, I lost my way. I started to compare myself to what other people were doing instead of carving my own path and doing the real work that it took to figure out how to just authentically show up as me. It's an opportunity for us to say we're not ready to release a project yet because it's not fully optimized. I would argue that that is hiding behind follower count. That's hiding behind a vanity metric that doesn't necessarily mean anything, let alone you are not entitled to a bigger number. But what you do have is an opportunity to show up. An opportunity to connect deeper with the ones that matter to you and the ones that you will matter to to them. So selling, sharing, collaborating, those things have nothing to do with a follower count. It has everything to do with a connection and developing a deeper connection. And I just want to say thank you to those of you that have left such kind comments about.

About me showing up more as me and how you can feel the emotion. And I'm so glad because I feel it. It's real. It's totally real and it feels so good. And so I want you guys to check out this video here where I talk about how you don't need more followers, you just need better ones. I think this is a good one to check out if you found this inspiring at all. But I just want to say that I appreciate you so much, and I'm really excited to see you step into yourself and figure out what it means to not hide behind something anymore, but to start to step up and figure out what you're trying to say and how you can say it. If I can help you do that, let me know. I'd love to do to do that and to be a part of whatever it is that you're making. All right. Sending you love, and I will see you soon.