George Kao advises new content creators who feel like they’re "playing ball by yourself": expect low initial engagement, treat consistent creation as practice, and cultivate an internal locus of motivation rather than relying on immediate external validation. He shares his own path (started creating in 2014, committed to 70 then 100 daily posts), suggests supportive options (private Facebook group, his Soul Gym program), and recommends resisting frequent notification-checking and logging engagement data periodically.
Chapters
When you are beginning your content creation journey, you probably don't have a huge audience that is ready to receive and engage with your posts. And you might find yourself in this dynamic of what one of. One of the members of my ABC program said, playing ball by yourself kind of situation. What that means is like, you know, if you've seen the kid, you know, whether they're on the playground, they're playing some game by themselves, that's a pretty brave kid to keep doing that, right? Because I know when I was doing that, I felt really embarrassed and I quit after two minutes of playing by myself because look at the other kids. They're. They're over there, they're playing, and I want to be whatever it's like, but it's. This is what content creation as a journey is. It's in the beginning because we're doing authentic content. We're not just copying other people and trying to, like, use memes to build an audience, which you can do if you want to, but we're learning and practicing how to share of our soul and to practice expressing authentically something that maybe not in the world yet, at least not from our point of view. So therefore, you're going to feel like you're playing ball by yourself. Maybe you're playing, you're playing some, some ball or some game by yourself. And then there's just traffic driving by and they're looking at, oh, look, look at that weird kid, right? Doing that by themselves. Until you get so good at doing it that people stop and you become a busker. You know, you be. You're actually putting on a show and people are paying you money to say, please continue that juggling. It's amazing, right? Something like that. But in the beginning, no one, everyone's just driving by, everyone just walking by, and maybe occasionally someone looks at you kind of weird, right? So how do we, first of all, do you feel like that right now? You make a post, whether it's on Facebook, LinkedIn, you know, YouTube, Medium, wherever you're posting, and you're like, nobody's engaging. What's the point? Why bother? Do you feel that way? Well, I felt that way, you know, when I first began. Some of you, I don't know if any of you here or some of you watching this may remember my early exploits in content creation. I started in 2014. I started my business in 2009, not knowing about content creation. I was just hustling and, and trying to get people to buy my stuff and never building an audience and always having to Work so damn hard to get enough clients. 2009 to 2014, it was that kind of a salesman type of experience. It was very, I, I, I didn't like it. That's what made me want to quit my business. But then 2014, I got inspired. 2012 to 2014, I started getting inspired and I started in 2014. Took me two years to like commit to it. And I created something called Our Highest Work. It was a podcast and a YouTube channel. It's still there. The, the YouTube channel and YouTube channel, podcast and, and a Facebook group. A private Facebook group. Well, I don't, don't know if it's public or private, but I basically invited some of my friends to support me as I created this. And I didn't want to play ball by myself, so I asked my friends to at least watch me play. Okay, they want to play with me, that's fine. If you don't want to comment, that's fine. But at least watch me play, you know, and learning how to play by myself. So I, I, I dedicated myself to this and I said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this even if there's no comments. And most of them, most of the stuff I posted even in the Facebook group didn't get any likes. Even if my friends were there. A few of them got likes. Maybe like I had like one or two friends who always liked it, but I don't know if they watched it at all or read anything. Right. Just like, like, like. So I did that for 70 episodes. Not bad. 70. Well, I want you to get, to get to that number too. And then in 2015, I dedicated to my own brand, George Cowell. And I said, I'm going to go for 100 this time, not just 71, because I burnt. I kind of like petered out at 70. And I said, I just want to build my own brand now. So I said, 100. I'm not going to quit until I get to 100. And it's daily, Monday through Friday, every single day until it gets 100. You don't have to do that. But I felt I needed to do it, to not have it be a question at all whether I was going to create something and post something that day. There's no question I'm just going to do it. There's no question. It's 11:50pm it's almost tomorrow, and I'm going to do a three minute video and write two sentences because every, every, all 100 is going to be a video and a written something doesn't have to do two sentences, three sentences. Just fine. So anyway, the takeaway from this, you don't have to play ball by yourself. You can start a private Facebook group so that it's not public, and you can invite a few supportive friends and say, will you watch me play? Will you. Will you support me? If you see my post just like it, you don't have to read it. You don't have to watch it. I know we're all busy, but if you happen to see it, just give me a like or. And knowing the group, the group is there, so I know that I'm actually putting it there for someone who might see it. Okay? So that's one possibility. Another possibility for those of you who can afford it, join Soul Gym. Some of you are watching this who are part of Soul Gym. Some of you who are watching this are not part of Soul Gym. But Soul Gym is the program I created because I wish I had that myself, to have this kind of loving community to. To support me in playing ball by myself until I was good enough where I could, you know, play ball and have people pay me to play ball. So. So you don't have to play ball by yourself. That's takeaway number one. Number two, though, and this is maybe, maybe even more important, even if you create a Facebook group or even if you join Soul Gym, you're still going to have the experience where you post something and you don't get the feedback quickly. Right? Like, you. You post something and we're like, how many. How many of us are like, okay, I posted something. Now I'm going to go ahead and wait 72 hours to see if there's a like. No, we want. We wait 72 seconds. We check the notification. Wait, there's no. I just posted this 70 seconds ago. There's no like yet. Check. Another 30 seconds later. There's no comment yet. Right? Right. So no matter what, you're still going to have that window where you're. You feel like you're playing ball by yourself. You have a little bit of visibility hangover. And so I want you to practice in those. In that moment until you get your first, like, if ever on that post, know this. It is a spiritual practice of strengthening your internal locus of motivation. Let me. Let me unpack that just a little bit. You have two motivations when you post something, when you create. Okay? Most of us are creating, like, on social media or newsletter or website or whatever. We. You have two motivations, very simple. One is internal and one is external. When we're when we're refreshing our notifications to see if there's a like or a comment, you are essentially giving your power over to the external motivation. You're you. You are saying external validation. Please show me that that was worth doing. What I just spent time doing was worth doing and that I should keep doing this in the future. I need external validation for that. Understand? This is what's happening. So do you want to keep giving your power over to external validation or would you like to practice your internal power to say, no, no, no, I'm creating this for me. Yes. I'm creating it in service to some ideal reader, an ideal client in my mind. Yes. That's just a technique that I use to be able to have a voice or writing style that speaks to that person. Yes. But the discipline of showing up and posting and creating and posting, that's for me. That's for me. That's for my creativity, fitness. That's for my dedication to my higher self and the unfolding and the flowering of my authentic power. It's for me. And so therefore I'm going to post and I'm not going to check the notifications every 72 seconds. In fact, I'm not even going to check until the next time I post. Or maybe, maybe not the next time I post, but I'll check in a few days. Just maybe I'll check once a month or once a week for data collection purposes only. I have a spreadsheet where I, where I log the data and go, okay, that post got 0 likes. Moving on, moving on. So you maybe check once a month. You log data once a month. We will talk more about the data logging later on in this course because I think that's pretty important. But set that aside. If you don't do, don't do any data logging. I just want you to know that when you resist checking the notifications, see if you got any likes, you are practicing your internal locus of motivation and you are becoming stronger and you are growing your authentic voice and power and confidence. And that is worth everything because that spills out to everything. And so let's go on from here. There's lots of things we'll talk about in this course about actually getting engagement from people. But this lesson, I wanted to emphasize this because this shift of perspective about why you're doing will hopefully, as you practice this, keep you going past 70 episodes or posts even with no engagement past 100. And at some point the trickles of engagement start coming in and then you just, but, but, but by that point, it doesn't matter anymore because you're doing it for your own growth. And by sustaining that, the floods of engagement come in eventually. I look forward to seeing your comments below. This is helpful. How do you how will you deal with this syndrome, this experience of playing ball by yourself.
