The Secret to Selling More Without Becoming Internet Famous (with Jonathan Goodman)

So today I have a fascinating conversation with my friend Jonathan Goodman, author of the new book out today, The Obvious Choice. This is even the fancy pre, like, advanced reader copy. Jonathan has already self-published 11 books and has a track record of helping businesses thrive and selling millions of dollars of products of his own. In this conversation, Jonathan shares his hard-earned tips on writing and marketing books and how to use those books to build your business on the backend. In this conversation, Jonathan shares his hard-earned advice on writing and marketing a book, but also how to use it to leverage your sales and build a profitable business. We talk about why you don't need to be internet famous to succeed, how to pick the right publishing strategy for your goals as a writer, and the steps he takes to create content that truly resonates with your audience. Jonathan's approach is practical, proven, and based on years of real-world experience. So if you've ever thought about writing a book or building a business without burning out, this episode is for you.

This is your 12th book, and it's the first one that you did traditional publishing for. HarperCollins published it. Why make the shift?

So I thought long and hard about this. At first, this book was actually going to be a self-published book for coaches. And I think anybody who's written a book will agree when I say that writing a book, going this deep into any project, is really a way to find out more about yourself and learn about yourself. I mean, writers write, writers selfishly write for themselves. I don't care what they say. They selfishly write for themselves to learn what they think and better navigate the world that they're in, whether that's business, whether that's personal, whatever they're in. And so this book, as I started to write it, I remember multiple times I started to write it when we were living in Mexico. And I remember multiple times speaking to my wife, Allison. I was like, I care way more than I thought that I cared about these subjects. Everywhere around me, I noticed people were just burning out trying to become somebody that they're not, particularly online, thinking that they need to do all of these things in order to just get a couple customers. They need to entertain the internet, run into this, this insane content wheel. And for some people, that fits them.

Yeah.

For most though, it doesn't. They're doing it because they feel like it's a way to achieve some desired outcome. You know what I'm saying? Like, they feel like it's gonna get them customers, and it might eventually, but it's a gloriously inefficient way, particularly if you're newer. And so Number one, I cared much more than I thought that I cared as I started to write this. But number two, as I started to realize how much global applicability there was, you know, most of my books, aside from one of them, have been for an industry. They've been books for personal trainers. Now, those books, some of them actually could easily have been written for the mass market, right? Or for all coaches or for all service professions. But Peter Thiel, and I talk about this in my book, The Obvious Choice, Peter Thiel gives the point of even if you want to make something really, really big, the best way to approach that actually is to start with the smallest available market. He says the goal of any business is to build a monopoly as fast as possible. The way to build a monopoly as fast as possible is to find the smallest available market that you can monopolize. Monopolize it, and then begin to expand outwards. And so, my smallest available market was online personal training.

Yeah, not even like personal trainers broadly, like you're saying. It's like online personal training.

Online personal training. I wrote 4 books, including the textbook, for online personal training. I wrote a 2-book series that is Habits of Highly Wealthy Online Trainers. It's not a habits book. It's not a habits book for coaches or service professions or even personal trainers. It is a habits book for online trainers. Ain't nobody going to compete with me on that. And so, we sold out the first printing of 3,000 within 24 hours, did another printing of 5,000, sold that out within a couple of weeks. This is what you can do when you're that specific. And so what I find is particularly when you're newer, the tighter you can go, often I'm not the first person to say this, the easier a time you're going to have making inroads in that market. And also because you're so tight, because you're so specific, you can operate at a much higher profitability with a much less complicated business. —there's a lot of problems that are very easy to solve when you've got excess cash and high profitability. There's not many problems that you can solve with not enough cash and a really low profitability, even if you have a lot of customers. In fact, even harder if you have a lot of customers. And so, I started self-publishing because, to be honest, Matt, ain't nobody's going to publish a book for habits for online trainers. Yeah. It's not going to happen. And so, when this book when this book I realized was more widely applicable, I started speaking to agents. And I had friends who have agents. I've sold a couple hundred thousand books. It wasn't hard to get conversations with them. And anyway, the perfect agent—

you have some proof of concept for sure—

and sold courses and everything, right? And so the perfect agent kind of ran me down at a conference, if I'm honest, and we hit it off. And she's been the partner I never knew I needed and can't live without now. Her name's Jadri. But what I realize now, and I can get into the economics of self versus traditional publishing, and there's a lot of false economies, yeah, that people don't understand between the two. But also, and here's the rub, man, if you start self-publishing and have a back catalog of self-published books that you make a lot of money when they sell, And then you go and you have a traditionally published book that gets the attention, your back catalog goes for the ride. Yep.

That's a really interesting way to think about it. That's, yeah, I don't know if I'd really considered that, like, second-order effect of having, like, a successful traditionally published book when you have a back catalog of self-published books that then people can go down, go down the rabbit hole on.

Let me, let me give you an extreme example, an outlier example of that. Yeah. Mark Manson, Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. So I'm sure you know Mark's history. You're in the creator economy. Yep. He's a great dude. Mark was basically a dating guy. I mean, he was a popular blogger, but he was basically a dating men's advice, right?

Kind of like Neil Strauss sort of thing. Yeah.

Obviously incredibly wise and not jerky or anything, but like, that's what he did. And so his, his first book— well, I don't know if his first book— he self-published a book called Models, which is basically a dating book. Yep. And he self-published it and sold it through his blog, and it did like reasonably well, right? But then that book just sat on Kindle on Amazon and was dead weight. It was a book by a blogger from many years ago who no longer talks about the subject that the book is on. Yep, basically didn't sell. And then Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck came out. And I mean, we've never had a viral hit of a book ever in history the way that Subtle Art took off, right?

Yeah, it was definitely— it was a unique thing for sure.

And, and, but what if you go and look now on Amazon on Mark Manson's profile, go and look at Models, it's got over 10,000 reviews. Right. My guess is that little book that was deadweight on Amazon has made him anywhere from $5 to $10 million in pure profit. Yeah. As a byproduct from the tailwind of Subtle Art. That's an outlier example. That's an extreme example. But a back— I mean, like, like a back catalog of anything once you have something go big.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, especially if that back catalog is profitable and you own all of the IP around it. Yeah.

And especially, especially when you said it's something that's as digestible as a book. That's what, that's what we're talking about. It's not saying like, oh, Mark had this and it would sell. Like when you have a book that does as well as Subtle Art has done, you have like anything that you have to sell in the back catalog is going to do well.

But I think like, it doesn't matter.

But still having like I, he had, I think about like, I don't even know if it's still up, but James Clear had a, um, like habits course for like a few years that he would just— $49. Yeah. $49. Yeah. It's $49 now. I think I got it when it was like $149 is like one of the times that he was like doing it. This was pre, pre-Atomic Habits.

And that's how he financed his blog as he was building it was just that one course.

He was like, okay, every time that I need to like make enough money to keep doing the blog and writing the book, I'll launch it at a discount. And he talked about this with Nathan Barry, I mean, a long time ago. But I'm sure that that's probably part of why it like went down in price the way that it did is like, hey, someone looks up and is like, the companion course to Atomic Habits now just $49. Oh man, I see courses for $499. What a deal from James Clear, right?

So imagine now if you're sitting there in my position, and you don't just have one companion course or one past Kindle book, but 11, right? I don't know what's gonna happen in the next couple years, dude, but if any one of these books that I'm writing— and I'm just gonna keep going, and I'm putting my heart and soul into them. I mean, it's, it's— I consider myself an author now. I mean, it's 90% of my time is on authorship. Yeah, it doesn't take a lot for everything else to come and kind of go along for the ride. So you asked about the traditional versus self-publishing. It was with those views in mind, and then the economics of it gets much more interesting too. I mean, if you are in the position where you can get— I would say actually, um, Matt Eliason is the one who first said this. He basically said, he basically said like So long as you can get a $100,000 advance or more, you should probably traditionally publish. If you can't, you should probably self-publish and prove yourself to the point where you can. Because at that point, I mean, I've been surrounded by just a truly world-class team. I mean, the product that we've put out, the editorial direction, the design, every aspect of it has been world-class. Could I have done this myself? You know, could I have found these people myself and hired them? It's like, yeah, maybe, but the incentivization structure would not have been as aligned. Yeah. And also, so I got six figures plus, right, in three increments at manuscript acceptance, uh, or at contract signing, manuscript acceptance, and then I'll get the third one on the date that the book comes out, right? So all have collected I've already collected two-thirds of my advance. So instead of paying the $30,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 to self-publish a book professionally, I've now already earned that. So you're not talking about, you know, spending $50,000 or making $100,000. You're talking about $150,000 swing, right, at this point with that cash in hand. And because their entire team is managing it, I can focus on the writing, the marketing, to the point where I've already produced and had accepted the option proposal for the next book, right? And I'm already more than three-quarters done writing it. And so I've already collected the first part of my advance for the next book, and I haven't spent any money, yeah, right? And so, so if you do this, this is, this is where the conversation of the difference in, in gaps of like, oh, you know, you make 60% self-publishing, you make 12.5% after your agent's commission traditionally publishing. It's not actually 60%, it's list price minus cost to print the book and then 60% of that. So it's actually more like 47, 48% versus 12.5%. But then you start to consider all these other things. Yeah, it's like the back catalog.

You're capping your— you have a benefit already built in with the back catalog that can help bridge the gap between that 12.5 and 47. I never really thought of it that way. Think about—

so here's— I started to ask everybody, right? But I also, you know, Ray Dalio and principles. He talks about reliability of information. And one of his main points is that repeatability of success is very important to trust the information that you're getting, for the reliability of the information. And so, okay, look at who else is out there talking about self-publishing. In almost every single case, they're either very young or very new to writing books. They've maybe put out one book and had mediocre to some success with it. Then look at every single case where somebody has produced multiple books and built a linear or exponentially successful career as an author, you know, primarily in businesses on the back end of it. Every single one of them traditionally publishes. Ryan Holiday, right? Ryan Holiday is one of the best book marketers on the planet, has a massive platform.

Yeah, if anybody's gonna self-publish, it'd probably be Ryan, right?

And so what does that data point tell you? Yeah. What does that data point tell you? It tells you there's more to the story is what it tells you.

Jonathan, one of the things that I liked the most about the premise of your book, The Obvious Choice, and like, as I was going through it is, you mentioned this in the, in our conversation, but thinking about the, maybe the lie that people are sold of believing that I have to get internet famous, or even just like niche famous, not that I need a million followers, I probably need like 10,000 followers. And I have to like, produce content every single day, I have to have something on Twitter every day, and I have to have a new YouTube video or newsletter. What is it that you discovered through your own work and the work that you've done with clients to show that that isn't as true or not, not true at all relative to our beliefs or what we've been told? It helps. Sure, obviously it does help, but it's not the requirement that every— like, I felt like I couldn't start to like sell or do anything before I got 5,000 email subscribers or 15,000 YouTube subscribers, which is ridiculous.

It obviously helps. It's obviously a positive if you can do it. But what you will find if you speak to anybody who has successfully done it is that it takes way longer and way more work, and they've sacrificed way more than you would ever expect to get to that point. And I don't think that that's necessarily a bad thing, as long as you appreciate what game you're playing. And put a pin in that, I'm going to get back to it. Think about, think, look around the house, look around you as you're listening to this, wherever you are doing dishes, walking outside, wherever you're listening to this podcast, look around you. Okay, so I've got a pen, I've got a clipboard, I've got Bose headphones, I've got my phone, I've got a microphone, I've got a Coke Zero mini can, the most perfect drink at the most perfect time, mid-afternoon. How many of these items, when you look around, did you buy because somebody on the internet told you the 3 things you need to consider about Coke Zero? Probably the answer was zero. Maybe the answer is one. Now think about the last 10 big purchases that you've made, whether you hired maybe a coach for something, what restaurants you went to up and down your street, all the other businesses. Consider whether you even know whether they have a social media account, not even whether you've consumed their information. You don't even know about it. The problem, I think, Matt, is that we're simply too close to our own worlds. We see what's thrust in front of our faces, thinking that that's the only way to do anything. The minute that we start asking ourselves perhaps different questions that challenge us to look outside of the bubble that we exist within, we realize that our social media bubble is maybe 0.0001% of the world that affects us and 0.0000001% of the world at large. It is so comically insignificant. Now, again, I'm not saying that it doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that over 90% of sales still happen through mostly offline word of mouth. And so you have a choice. You have a choice, which is you get to choose what game you want to play. And neither game is better or worse. And I want to be very clear with that. But the games are very different. The game of trying to win the internet, the game of trying to be a creator, the game of trying to be an influencer, the game of trying to be an entertainer. Those are all synonyms of the same thing. That game versus the game of trying to build a business.

Yeah, those two are not exactly—

wildly different games. Yeah, exactly. And they're not— neither game is better nor worse, right? But they have different rules of engagement, time horizons, odds of success, and reward mechanisms. It used to be if we wanted to be an entertainer, we hopped on a bus, we went to LA, we knew that we were going to wait tables on weekends, We knew that it was going to take a long time. We knew that we were going to get shit on by most people that we spoke to. And we knew that the odds were going to be very, very small that if we made it, but those that made it were going to benefit from outsized rewards for a chosen few. And if you went there, you knowingly signed up for that game. Right. Great. Wonderful. Inspirational. Go for it. The problem is now the games are conflated, the rules are conflated. And so what do you do? I believe that the goal is actually always the same goal as it's always been, which is why the book is timeless lessons on success, profit, and finding your way. It's timeless. It hasn't changed, right? Which is you want to become famous to the family. You want to become famous to the family. You want to fix what's inside your fence first. Now, that might mean that your family is online. That might mean that your family exists locally within a 2-mile radius of you. And I can give you examples of some people that have done that. But the goal is not to be famous. The goal is not 10,000 followers at all. The goal is to become the obvious choice to a few people, not just an okay choice to many. Like, what would you rather have? 50,000 listeners to a podcast that are tangentially interested in some sort of fitness, or 50 high-end business leaders who all exist within 5 miles of your house? That look at you as the obvious choice for fitness and health solutions locally? Yep. What's more valuable? What would you rather have? What's simpler? What's more profitable? What leads to less comparison and burnout? Um, there's— there's— they're both fine, you know, but there's only one Andrew Huberman. There's a hell of a lot of people who are fantastic, you neighborhood businesses. Yeah.

What do you— what are the other, like, key differences you see? Like, what are the— what are other beliefs that people have, or what are mistakes that people are making as they kind of conflate those two ideas together between winning the internet and, like, having, having a business that works?

It's a matter of focusing too much on what you can see and not enough on what you can't see. Um, I've sold information, as you know, on the internet for 14 years, um, and a lot of it— over 200,000 customers, 120 countries, over $35 million in information sales, call it. So I've been selling information for a long time, so I know what you have to do in order to sell and market information, which is you You have to neaten it up. You've got to post-rationalize something that's already happened. You have to create some sort of a narrative and framework around it and smooth out the edges so that it gets from A to B to Z much better, eliminating all of the fucking around and finding out that you had to do along the way. Whereas the reality of it is, yes, it's wonderful to learn from somebody who's already been there. Great. But you can't forget the most important part, which is the fucking around and finding out. Right. And so what a lot of people are doing is they're taking information that's being marketed and sold to them in even smaller snippets than ever. And they're thinking that that's the way that they have to do something because they saw I don't know, Joe Smith, celebrity expert in your industry, uh, market his videos that way, or do this trending video thing, or create these thumbnails this way, or whatever, thinking that that's how they got to where they are. And in almost every case, it's not. What actually happened was, A, it took them a very long time of testing and iterating and getting there in their unique way. And now that they're already big and popular, they could basically do anything. And people say, oh, this works. It's like, it's like people, everybody in the book marketing world talks about James Clear and how they're studying James Clear and Atomic Habits. That's what you have to do. I don't think that that's the right approach. James has only written and published one book, right? Massive success. Unbelievable. James is great. He executed unbelievably well. There's no question. But he's only done it once. He hasn't proven that he's been able to repeat it yet. Yeah.

And, and he spent 8 years building an email list and do it like writing all the things that he did.

And he spent also 8 years building an email list and now an additional 8 years and counting marketing the same one book, the same one product every single day. And so, yeah, what does that tell you? 16 years. Yeah. For one product. Now, that product, if you do the math and give it even a reasonable multiple, is a billion-dollar product. But I mean, you can't study that. And so, the mistake, Matt, circling back to this, is copying what somebody is doing now superficially and not realizing that social media success is largely a lagging not leading indicator of real-world success. Said another way, it's a misconception that in order to do dope shit in the real world, you've got to first do dope shit online. It's actually the opposite. You've got to first do dope shit in the real world, and then you amplify it by talking about it in a dope way online. Yeah.

Do you find that— so this, this triggers something for me. Do you find that We get a little too— this, what it makes me think about is the first year that I like quit my job at startups and I was like all in YouTube, uh, productivity content. And what I found at the end of that first year was that like the productivity, the goal setting, the task management, after a year of like that being my whole topic and only having to do that for like YouTube videos, blog posts, and newsletters. Yeah, what made it really like applicable for me going into that year is like, hey, I'm working at a startup, I'm busy, I have kids, I'm like trying to like still work out. I have these things that I have to, I have to like use these productivity strategies for. And while I still had to do that after the fact, there was a little bit like, well, the only thing I have to do today is make a YouTube video about how I'm going to be productive making a YouTube video. I think like there's a little bit of like the dog chasing its tail sometimes if you're just trying to do things online and not like actually doing more of them like in the real world, or even if you said like in the real online world, like if you have, you know, if you have a SaaS or a startup business that you're trying to run, it actually is like now that I'm doing like Hey Creator and some of the other stuff that I'm doing with email marketing for clients, like Okay, the productivity stuff feels applicable again because I'm like, hey, I've got 2 podcasts this week. I'm teaching, I'm teaching 2 like community sessions. I have these calls with clients. I'm doing all this stuff. Here's how I stay productive and focused for the stuff that I'm trying to do.

I love it. I love it. I love that you brought this up. I mean, again, it's just different, different strokes for different folks. Gabriel Zevin, who wrote a book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, beautiful book. Life and Times of AJ Foke as well. Wonderful fiction writer. One of the things that she said in one of her books is, and I'll butcher the quote, but she said, the things that we respond to at 20 are often very different than what we respond to at 40 and vice versa. When I was 20, I bought into all that shit. I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I wanted to be the most productive. I wanted to have the best mornings. I wanted to find the best supplements. I bought into it, right? Now, I think all of that stuff is comically cringe. But I take a step back and I realize that it's not actually. I'm the one who's changed. Yeah.

I mean, if you've been around this game, you need to learn those lessons to know they're cringe.

I look at, I look at the internet kind of as dog years. And so, like that, by dog years, I'm a 90-year-old on the internet. Like, I started my first blog in 2011. Like, I'm 90 years old. Like, I've taught people who have taught people who have taught people that are now teaching people how to do this stuff. And so when you're in it for that, it's not that long, but because the world turns over every 2 years and there's a new Periscope or Snapchat or Facebook Live or Instagram algorithm change or whatever, you see so many of these things come and go that you realize that you just don't want to be a dog chasing your tail anymore. And perhaps the better way is actually to find your way and just understand that there's going to be spikes that you're going to miss out on, and life's going to be better, and you're going to be the tortoise passing the hare in the long run. And so, I think you hit the nail on the head for me, Matt. I've got a 7-year-old and a 2-year-old and another on the way and 2 businesses. And I'm marketing a book and I'm writing another book. It's hella busy. But constraints in our lives act as a force factor, act as amplification agents in a really, really powerful way. People say, you know what, what happens when you have kids? And I said, kids are an amplifier. Kids are an amplifier. Anything that's good, the love that you have in your heart, to your time management, to whatever, is going to get so much better to the point where you're a monkey looking up the stairs. You don't even know it's stairs. It's just so far ahead. It's such a different universe. But anything that's bad that wasn't previously a problem, that fissure now gets spread wide open. And what happens is The more force factors that you have in your life over time as you deal with shit that comes up, bad stuff, good stuff, whatever constraints, the better you'll become. Yeah. And I think it's really powerful to look at that. And it's hard to recognize it if you haven't already also gone through that stuff. Like, my guess is your audience Matt has evolved to be a little bit older now than it was when you were making YouTube videos. But even then, like, I hired you. How did I hire you? I didn't hire you because you created some piece of content. I hired you because my buddy Dan said you were good at what you did. I did. If you remember, I didn't— I didn't interview you. Yeah, I didn't look up a single piece of your content. I didn't. Call up any references. And so what did you do? Well, right, you got linked up in a very tight behind-the-scenes family that people in the know know to be doing this stuff the right way. That's how it works. That's how it's always worked, right? Yeah.

Yeah, that's why I say like the timeless principles, and that's how it's going to keep working. Also, I think that's even further amplified because of the internet. I think it's hard to know. Oh, God. It's hard to know who to trust or who's going to do good work or who you can— who you can rely on, even if things don't go entirely the way that you want. Be like, well, I believe that this person is going to come through for me. Sure.

Well, if it's even that person saying that thing.

Oh, yeah, exactly. There's a new— that's another— that's another piece of it that this year has become even more of a significant, uh, like, element of the internet is like, how, how real is this thing even, right? Right.

I mean, I'm, I'm of the opinion that trust online is rapidly trending towards zero. We can get back to self-publishing versus traditionally publishing to demonstrate this. Every publisher that I met with asked me the same question. They said, why are you talking to us? You can obviously sell books. Why are you talking to us? And what I said to them is it's becoming impossible to know who to trust now, that I actually think there's going to be a return of gatekeepers. I think in any industry, in any society, you can just visualize it as a pendulum swinging back and forth. You know, eggs are good, eggs are bad, eggs are good, but only eat the egg whites. Well, actually, the yellows are pretty good. Well, just eat the yellows. Yeah, why don't you just eat the whole egg? Like, that's kind of the pendulum that's going to always swing back and forth. But in the process, it continually gets knocked askew. And so what happened when everybody all of a sudden had a media kit in their phone. What happened when all of a sudden anybody could self-publish online easily? Like, when I started my website, it was reasonably hard to start a website. I had to teach myself Photoshop on YouTube. Yeah, I had to teach myself basic HTML. It cost enough money that it was significant to start a website that you could, you could kind of trust the information because it was hard and expensive to have a website. That's not the case anymore. Right. And so whenever decentralization happens, there's a period where it's just a free-for-all, which is wonderful. Everybody has opportunities. And then there's a period where trust diminishes to just about zero. And people say, nah, we actually kind of liked those gatekeepers. We actually kind of like those music labels. We actually kind of like the fact that there was a magazine or whatever that we trust whose opinion we like and have found that we associate with or agree with, we actually kind of like that they tell us what to read. Yeah, yeah. And so having the name of a publisher, I think it's really valuable. And what's happening now, the combination of information overload— like, you can't Google anything anymore, like, good luck, man. How do you know whether the information is legitimate? How do you know what you need to know about a thing? Like, if I'm trying to buy a bike, like, what kind of brake pads do I want? Silicon, NaO, ceramic disc? What? Like, how do I even know? Like, ain't nobody got time for this shit, right? And so I don't even know what questions to ask most of the time. And so I'm certainly not going to go to the internet and just do basic Google searches. So information overload combined with the understanding that so much of the information is fake or scam or deepfakes or AI-generated influencers or whatever. I mean, right now, great, there's opportunity in all that stuff, but all that it's going to do is continue to trend trust lower and lower and lower in any of it. It's going to cannibalize it all, to the point where what people are going to look for is somebody or something that they trust. Yeah, as an expert in that thing. And so you look at what trust is. We trust the opinion of a neighbor more than we trust the opinion of a verified expert. Even if the neighbor knows nothing about a thing, and the verified expert is actually an expert in that thing with credentials. It's silly. It's ridiculous. But you won't like this about yourself, but pay attention to your own purchase habits. Do you actually make logical, well-informed decisions on just about anything that you buy? The answer is no, you can't. There's too much to know. And so you have to understand that the vast majority of the people who buy anything from you are going to be largely ignorant towards what makes your thing good or not good, or credentialed or not credentialed. It's not to say you shouldn't try to make it better or get credentials, but understand that the goal of that is to make your product better it won't actually do a lot to sell your product. And then you've got to deliver. You've got to deliver on your promise. If you don't, you're dead in the water.

Yeah, I, I've been thinking a lot about that in the, in the context of like having good taste online also, that the more that like the curated taste. And now I do think like to couch that statement a little bit, I think people who only rely on curated tastes are also like not quite doing everything that they could. The people who do, like they only share like their favorite tweets in their newsletter or like links that I, links that I like. I don't think like that's quite the answer either. Uh, only a few people can have like such good taste that they're going to like break through.

But I do think like, and you wonder what it was that led them to break through. Like here in Canada, we've got Heather's Picks. So Heather Reisman runs Chapters Indigo, and her book picks are a major deal. I mean, Heather like owns the bookstore, owns like— Heather owns like the bookstore in Canada. So like, of course her curated picks are— but she owns the space that they are created in, and then she has been proven to have good taste that people like, and so it's continued. Right. Um, she didn't build her popularity through her picks the same as, um, what's that actress who was the big book list?

Uh, Reese Witherspoon, I think.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, like Reese Witherspoon didn't become Reese Witherspoon because she had a book club, because book picks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then she had good book picks, right? So like, that's—

yeah, she created— if she picked a bunch of trash books, then it wouldn't, wouldn't have mattered. I mean, like Everyone tries the— this all kicked off because like, you know, Tim Ferriss started Five Bullet Friday. And so they're like, oh, I'm going to have my— I'm going to have my bullets. But like, well, Tim sold millions of books and had proven that he could like pick out interesting kind of weird, weird shit from the internet, as he called it. And yeah, it went from there.

He was the tastemaker. He proved himself as the tastemaker of his generation for sure. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. There's something else that I want to talk about, and this is— this is from the book also, because like we've talked about the importance of taste and like building trust and also how the, the trust that you have and the referrals that people can make on your behalf, the word of mouth, the importance of building a business that is sustainable and about like more of those 50, potentially those 50 people in your area rather than like 5,000 or 50,000 random, random people. So you have a 4-step content framework in the book. And I'd like to talk about how, but I'd like to think of it like with the context of like trust, sustainability, profitability. How do I create content now that's focused more on those elements that will bring in the type of people that are going to be good fits for my business instead of just being like, got to throw something at the Twitter machine today. Yeah.

I'm glad. I'm really glad that you brought it up. Well, first of all, Matt, thank you for reading the book. Oh yeah, you would be amazed at how many people I do these types of interviews with and they're like, okay, so, uh, why don't we start by you telling me what the book is about? I was like, I can, but like, that's not going to be interesting for many people. So thank you for reading the book.

A bit of a bummer.

I'm super glad that you brought this up because my fear in writing the book was that people would think that I'm just like shitting on content and social media and just this old guy who's like now getting hair in his ears and gray hair and whatever and just like, these kids don't get it.

Like, all right, maybe that's so I just want to hear it.

Maybe, maybe there's some of that. We will see. But I developed this framework for our students years back to help them figure out, because my opinion is you should always be creating content. From day one, you should be creating content. But the reasons over the course of your career, as your goals change, as your experience changes, as your career progresses, the reason why you create content and what you measure you're going to measure the success of that content against evolves. And so I created this framework that has 4 steps for you, for your clients, for your industry, for the world. Okay, 4 steps. At the beginning, creating content is the single best way to learn something, right? The single best way to learn something is to teach it to somebody else. It forces your brain to remove— whenever you're trying to communicate something to somebody else, who you have to assume has no prior knowledge of that thing and no biases that are the same as yours, you have to do something in your brain that is very difficult to do, which is you have to empathize with other people and change that information out of your own brain to be something that others can generally understand, which forces a greater level of understanding than you could ever have. If you've never taught that to somebody else. So it doesn't matter what medium you do this in. Do a podcast, YouTube, write, whatever. It doesn't matter what medium you use. The important part when you're starting is that you create content and you don't care if anybody else consumes it. Now, this is very hard to do when you're in this world and I, I understand that, um, you know, but my first book— I'll tell you the story of my first book, Ignite the Fire. It was a way for me to learn. I had a blog called championlifestyle.blogspot.com.

Love it, love the Blogspot.

4 different times there are posts— if you go back on the Wayback Machine, you could find this— 4 different times I had a post of, guys, I know I've been gone for a while, but I'm back now and I'm here stay.

Encouragement for everyone who's wanted to or been too afraid to write that post.

In, in 2 years, I had one comment, which was on the first ever blog post that I wrote, which was from my mom. Yeah. And I think at the time, probably I was pissed off that other people weren't reading it, but now I realize how powerful that was. At that same time, I had a clipboard. I was a personal trainer, so I had a clipboard, and on the back of my clipboard, I wrote down a note of everything that I did.. It was just a quick bullet as I was with my clients who were in the gym. And it was everything. It was like, "Taught this exercise," you know, "Taught deadlifts," "Have a crush on the secretary," "Client had an objection in a sales meeting," like everything, right? I didn't write anything about it, but I wrote down a bullet note. And then I'd go home at night and I'd reflect on my day. And I'd write perhaps a better way to have dealt with the situation or how I should deal with that situation next time. I couldn't think of a good way, I'd call up friends and I talked to them about it, and I document this. Well, within a year or so, my document was about 100,000 words long. Wow. My mom said, you should hire an editor. You got something there. You should turn it into a book. I didn't know anything about how to make a book. I'm a personal trainer in a gym in Toronto. I don't know any authors, let alone any editors, but I knew where— I knew where books were. And so I went to the bookstore and I looked up the names of bestselling fitness books and I wrote down the names of the authors and I went home and I emailed them and I asked them for their editor. That's how I found my editor. And that's the story of Ignite the Fire, which was the first book that I wrote. It was actually a process of improving myself at my job. Right. And so that's number one. Number two is for your clients, for your customers. So eventually now you're obviously going to get better. You're going to get some customers. We talk about how to get customers from nothing the rest of the book. But you're going to have some customers. Now what you do is you create content for your customers. You don't care if anybody else reads it because by this point, you know enough to help the people that you can help. But you don't really know anything that is really deep, deeply wise or insightful or whatever. You've read the same magazines, you've watched the same videos, whatever, right? But what you know can be useful for others. And so, you start answering your customers' questions via blog posts and you start to get in some reps writing maybe with some character, speaking maybe with some character. Doing. You're practicing that and you're sending it out to your existing customers. And they're going to benefit from that. They're going to have their questions answered, whatever, right? They might pass it along to other people. What also often happens at the stage, because you're actually solving problems and not trying to impress anonymous people on the internet, well, the stuff is genuinely useful, right? It might get picked up. It might get picked up. And it might go viral, it might get shared along, but that shouldn't be your goal. I actually think that most people in most businesses should stop at stage 2. Stage 2 has almost every benefit of content to somebody running a business, right? Devoid of the vast majority of negatives, the constant cycle the burnout, the comparison, the jealousy, the obsession over superficial metrics that have nothing to do with the success of your business. Yeah.

So just to like put that, put that up like in a bill on like to highlight that you're saying that if you create content for yourself, you create content to help your customers and clients, you can have a very good business without all the bullshit and all the craziness and all the stress that can come from like, I got to go viral, I got to grow my subscriber base, I got to do, I got to do all these things.

That's where most people should stop. But what, what some people decide to do, what I decided to do, is evolve into number 3. So, so what happened was I evolved championlifestyle.blogspot.com into jonathangoodman.com. And I started profiling my clients. I had an award that I called the HF badge, the hardest fuck badge, to whoever, whichever one of my clients was the hardest to fuckest that month. And I wrote a profile on them. I answered the questions, you know, like, does fruit make me fat? Like, I answered those questions. Well, those articles started to get picked up. All of a sudden, Livestrong names me one of the 24 best personal trainers you've never heard of. All of a sudden, Schwarzenegger's blog reaches out and offers me a writing spot. Get involved in a Men's Health book. Like, this can start to happen. Now, the interesting thing about all of these multiple articles that went viral, uh, about all of these profiles and rating spots and all these places is none of them led to a single customer. Not one. Nobody ever came into the gym once, ever, as a result of me going viral multiple times, being in Men's Health, having a writing spot on Schwarzenegger's blog, being named by, at that point, one of the major authorities in health and fitness as one of the best trainers. Livestrong back then was the biggest fitness and health website in the world. Now they were doing so much black hat shit that they got crushed by Google, but that's a whole different story. But none of them led to a single customer. What they did lead to though was industry attention. That combined with the fact that I was actually legitimately successful in my job outside of it led to a whole bunch of people from my industry asking me how I was doing what I was doing. And so stage number 3 is you start producing material to educate and help others in your industry. Rising tide lifts all boats. And then you start building a platform. If you decide to go into stage 3, this is when things like follower count starts to matter a little a little bit, because then once you have a community, you can turn around and ask that community what they need, right? So I did it opposite. I didn't have a product. I built a platform. I built a community. And then I did 137 13-minute phone calls, and I asked them what they needed, and then I went and built it. And I followed that process multiple times, working backwards, right? And so that happened. And now, so this would have started, this process would have started in 2008. I started writing on that blog for the first time. Now we're in 2024. And my first traditionally published book comes out in 2025. So that's, I don't do public math, a bunch of years. That now evolves into potentially stage 4, which is trying to impress the world, thought leadership. Yep. What's that? 25 minus 8? 17 years?

17 years.

I've written 15 million words on the internet. Yeah. 11 books.

Yeah. When your book blows up next year, you'll be an overnight success. Yeah.

Yeah. Now I think I might be ready to be a thought leader. Right. Yeah. So this is the process and thought leadership, like, I define thought leadership as being very different from being a creator or from being an influencer or an entertainer. Um, thought leadership. Thought leadership is about the owned reputation of the person, not about their ability to create content. Give me an example. Um, Elon Musk tweeted one time about sleep. It was a tweet where he said that you should raise your head up a certain whatever, a couple inches. And what he did then is he put out the tweet and he had 30,000 shares, 300,000 likes and whatever. Right. So as a test, I decided to copy his tweet and I tweeted it. And as you know, Matt, I'm not that active on Twitter. I'm more active these days. I'm much more active on Instagram, fitness industry, blah, blah, blah. So I didn't have a big Twitter following, right? So I copied his tweet and I got one like from that same person who likes every single one of my tweets. It's not about the content once you become a thought leader. It's about your earned reputation. And this is why you have to be very, very careful looking at people who have earned reputation elsewhere. Producing content and thinking that you can copy their formula. Yeah. And you're going to have similar success. Um, you're missing the most important part, which is the dude builds rockets and cars and controls money and is probably an alien from outer space, either that's come here to Earth to destroy us or make us better. Um, we still haven't figured that part out yet, but he's winning. Whatever he's doing, he's winning. That's a good— whether you like him or not, he's a good example between, between the two.

And it also makes me— it also makes me think about how that earned reputation, especially if it's earned in a different industry. Yeah, it often— it often does translate. But we also have to be— I think it'll be interesting to see over time, like, How much does the trust level that you have with that person, if they're trying to transfer their, their earned authority and one, one part over to you, because like Elon's going to get a lot of engagement because he's Elon, but then like how many people are going to like take that, take that sleep advice. Now maybe he links to something that like a study or something that is like, he's just He's more highlighting stuff. That almost goes back to like the, um, you know, do you have, do you have good taste? Can you curate information effectively? Um, but I do think like that, yeah, I've, I've tried to do that kind of like copy insert famous tweet here a couple of times and it always, it always falls flat.

Well, and so I mean, now you're getting into like why things go viral and I wrote a book called Vironomics that dove into all of this. But like, people share as an act of select— people share for one of two reasons, right? Number one is an act of selective self-representation. We share things. Yeah, we share things because we want others to feel like— we want to believe that others think that we are intelligent, intellectual, interesting, attractive, or funny. I call it the triple IAF drug. Or we share things as kind of an act of social climbing. It's like you're in high school again, and there's like a cool guy and you're trying to associate with the cool guy and like, hey, look at me, I agree with the cool guy. Or, hey, look at me, I don't agree with the cool guy. Look at me, I'm so, I'm so wise. And, uh, and it's, it's, it's one of those two things.

But yeah, what was the reply, guys?

Uh, the reply, guys. Oh God, the reply, guys. What, what, um, but then you look at like what you can sell. Um, so, so let's bring this back a little bit. You look at what you can sell. And the biggest difference to me between thought leadership and influencership is an influencer— there are examples of influencers who have been able to build massive big businesses. There's not many, and there's fewer that have been able to do it sustained over an extended period of time. If you actually pay attention to these people over an extended period of time. They're actually reinventing themselves every couple years in almost every case. But also, look at what they're selling. In almost every single case, it's low-priced items that are commoditized, that are sold based off of largely fear and emotion. We're talking makeup, clothing, hair extensions, various types of vitamin waters, supplements, They're— it's all the same thing, right? Pay attention to it. And they are by definition commoditized. They're by definition very difficult businesses to scale, extraordinarily difficult businesses to scale. And so these people are reinventing themselves all of the time. And there are some examples of people that have been able to blow the roofs off with it, right? But really not that many. Over a long period of time. And even the ones that do have so much just nightmarish effects, like a Logan Paul and KSI with Prime. Like, they're getting sued by everybody and their mother, man. Their sales are spiking up and down like this. You can't build a beverage business like that. There's no way. You just can't. The model doesn't work for it. And so that's number one, right? In those businesses. And again, it's not bad. You just have to understand the game. My opinion is if you know the rules, you figure out where to play it and how to play by those rules to best serve you. A thought leader, on the other hand, though, a thought leader sells largely based off of trust. And so publishers, for example, don't publish thought leaders' books as often anymore or don't publish influencers' books as often anymore. Because they've gotten burnt, because they know that this person really— nobody's coming to them. You know, if you can entertain around a subject, all that you need is a basic 101-level knowledge of the subject. In fact, if you understand the Dunning-Kruger curve, you understand that actually the less information that somebody has about something, the more confident generally they are on that subject. And as they get more knowledge on a subject, they actually start to doubt their intelligence because they know all of the reasons why something may not quite be that case because nothing's clear-cut. And so they're less willing to entertain on that subject, right?

Yeah, it's kind of like what you're talking about even at the beginning with self-publishing is like, hey, a lot of these people teaching self-publishing have only— are young and maybe have only self-published one book. They don't know enough yet to be like, well, here are all the issues, or this is why it might not work out, or like, I don't even, you know, it—

well, here are the false economies, or here's the real economics of it. Yeah, you just, you just don't understand unless you've been through it. I guess, Matt, you know, a thought leader has the ability to sell a much wider variety of things. Hi, Calvin. Have a seat. I'll be with you in a second. A thought leader has the ability to sell a much wider variety of things. And also not commoditize things, which means that they can sell it much more profitably, which means that they can maintain a lot more control over what they sell often. It's just a better position to be in. Yeah.

Well, Jonathan, this has been a great conversation. I'm really excited for people to get your book, The Obvious Choice. We'll make sure that the links for everything are are put in. And you said you're mainly on Instagram. I know you have The Obvious Choice podcast. Anywhere else that people can find you or learn more about you?

Yeah, let me make you a deal if you're listening to this. Okay. The Obvious Choice is the book. You can get it in Kindle, Audible, hardcover, anywhere where you get books, right? Pick up the book. I know that you're going to love it, but I want to guarantee that you're going to love it. And so if you buy the book, when you buy the book, if you don't absolutely love it, you can message me on either Instagram or Twitter. I'm @itscoachgoodman on both. And send me a message and I'll give you back 100% of what you spent on the book. So please check it out. I think that you'll really like it. I think that it will perhaps bring your shoulders down back to their proper place away from your ears for a little bit as it pertains to this kind of stuff.

Well, this has been super helpful. It's been encouraging and enlightening to me to think about that 4-step content creation process, I mean, like, I really am thinking about like, are there areas where I can just stop at phases? Yeah. Stop at stage 2 and do a little bit of stage 3. I feel like that's actually where I'm at right now. So you gave me like a good, a good model to think about. Like, yeah. But also thinking about like, I probably spend too much time recently in stage 3, whereas like, I've thought about this also of like, when you feel stuck, just go back to stage 1. And start to make something for yourself again. Yeah. When you make something for yourself, someone's gonna respond, answer that question. Now you're in stage 2 and just like, it feels like you can kind of like bounce around those stages, which is really encouraging.

You absolutely can. The, the framework that I give is, uh, whenever you're trying to create content, viral, value, depth, you need a combination of those 3 kinds of content. And that the, how much of one or the other might change depending on where you're at, depending on what you need, but viral. Value, depth. It doesn't work unless you have all three. And, and I think, I think you're doing good. I think you're doing good, Matt.

I like your stuff. Thanks, man. I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks, Jonathan.

Got it.

Really, really enjoyed it. And I'll talk to you soon.