How to Stand Out on Social Media in 2026 (as a Small Personal Brand)

2026 is setting up to be the riskiest year for entrepreneurs who want to build a personal brand. There is so much noise and AI out there and it's squeezing people out. I've spent the last five years obsessed with how to build a powerful personal brand. And now I generate millions of dollars every year online and speak on stages throughout North America on this exact topic. And what I'm seeing right now has me genuinely concerned for newcomers. The smartest business owners, big and small, are realizing that connection to the audience distribution is the last thing left that AI can copy. A personal brand online is no longer optional. It's the only way to survive the squeeze. But if you using a 2024 playbook in 2026, you're going to waste years running in the wrong direction. So that's why today I'm going to get into these seven critical shifts, the absolute non negotiables that you need to make in order to get into that top elite group that just dominates the competition. Let's get into the first shift. Number one, someone with half your IQ is making 10x the income because they're too dumb to overthink. This is the biggest shift you need to make mentally before we even get into the strategy. I speak to so many people across the country every year and the number one thing that keeps everybody just behind from their pot, overthinking. They're overthinking all the different things that are gonna prevent them from being successful with a certain strategy. So for example, if I'm teaching a strategy on conversions and I'm going through how you get people from just stranger to follower and then follower to customer, and I go through that whole thing and then somebody will ask a question, well, what days do you post or what camera did you shoot that with? It's because you're thinking about all the wrong things. And so if you find yourself doing this, if you find yourself thinking about all the little things that maybe are important but really don't matter, big picture, it's because your brain is just getting caught up in all the details and not in a mode of taking action. And you have to catch yourself from doing this. I actually got stuck for 10 years in this in a rut, honestly, because I was overthinking everything. I would think of the seven reasons why this won't work before I would think of the one or two reasons why it would work. And so if that's you, you have to be honest with yourself, you have to stop this because it keeps you in an indecision mode keeps you from taking action. So I used to get down on myself, say, hey, I'm just lazy, I'm not doing anything. And then it really becomes this like negative cycle when you snap out of it. The best way to do this is to start taking action first and then figuring out as you go. You're never going to be 100% certain on any marketing strategy, on any business strategy, but you can probably get to about 70%. So I would tell you this, best way to get over this is to make a decision to move forward when you are 70% sure. Stop waiting for 100%, it's not coming 100% certainty, clarity is not coming 70%. And then you actually figure the rest out as you go. So when you're considering something new for your marketing or for your personal brand, think about, is this going to get me to my goal? Is this putting me on the right path, I'm going in the right direction and will it work for me? 70% sure, okay, I'm doing it. And then you just start taking action on this. I use the set the date formula for this. So when I want to launch a new thing, I'm going to say I'm going to post this piece of content by Friday. I'm going to post this piece of content even by today. And I make it a non negotiable on my schedule. The other thing I'll do is when I'm launching something new that I haven't done before, like an event, a webinar with all of these things, every time I've done something new for my business or for my marketing, I use the set the date framework, meaning I put it on the date. I make a commitment to the public first and then I work backwards. Now this means that you're going to be under some pressure. But what I've found is when you make a public commitment, when you make a commitment to other people, you will show up. If you put some pressure on your shoulders, you'll be surprised at your ability to push through that and come through. We're all really good at letting ourselves down. Like we're really good at telling everybody else, hey, I'll show up for you. If you tell. If you make a commitment to your clients, if you make a commitment to your family, if you make a commitment to anybody out there, you show up for them. You're not going to miss that appointment, you're not going to flake. But when you tell yourself goals, you're like, hey, I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to build my personal brand. I'm going to post three pieces of content this week. It's really easy for you to let that one go. What I would advise you to do is flip it to the opposite and put that as a non, non negotiable number one and then work backwards from there. So when you make a commitment like, I'm going to show up on this date, I'm going to be doing these pieces of content. I'm going to be doing this webinar on this day. What you've done there is you've made a commitment. And even though you might think, well, nobody's really going to complain if I don't show up, if I don't do it, just the idea in your head that you made that commitment is going to give you that much more power for coming through for yourself. So think about doing this more often. Even with something as simple as, hey, it's 2026, I'm going to be posting more content this year. It's first quarter, second quarter, you're going to see a lot more of me on social. You're going to see a lot more of me here in this area. By telling people this, it's going to trigger your brain to actually coming through because you're going to be thinking on that week when you didn't do it, man, I don't want to let people down. Remember a few weeks ago I told them this, I need to actually come through and do it. So the first thing here is going to be to switch out of a mode of inaction and overthinking and into a mode of taking action first. I know it's a lot easier said than done, but the rock is hardest to move when it's stuck. Once it gets going, momentum is going to be your friend. Number two is going to be the right thousand views beats the heck out of the a hundred thousand empty views. There's two types of content you need to be posting when you're building your personal brand. Top of funnel and bottom of funnel content. Bottom of funne content is when you actually want to convert somebody into being a customer. It's more sales driven. And then top of funnel is just attracting more people into your tent. Think of it like this. Everybody's walking across this is the audience online. They're walking across this big field and everybody who wants to have a personal brand or is building a personal brand has a tent. And so these people are walking across the field and they look in your tent if it's empty and there's nothing going on in there, they're less likely to go in. It might be weird, but then they walk across and now they come across another tent and there's actually some music going on, there's some people in there, there's some conversations going on. It doesn't feel weird. So they walk in, right? That's what you want your tent to be like. And so there's value to just people in your tent. Even though 95, 96, 97% of these people will never transact with you, there's just value for having them there. This is why you need to make top of funnel content in addition to bottom of funnel content. The problem is I see so many people out there making bottom of funnel content and wondering why they're not getting the views. So it's about a very niche topic or it's very sales driven. It's almost like an advertisement and they're wondering, hey, why didn't this video get views? Why doesn't this go viral? It's because it's not meant to go viral, right? That's meant to get you a customer or to get you a piece of business, make money, right? And so I think about the form vfm viral for me. If you get a customer, if you get a valuable relationship from a single piece of content that's viral for you, it doesn't matter if it did. A thousand views, a million views doesn't matter, right? It's more about what actually moves the needle for you. Last time I checked, I was not able to deposit my likes and views at bank of America, right? They would laugh at me. So sometimes you need to make content that's going to get you customers, but other times you're just making content and focused on making a video that people would watch. So if you like today's video, you are absolutely going to love my forward focus email. This is just one tip delivered, takes about 60 seconds to read and it's going to move the needle for your personal brand new content strategy. Over 25,000 people get this email from me every single week and the feedback has been the greatest I've ever received from a single piece of content. I think the reason why is because it gives you clarity in a world of all this noise and all this overwhelming information, gives you that one thing that you could do this week. So if you want to get access to it, there's a link in the description and you will get the email from me this week. Now let's get back to the video. I recently had a video that did not go viral by any means. It was almost a dud in terms of my average views. And I posted it, didn't think anything of it. But then later on I got a message from somebody that said, hey, somebody saw that video and he said, hey, love the video. On this topic, I actually am posting an event in Utah with 500 people would love for you to be one of our speakers. So I got this incredible opportunity from a video that I thought and the public thinks would be a failure. But it was viral for me because I got this opportunity to speak at this event and now I'm gonna be able to impact and grow from there. One of the members in my group had a similar situation. She was making both top of funnel, bottom of funnel content. Some of the top of funnel content was meant to reach a lot more people. And then she would also make bottom of funnel content expertise to show people that she's competent, she knows what she's doing, she's getting success for her clients. She has a mix of these on her page. Well, because of this profile, she got the attention of a high profile real estate developer in the area. That developer reached out to her to be the preferred lender for one of her whole developments. So she was looking for just getting a next client on social media and ended up getting her next hundred clients because of one relationship. This can happen so many times where some of the biggest wins when you're building a personal brand are going to be things that aren't on the roadmap. They're going to be not just the next deal, but huge relationships that can really move the needle in your business. Now the problem is you don't know all these things are coming. So it's hard for me to say, hey, invest this time, get this relationship, invest this, get this deal. But this is the nature of doing something that your competitors are not willing to do. Because of this uncertainty, less people will do it. Right? Because followers may not mean anything or followers might change your life. Right? Because speaking at this event might not do anything, but if you do it correctly, it could change your business for the year. That's a huge upside event. But it's not known. It's uncertain. Because it's uncertain. Very few people pursue this. If you're one of the few people who pursues this, you end up building the massive personal brand that we're after and putting yourself in that elite category I talked about earlier. Now, having the right viewers is not just about your video views. On social media. It's also about live events, both in person and online. I recently spoke at an event where the audience was my exact avatar. It was people in my industry who wanted to grow, and so I was speaking to them, talking about my expertise, teaching them things, and they were locked in with me. Like, it was just one of those moments where everything was going the right. The energy was there, and it was just like we were on the same page. I could tell that they were getting a lot of value from what I was teaching. Which, by the way, if you're ever speaking to a large group, check in with them along the way. Say, hey, is this helping you guys? Is this providing value? And if you feel like that there's just not a lot of energy in the room or it feels kind of dead pivot, you can actually check in. You don't. If you're going down a little bit, you don't have to keep going down. You can actually take a turn and improve the talk. So make sure you check in. But I was doing this, and everything was kind of going the right way. And at the end, I had one of the biggest results for our business on the forward side, where we were actually going to help people with a workshop, a program. And we just got flooded with people at the end of the talk. And I was wondering, well, what happened, right? I go back and watch the film because success leaves clues, almost like an athlete. We want to watch game film. I'll watch film of my past videos of talking, of speaking on stages and see what went well. What could I improve on? And like, what. What were the components of this so we could repeat it? Well, it turns out there was a lot of good things about that talk. So I went and took that exact framework to another city where I was speaking to a totally different group within the same industry, but from different divisions within the industry, I would say. And so anyways, I did the same talk and got nowhere near the same results. I think it was like crickets at the end. Now, a lot of people told me it was a good talk, but we didn't get to the point where we were getting flooded with people that wanted to take us up on this opportunity. So what was the difference? Same talk, same same offering, but just way different results. Like, I almost failed at the second one compared to the first one. Well, it wasn't the right audience. These people weren't at the right stage of their business. They weren't sold that this is the right thing they need to be doing to grow their business. And so I assumed all of this and went in there almost too cocky and then didn't get the same result. So the right audience means a lot. And by the way, if you don't have the right audience, meaning like the people on your videos or the people in the room or on the zoom are not convinced about why they should listen to you, you need to make sure to take some time to do that. This is called framing. So, like in the beginning of this video or podcast, if, if you're listening, I talked about how important, how critical these lessons are going to be for your business this year. Based on that, you give it more attention. Right. The number one issue I see with people is they don't value the things that they're telling you. Like they undervalue themselves, they undervalue their advice. So what you need to understand is your advice matters. The work that you do really makes an impact on people. Now, I'm assuming this is true. If it's not true, maybe you're not ready to build a powerful personal brand. But for most people watching or listening, I believe that you're doing good work. You have good. You have clients that tell you great things. You have five star reviews. So for you, you just need to make sure you don't undervalue that. When you speak online, we take it for granted regardless of what industry you're in. I help a lot of people within real estate and mortgage and finance, but it's the same regardless of industries. We get great results. We change people's lives. I know it sounds cliche, but it's so true for the right people in this industry. So based on that, we should be giving it that level of importance. I had a mentor years ago who told me this. He's. And I never forgot it, he said, neil, you don't need to convince everybody. You just need to make sure you're giving it the level of importance it deserves and then the other people will give it that level as well. All right, number three is perfectionism, is procrastination disguised as quality control. When you're making content, when you're launching something new, when you're about to speak, the tendency is going to be to try and make this as perfect as possible before you put it out there. You want your best attempts to be out there. The truth is it needs to be the opposite. You don't need it to be, like, terrible, but you're looking for a 6 or 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. It does not need to be perfect. Far from it. In so many cases, I put out a video that was nowhere near perfect, but it landed me good results. But also it gave me the ability to learn from my attempts. Like, you can't learn to ride a bike in the classroom. You have to actually make the attempt. The best way to give an amazing talk is to do a few bad ones. The best way to put on the best webinar ever that gets you the most clients for your business and the highest conversion rate is to do a few that suck, right? That's how I got there. That's how everybody gets there. Think about this. Every single creator that you admire online went through a period where they were cringe, like absolute cringe. They couldn't even watch their own content. People probably made fun of them. People probably sent DMs to other people making fun of them, right? Every single speaker that you love today day gave a talk that just absolutely bombed. It was embarrassing, but now they're in a great spot, right? So your ability to get through that valley, the shitty part, is going to be the biggest factor for your success in the future. Most people give up during that part or they don't even get in there because they're fearing embarrassment. And if you can just push past that, you win. The good news is the least amount of people see your stuff. Like the webinar that bombed for me, I had only 13 people on it. The piece of content that was a total failure, very few people saw it because they all scrolled past because it sucks so bad. The algorithm is not going to show one of your terrible videos to a ton of people. So good news is this, not many people are going to see this. You can always delete it. And so just try new things. Just have an action again, going back to one of the previous lessons. Have an action towards taking action. Have a bias towards taking action going back to one of the previous parts, right? Just move forward with the idea and don't worry about it being viral. Don't worry about this being a massive success. There's so much knowledge that's gained by just doing the thing. So again, go for a 6 or 7 on a scale of 1 to 10. So when I'm shooting a video, I don't want it to be like my worst attempt. But if I keep trying to shoot the same thing over and over again, it may start to get worse. So I will get to the point where it's like, okay, that's good enough. I'm going to go ahead and send that next thing. I'm going to do is move on to the next, right? This keeps me rolling, keeps the momentum going. I will say that a lot of people will say, neil, you contradict yourself because you do talk about quality, you do talk about use this particular style or organize things in this way. I'm being intentional when I'm doing that, but it doesn't mean I'm not moving forward. So there's a thing about being intentional. Like, I actually care about this. But then there's another thing about, like, I need to get this done, I need to produce this, or we have a deadline. This is why I love setting the date for certain things, because work will expand to the deadline that you give it. So if I have to produce a talk by tomorrow, then it's due. Like, it just has to be done. And I always joke about this. But when I look back at some of my best content, the best presentations, they are timestamped, saved, like last saved. If you look at the files at like 12:00am, 1:32am, in the worst case, on the day that I actually published it, on the day that we actually are giving the talk, right? Because for me, I have ADD and my work expands to the deadline that I give it. So if you're that type of person, you're watching this. Give yourself a deadline. Make it one that cannot be missed. You will be shocked how well you do. Nothing motivates you more than a deadline that that cannot be missed. Number four, and this is the one that gave me the biggest lift for my business is stop begging for a seat. Build your own table. As I was building my personal brand, I wanted to speak on more stages. I wanted to be on other people's podcasts. I want to do all these things that I see all the other people with personal brands doing. The problem is I'm not getting invited because my brand isn't big enough. So I'm in this catch 22 where I want to do all these things, but I'm not yet there. If you're in this position, realize that you can actually host it yourself, right? You can do it yourself. So let me give you example. I wanted to start doing events. I was not getting invited. I needed to get the reps, so I hosted my own on. The first event that I host hosted was for 20 people in my industry. I just set it up and I could not host that thing by myself because I wasn't a good speaker. I didn't have the content, didn't have the confidence at the time. This was six, seven years ago. So what I did was I put together and I invited somebody else to do it. Like I invited a speaker. I went online, I found somebody that was teaching the expertise that I wanted to teach at this particular event. And so I got to open that thing. But then I passed it off to this person who ended up teaching for 45 minutes. And then I closed it out and I ended up asking for business at the end. And so I got the result that I was looking for, but I didn't have to to do the heavy lifting of all the content and speaking. And so just realize that you will get credit as the host of the party, right? The host of the party is pretty cool. Think back to high school. Like, the guy who hosted the party got a lot of credit. He got a lot of social proof just from being the host. He didn't have to actually do all the entertaining or do all the speaking. So the same is true with your business events. The same is true with webinars, in person events, all these different things. You can actually just host them. And then now you get the rep of actually doing it. And you get the credit for hosting it and putting it on. I'll give you guys an easy way to take action on this. You can announce a webinar coming up and make sure that the time title of this is results based so that more people sign up. We could do a whole nother video on that topic, but make it actually attractive. And then get a guest speaker on this webinar to be the main person bringing value to the audience. Right? Then you don't have to do it. You don't have to really think of what you're going to do on the thing. You just have to organize it. So literally you think of a name, you actually make the quick landing page to set this up. I have a framework for doing this as well. And then you will just launch that. Invite people, text people, DM people, post about it. Now the person you've invited to be the guest speaker is the one who's going to be delivering the presentation, putting together all the slides. You just have to work on a solid intro, a good introduction for this person that you're going to bring onto the virtual stage on the zoom and then answer questions, be the host of the party. It just takes all the pressure off of you. Now, if you want to make a small talk for the beginning, this is great practice for you on what it's like to engage the audience, to retain the audience. It's a great first attempt for you. If you haven't been doing this a lot. Or if you did this years ago and now you want to get back into it, this is a great way to get back into this. You only have to worry about 10 minutes of content and then pass it off to somebody else. And then make sure when you do something like this that there's a goal for this. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make, myself included, was you would put on all this effort to host something either virtual or in person. And then you climb a mountain, you get to the top and you take a deep breath like, man, I did it. That's it, I'm done. That's just the beginning. Like you were just about to cash in the chips from all this hard work and you just leave it. So make sure at the end of that thing, if there's a next step to working with you, that you tell people clearly what's the next step. Or if you're trying to recruit, if you're trying to get business, if you're trying to make an offer, make sure you do that at the end of this event online and let people know that this is coming up because that way you're going to be getting credit for all the hard work that you just put in. So when I say, stop begging for a seat, build your own table. This is true for content, this is true for webinars, this is true for in person events. It's true for anything this guy had on my podcast, Daniel Priestley. He moved to London with no friends, no barely any net worth, and now he is a multi, multi millionaire. He's got a massive YouTube presence, building a solid personal brand. He was just on Stephen Bartlett's diary of his CEO. How did he get there? By hosting these events? Like, he literally started with a 10 person dinner in London, invited people from the industry, those grew to a hundred people. And then he grew to being invited on massive stages because of all the relationships created from this exact strategy. And by the way, this does not matter if you're an introvert, extrovert if you're shy. I'll tell you what, if you look back at how much of an introvert I was, this is incredible. I could barely speak on a stage. Like my mouth would go completely dry. I would literally be like pissing my pants. If you put me in front of a hundred people, I could do it on a one to one basis, but when you put me in front of a large group, I would get completely anxious about the whole process. The best way to overcome that for me was to do it in steps five, 10 minutes at a time, Go from there. I remember paying thousands of dollars to be the sponsor event because I would get eight minutes on stage at that event. Those eight minutes was able to film and then use as collateral to get myself invited or get myself onto other bigger stages. Right. This is the process. You do it once and you can build up from there. Now, there's one more topic I'll give you on this stage topic that's incredibly powerful, and that is starting a podcast. I did this four or five years into my personal brand strategy, but when I started podcasts, it was a huge accelerator for my brand. I started a podcast with this sole purpose of inviting thought leaders to be on my platform. Now, this worked with local people who I wanted to connect with all the way up to Internet celebrities or people that I really look up to. People like Grant Cardone, who was an author who got me into the entrepreneurship game, or Alex Hormozi, who taught me so much about content and someone I really look up to. Right. I was able to do podcasts with all these people by starting off small and having a platform. So, for example, if you have a podcast and you know one of these people is going to be in town speaking in an event, you can reach out to them or their team and say, hey, I have a podcast. We'd love to interview you, we'd love to have you on. Can we do it? Like, the first step is you have to have a podcast to be able to do this, and then you need proof. So having people on the show, making sure you package those episodes properly for online, for YouTube, meaning the right title, right thumbnail, all that stuff, that's a whole nother video strategy. But if you do this correctly, then when you want to invite the next person on, you can send them proof. So when I asked for the first person to get on, I didn't have any proof. So those are going to be the hardest ones to get. You can do that through relationships. If you know someone who will vouch for you. This is the best way to get started there. If you have to pay someone to be on a podcast, do it right. You're just doing it not only for that content, but also for the leverage to get the next bigger and better guest. So I hope this makes sense for some people. For some of you, you might be like, dude, I don't care about podcasts. Neither did I. I do care about being in front of thousands of people with Cody Sanchez and then leveraging that to get the next Big guest on my platform. This is the ultimate networking cheat code. If you're trying to level up in terms of the people you can connect with. Nothing more strong than having a local podcast. And this especially works good if you have a lot of events in your cities. I'm in Las Vegas, so anytime a big influencer is in Citi, I'm actually reaching out actively through DMs. You'll be surprised how many people you can get just through DMing. Like, you can literally send a DM. By the way, like, when I'm in town and I go to speak at events, I'm not Mr. Big Time by any means. I'm still way far away where I want to be. But when I'm on a local event and I get a DM from someone, they might say, hey, Neil, would you like to go to lunch? Hey, dude, we'd love to pick your brain. There's no time, but somebody says, hey, Neil, would love to have you on my podcast. I know I don't have a big audience, but I have this or I have this. And they give me proof. I'm not like their first episode. They're on episode number 33, and they have a small audience. It's a yes. Almost every time, as long as time permits, I'm going to do it. Why? Because I'm creating content. I'm spreading my message. I'm getting introduced by that person to their audience, but I'm also creating content for my audience because obviously this content can be chopped up for content on social. So it serves so many purposes and it actually, actually saves me time. And so when you do this for somebody else, as you grow up the food chain, you'll notice that it's actually providing value to the other person as well. I'll give you one insider tip on this strategy. When someone is launching a book, it could be a celebrity. When they're launching a book, they get in super competitive mode. They want to sell the most amount of books possible. And so you can, like, really land an amazing guest if you buy their books. So here's a cheat code. If you notice someone is launching one, tell them, hey, I would love to have you on my podcast and I want to support your book. I would love to buy a hundred of your books for my people. I'd love to buy 50 of your books. That goes a long way. Even if somebody's super rich, they could be on honestly a billionaire, they still want to win on the New York Times bestseller list, so they will actually pay attention to you if you want to buy their books. Number five is doors aren't closed. Sometimes you just need to push harder. When you're building a personal brand. Most people don't make it. Honestly, if I'm just being real, like I know all the YouTube audience is like, hey, anybody can do this or it's never been easier. I'm telling you right now, for real, the strong will survive. The people who go the extra mile. You know, they say 80% effort gets you 80% results. Well, 100% effort gets you thousand percent results. Why? Because nobody will go the extra mile. It's freaking lonely. I know it sounds cliche, but it's so true. Think about this. If you are making content and you actually look at the videos you did, you make 10 videos, you look at, hey, two of the 10 did better than the other ones. Why did they do better? I'm gonna actually look at these, I'm gonna look at what was different about those hooks, what was different about my pace, what was different about the packaging. How can we repeat that? You're all of a sudden in that top category just by being intentional, right? Most people won't even do this. Or when you're speaking, like I said, if you watch back the film, hey, here's the transitions where I was weak, here's the ones that went really well. I noticed my energy goes up here. Like those are the little things that most people are not willing to do. And then on the opposite side, when you're reaching not just with your own content, but when you're reaching out to the public, you'll notice that the people who do this in an intentional way are the ones who get the results. I'll give you an example. When I wanted to invite people to my webinars, to my classes, to my in person events, I would post about it. And my thing was, hey, you build it, they will come. Well, I found out very few people come. It's so noisy. It's so much just going on right now that you have to cut through the noise. The way you can cut through the noise is by scaling the unscalable. So what does that mean? Well, hey, what are the unscalable things that you could do? You can call people once to one, you can send people messages, one to one, you can voice memo, you can send them videos. And so that's exactly what I did. When I wanted to invite people, I would post about it. I would definitely make pages, I would run even ads to this thing. But people would see it and not Sign up, they wouldn't like take action. When I personally invited people at scale, it started to work. So I would literally send out 100 voice memos, personal voice memos. These aren't like spam. I would say, hey, John, just want to make sure you saw this. Maybe you missed it, but I wanted to personally invite you because I know this is going to be good for you. Or here's why. I think this is why you should be there. And I would give them a personal invite and tell them, them, hey, let me know if you'd like to be there. I would love to have you there. And you would get a ton out of this. Just message me back. And then all of a sudden the reply started to come in and I would get way more people because I personally invited them at the largest scale. I did this for a thousand person event, my first big event that I did. I had to reach out to thousands of people, one to one because it wasn't selling like I was posting about it. And I got my core group of my big fans, like my, the people that rock with me. Those are the people who signed up and paid for a ticket. But everybody else was like, it was crickets. And I was like, oh my God, I just signed up, spent all this money and I'm going to fail publicly if I don't get done well again. Put some pressure on your shoulders. You'd be surprised. I spent the next two months literally messaging people for an hour every night, just voice memoing, calling, sending personal videos. And at the end of that period, I was able to fill that event. Now it got easier as my brand took off, but the heavy lifting, this is the stuff that goes on behind the scenes that most people are not willing to do, but this is exactly the stuff that most people are not willing to do. And this is why you will win with your personal brand. So when it comes to all of the different avenues of you putting yourself out there, think, how could I do just a little bit more? How could I make just one more attempt? My friend Ed Milette actually wrote a book on this. It's called the Power of One More. If you just make one more attempt, most people will not do that and you win. I've seen this over and over with my content, with my events, and I've seen it across the space. Now one extra thing I will tell you on this is when you are being intentional with your business things, don't forget to also take that same level of intention and apply it to your relationships. And this could Also be with your spouse, with your kids. Like, how could you wow someone this week? I think we think customers when we think about this, or viewers or people on this podcast or on YouTube. Well, what about when I get home? How could I wow my spouse? How could I work my kids? How can it be really intentional with that? Because I have found when you have success in multiple areas of life, like especially the foundation of your family, my business success goes to another level. Because when things aren't right there, I've noticed it's a massive handicap on my business. Like, my head's not fully in it. But if everything is solid with my foundation, with my wife, my kids, my family, I'm like a beast in business. You can't mess with me. And so I would just encourage you if you're doing your business strategy, if you're working on your marketing, but things are off at home, please fix that first, because none of this stuff is going to work. If you're handicapped there, you're swimming in a pool with, like, a weight tied to your ankle. Fix that first. First, please. All right, Number six is I learned more from my failures than my wins. Right? You need to fail way more than you win. You know, the crazy thing is, is so many people see the limited success I've had, and like I said, I'm nowhere to where I want to be, but I've had some great wins along the way, and they see that and they're like, wow, those are really cool. Like, you must be having a blast. Well, they didn't see the failures of, like, me, up all night, no sleep, eyes bleeding in front of a computer, trying to put together something that didn't get any sales or trying to put on something where nobody signed up for it. Being in a pressure cooker, like, doing all the things where you're juggling multiple businesses or you're committed to your customers and also letting down your family at the. And all the different hats that you have to wear as an entrepreneur. It's a lot of pressure, and it's okay to fail. Like, that's what you learn from. And so I would just encourage you to shift your thinking on losses. They're actually lessons. The most successful people I know treat setbacks as data. It's just information that they can use to win in the future. But on the opposite end, losers treat setbacks as a reason that they should quit, and that's why they fall off. And so you just don't want to get in that category. Learn from error. Learn from the videos that bombed. Like I said earlier, the best way to a great conversion event is to do a few that just completely missed the mark that don't get you where you need to be because you'll learn so much in that attempt. There is shortcuts. You know, I think people talk about there's no shortcuts in life, just put in the work. Well, part of the shortcuts is watching content like this, which by the way, I will tell you this. If you're watching this and you're not subscribed to the channel, I just noticed, I think it was 80% of the viewers on this channel are not subscribed, meaning I see you this time and then I never see you again. So if you're getting any value from this at all, please hit that subscribe button. Or if you're listening to the audio version of this, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Podcast because this really helps me to reach more people and put in even more effort into the content this year. So when you think about the things you want to try this year, get some information, but don't get stuck in over analysis like we talked about earlier. Go ahead and make the attempt and just realize that that's okay. That's how you're going to get to the part where it's going to get great is by doing the few that aren't great. I'll give you two examples on this that will really help you. So one example was when I applied this to content. I was making a video about a specific strategy on buying investment properties. I wanted to reach people who wanted to buy short term rental properties, investment properties that could grow their overall net worth and do all these cool things. Well, I looked at it, I made the video. I'll give you two examples that will really help you. Okay, so number one, I was related to content. I wanted to make a piece of content that was about a specific type of property. This was short term rentals, Airbnbs. So I go ahead and make that video, talk about all the benefits and it kind of is a bomb. Like it doesn't do well. I'm like, shit, what? What went wrong? We had the right hook. We had all the right things in that video. But when I went back and analyzed it, I realized that it had a very small audience. The number of people who wanted to buy real estate is limited on Instagram. And by the way, there's riches in the niches for sure, especially when you get to bottom of funnel content. But I wanted this video to do well, like how could it reach more people? So I was talking to people within a niche. So it was like a needle within a needle of a haystack. People who wanted to invest in real estate and also wanted to lear about short term rentals and also wanted to find out about the nuance. Like this is a very small audience. So I looked at what are the benefits of the thing I'm talking about. Well, I listed them all out and one of those benefits stood out. It was tax benefits. There's an incredible tax benefit to buying short term rentals because you can take a huge deduction off of your active income if you do all this fine print correctly. So I was like, okay, I'm going to lead with that because that one is the one that stands out as the most broad appeal benefit of this thing I'm talking about. And I started with, this is a tax strategy that people are using to wipe out their tax liability. Or, or this is some what rich people are doing or what high income earners are doing to wipe out their taxes. They're buying short term rentals. Let me explain it. And then I got to insert all the rest of the expertise and all the information into that video. I did the same video that was originally going to get about 8,000 views from me. It ended up getting 800,000 views. It might even be at a million by the time you guys are watching this video. And so what that taught me was, is like looking at the failure. And by the way, this could be 80 for you, it could be 800 for somebody else. 8,000, doesn't matter. It's all relative. But look at the video that didn't do well. And analyze, why didn't this do well? And you'll start to see, see, oh, here's the thing, here's the thing. I could change. Let me do this. And the only way I found that out was by actually doing it. And so I ended up getting a viral video from this failure. Now the same is true with my events. When I would launch my webinars, I would realize that, hey, a lot of people aren't signing up for this or they're not getting value from this. Well, why is that? I would actually get the feedback. So I would ask people afterwards, hey, what did you like about this? And I know it kind of stings a little bit, but ask for anonymous feedback and people will tell you the truth. Right? So say you can make it easy type form. And so the way you do this is you make a type form which is just A form gathering, like a question gathering service. It's. I think you can start for free, honestly. You could do it with type form. And so the way you can do this is use a tool called Typeform and you can make an anonymous survey, right? So you can ask questions and they answer them and you don't ask for their name, you don't ask for the email. Nothing, nothing is tracked. And I will tell you this with absolute certainty, because one time I got such bad feedback on something that I wanted to search out who gave me this mean piece of feedback, and I couldn't find it. Like, it won't even give you the IP address. I was making an anonymous survey and I was actually trying to find the person who talked crap to me. But anyway, you can make this a anonymous survey posted out there. People will tell you the truth, and then now you can make the changes that you need to make the next one better. So again, through the failure, I was able to make a webinar that retained the audience attention they got a lot of value from and moved to the next step, whatever that conversion step was at the end. Right. The only way I got there was by doing the few that didn't do so well and getting the feedback on my attempt. So make sure you make attempts, but then look at the attempt. Ask for feedback on the attempt, especially when it comes to content. Ask somebody for one thing you could improve. Two things that you can improve, because people will just tell you what you want to hear. They pat you on the back and say, hey, dude, great job, great. I'm like, okay, I got that part. But what's one or two things I can improve on this? Well, I don't really know. Just give me one thing, bro, please, one thing that I could do better. Next time they're like, you know what, bro, you lost me here. Or I was completely off at this point. Well, they weren't going to tell you that unless you pushed them. Make it anonymous or ask people for something that you can make better next time, and you'll get the accurate feedback that you need to take it to the next level on the next attempt. And that is how you turn failures into wins. All right, number seven, and this one is huge for me right now, is things happen slowly and then all of a sudden, all at once. If you look at the growth curve on any company, that is huge, right? It was really, really slow all of a sudden, and then boom, hit this growth curve. That's incredible. And so, yes, as you're building your personal brand as you're putting out content. As you're doing more of these things we're talking about, you will see wins along the way, especially if you're doing this with intention. But just remember this, the biggest wins are going to be in the later years, in the later part of that growth curve, the doors that open up, some of the opportunities that come your way are going to be things that are asymmetric. So think about this. Whenever you are starting off a business, you're used to symmetric opportunities. You invest this time, you get this much return, you buy these leads, you get this many conversions. It's very like investing this. Get this. And so you train your brain to think like this. Now, this is important because it helps you pay the bills, but you will never break out of that until you start spending some of your time on asymmetric opportunities. So asymmetric means you put in this level of effort or this level of investment. The return is unlimited. There's no cap on this. It could be huge, it could be nothing, or it could be massive. This is why people make so much money in business and entrepreneurship or venture capital, because they invest something and it has huge returns. And so that's what you want to think of your personal brand. This is an investment you're making. This is a long term investment investment. The biggest benefits of this investment are going to pay in years 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Because why most people will have quit by that point. You were the one that stuck with it. And because you've been doing this with intention, you've been compounding your wins. The wins will keep compounding into massive wins. So I will tell you, with my personal brand, in the last 12 months, and I'm like six, seven years into this journey, I've had opportunities that I never thought were possible. I've got invited to speak at massive events. I've got opportunities that my competitors are like, hey, dude, Neil sucks. Why is he getting that I'm better than him? Well, you didn't have a personal brand, so I got the opportunity community. You didn't, right? So I just think about the connections, the speaking, the podcast, all these kinds of cool things that come my way. None of them would have been possible without my personal brand. And I've seen this happen over and over with members of our community, people that come to our events, people in my coaching groups. Like, there's so much opportunity for the people that have been doing it longer. And so, yes, do it with intention. Get your wins early on. I understand it's really hard to Sell someone like personal training if you are going to be fat for the first year or two. But the truth is, yes, you can do hacks. There's important things. There's things that will get you a result quicker. But don't forget that the biggest result, the biggest hack is just gonna be not quitting. It's going to be doing it with intention and not quitting, continuing to get better. The problem is somebody will hear this and they'll be like, dude, I've been doing it for five years. I didn't get any results. Well, I don't believe that you were doing it with intention. I don't believe that you've truly been consistent. And so, yes, be consistent, but also be intentionally consistent and you will see these huge benefits that I'm talking about. I'll never forget this. Jesse Itzler, who's like a billionaire, told me this backstage at one of our events. He said, neil, biggest upside for me with my entrepreneurship journey have been things that were not on the roadmap. It's just this conversation that happened backstage with this person or in this. He got to connect with somebody was an unplanned thing. They ended up partnering up on something and it turned out to be this huge hundred million, $200 million opportunity. Well, how did that happen? Because he put himself in a position to get lucky. I think about the surface area of your luck and some people will say, hey, how did this person get lucky? Or Neil, seems like you got these, all these lucky breaks. Well, you create those lucky breaks by having a large surface area. This means that, like, think about like a net, like there's four leaf curlers. These are luck opportunities falling from the sky. Most people are walking around with a tiny net, and so it's very hard for you to catch one of these four leaf clovers. I'm walking around with this huge net, so I catch more lucky opportunities. Well, some people have a massive net, so that's why the rich keep getting richer. That's why businesses that are huge just keep getting bigger and bigger and they just grow to massive scale and squeeze out all the competition. Because as your net grows, so does the amount of luck that comes your way. And so really focus in on this. Be intentional. But just remember, the larger this surface area gets, the luckier you're going to get. Now, if you're still watching or listening, please let me know. What's your feedback on this? I read every single comment. If there's certain things I talked about today that you want me to go deeper on in a future video. Drop that in the comments. I will definitely address that in a future video. We might even make a video on your exact topic if you leave it there. Again, I read all these and I really appreciate your feedback. But for now, thanks for watching and I will see you guys on the next video.