#027 Productivity And Social Media Wins with Evan Carmichael

Welcome to Personal Brand Breakthrough. Today's special guest is Evan Carmichael, and he is trying to solve the world's biggest problem. We've got a really special interview with him right now, so let's get started. So Evan Carmichael, thank you so much for being here. I am a big, big fan of your book, Your One Word, and so I'm really excited to talk to you today. Thank you so much for being here. I know you've authored other books, you've got a YouTube channel with, I just checked, it's like 1.5 million plus subscribers. Just an amazing work that you're doing. Tell us about the Believe Movement and what you're really accomplishing and what you're trying to accomplish.

Cool. Well, thank you for the intro, Cheryl. I appreciate it. It's awesome being here. Believe for me is at the core of what I think people need. I think everybody has Michael Jordan level talent at something. I think Michael Jordan is a great, great, you know, great skilled man. You might not be able to beat him at basketball, but I think you have that ability level at something. And I think one, some people don't know what it is and never tried, they never explored, they never try to find it. But two, I think a lot of people have inklings for what they should be doing and they don't believe in themselves enough. They don't take that shot. They go for the safe route instead of betting on themselves and they end up living the rest of their life in regret. And, uh, I'm trying to change that.

Well, I think you're, you're so onto something because we all have fear, right? We're all fearful of something. And you even say on your website that you're tackling the world's biggest problem, which is people don't know what to do with their lives and you're trying to fight mediocrity, you know, Where, you know, that fear is something that I think we can all relate to. What do you do kind of on a daily basis? What's your sort of mindset or frame of mind every day when you wake up and you say to yourself, okay, today I have to try and fight this again? What is the mentality that you go through? What do you think?

So I think that's normal. I think that's what most people do. I don't wake up and I'm on fire like, yes, amazing, another day. You know, I wake up and I'm tired and I'm wiping my eyes. I think, I think what I love doing and what I encourage people to do is not have to think your way at the beginning. If you have to think your way into today has to be a great day or today I'm doing something important, then, then it's easy to lose because you're creating friction. And so what I try to do is create a habit, schedules, routines, and environment that automatically set me up for having a great day every day. I think most people wake up like an accident. I think charting your start, creating a morning routine that serves you, and then the physical environment that makes you come alive. Like, this, this is my office. All these people mean something to me. I don't have to think about them every day. I walk in here and, and automatically I got Steve Jobs staring me down and my parents on the wall. And these people may not mean a lot to you or your audience, but to me they all have an important meaning. And so I think designing your day, especially the morning part, to do the thing that makes you feel bold and alive and courageous. If you did that every day, your life would be unrecognizable a year from today.

Fantastic. You obviously have a ton of YouTube subscribers, and video is a really big part of how you're getting your message out to more people. Can you speak to that and the importance of video and the impact that it's had on your ability to get the Believe message out to the world?

So I think that's an exercise in self-awareness. I would much rather be on video than, than do a podcast or than to write. Even though I have, I have 2 books to my name, but like video is where I live. I find it a lot easier to create video content. And so that's, that's what I'm great at. It doesn't mean that everybody has to do it. It's understanding what you're great at and going in on that strength. I think video is so powerful right now because one, people mostly are visual learners. If you, if you survey, you know, humans, uh, between visual, auditory, and kinesthetic, visual is number one. So people prefer to learn through visual than anything else. And every social media platform has made it so easy to win with video that it's a big opportunity that a lot of people are missing. There's fears, there's nerves. It's a skill set to build up. You know, we didn't go to school for this, but I think if people can get the comfort level up and you have a powerful message to share, there's no reason why millions of people can't be paying attention to you. I look at someone like Martin Luther King, like imagine if he had, you know, YouTube. Imagine if he had Twitter video, like everything, all the great stuff that he did, that he had such a powerful message. Imagine if he had YouTube. And so I think for people who are watching, you know, part of your audience, if you, if they have a powerful message, like if you guys have a powerful message, then, um, you, you have the responsibility to get it out. You know, like if you can, then you must. Um, so that's the way I see the world.

I love it. Tell me about your schedule. Do you have an editorial schedule? And I know on, it was on Instagram recently, you said today is YouTube day, which gave me sort of an inkling that you do kind of have a schedule. Can you tell us a little bit about what that looks like?

So we have a schedule for broadcasting and we do 3 videos a day on YouTube. I also have a personal schedule myself of how I run. So from when I wake up, I'm usually up around 7-ish until, 10, I do my morning routine. Then at 10, I start my day and every day is slightly different. Uh, and this works for me. I have a hard time switching tasks. I have a really hard time switching tasks. Uh, I'm naturally an introvert that may not come out on this video, but naturally I am. And so we're recording this video on a Thursday. Thursday is my public-facing day. Thursday is when I'm doing Hangouts and podcasts and interviews and guest appearances and radio shows. And so I go from one to the next, the next, the next, the next, and I carry the energy forward with me. If I had to do 2 hours of interviews and then go write my book and then come back and do— like, I couldn't do it. My brain takes way too long, and I know most people have switching costs, but for me, it's just, it's, it's a lot. Um, plus I like missing things. So on Tuesday is my YouTube filming day. I make all my videos for YouTube. There's the pressure of I need to get it all done today because I don't have time tomorrow or Thursday or Friday or next Monday. It has to get done. So it forces you to be productive, but then I kind of miss it during the week. It's like I'm looking forward to the next YouTube day. I got to wait a whole week. So it's designed around my maybe peculiarities. It's designed around what makes it work for me, but I like having a dedicated day to different things. So Monday is my mentoring day. I basically spend the whole day working with the people on my team, helping them get better. Uh, Tuesday is my YouTube day, researching, filming. Wednesday is project, so I get to work on whatever project I'm excited by at the moment. It's not a floater day, but like whatever I'm most excited by is what I work on. Thursday is public-facing day, interviews, Hangouts. Friday is my CEO day, things to grow the business. I apply to my weekend. Saturday is my day with my family and not administration, not like we need to go to Home Depot or we need to go grocery shopping or we need to, you know, fix up the condo or something. It's fun. So it's, it's my wife's a foodie. So we go out and try a new food. We do hiking or, you know, something, the street festival, and I, I'm in charge of planning it. So they don't know what's happening.

Nice.

I'll just show up on Saturday and like, here we go. And it's a whole day planned. And then Sunday ends up being our admin day, cleanup, vacuum, like whatever has to get done around the house kind of thing.

It's a really nice balance. It's a really nice balance. And it allows you to kind of hit off on all of the things that you need to accomplish. So that's, that's fantastic. Which platform right now, Evan, social media platform, are you most excited about as far as, well, content in general, but video specifically?

So I think it depends on your ambitions. I think if you're in it for the long term and you want to build a real brand, YouTube is the place to be. I think of all the platforms, it's the only one where content lives forever. So if I post a video 5 years later, it's still getting views. I'm still building my brand. I'm still getting traction and comments and awareness from videos that I made almost a decade ago. Uh, and no other platform is like that. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you're not looking at an Instagram from yesterday, let alone, you know, 5 years ago. And so if you're in it for the long haul, you have a really important message. I think you need to be, on YouTube. It's the best place to be for short-term results. I think you can get faster impact on Instagram, but you have to— you're on a treadmill. Like, you have to keep— if you stop posting, you're irrelevant. So you have to keep going. You got to keep creating the content. You can create content that then lives on both, and you can hack your way with the editing so that it works. But if I'm a thought leader, I'm looking at YouTube number one, Instagram number two. And then everything else, a distant, you know, 3 to 8.

Yeah, that's interesting. And so do you have a big team of people that help you with the video, or have you ever been sort of a one-man band from the video production standpoint where you had to learn to edit and you had to learn to do everything yourself?

Yeah, so I hate spending money till I'm making money. So I always do everything myself to figure it out. One, 'cause I don't wanna spend money until I'm making something, but also to taste it, to understand it, to, get a sense of it so I can be dangerous in the area. So with YouTube, I had a successful business. I had exited another successful business, but I did everything myself. I edited, I researched, I shot everything, and it was okay. You know, I did, I used Windows Movie Maker, which for any editor is laughable at how basic that is. Like my—

But it worked.

My 9-year-old does it. But it worked. Yeah, it worked and it's fine, but like start. Right? Start. A lot of people think you need an editor. You don't. You start. Nobody's watching anyway. So just start and continue making it better. So I did everything myself. And then my first hire was an editor, part-time editor, because I didn't, I didn't like the editing process and I didn't want to be world-class at editing. Of all the things that went into making my content, editing was the thing I enjoyed the least. So that has to be the first thing that I need to give up. Because it's required and I didn't want to do it. So I hired a part-time editor that moved me from making a video a week to a video a day. And then now we've got 8 people who work on my video team. Nice. And that creates content 3 times a day for YouTube, one time a day produced video on Instagram. I go live every day on Instagram. I make a short video on Instagram myself. Instagram is a good model. For someone who wants to kind of copy what I'm doing or learn and grow from it. I had an Instagram account for years and never did anything with it really, posted some promotional stuff. And now recently I'm getting into it and I've got 20,000 subscribers. And like a couple months ago I had, I don't know, I remember 7,000 or 6,000. For me, it's not a lot, right? Like I'm used to 1.5 million, not 20,000.

That's a drop in the bucket in the Instagram world, right?

And that's true too. It's true too. Like for people in my space, if you look at someone like Gary Vee, he's about the same as me on YouTube, about 1.5 million, but on Instagram, he's probably closer to 4, maybe even higher. So like you should be able to do better on Instagram, but it's the humility to get into it and do it. So I'm posting 6 times a day on Instagram. At the beginning, it was all me. Everything was me just to taste it, just to understand it. And now I'm posting 3 of them, My team is posting 3 of them and it'll eventually work its way out that I'm, I'm still touching everything, but my team, we figured out the process and a system just like we have on YouTube. So I'm a big believer in testing and starting and doing everything dirty yourself. And then as you start getting results, you start figuring out, okay, who do I need to bring on to help me scale this?

Yeah. And so, you know, if we kind of dive a little bit deeper into that, it's that I think a lot of entrepreneurs that they feel like, oh, you know, well, I only have I have 1,000 followers, so, you know, they don't, they don't see the value in really applying themselves to it and working through that tough part where the audience is still building. And sometimes they look at that and they're kind of embarrassed by the numbers and they have, you know, social media shame in essence. How do you recommend that people kind of get over themselves and say, you know, it's like instead of looking at it as, oh, I only have 1,000 subscribers, I've got 1,000 subscribers. I mean, it's how you look at it that can really make the difference.

Yeah, I mean, I'll come at it from a different angle, which may not go over so well. I don't know, we'll see. The easy to digest answer is when you start everything, you suck. Like, if you're an entrepreneur, you started your business, you didn't get instant customers, you weren't crushing it right away. When you first learned English or how to tie your shoes or whatever it was, like, it's practice and repetition. And so it's just starting the business over again. Like, if it's especially for someone who's had success somewhere else, to have the, the humility to come back and start over again, to say, well, I'm crushing it. I've got, you know, a million dollars in my bank account from my business, and now here I am and nobody's paying attention to me. You're starting at the beginning, just like you were when you started your business. It doesn't have to take you as long to get to where you have risen to, but that climb is still part of the process. So that would be how I would reframe it. But for me, the harder answer is I love it. Like, I sometimes secretly hope my YouTube channel goes to zero just so I can start over again. Like, I love the process so much. I love the building and the hacking. Once you've made it, like, it's not as exciting for me anymore. And so that might be just I'm a messed up bird, or there's other people who might feel the same way, but that's how I think of it. Like, I love Instagram so much right now because— not because of Instagram, but because it's fresh, it's new, it's starting over from the beginning again, and hacking on my way up. I'm not crazy enough to sabotage my success on YouTube, which some people will do. Like, they've had success, then they sabotage themselves. I care too much about my mission and my team and everything else to do that. But I love, like, I love the underestimation. Like, people will call me and say, hey, you have 1.5 million subscribers on YouTube, but how come you only have 7,000 on Instagram? At the time when I first was going, like, I love it. I love that so much. It's like, yes, I love the journey of building that up. So, so I, you know, I think that the pain and the struggle is is awesome.

It's a great way of looking at it.

So, but that's, that's like, that's harder. It's, it's easier to say like, oh my God, I have 1,000 subscribers. I'm so grateful for those people. And I think if you lean into gratitude, I think that can definitely be helpful. For me, I lean into the struggle because I love it. But I'm a weird person. So it may not, it may not be the right answer for everybody.

I love it. It's the right answer for you.

Right.

And so I think that's the important thing. So you know what, Evan, about, I don't even know when it was, I didn't read your book as much as I listened to it. I binge listened to it over a period of, I don't even know how many hours, but all pretty much in one fell swoop. It was very impactful, and I thought it would be probably most appropriate for me to reveal what my one word is right here on the interview with you. This is it? I've been saving this.

Okay, okay, okay, I love it.

I went through the whole process, and I had notebooks, and I was writing notes, and I was taking paper and like crumpling it up and throwing it across the room, it was great. So the word that I came up with is shine.

Ooh, okay.

Yeah, and I wanted to thank you for that, because it was your process through your book, Your One Word, that helped me to kind of come up with Shine as being a representative of what I believe.

Yeah, yeah.

Be true for the people that I work with, right? So entrepreneurs and small business owners who I believe need to be using video more in their businesses. Yeah. And so I'm going to start to incorporate the word Shine as part of my mantra, as part of what I do in my business. And it's interesting because your book was so instrumental in helping me find clarity around that. Because prior to reading your book and listening to it, I knew it, I knew it in my heart, but I hadn't put a word to it yet. Yep. Right. It was a feeling inside of me. And your book really helped me to give voice and give it a name.

Yeah.

Oh, I want to thank you for that.

Cool. That's awesome. You know, it's great hearing those stories. And I appreciate you waiting to have me on to talk about it. The other kind of mind-blowing thing then also becomes it's not just business, right? You know, before we went live, you mentioned your son who's upstairs playing Fortnite. How do you help him shine?

Yeah.

Right. And so that's when it gets heavy. Like my relationships, I have a 9-year-old son. So like, how do I help him believe more? He went through the One Word Exercise. He came up with confidence. It's like, how do I help him have more confidence? And so it just becomes the framework for everything, not just business.

Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I believe in your message and how you're helping entrepreneurs. I know you have a, a BHAG of helping a billion entrepreneurs. I think it's fantastic. And I just thank you so much for the time you spent with me today and sharing your expertise and your insights on how we can all grow to that next level. Thank you so much, Evan Carmichael.

I appreciate it, and, uh, keep spreading shine.

I will.