If you’re reading to this close to when it was released, I’m currently away—I’ve run off for a couple of weeks to get married and spend some quality time with my about—to—be—wife.
So this week’s and next week’s letters are a little shorter than they have been recently because I had to prep them in advance, and I didn’t have a lot of time.
However I still wanted them to have impact—to still be totally worth your time.
And so instead of just talking about one topic today but not being able to go into it properly, I’ll be sharing a handful of insights that you can take with you into your week.
In the spirit of not having much time, we’re going to start with a tip about how you can keep making impactful stuff when you’re in a busy period too.
And we’ll keep this social media focused but you can apply these to other types of content too.
#1: Content for when you’re in a busy period.
If you’re a creative who finds themselves in a situation like I’m in right now (having limited time to produce content but wanting to keep it impactful), here are a few things I do to help keep things going without sacrificing too much impact that you can try too:
First thing is lists.
People love lists and they’re easy for your brain to produce.
Whenever you’re stuck with content—even if you’re a musician who mostly showcases your music—you can probably find a way to work lists into it.
Coming up with a “top 3 something” or “5 reasons why x” list can be quick, effective, and can also help you spark more ideas easily.
I use lists all the time when I’m busy.
And like I said, even a musician showcasing music could use this.
- Maybe you make a post that’s like “These are my 5 most popular songs, which one do you like best? Comment below.”
- Or “top 3 lessons I’ve learned about the music industry”
- Or even “wait for the drop, coming in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…” — that’s obviously not a list but it’s using numbers in a way that makes it easy for people to engage.
If you’re building a presence based on your service, or it’s education—based, lists are even easier.
You see these everywhere, with ‘top 3 tips’, ‘10 best plugins’, ‘5 worst mistakes’ etc.
Lists are easy for people to take in and for you to come up with.
So when you’re stuck or in a busy period and you need content, reach for lists.
Repost / reuse.
Another thing you can do, which is super simple and obvious (but I feel like it needs to be drilled into people), is to reuse stuff you’ve already put out.
Every few months, if you’ve got stuff you can repost that will still be relevant today (which will most likely be the case if you’re sharing art), do it.
I feel a lot of creatives have an aversion to reposting for whatever reason.
Maybe they don’t like their older stuff…
…or they don’t feel like they’re allowed to repost it…
…or maybe something else.
But at the very least you need to understand that you are absolutely allowed to repost older stuff.
There is no rule that says every post you put out has to be this super new, fresh, unique thing.
Maybe that’s the ideal situation, but it’s definitely not mandatory.
Most people aren’t going to mind seeing an older post pop up in their feed again (if they even remember it).
And you don’t know if they even saw it the first time anyway.
If it helps your head, you can give yourself an excuse to repost the old stuff.
For example, if you feel weird about reposting something about a song that came out a year ago, maybe the post could lean into that, like “this song is officially 1 year old today”.
Not that you need an excuse to post an old song, but the option is there if it’ll help you feel more comfortable.
Reposting is a huge part of my strategy. It’s a big part of how I can stay relatively consistent week to week.
Don’t be afraid of it—it’s your friend.
And if you don’t like your old stuff enough to just repost it, you have another option:
Repurpose it.
I do this all the time.
If you have an old post or idea or whatever and you don’t feel good about reposting but you still like some part of it, you can take the idea and rework it to make it feel different and new.
For example:
- Sometimes I’ll make a carousel post with a bunch of thoughts or something, and then turn each slide into an animation that says the exact same thing.
- Sometimes I’ll take an idea from an old post and just reword it so it sounds new.
- Sometimes I’ll just update the visuals in the video.
- Sometimes I’ll collect a bunch of separate ideas or tips or whatever that I’ve put out and put them into a single carousel, or a list video or something.
You see where I’m going with this?
You take existing stuff and just rework it so it feels fresh.
If you’re a musician, this could be using older videos but changing the text.
It could be using the “this song is x years old” technique.
It could be reusing b—roll footage for a different post—maybe putting a different song under it, that kind of thing.
If you make cool stuff, you don’t have to just leave it at one post that gets seen once.
You can do a lot more with it, and increase the chances of people actually seeing and registering it.
On social media, repeated exposure is key, and this is one way to do that without burning out.
So to summarise…
When you’re stuck and/or busy and you need to come up with content:
- Use lists, because they’re easier for everyone involved
- Reuse old stuff if it’s been long enough
- And repurpose stuff—take your existing ideas and rework them to feel fresh by using different formats and making tweaks.
See, lists—they’re great, right? This whole letter is a list.
Ok, let’s move on.
#2. You’re not a victim.
I got a comment on a post the other day which I screenshotted.
I’m going to type it out with the words changed slightly because I don’t want to call this person out or anything—but I want to use it to make a point.
This is the comment, and it was about showing up on social media, being consistent, and working through the difficulties:
“Made an account in 2016 that did just that. Making beats and playing guitar solos, tried to post as often as possible. Never broke 1000 followers and my most liked post was of a cover. Gave up in the pandemic—it’s clearly a more pay to win game.”
This person was basically saying “Yeah I tried that but it doesn’t work—the game is rigged.”
Unfortunately I see this kind of talk a lot.
“Good luck with trying to succeed in today’s world”
“The algorithm only cares about “x” thing, it hates musicians”
It’s everywhere, all the time.
And I’m not saying this social media game or the modern approach to getting yourself out there is perfect or anything like that.
I’ve got my fair share of beef with the way things work nowadays too.
But can you see the pattern here?
There is zero ownership.
Everything is something else’s fault.
It’s the algorithm. It’s today’s world. It’s pay to win.
You rarely hear something from these people about taking personal responsibility for their success.
It’s always something else, something outside of their control, something designed to keep them down.
And again, I’m not saying there aren’t flaws in the setup. There are.
But this defeatist attitude is what’s crushing these people’s souls and dreams more than anything else.
If all you look for is how fucked up everything is and how the world is against you, that’s all you’re going to see.
You will be completely ignorant to the solutions in front of you because you refuse to shift your filter to allow them into your line of sight.
Maybe if this person who could never break 1000 followers asked themselves things like…
- What if my stuff just isn’t that compelling and I need to improve it?
- What if I’m missing a piece of the puzzle?
- What if every example of a musician who has more than 1000 followers (and who did it for free) isn’t actually some exception to the rule… what if it’s me?
…they might be able to break 1000 followers.
People who hold this stubborn view that everything is against them will bend over backwards to confirm it, despite the overwhelming evidence to support the opposite.
And I get it.
I understand why some creatives are incredibly frustrated with the path they feel they have to take. There are plenty of holes in it.
But there needs to be some ownership here.
The reason I’m bringing this up today is because I’ve seen a lot of it lately in musicians, and I just want to encourage you to be super aware of falling into this trap.
Things are hard. For sure.
But you are harder. You can win.
If you change your filter to seek solutions—things that will move you forwards instead of looking for everyting that’s holding you back—you’ll be amazed at the doors that open for you.
I’m not saying it’ll happen overnight, but if you’re strong it’s much more likely to happen at some point.
You have to be persistent.
You have to not let something being hard be the reason you don’t do it.
You have to let yourself be led by something more compelling than how easy or comfortable it is.
This idea that everything should be easy, everything should just work, and if it doesn’t it’s unfair, is one of the most limiting attitudes you can possibly have.
It’s the opposite of nourishing your soul. It keeps you small.
It leads to a bitterness that turns the world cold for you.
It sends you down a dark path that keeps you stuck and never allows you to see the way out.
I used to have a victim mindset about everything.
Any problem in my life could be attributed to some external thing, something outside of me.
I remember saying to my about—to—be—wife when we first met that I was never able to properly click with any of my exes.
There was always something about them that caused too much tension in the relationship.
After I started doing some serious personal growth work (with her help), guess what?
Turns out the common denominator is… me.
Maybe all my exes weren’t super crazy, and maybe I was just immature.
And this didn’t just apply to my relationships. It was everything.
I started looking at all the other problems in my life: Struggling to make progress in my career, struggling with my health, struggling with a sense of a constant dread, and a lot more.
Through this new lens of “what if it’s me? What if I have control?” I started to see things differently. And more importantly, I started to fix things.
Weirdly, I was never able to fix anything when everything was someone else’s fault.
As soon as the responsibility came back to me, I was back in control.
I was able to radically change my situation for the better, in multiple areas of life.
It’s easy to be a victim.
It’s easy to palm the responsibility off to someone or something else.
It’s easy to argue that everything is against you and that’s why you can’t get anywhere.
But at the end of the day, it’s mostly just lies.
Sure, there are things that get in our way—legitimate things that make life harder.
And some people have been dealt a shitty hand, genuinely.
Also, not everything difficult is worth fighting for. That’s something to consider.
You don’t have to just power through with everything.
But I’ve seen so many musicians lately with this victim mindset and it’s gotten so bad that a lot of them can’t see the obvious solutions that are sitting right in front of them.
So many times I’ve heard a musician talk about how hard or unfair everything is and then I check out what they’ve been doing, and it’s next to nothing.
So many times I’ve heard about how they keep going around in circles, and then I ask what they’ve been doing to try and make progress, and it’s next to nothing.
Again, some things suck, and they do make life harder than it needs to be.
But if you want to do this creative career thing for real, you cannot go into it with this defeatist attitude, this idea that the world is just against you in every way.
You won’t survive it.
I want you to win. I want you to see that you can do way more than you currently think you’re capable of.
You have incredible power in you, but you have to let it out.
You have to shift your filter of reality to see that life can be better, and that you have the power to make it that way.
I’ve seen what good can come from perspective shifting.
And I’ve seen what bad can come from staying stuck in a dark pit of negativity.
You have the power to change.
You have the power to choose good. Please use it.
You can do this 🙂
Ok, let’s move on.
#3. The lie of consistency.
The next thing is the lie of consistency when it comes to building online.
We’re all sick to death of hearing “be consistent, that’s how you win”.
Everyone in the world knows how important consistency is at this point.
But sometimes this messaging can be misleading.
Sometimes it signals to creatives that all they need is consistency, and the rest will work itself out.
This is a huge lie.
When it comes to something like building your online presence, creatives will often understand “be consistent” to mean just keep showing up.
And while that is 100% important…
…and while many more creatives could probably get a much better result simply by showing up more consistently…
…it is not the whole picture at all.
What happens—especially with musicians I talk to or see online—is they get this message to be consistent, so they start showing up on a regular basis… but they never really move forward.
Their whole plan is to just show up, believing that if they do that for long enough, everything will work out.
This is a dangerous way to think.
The thing that often gets overlooked is that for consistently showing up to actually pay off, you need to also be consistently trying to improve.
And you might be like “yeah yeah no shit, I get it”…but this is a really common problem.
People don’t do this.
You can easily end up years into this with next to nothing to show for it.
Simply showing up but never really improving guarantees nothing.
Well, maybe it guarantees that you’ll be spending a lot of time online. But that’s it.
You need to be able to recognise when to just keep pushing forward, and when to focus in on actually improving things like the quality of your output so you can make real progress.
If you’ve been going for a couple of months and haven’t seen much progress, that’s fine.
Keep going, and soon enough you’ll have more information to tell you how things are going.
But if you’ve been going for a couple of years and haven’t really seen any movement, that’s not fine.
Simply consistently showing up is not working for you, and you need a new plan.
We know that progress isn’t always going to be as fast as we want it to be.
We also know that there’s a learning curve with this stuff, and that we will most likely have to grind thanklessly for a bit before we see any real movement.
But if it’s been a couple of years and you feel like you’re totally dragging your feet… something needs to change.
There is a big difference between consistently showing up and consistently working to improve as you go vs simply consistently showing up and closing your eyes to whether or not you’re improving.
In the first case, your years of hard work will probably pay off.
In the second, those years of hard work will make you bitter because you never see anything decent from it.
You must pay attention as you go.
Showing up consistently is a cornerstone of building your online presence.
But unless you can clearly see that you’re getting somewhere, that alone is not enough.
Again, in the early stages you have to have some amount of blind faith.
It’s just part of the deal. You grit your teeth and power through the thankless work.
But beyond that, you need to be getting some clear feedback that what you’re doing is working.
Otherwise you could go on for years and years and end up with nothing.
So what do you actually do here?
How can you know if you’re going in the right direction?
And if you’re not, how do you get on the right track?
Well, first it’s important to have a clear objective so you have a way to measure whether or not things are working.
Let’s keep the example simple and say you want to build your online presence as a musician. Your goal might be simply to grow your audience, for the sake of this example at least.
So in this case the way you can tell if things are working is if your audience is getting bigger, right?
Taking into consideration that you might have to just grind it out for at least a couple months before you notice any significant movement, you can use audience growth or lack thereof to determine if you’re moving in the right direction.
If your audience is getting bigger, it’s working.
And from here you can start to build on your existing strategy if you want to try and speed things up.
But basically, if things continue to go up, you’re moving in the right direction.
If your audience is not growing (or it’s shrinking, or it stops moving completely for an extended time), something needs to change.
I know that sounds incredibly obvious…
But there are plenty of musicians out there who have been consistently showing up on social media for a year+ and have seen no change in their audience size whatsoever (and who are actively trying to grow).
And they might be doing that because they believe they need to just keep going and things will come good.
Not likely unless that whole time they’re really trying to improve.
Keep in mind that audience size is not the only measure of success on social media.
Your audience could be actually decreasing in size but you’re getting better results in terms of sales or streams or something else.
Depends on your goals, right?
But for this example our goal is audience growth, and so if you’re not growing, you’re not achieving your goal.
So in this scenario, what would you do?
How could you change your situation so that you start actually achieving your goal?
If you read last week’s letter about making progress, you might know the starting point:
You first get real with yourself about where you’re at so you know the actual ground you’re standing on.
And then you make sure the fundamentals of the thing you’re trying to achieve are in place.
9/10 if a musician comes to me and they’re struggling to grow, it’s because they don’t have all of those fundamentals in place.
As a quick reminder, those fundamentals are consistent output of high quality material, at least one source of consistent traffic, and a way to build relationships with the people in your world.
But if they do have that stuff in place, and they’re still not achieving what they want, then it becomes a matter of levelling up one area at a time.
So let’s say you’re consistently putting stuff out, you can clearly see you’re getting eyes on that stuff, but you’re not seeing your audience grow.
That says to me that, although you’ve got a system in place, people just aren’t responding to your stuff.
It’s not a problem of visibility, it’s a problem of value.
And assuming these are the right kinds of people (your target audience), your next step is to improve the appeal of the stuff you’re putting out so people actually stick—follow you and continue to engage with you.
I don’t want to just repeat what I said last week, so I recommend you go back and read last week’s letter if you haven’t…
But basically from here you’d start to look into the individual elements of impactful content— creating great hooks, visuals, quality ideas, etc—and attack them one by one.
Assuming your music is actually awesome, if you’ve got a good solid system in place and you’re actively working on improving the stuff you’re putting out, you should see some movement.
And then you can safely assume consistency is going to be really beneficial, right?
It’s not always going to be this straightforward.
But based on what I see, it’s pretty common for the problem to be either a weak fundamental system or a lack of appeal in the stuff the musician is putting out—or both.
Once they have that system and they’ve got some direction with how to improve the content, consistency becomes a major focus and will likely be the thing that takes them further than they’ve ever been.
So what I’m trying to communicate here is that…
Simply consistently showing up is not at all a guaranteed path to success.
Consistency only works when you’ve got the right stuff in place to go with it, and when you’re actively trying to improve.
If you’ve been consistent but you haven’t made any noticeable progress in the way you want, something needs to change.
And it’s likely what I’ve been talking about.
I do not recommend if you’ve been grinding for 6+ months and you’ve seen no change, that you just keep going and hope for the best.
You need to start paying more attention and make a new, better plan.
If you feel completely lost with this, look to the fundamentals I mentioned.
That will get you on track.
Ok, let’s move on.
#4. What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
Recently I saw a video of someone asking “what would you do if you weren’t afraid?”, and I can’t get it out of my head.
It’s a really simple but powerful question.
By removing the massive fog that fear produces, you’re able to much more clearly see what you want and make a plan you can get excited about.
If I look back at the majority of the decisions I’ve made in the last 10 years, fear has been a major contributing factor, which is terrible.
It’s taken me off the path countless times.
This might be the case for you too. How much do you think fear is leading you astray?
How many times do you think it’s tricked you into doing something you don’t actually want to do, or stopped you from doing something you do want to do?
A way you can figure this out is by honestly answering the question: What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
How different would your creative career look?
What kind of things would you be doing on a daily basis?
What would you be sharing with the world?
Chances are, if you’re being honest, there’s a pretty big gap between what you’d do and what you are doing.
At least that’s been the case for me, I can’t actually speak for you.
Asking this simple question can be confronting, because it can show you just how easily we get pulled off track by our fear.
It can shine a light on how little control we’ve been claiming over our own lives.
But it can also clearly show us the right path—or at least the next step.
We let fear play such a big role in our decision—making…
But what if it didn’t matter?
What if we pretended it didn’t exist and we got super honest about what we’d be doing in its absence?
Whatever your answer is to this, that’s your path.
That’s the direction you go in.
Because as much as it’s hard to accept it, these fears are rarely valid reasons not to do something.
Obviously some are. If you don’t want to jump out of a plane with no parachute for fear of death, that’s pretty reasonable.
But we need to recognise that often letting our fears around judgment, rejection, visibility, success, and the like direct us—as well—intentioned as they might be—is not what’s best for us.
Most of the time, what’s on the other side of those fears is everything we want.
Behind those fears there’s freedom, strength, progress, and fulfilment.
There’s a version of us who’s more capable and successful and grounded.
Our fears should not be the decision—makers.
They should be addressed, because there’s valuable information in them.
But we have to learn to say to them:
Look, I get that you’re trying to protect me, but I’m good. This isn’t the crazy danger you think it is. This is actually good for me, and I’m gonna do it.
So bottom line: If you’re lost, pretend fear doesn’t exist.
Ask yourself from this place of no fear what you would love to do.
That’s where you go next.
You can do this.
Ok, let’s call this here.
I hope you got something from this. I know it was a little different to the normal episodes but hopefully it was still valuable.
Again, I’m away right now for a couple of weeks, but if you’re interested in getting help from me when I’m back please feel free to check out your options and email me with questions if you have them.
Ok, all the best and talk again soon 🙂
