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Comparison is the death of true self-contentment (John Powell)
I don’t often rant on this blog, but this week I’m really riled up and I’m going to let it fly because this is vital. It is critical to your business’s success.
Stop comparing your beginning to their middle.
That’s it. That’s the point of today’s rant. Whether “they” is Marie Forleo, Gary Vee, Amy Porterfield or Richard Branson, you must stop expecting to receive the same results as they do from the same tactics.
Of course, they know what they’re talking about. Yes, they obviously have some major business skills and know-how. And absolutely they have good advice to offer.
BUT.
Their advice comes from YEARS of experience.
“Well, duh, Anita. Of course, it does, that’s why we listen to them,” I can hear you thinking.
Everyone Starts at Zero
Amy Porterfield ran a Facebook ad saying “Learn how I earned $1ooK from just two emails”. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Two emails? I can write two emails. I’ll even spend the time to research persuasive email marketing techniques to make those two emails better. I’ll read her blog, listen to her podcast and attend her webinar. Then I’ll have all the information to write those two magical emails for my own business.
Except.
I’m not Amy Porterfield. I don’t have her experience and her email list. I don’t have a team of six marketers working full-time to build that list to the 30K or 50K or whatever number she has. I don’t have thousands of past students waiting to buy their next course from me.
And I can tell you that me sending two emails to my list of just over 2000 isn’t going to get the same results that Amy’s blog post suggested. Those two emails worked because of all of her experience, history and past work. They worked because of her team and their knowledge. They worked because that list of 30K subscribers has received weekly messages from Amy about a wide variety of business-related topics, warming them up.
So don’t you dare compare your sales success starting out with 100 people on your email list and 32 followers on Instagram, to someone like Amy Porterfield. You can absolutely get there if you want…but not even Amy started there.
Everyone, even Amy, starts at zero.
Some things can’t be stopped, if you want to be successful
Now, don’t take me wrong…I do believe in letting things go when they’re no longer serving you. I gave up on Hootsuite after having been an ambassador for the social media automation program for years.
Personal branding, however, is not something to let go.
When I started my business in 2011 I attended every in-person networking event I could find to build relationships and get the word out about me and my new business. I know it’s hard to believe there was a time when not everyone was on social media, but it’s true! In 2011 I had to prove the value of social media and had to convince business owners it wasn’t just a fad.
I networked my tookus off for the first two years. After that, I learned to be more strategic about my networking.
That first few years in business set the tone for my personal brand, even if I wasn’t aware of that term at the time. People knew me as the go-to social media consultant in Halifax. If they had social media questions, they called me. And I’ve spent the most recent years blatantly working on building my personal brand. Part of that is continuing the relationships that started many years ago with colleagues like-minded small business owners and service organizations.
So colour me surprised when I read that someone was proposing it isn’t necessary to keep building your personal brand! You can read the whole thing here in Mark Schaefer’s blog where he also disagrees.
In fact, it was Mark’s blog that inspired me to write today’s rant about comparison. Adam Grant is doing the same thing in his post that Amy Porterfield did: marketing from a place of built-up privilege. If they were talking to Richard Branson or Marie Forleo, this might make sense…but are they? Or are they marketing to millions of people who are not household names?
Like Amy, Adam has years of personal branding behind him now and is well known. So sure, he can stop thinking about building his “personal brand” and focus on something different. He’s confident enough and figured himself out well enough that he has his personal brand under control and, assuming he’s not faking it for the IG, it’s really not something he needs to think about on a daily basis. It just is who he is. It’s baked in.
But make no mistake he still has and is still building, a personal brand with every post, podcast and article he writes.
To say he doesn’t have a personal brand would simply be false. Everyone has one…curated or not. What other people say about you when you’re not in the room? That’s your personal brand.
When you’re just starting out in business, a lot of your energy will be focused on creating your brand, and for most of my readers, that is going to be a personal brand. When you’re learning from coaches and gurus and experts who have been out there, in the arena, for a decade, or even just a couple of years longer than you, you HAVE to remember that you are not yet where they are.
Focus on the right things
I’m not going to try and tell you what the right things are. Only you know what work is the best work for you to be doing.
Are you procrastinating on doing the right work because you want to find the easy way? Or maybe you want to be able to blame someone else…like the guru who’s selling you the perfect system to build something in your business.
Do you really need to spend time building an online course, a funnel or a membership? Or do you need to spend time delivering your program or service to people now so you know what will work as a course?
I got two emails this week about this. My friends at UnreadMail talked about Neo’s spoon in the Matrix. Or rather how there is no spoon in the Matrix. There is no magic formula, funnel, system or program that is going to magically make you a gazillionaire. And Mark Manson’s email this week discussed the paradox of productivity and how focusing all your time and energy on that guru’s system probably isn’t going to get you as far as JUST. DOING. THE. WORK.
And please, this doesn’t mean systems and funnels and such are bad and useless. Of course they are helpful and can grow your business. But they won’t grow your business if you’re spending all your time on that and not enough time on THE RIGHT WORK…putting in your time…providing value to your customers. It’s not going to help if you’re using these systems, courses, and programs to procrastinate.
You cannot compare how much work you are putting into making “passive income” to the amount of work any one of the gurus selling a passive income dream is. They are working from a place of built-up privilege, like Amy and like Adam. They have the privilege of being able to have truly passive income because they’ve done the hard work of figuring out WHAT works and then spent the time building it.
The Amy’s and Adams of the world have spent a lot of time and energy building up their business, lists and personal brand to the point that sending just two emails can sell $100,000 in courses.
So yes, there’s lots to learn from everyone’s favourite business coaches, mentors, icons and gurus. And if you are inspired by them, that’s awesome. Run with it. Take the program, buy the system, build that funnel.
And do the real work.
Stop comparing your conversion rate, your social media following, or your course purchases from two emails to those of people with teams and a decade or more under their belts.
Don’t let comparing yourself to them steal the joy you feel in your accomplishments.
End rant.
