Afford Anything - How to Create an Authentic Life

Episode Date: July 7, 2018

#138: There’s a famous quote that’s attributed to Henry Ford. The quote says, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”⠀ ⠀ There’s no proof that Henry Ford actually said this. But whether or not that quote is historically accurate, the point remains. If Elon Musk had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a car with better gas mileage.⠀ ⠀ But Elon never bothered asking. Because he knows you cannot change history from the middle of the bell curve. And he knows that design by consensus, by definition, leads to average results.⠀ ⠀ He may ask for input on the details. But he will never ask the crowd to guide his vision.⠀ ⠀ True innovation comes from vision. We see this in technology. We see this an art, music, writing. But often, we fail to see this in ourselves. We allow the crowd to dictate who we are: what our dreams are, what our goals are, what our fears are. We crowdsource our vision and live a life of “should.”⠀ ⠀ Authenticity is the art of not giving a sh*t about should.⠀ ⠀ This sounds fine on the surface, when we’re pontificating about our lives. But it’s much scarier in the real world, when you face the reality that people will judge you. They will criticize you. They will tell you that you’re wrong. ⠀ ⠀ The more you try to step away from should, the more shoulds they throw at you. You should be married. You should have kids. You should have a job.⠀ ⠀ The thing is, they may be talking about you, but it’s not really about you. Your decisions are triggering to them, and they’re reacting to that.⠀ ⠀ Authenticity means accepting that if other people get triggered, that’s not your responsibility. You may be the catalyst, but you’re not responsible for their emotions.⠀ ⠀ And in that regard, authenticity is also the art of setting boundaries.⠀ ⠀ That doesn’t mean you exclude people from your life. But it does mean that you set healthy emotional boundaries, such that their thoughts and feelings do not become internalized as your own.⠀ ⠀ _____ This is a snippet from a speech I delivered at the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon last week. I'm sharing the speech for this July 2018 First Friday bonus episode. We broadcast one podcast episode per week, and on the first Friday of each month, we roll out a special bonus episode. Today's episode is July's special bonus episode, and I've divided it into two sections: during the first half, I share the speech that I delivered, and during the second half, I discuss how and why I wrote this speech -- and the key takeaway that I hope people learn from it. Enjoy! _______________________________________ For more ways to interact or listen to the show, go to http://affordanything.com/episode138 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that's true, not just for how you spend your money, but also how you spend your time, your focus, your energy, anything in your life that's a scarce or a limited resource. And so the questions become twofold. Number one, what matters most? And number two, how do you align your day-to-day behaviors to reflect those priorities? That's the question that this podcast is here to explore.

And it's not an easy answer. Figuring out the answer to this is a lifetime practice. But that's why we're here. My name's Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. Normally we're a weekly show. We air one episode a week every Monday morning. But once a month, on the first Friday of the month, we air a bonus episode.

And so this is the July 2018, first Friday bonus episode. And today I'm sharing with you the speech that I delivered at the World Domination Summit in Portland, Oregon last week. Now, the World Domination Summit is an unusual gathering. This is not your normal conference. Conference really is not the right word for it. This is a gathering of ambitious, unconventional, creative people. Entrepreneurs, writers, artists, sculptors, musicians, world travelers,

just interesting people doing interesting things. People fly from all over the world to gather in Portland to meet other innovative like-minded people who are just doing stuff that's out of the ordinary. The founder of the World Domination Summit is a man by the name of Chris Gillibow. He's also a podcaster, as well as a New York Times bestselling author. And he has been a guest on this podcast, on the Afford Anything podcast in the past. If you go to the show notes, which are available at Afford Anything.com slash episode 138, we will link to that episode with Chris Gillibow in the show notes.

last year, 2017, was my first year going to the World Domination Summit. And that was a very meaningful trip because back in 2012, when the summit was fairly new, I tried to get a ticket as an attendee. And the ticket sold out extremely quickly. And so I could not even go there as an attendee. And last year, when I went for the first time, Chris invited me to go there as a speaker. So that was a big moment for me because. Here I was five years prior. I wasn't able to get a ticket to attend.

And, you know, fast forward five years into the future. Now I'm there as a speaker. That blew my mind. So last year I went there as a speaker and I led a three-hour-long workshop called How to Afford Anything. And in that workshop, I did a deep dive into how to improve your relationship with money. I broadcasted that talk on this podcast as well. And because it was three hours long, I chopped it up into three different episodes. And we aired that on episodes 87, episode 89, and episode 91.

That was my presentation last year. This year, however, was totally different. This year, instead of giving a three-hour deep dive workshop about money, Chris asked me to do something pretty radical. He asked me to get up on the main stage, which is in the Newmark Theater. It was in front of about 880 people. I got up on the main stage and gave a talk about a totally different topic.

a non-money topic. I talked about authenticity. And authenticity is a cliche but very complex concept. And that's something that we're going to dive into in today's episode. First, I'm going to share with you the speech that I made at the World Domination Summit. And that speech is about 25 minutes long. So that's going to be the first half an hour of this episode. And then after that's done, I'll talk in more depth about how I wrote that speech, why I wrote that speech, what I wrote that speech, I was thinking about and what I hope people take from this, what some of the key takeaways from that speech are. And so that will be the second half of the episode. If you're new to this podcast, by the way, today's episode is not a normal episode. So normally on this show, every other

week we interview a guest on the weeks in between. I answer questions that come in from the audience. So today's episode is totally abnormal. But if you're a long-term listener, I think that you'll really enjoy this fresh take on something that we rarely discuss around here. which is how to be real, how to be you, both in your work and in your relationship with others and in even your understanding of yourself, how to be more authentic in all arenas of your life. So that is what today's episode is going to cover. Now, because the speech is about 25 minutes long and I don't want to interrupt the speech itself, here is how we're going to format today's episode and it's going to be a little bit different than what we normally do.

Right now, we're going to go into a quick word from our sponsors. and that's going to last for about three minutes. After that, we're going to go into the speech. That'll be about 25 minutes. After that, we do another quick commercial break. And then after that, I talk about that deep dive into how I wrote the speech. So here we go. Do you want to support the environment with the clothing decisions that you make?

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That's freshbooks.com slash Paula for a free 30-day trial. Welcome back to the episode. And now here's the speech that I gave at the World Domination Summit. Based on the fact that I'm standing on this stage, you probably think that I'm here to tell you, stories about me. And you're correct, kind of. But I'm a bit of an introvert. So I'd like to start this speech by asking you a few questions about yourself. So specifically I'm curious and I'd like to see your hand in the air. Raise your hand if you have a website or a blog where you share your stories with the world. Keep your hands up. Now raise your hand if you have a podcast.

Keep your hands up. And anyone who still has a hand down, raise your hand if you have any social media accounts, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, anything. Look around the auditorium. Thank you. Now you can put your hands down. Almost everyone in this room has some type of an internet presence. And what that means is that you're cultivating the side of you that other people see. You don't post everything. You can't. It's impossible. Even if you wanted to, you just couldn't. I don't post pictures of myself sitting on the toilet, even though that's a frequent part of my life. I don't post pictures of myself brushing my teeth, even though I do that twice a day. Well, usually. Okay, I try to brush my teeth twice a day, most of the time. So it's normal to not

post every aspect of our lives. By the nature of the internet, we have to choose what we share. We have to choose which stories to tell. And we have to post a selective, cure. version of ourselves that's intrinsic to the medium. But that's also where problems start to arise, problems surrounding the presentation of ourselves and the tension between who we are and who the world wants us to be. Those problems don't just apply to our online presence.

They apply to any act of creation or self-expression, whether you're an entrepreneur an artist, a writer, a musician, or anyone who creates anything. Those problems, and how to solve them, are what this talk is about. And the solution to these problems is a cliche yet incredibly complex concept called authenticity. We'll talk about that in just a moment. But first, let me introduce myself. My name is Paula Pant.

Actually, you know, I take that person. That's not totally true. When I was born, the name given to me at birth, the name that's printed on my birth certificate, is Pragya, P-R-A-G-Y-A, Pragueia. I was born in Kathmandu, which is the capital of a country called Nepal. Nepal is a country in the Himalayas, sandwiched in between China and India. Our claims to fame are being the home of Mount Everest and being the birthed. place of Buddha, both of which are fun talking points at cocktail parties. And by the way, if I'm the only Nepalese person you've ever met, shoot, that's cool. I get that a lot.

I'll be at a party. And somebody will be like, hey, where are you from? And I'm like, Ohio. And they're like, no, no, where are you really from? And I'm like, well, I was born in Nepal. And oftentimes after some conversation, people will say to me, you know, I've never met a Nepalese person before. And so of course, I always reply, well, you never forget your first. So I was born into this identity of Prugia of Kathmandu, and I moved to the United States as a child. And by the way, do you want to see a really bad passport photo? So check this out. And then this is the point during the speech where I put up a slide with a picture of myself with a terrible passport photo.

And then I say, I had such a bad haircut that my immigration documents listed me as a boy. And then this is the part in the presentation where I show a picture of the page on my passport where the officials had written, the boy whose photograph and other particulars are given below is allowed to travel with the bearer of this passport. It was when I was a kid. I was too young to have my own passport. So I flew on a passport with my mom and I was listed there as a boy. Anyway, I'll share those photos in the show notes. That's afford anything.com slash episode 138 if you want to see a terrible, terrible picture of me with a bad haircut. And then the speech continues. So I moved to the U.S. And I grew up in Ohio.

And in many ways, I was an all-American kid. I watched Looney Tunes and Duck Tales and Darkwing Duck. And I played Carmen San Diego and the Oregon Trail, where I always died of dysentery. And I ate gushers and fruit by the foot. Do you remember that stuff? That stuff was awesome. And above all, I loved reading. So I read all the goosebumps books in the Babysitters Club and Sweet Valley High.

So I never felt as exotic as the name Pragyav Kathmandu might imply. Like at heart, I was just some kid from Ohio. But when I would go to school, the other kids didn't really see me that way. I was the only person of color in my class. And I was one of only two or three people of color in my entire K-8 elementary and middle school. And so that became my defining characteristic, overshadowing everything else about me, including my personality and my interests and my me. And the other kids made fun of me a lot

because they had never seen anyone like me before. I looked weird. I looked different, which to them was weird. And I had a funny religion, the one that worships cows, and I had a funny name. And one day, when I was around five, I went to a friend's house, and I tried to teach her grandfather how to say my name, Pragya.

And after several failed attempts, he said, I am sick and tired of trying to learn how to say your name. Well, like most young children, I was very literal. So when he said that he was sick and tired, I took that to mean that I had quite literally made him sick. I thought that I made this guy physically ill, just with my existence. So I came home and I told my mom and dad about it,

and my parents suggested that we legally change my name. But here was the catch. We wouldn't get rid of Pragya. We would give me an additional name. This additional name would become the leading name, the first name, which therefore would slide Pragya into the default middle name position. And by doing that, I could be both. My parents said I could choose any name I wanted,

as long as it began with a P. They liked alliteration. So for about a month, we would lay in bed at night and flip through a book of baby names, and we would read through all the feet. female P names like Paige, Penelope, and we narrowed it down to either Paula or Pamela. And I spent a few weeks deliberating between these two names, Paula, Pamela, which one should I be? I can't decide.

And ultimately, the deciding factor was that my parents told me I was going to have to learn how to spell my name, and Paula was one letter shorter and therefore easier to learn how to spell. So I picked that one. My parents hired a lawyer, and we had the name Paula legally added to my identity. And so now my name is Paula Pruggia. Either one. I answer to both. I normally introduce myself to Americans as Paula,

and I introduce myself to Nepalese people as Pruggia. So I embraced the split identity. So this is me as Paula. Paula was an all-American kid. And then at this point in the presentation, I show a slide of a piece of paper where in the fourth grade I wrote down, I had to write down an answer to what I wanted to be when I grew up.

All right. So this was the journal where I documented my childhood ambitions. And check this out. As you can see, when I was a kid, I wrote down that when I grew up, I wanted to work part-time at Taco Bell. By the way, in the show notes at Afford Anything.com slash episode 138, I'll share a picture of that as well. This is me as Pragya, and then here I show another slide. Sorry, this really does not translate to a podcast very well. I'm realizing this as I'm going through it. So here's the point where I show a couple of pictures of myself as Pragya looking very Nepalese, all the traditional attire. And then the speech continues. Sure, I was both. But I was also neither. And I constantly had to switch between the two identities.

And here's the thing. The social norms of these two worlds are totally different. Behaviors that are acceptable in one culture are just weird in the other and vice versa. So I kept trying to toggle between these two identities and these two cultures. And especially as a kid, it was extremely confusing. I kept missing social norms that everybody else thought of as obvious. For example, when I was in the first grade, I didn't know how to high five. I thought that if you raised one hand in the air, palm facing outward, that was a gesture to mean that you were granting somebody a favor, like in the Ramayan.

So if someone raised their hand to give me a high five, I would just stand there and stare at it. I spent all my time trying to figure out stuff like that. I spent all my time trying to figure out, what do you want me to do? How should I behave? How should I act? How can I fit in? What should I do? How do you want me to be? I spent all my time observing and learning and trying not to make social gaths. And because I was so occupied with all of this effort, I spent zero time asking myself, Hey, who am I? Fast forward 20 years.

My love for reading morphed into a love for writing. And so I started a blog, which later led to a podcast. And what I didn't realize when I started this blog and podcast is that this same childhood dilemma, the challenge

of always looking to the outside world to tell me how I should behave and who I should should be and how I should act and how I should quite literally identify myself and define myself. This dilemma would show up in my work life and it would affect my work life just as much as it had affected my home and school life as a kid until I figured out a way to solve it. So here's what happened. I decided I wanted to make money as an online writer and teacher. But the only problem is I didn't know how. So I read mountains of advice about email marketing

and product launches. And most of this advice can be boiled down to two steps. Discover what your audience wants. And then, serve it to them. Seems simple enough. So I mastered step one, the discovery. I gathered survey data. I ran heat maps.

I tracked clicks and opens and shares and comments and likes and unsubscribes. I discovered what my audience wanted. And then I stopped caring. I had all the market research in the world, but no motivation. At first, I couldn't figure out why I'd lost my mojo. Was I depressed? Was I self-sabotaging? It didn't make sense. I'd struggled for years to build an audience.

I mean, when I started blogging, nobody read me, not even my friends. I'd worked for years, very slowly building a platform, and now here I was, finally with a platform I was proud of and a message I believed in. And yet, with this mountain of metrics in front of me, I had no motivation to keep going. Why? And that's when I realized I didn't want to serve the survey data. Not if that meant that the metrics would become my new boss.

You see, I was letting the voices of others tell me what to do. I was letting other people guide my writing. my content, my voice. But no audience survey will ever say, yeah, we want you to just be you. We want you to be bold. We want you to be creative. We want you to dig deep and think big and be original.

No, that's not what the surveys say. The surveys say, hey, can you explain how to pick homeowners insurance? Look, you don't need me to answer that. A thousand people have answered that a thousand times all over the internet. My answer is not going to be unique. And since value comes from scarcity, my answer, therefore, will not be valuable. Value comes from what's unique within.

Value comes from your ideas, your thoughts, your insights, not your willingness to write for clicks and keywords. And so eventually I realized I could either try to read the crowd or I could be myself, but I can't do both. I could either try to be accepted and mold myself to who I think others want me to be, or I could be me. But I can't do both. So I threw away the market research, and I picked authenticity. Now, authenticity is a complex concept, so let's talk about what this means.

Here are three qualities that I associate with authentic living. Number one, you're responsible for what you do. You are not responsible for how you're viewed. Your job is to be you. Your job is not to tell people how to interpret you. At a fundamental level, what other people think about you is none of your business. And this can be a hard pill to swallow, particularly if you're an entrepreneur, an artist, a writer, or any other type of creator. Because in these worlds, what other people think of you is also literally, that's your business.

You're in the business of being accepted and admired and externally validated. That's your whole business model. That's what you do for a living. You're in the business of being liked and your worth is measured in part by Facebook likes and Instagram likes. That's how you know how well your brand is doing. And yet, paradoxically, there's only one way to win. at the business of being liked. It's by not caring.

Stop caring. And start creating. That's how you come up with work that's inspired, not work that's email six out of ten in AutorSponder A. If you're a creator, your job is to create. Your job is not to tell people how to receive your creations or how to interpret your creations. Your job is simply to create,

from within, release it into the world, and then get out of the way. Whatever happens, happens. Now, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't market your creations. Marketing is fantastic. It simply means that you shouldn't mold your masterpiece to what you think others might want of you. In other words, marketing is great, cowtowing is not. So if you find yourself as a little bit, during the creative process asking, what do they want? Let me just figure out what they want, and then I'll just make that for them, rather than listening to myself.

More than you're asking the wrong questions. The more essential questions are, what's inside of me? What inner voice can I express? What unique value can I share with the world? Because at the end of the day, there's a huge difference between asking, how can I contribute,

versus how will they view my contribution? Number two, authenticity is not giving a shit about should. There's a famous quote that's attributed to Henry Ford. The quote says, if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. There's no proof that Henry Ford actually said this. But whether or not that quote is historically accurate,

the point remains. If Elon Musk could ask people what they wanted, they would have said, a car with better gas mileage. But Elon never bothered asking, because he knows that you cannot change history from the middle of the bell curve. And he knows that designed by consensus,

by definition, leads to average results. True innovation comes from vision. We see this in technology. We see this in art, music, writing, but often we fail to see this. in ourselves. We allow the crowd to dictate who we are, what our dreams are, what our goals are, what our fears are, what our actions are. We crowdsource our vision, and we live a life of shoulds. Authenticity is the art of not giving a shit about should. Now this sounds fine on the

surface when we're in an auditorium pontificating about our lives. But it's much scarier out there in the real world when you face the reality that people will judge you. They will criticize you. They will tell you that you're wrong. And the more you try to step away from should, the more shoulds they throw at you. Oh, you should be married. You should have kids. You should have a job. The thing is, they may be talking about you, but it's not really about you. Your decisions are triggering. to them, and they're reacting to that. Authenticity means accepting that if other people get triggered, that's not your responsibility.

You may be the catalyst, but you're not responsible for their emotions. And in that regard, authenticity is also the art of setting boundaries. Now, that doesn't mean that you exclude people from your life, but it does mean that you develop healthy emotional boundaries such that their thoughts and feelings do not become internalized as your own. Number three, authenticity is courage and vulnerability. Authenticity is the combination of courage and vulnerability. And these two concepts, courage and vulnerability, may sound like polar opposites, but they're actually one and the same.

Courage is not a lack of fear. Courage is moving forward in spite of the fear. When you show up with courage, you're making a statement that, yeah, I'm terrified. I own that. And I'm going to do it anyway. It's kind of like being on the stage right now. So here's a thing, when people act courageously, they sometimes get hurt. When you fall in love, you take a risk.

And sometimes that risk hurts. When you make an investment in a business or in yourself, sometimes that investment flops and you end up losing. When you make a bold statement in art or fashion or music or writing, you sometimes get mocked or war. worse, ignored. When you travel, you might get mugged or lost, or both, and when you make a request, you might get denied. When we respond to the calling in our hearts, when we open ourselves up to our most authentic lives,

we also open up to hurt and pain and rejection and disappointment and grief. And yet we persist. That's why there's no courage without vulnerability, and there's no vulnerability without courage. These two attributes are inseparable, and both of these together will lead you to a more authentic life. When you move towards the type of life that demands courage and vulnerability, you move towards something that is greater than the sound of should.

So here's my question. What scares you? What idea sounds bold and terrifying and exciting? All at the same time. When you move in that direction, you move into a space that's more authentic. Here's my challenge to you. Be courageous. Do something every day that scares you.

Be vulnerable. Accept that people might not like it. Be authentic. Thank you. That was the speech that I made at the World Domination Summit in Portland last week. We're going to take a quick break for this word from our sponsors. And after that, we're going to come back

and I'm going to talk about how and why I wrote that speech and what I hope that people take from it. I've got a question for you. What kind of interest rate are you getting from your checking account? Well, if you are like the average person, probably not much. According to the FDIC, as of February 7, 2018, the national average interest rate on checking accounts is 0.04% APY. If you are looking for a bank that pays 12 times the national average, check out Radius Bank, where you can earn a 0.85% APY on balances of $2,500 and up. And that rate is not going to expire.

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fees, check out Radius Hybrid Checking. You can open an account at radiusbank.com slash Paula. Again, that's radiusbank.com slash P-A-U-L-A. Radiusbank.com slash Paula. Do you want to start a business or start a side hustle? Well, if so, you're going to need a website. And that's true regardless of whether you want to be a freelance writer, a designer, a professional public speaker, if you want to sell books, if you want to do social media consulting, like regardless of whatever industry you're in, if you want to be a dog walker in your local neighborhood, like no matter what you want to do, you're going to need a website. And if you're building a website, you're going to need hosting for it. There's a company called Bluehost that I think is fantastic.

Normally, they charge eight bucks per month for hosting, $7.99, to be exact. But they're offering an exclusive offer for fans of afford anything. You can get a hosting from them for $2.95 a month. So instead of paying $8 a month, you pay just shy of three bucks a month. Now, you can get this deal by going to afford anything.com slash bluehost. Again, that's afford anything.com slash bluehost, where you can get hosting for just under $3 per month. And with that, you can start your own website or start your own blog. Again, that's afford anything.com slash bluehost. Welcome back. So in this portion of the episode, I want to talk about why I wrote the speech, how I wrote it, what it meant, and what I hope some of the takeaways are.

First of all, this speech is an iteration of something that I've been working on for about a year and a half. If you have heard some of my previous speeches, then parts of this may have sounded familiar. The first version of the speech that I gave was in San Francisco about exactly a year ago. It was in spring of 2017, where I gave a talk at a FinCon Masters event to a group of about 100 people that was about this topic. I believe the talk was about 10 minutes long. It's on YouTube. We'll link to it in the show notes. But that talk that I gave was the first formulation of this idea. And where that had come from about two years ago, so it had been a year prior to that, I decided I was going to launch a course. on how to invest in rental properties. The course is called Your First Rental Property. And I'd never done anything like this before. I'd always written blog articles, but I never really tried very hard to monetize the blog. Most of the money that I made came from freelancing and consulting for clients.

So I made money from the blog indirectly. The blog was sort of a lead generator that allowed me to serve clients, but I wasn't directly monetizing from the blog itself. But I decided I wanted to stop doing that because I didn't want to work with clients anymore. It was taking too much time away from afford anything. And if I wanted to spend all of my time focused on afford anything, and that meant that I could not simultaneously, you can do anything but not everything, I couldn't simultaneously run afford anything and also be doing a whole bunch of client work. So about two years ago, I decided to drop all of my clients. I dropped all my freelance clients, my consulting clients.

I purposely slashed my income from six figures down to almost zero and decided, you know what, I'm going to directly monetize the blog. This was two years ago. And I decided to do that predominantly by launching a course. But, you know, I'd never really monetized, directly monetized the blog before, and I'd certainly never launched a course before. And I didn't really know what I was doing. I didn't know how.

So, as I said in the speech, I read a whole bunch of advice. And all of the advice about quote unquote internet marketing, it always says the same thing, which is figure out what people want, give it to them. Figure out what people want, give it to them. When I tried to do this, it just, it sucked. I had no desire to keep writing. And if you've read me for a long time, you probably noticed that in the early days, when I was not worried about making money back in 2011, 2012, 12, 2013, when I was making most of my money from freelancing and I wasn't trying to monetize the blog itself, I was a fairly prolific writer. And then it was only in the past couple of

years when I dropped on my freelance clients and blogging became the central thing that theoretically I did that I stopped writing. And it was because I just had no motivation to write if all I was going to do was just feed people what they wanted. I had no motivation to write if that just meant forming word clouds of survey data and pandering to that. And so all of this started about two years ago. My decision to drop my freelance clients to launch a course, it kind of provoked this crisis of confidence because on one hand, I was afraid. I was afraid of being called a sellout.

I was afraid that if I tried to monetize the blog directly and later after I started this podcast, I was afraid that if I tried to monetize this podcast directly through sponsorships, that it would somehow make the work less pure. You can hear the implicit money myth in there, right? That money is somehow an evil and impurifying object. But yeah, I was afraid of being called a sell-out, and in that regard, I was afraid of success. But I was also afraid that maybe I would try to monetize the blog and it wouldn't work out, or I would try to launch the course and it wouldn't work out. And that would have meant that my big gamble didn't pay off. It would have meant that I slashed this very lucrative freelance career that I had built for myself.

I'd killed off that career for no reason at all. And then what? I've just killed off the six-figure business that I built so that I could do something else. And then that something else doesn't pan out. And then what, right? So I was simultaneously afraid of success because I was afraid that success would make me a sellout. I was also afraid of failure because failure is failure. And in many ways, I've been grappling with that for the last two years.

Whenever I grapple with anything, my solution often is to read about it. And the more I read about what to do, the more I read about how to make money online from your blog, the standard conventional advice is feed the metrics, serve the metrics, gather a bunch of data and figure out what people want from you and then mold yourself to fit what other people expect you to be. I found that answer when I was already in a scared place within my business, and that answer was only further demoralizing. And so 2016 and especially 2017, both 2016 and 2017 were very hard years business-wise. And I don't mean in terms of monetization, that too, but really they were very demoralizing years because I was in this locked in this cycle of fear, drudgery,

procrastination, afraid things wouldn't work out, dreading the type of work that all of the conventional advice was telling me to do, and then procrastinating on everything. And that procrastination only made me feel guilty, which exacerbated the fear. And then the whole thing got locked into a very negative cycle. And one of the ways that I've pulled myself out of that was I read this quote. I read it on Instagram. It came from an Instagram account of an Instagram celebrity named Yoga Girl. She has more than 2 million followers. And as you can imagine, anyone with more than 2 million followers on Instagram is going to get criticized a lot no matter who they are and no matter what they do. And unfortunately, because those criticisms are so personal,

it's hard, you can't just just develop a thick skin. People give that advice as though that's the easiest thing in the world to do. A, you can't snap your fingers and all of a sudden not be sensitive anymore. And B, even if you could, I don't know if you'd want to. A sensitivity is what makes you human. Why would I want to develop a wall around myself? So I was on Instagram and I was reading through Yoga Girls account and she wrote on there, in one of the captions for one of her photos, she wrote, What other people think of me is none of my business.

And that line really resonated with me. It stuck with me. And it helped reframe my thinking around this issue. And it was from that quote, the quote, what other people think of me as none of my business, that the rest of this speech started to germinate. And the first iteration of this speech was a speech that I delivered at the FinCon Masters event in San Francisco in spring of 2017. That speech, I believe I titled it Why I Stop Serving My Audience, which was a bit of a click-baity title. But the thread of that speech was that I decided I didn't want to serve my audience in the traditional sense of figure out what they want and hand it to them.

I wanted to be original because true innovation comes from creative originality. There's this thing in online business where everybody talks, people really obsessed about doing things that are scalable. If everything that you are doing is that easily outsourceable, then you're not creating anything of value. I get that if you're a manufacturing company, then you want everything to be scalable, sure. But if you're in the creative field like writing or music or art or fashion, not everything you do should be scalable. If that's the case, then you're not actually creating anything of value. People would often tell me, like, taking this MBA business model and slapping on to any old thing without critical thought, you know, they'd be like, why don't you hire somebody to write blog posts for you? And that's ridiculous.

Writing is the expression of thought and feeling. I can't hire somebody to have thoughts and feelings on my behalf. So my speech that I gave at the FinCon Masters event in spring of 2017, which was the first iteration of this talk, it was very much around that. It was very much around the thing that most creative entrepreneurs are taught, which is to build a business that is so that's scalable and outsourceable and one in which you do nothing other than respond to metrics and market data, that. whole conventional wisdom is a load of crap. And if that is how people define quote and quote serving your audience, then I don't want to serve my audience, not if that's the definition of it. I believe that people can be much better served through true creativity and through true originality. So that was a speech that I gave at that event. And then I gave a

revised, updated iteration of that speech at FinCon as the FinCon Big Ideas talk in the fall of 2017 and Chris Gillibow was in the audience of that and when he saw that talk he asked me to give a main stage talk at the World Domination Summit along the same thread. So, so that was the talk that you just heard. So what you just heard was the third revision and the third iteration of this line of thinking that I've been having for a while. And the reason that I have been having this line of thinking is because I just disagree with what the vast majority of people say about how to run a creative business. I disagree with the conventional wisdom around how to be a entrepreneur in the field of writing or design or in any of these creative fields. So that is how and why I wrote this

speech. And in terms of key takeaways that I hope you got from this, number one, I hope that for anything that you yourself create, you don't listen to the voices of others when they tell you what they think your art should be. Here's an example. About a year ago on Instagram, some guy left this comment. He was like, hey, Paula, I like your real estate stuff, but this account would be way better if it didn't have so many selfies of you. You know, so this guy is on my Instagram account telling me not to post pictures of myself on my own social media account, telling me that he would like my account better if I posted more real estate photos instead of pictures of me. And he was very polite about how he said it.

And so I wrote him back a very polite response. And he actually then apologized and clarified he was like, you know, I didn't mean any offense by it, but I did mean that I just enjoy seeing pictures of real estate more than I enjoy seeing pictures of you, basically. You know, he said that in a very polite way, but that's what he said. And he framed it in these terms of, and I think that's what your audience would enjoy. And that is the red flag right there. You as a creator, you will get so many people who give you advice in a very polite way

that is framed in terms of, well, I think that this is what your audience would enjoy. I think that this is what would benefit your audience. I think that this is what other people would like from you. And when you hear advice that's framed in that way, it can be so easy to buy into it, right? It could have been so easy for me to have bought into this guy's statement of, well, I really think your audience would enjoy that. You know, I really think that your audience would benefit from you posting more photos of houses and and more, writing more captions about houses, you know, and posting fewer photos of yourself. and writing less about your own emotions and thoughts. When things are framed in the context of what would benefit others,

you don't want to be selfish. You do want a stuff that benefits others. And so when things are framed in that context, it can be very easy to lose your own voice because you want to people please. You want to serve your audience. You want to benefit your audience. And so when people say, well, I think that they might like this better if you did this, then it can be so easy to then just mold what you do to,

that feedback that you're getting. But the thing is, it's not you. And eventually it's just going to wear on your soul. Because I didn't start this account so that I could post pictures of living rooms. And I don't want to do that. And if I do it, maybe some people will like it, but my heart's not going to be in it. And that means I'm just not going to post as often. Look at my own blog for the last two years, how I've posted a lot less often than I did back in 2011. Eventually, trying to put the needs, quote unquote, needs or wants or, you know, feedback of others, trying to put the feedback of others above your own voice is a losing strategy because you're not going to like it. Your heart's not going to be in it. And if you're a creative entrepreneur, then your heart has to be in it. That's the only way for your business to succeed.

So if you want to look at this from a purely strategic point of view, you have to, you have a. have to do the thing that is going to keep you motivated. Because if you're not motivated, well, you know what? The business is you. It's a one person or two person or maybe at most three person business. So if your heart's not in it, then the whole thing's going to collapse. And the only way to keep your heart in it is to come from a place of what excites you, not a place of what other people tell you they want to see. So if there's any takeaway that you got from this, I I hope it's that. If you have a side hustle, if you have your own business, if you are starting some type of

creative entrepreneurship or some sort of enterprise on the side, I hope that you treat that business in a way that keeps you excited about it. And yeah, some people, some very polite, well-meaning people are going to give you feedback that says that you should do something else. and you know what? They can have their opinion and they can go find the accounts that suit what they're looking for

because what they're looking for is not what you provide and that's fine. Not everybody is going to like what you provide. It doesn't matter. What they think of you is none of your business. Whether or not they like you is none of your business.

And only by internalizing that idea can you continually create things that are truly from the heart and truly inspired? And the only way that your side hustle or your business will ever succeed in the long run is if you're motivated and inspired to show up to it with your whole heart every day. So purely from a strategic point of view, you've got to run your business in a way that it makes you come alive. There's a famous quote attributed to Howard Thurman that says, don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive

because what the world needs are more people who have come alive. So that's the key takeaway from that speech. Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. You can follow me on Instagram at Paula Pant, P-A-U-L-A-P-A-N-T. Please do me a favor.

If you enjoy today's show, leave us a review. In whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast, go into that app and leave us a review. And while you're there, make sure that you've subscribed to this show as well so that you can get future episodes. If you go to Affordanything.com slash iTunes, that'll also take you to the page on iTunes where you can leave a review. As of now, we have 567 ratings, which is awesome.

So let's see if we can get to 600 by the, maybe in the next two weeks. So please help us get to 600 or more. And if you would like to catch the show notes for today's episode, you can do so at Affordanithing.com. slash episode 138. Thank you again for joining me on this journey. My name's Paula Pant. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast, and I will catch you on Monday for our regular Monday episode.

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