Prefer to listen?
A friend of mine recently sent me a Substack that went viral in a corner of the internet I spend a lot of time in. The author — a creative building her personal brand online — wrote an honest piece about things I hear almost every week from my clients: the desire to be seen and the exhaustion of being perceived. The piece was beautiful indeed, with hundreds of comments from people who recognized themselves in it.
And I understand why, it was very relatable indeed, but it left me with a very burning feeling to speak, because honestly so much was wrong about it.
Not the article or how she felt of course, but the perception she has of how her personal brand should and should not be. Because a lot of the bitterness she’s describing doesn’t come from marketing per se, but from a very specific narrative of marketing that is often presented as the only version that’s possible.
I work with introverted small business owners, I’m an introvert myself, and on a weekly basis I meet people who want to build something good and attract clients they’re happy to work with, ideally without having marketing drain every drop of joy they have for their business.
And they often come to me carrying the same beliefs I found in that piece, so this little fire inside me pushed me to write and challenge them publicly, hoping that your relationship with marketing can improve.
“I’m stuck between needing visibility, but wanting invisibility. I want my work to be seen without my life being consumed.”
In general we tend to assume that if we see a group of other people do the same thing, it’s likely the right thing to do. It’s called Herd Behavior and it doesn’t mean that you’re stupid. It’s a scientifically proven type of behavior connected to our biology for two reasons:
1 – Collectivity saved our asses in the past so we tend to think in groups to bond and become stronger together (I will talk later about this too)
2 – Our brain is structured in two systems, one thinks faster (less energy consumption) and one slower (more energy required). Herding behavior is connected to the fast one: ‘if everyone does it, it must be right’ requires almost no mental energy to process.
Note: This is a very BIG simplification but I hope psychologists and neuroscientists will pardon me since we’re not talking about the brain here, but the framing is important.
This means that when you look at the world and see a lot of people doing the same thing, you naturally assumes that that’s the way to go. But in reality, visibility can have many shapes and social media is just one. And I say this because she was referring a lot about it.
That said, there’s two relevant concepts to talk about here:
1 – Vanity metrics are views, followers and likes for the sake of having a big number.
Truth is that is just noise, because you can have 100 strong followers and sell more than someone with 1000 but random and uninterested people that followed because you asked to be followed in a group (yes, this happens). Of course many will say that more eyes means more revenue and it’s true if we’re talking big, BIG numbers (it’s the law of large numbers), but remember that less, but very specific eyes means revenue too and potentially at a lower cost.
I also have an older Substack about this one specifically, you can read it here.
2 – Nobody said you have to do it like they do
Showing your face on social media is just one way to do it. There’s dozens of formats you can use and test, and some of them don’t even have you talking in it, let alone showing your face. Because social media too has lots of diversifications within.
The real work you should do before posting is trying to understand what makes sense for you as an individual, otherwise you’ll always hate what you do and burn out after two months, resenting everything and deciding marketing is not for you.
That’s like trying to run a marathon without training and deciding sport is not for you. Maybe you just like light running in the park with the music on, maybe you like tennis even, you just never allowed yourself to try that.
“Social media success is about the aesthetics, and I’m not an aesthetic person”
Yes, that’s true, lots of people rely on aesthetics to stop the scroll. And to some of us (me too, honestly) this feels very shallow and even pointless.
But once again, this is just one side of it and social media it’s like a D20, there are 19 other options you just didn’t see.
One big trend I actually noticed in time — I’ve ben working with social media since the beginning of my career, so 2015 — is that the less polished the better.
Unless you’re in the high fashion industry, honesty is dominating. People like relatable stuff and not everyone can relate to high lifestyles or perfect houses.
This really made me think of this very talented artist who is an insanely good musician and makes covers of popular songs rewriting them about her kids and the mess they make, very often showing up in her pyjamas.
Note: this is content creators people, not business owners, so I’m not saying you have to sing in pyjamas, but it’s to give you an example of something that’s not a 5k bali yoga retreat or a €15 Starbucks coffee.
“I do so much and get nothing, they do less and earn 10x more”
Yeah sure, and you’re in their agenda, right?
I’ll never get tired of explaining this but welcome to the magical world of survivorship bias.
Survivorship bias is the cognitive mistake of drawing conclusions only from the cases that “survived” — aka the ones visible (or made visible) to us — while ignoring all the ones that failed and are therefore left out.
The classic example related to this topic is that we think social media fame is achievable because we see the people who made it, but we don’t see the thousands who posted just as consistently, just as authentically, and got nothing.
It makes the rare outcomes look like easy-peasy results of specific behaviors, which is why so much marketing-guru advice sounds so convincing and yet works for so few people.
Same thing applies to everything you don’t see those people do that is failing, or have done before and failed, before they got to the 10x you see. It looks easy and effortless, but it’s a magic trick.
And not all, but some, know exactly what they’re doing and they want you to feel that way so that you can then buy their course.
Just saying.
“Creation means consistency, consistency means everyday, everyday means hours lost. All for nothing.”
You told yourself that this time you’d really try. So first thing is you open a notebook or you Notion and start jotting down ideas. You lose hours in filling that calendar and now you have like 30 days of 5x week posts on whatever platform. Then you need to film, edit, design them. Then comes the posting. Sometimes you forget because you’re busy so you feel guilty. Sometimes a new idea pops up so you post one more time and feel productive, like you’re finally doing it.
You reach day 15 and you’re a bit tired, but you made a promise to yourself, so you keep going.
Day 20, you’re tired and you start skipping more days, but it’s okay, you’ll recover.
Day 35 you’re exhausted, posts are finished and you now face another 30 days of creation you can’t sustain. You tell yourself you’ll take a brief pause and that’s where your adventure ends: you’ll never open the Notion again.
This is a common journey that I know well, and not just because is what most of my clients bring to the table when we start working together but also because (spoiler) I’ve been there too, eheh.
Yes, the reason why these reframes are so relevant for me, it’s because I burned myself out before I decided I’d make this my mission. I felt all these things and the next on my skin and I know the fatigue, the resentment, the disappointment and cluelessness. And the best lesson I learned while growing into my profession is that everything is just perspective.
I also thought that consistency was at least 4-5 posts per week, being impeccable.
Truth is that consistency is just the ability of keep going and balance has a lot to do with it. Because no one ever taught me that I had to do 5x week unless they were bullshit gurus.
Real consistency is finding your own schedule that makes sense, and showing up the day after when you’re feeling better if the previous was awful.
It’s literally like dieting or the gym. If today I’m sick, low-energy or injured, I’m skipping. But what matters is not today, it’s the long run. I’ll show up tomorrow and it’s okay.
So find your pace (and fun fact: that’s the main reason why I called my personal framework like that) and stick to that. And if today you feel like quitting, just take a break and go smell the flowers. You can always come back tomorrow.
“I have to sacrifice my privacy if I put myself out there, I don’t want to share my private life or anything about it”
I know you might feel like if you turn yourself into a brand, then you’ll have no privacy anymore. You’ll always have to share as if you owe your audience. You can’t be silent, of it’ll feel weird, almost like something is wrong or a failure.
Truth is that you are the sole person setting your boundaries. You decide what to show and what not. Some people show their families, some don’t. Some people talk about their private issues, some don’t. Some will say that it’s a mistake, I call it positioning.
It’s like relationship with clients: Can you say no to them? If you can’t it’s a problem, but it’s a you problem and you need to work on it — and by the way, if you need I’d be happy to help ✌️.
Some people give only their email for connection. Some other prefer Whatsapp and allow daily messaging, but will pause notifications on weekends.
None of these options are wrong or right, there’s only what it’s right for you.
Remember: you make your own rules, always. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.
And if they don’t buy your product or service because of this, you didn’t lose a client, it just means that you weren’t aligned in the first place.
“If I turn myself into a brand, I’ll have to choose a version of me and be careful about what to show. I’ll feel like a fake.”
I know all about this. Especially in the beginning, you try with all your might to hide parts of who you are, because you think it’s better.
Truth is that this is, once more, a self-restriction. And this has a lot to do with our fear of judgement.
I mean, we all have experienced some degree of deflection when we said something or did something we really loved or cared about, while the person in front of us dismissed it as if it was nothing.
There it is: the fear of being. And it’s perfectly normal.
I still have that too, I won’t lie. It’s not easy, because the roots are way deeper than just marketing, this is something that you might want to work in therapy for instance, and it’s something that most of us experience.
But to give you some quick and dirty solutions you can leverage while working on it, here’s a few simple ways of going about this:
1 – Start a new social media account and don’t add the people you know. Work with sole strangers, don’t let those who judge you know about what you do.
2 – Block all of them. If it’s specific people you fear, block them. They will never know. And if trolls come and comment with nasty stuff, block them too.
3 – Avoid that channel entirely. A bit more drastic, but if it makes you feel safe it’s still valid. If the problem is one channel, it doesn’t matter if your audience is there or not, just avoid it. Start somewhere else, work your confidence else where and eventually go back to it when you feel ready.
Even the most experienced business owner need time to find their space and voice in content marketing, and everyone started from cringe and worked towards better and authentic.
Give yourself the same time.
“I’m just bad at this, how can I compete with much more talented people than me?”
And about giving yourself time: some results may look unachievable, some people just look talented in a way we will never even can hope to be. So my next natural point is talking about improvement and goals, because talent it’s just a 1% in the equation.
As small business owners we often have several goals and tend to want it all immediately (eheh, me too.) But if there’s one thing I hate and at the same time I’m very grateful for in marketing, is that you immediately learn that goals can’t be many and unrealistic.
In marketing and business you can only set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) and this means that you can’t say “I’ll reach 100k followers in 3 months” just because you want that very badly. You need to take everything in equation: where you are, the time you have available, the context you’re in, your actual resources, etc…
This will help you reframe how you see success, because if there’s something that is very true is that success and real growth is nothing like glamorous. Forget the popular hooks you might read on socials, forget the tale of overnight success, it doesn’t exists.
What you call overnight success, is the result of many little smaller actions and goals – usually vey boring and almost invisible ones – that you put one after the other and often fail to recognize as goals because they look, well, small.
Marketing and business growth works like that, so give yourself time to test, fail, learn and improve. Give yourself clear goals and ignore the rest of the noise.
“There’s no talent anymore, some people just understood the game better than I have”
Since we touched on talent, I’ll spend few words on that too.
Let me reframe this: Commercial is rarely about talent, it’s always been about marketability.
We have a very distorted way of seeing talent, and I’ll give you an example that should be quite horizontal.
We see the rockstars of whatever field and we think they have a talent we’ll never have. But what if I told you there’s so much than just talent? Because everything that becomes big and exposed has a lot to do with market and not just talent.
Talent indeed plays a role, but only if you work with it. Take a musician for example. If you read their stories — unless it’s very romanticized, and that means they’re still trying to sell that to you — realistically they are people that did something that someone else in another part of the world did too. They probably just tried harder for longer, so more consistently than others (remember the consistency paragraph?).
But also remember that luck is a real factor (a studied one, if you read Kahneman’s book), so there’s always an unpredictable element to it and the best you can do to counterbalance this dynamic is to expose yourself to positive opportunities (as Taleb also argues in his “Black Swan” book).
This means that talent exists, yes, but also luck exists and your chances increase the more you play the game we just mentioned. And as a rule of thumb, the more you play, the more you learn.
So, if you remove the resentment and just start think of progress as = work + consistency + luck, it will improve your life quality, I promise.
And about resentment and negative feelings…
This is a relevant one too in my opinion. The sentence above, about talent not being there, comes from jealousy, envy and other negative emotions that say much more about us than the person that we’re talking about.
And to be fair, not only us as individuals, because we’ve been taught to be jealous, to be wanting always more and to look at those who already have more with haste, as competition.
Trigger warning, I’m going to get political:
I believe that this is the dark side of capitalism: promoting individualism as the only way to do things. Competition is something to annihilate, destroy, to remove from our path.
This creates resentment, greed and in the worst cases, also self-deprecation.
If you stop focusing on what you think you should earn, gain or be, the vision of your own business and results will change dramatically, because perspective is a real thing and if you compare yourself to people that are not where you are in the journey, you’ll always be miserable and you’ll feel unhappy with anything you do and earn. Results will look too small, you’ll never give yourself credit and everything will seem pointless.
And I’m not saying that you should not have goals or ambitions, but just to frame them as they should be (we literally just talked about goals too previously and how they should be SMART, so I trust you can understand what I mean.)
Point is, you’re on your own journey and if you don’t enjoy the ride, what’s the point?
By the way, that’s the reason why I love connecting with likeminded people. I think we can achieve much more together than alone, so by all means, if this resonates and want to get in touch, I organize monthly free networking events on my community. You can check out when the next one is here.
“I miss the days when social media was for friends and family”
Yeah well, sorry to burst your bubble but it was never like it.
Call me a dinosaur but I’m almost 36 while writing and I’ve experienced several spaces before social media as we know it was a thing (Myspace, Forums, Netlog, Tumblr, etc.) and there were always the cool kids.
It’s exactly like school: there were always the popular ones and those that were invisible. The mechanism was maybe different, but the point wasn’t.
I won’t lie, now we’re a bit on the edge of it and things changed a lot, but what I’m trying to say is that — for as much as it pains me to defend social media for once — the problem is not the box, but it’s always been us and our eagerness to shine.
Platforms are boxes, people shaped the box.
And I know what you’re thinking: but aren’t we all chasing algorithms? Yes, indeed, but if there was no will to chase it in the first place, companies wouldn’t be changing it in order to please our thirst for spotlights.
Now, I know this is a much wider topic and this article is already quite long, so let’s skip for a second the vicious cycle behind it and the unfair practices behind it — Meta got a fine recently because it’s been accused to make people dependent on its platforms — but what I’m trying to say it’s just that social media is a human product and we made it following some patterns, that’s all.
And after all this, I’d like to close on the most important points, because they are resolution points that should give you relief if you’ve felt that even some of the points I just discussed were relatable to your situation and I’d start with:
Know that you don’t have to
If you ever thought about removing yourself entirely from social media, know that you can.
Literally no one will force you to install that app again.
And I’ll tell you more, you can even decide how to split things. I for example don’t use social media personally anymore, I don’t like it for that, and I only use it for business and to keep in touch with my friends but I only occasionally post about private life and mostly post about my art, creative productions and business stuff in general. In my practice, I only post what I want to post, what feels okay in my personal social media scale and otherwise use my personal channels to share my private life with close friends and family.
Marketing is a whole huge umbrella and social media is just one part of it, you can remove it entirely and still promote your business. It can be done differently and as smart as you want.
You have free will, it’s your choice, it’s important that you remember that.
I’ll tell you more, the way you use (or not use) social media shapes what it becomes, because as mentioned, it’s a box and WE shape the box. Think of what Tristan Harris calls “The Human Movement”, meaning people gathering to protest and request regulations and changes around certain tools or topics. That how the social media ban for under 16 became a thing and it’s now being adopted by multiple countries.
You don’t have to flatten yourself or be someone else
You don’t have to look or do like others do. In fact, especially if you’re working on a personal brand, distinction is what pays off. So the best gift you can give your brand is to work on what makes you differ from your competition and literally anyone else.
Media silence is not invisibility, visibility doesn’t equal value per se
To use the same words that the article used: We feel that our worth must constantly be proven, that silence equals irrelevance and the rest looks like failure.
She’s right, that’s what our surrounding is subtly telling us, an probably the hardest thing to ear.
But this is another dark side of the capitalist medal — the one I already talked about — and the truth is that your own happiness is entirely dictated by you.
Ever asked yourself what success really looks like for you? What’s really important for you? Because that’s what you should be chasing. Not the idea that once you have 100k followers you’re better than the others.
You’re allowed to ignore what others tell you, and set your own goals, away from what most think.
You’re allowed to want contradicting things too
And truth is that we’re humans, and as humans we are a walking contradiction that’s working on itself. So while you’re digging deeper to understand what you really want, and dreaming of dropping everything to go growing carrots in the middle of nowhere, you can still feel like you really want to give it a try at social media.
It’s okay, and it’s the beauty of our chaotic nature.
It can be painful sometimes, yes, but that’s also how you grow, explore who you are and understand what really matters to you in order to create your best possible future.
And if social media will be part of it or not, that’s your own free choice.
Hugs,
Chiara
