Being Vulnerable, Content Originality, #BuildingInPublic Inspiration

Good Sunday 🌞!

🥦 Update #1: I'm going to launch this email course, Making Twitter Friends, this week. I'll let you have the first glimpse!

🥦 Update #2: I decided to build a private community for #BuildingInPublic. My thoughts behind it! Looking for first 20 dedicated members.

I had quite a roller coaster ride this past week. On Tue, I experienced “productivity shame”. I had this feeling that I haven’t done enough, that I could do more and faster. I started questioning myself “Am I challenging myself enough?”

I went onto Twitter to express it because I wanted to let it out of my system. Maybe that would make me feel better? I got some amazing replies. This showed just how amazing the Twitter community is when you surround yourself with positive people. I instantly felt better and carried on with my week.

If I look back to the first 3 months of 2021, I’m sure I’ll say to myself “Kevon, you’ve done a lot!” So I’m not sure why I feel this way, but I do always want to push myself here and there.

😣 Being vulnerable publicly

I was chatting with Jon last week and one thing came up. He said I’ve been expressing myself well online, in my guide, in my email course, on Twitter, etc. I told him I’ve been training myself over the years to be my true self and to talk about failures and weaknesses publicly.

A lot of people have asked me about this: “How did you start? How can I do the same?”

Happy to share a few things that’ve helped me:

1. I never thought I’m smart. I’m really just an average person trying to make things work. I acknowledged that when I was young. My mum’s expectation of me in school was 60/100 😅, maybe that shaped me to think of myself as a normal person.
2. I took personal criticism seriously when I was young. I loved playing football (or soccer) when I was young. When I was 12, I was playing as a forward in a match. And someone screamed “If you’re that slow, please don’t be a forward!” Guess what, I never touched football again. As I got older, I figured it is not important how people see me. They have so little context to say the right things. So why should I spare my mental space for them? I shouldn’t. I’m just going to be myself: happy and carefree.
3. I realized people are nicer to me when I am able to make fun of myself casually and share genuine failures. I never had someone coming up to me and say “Kevon, you have no idea what you’re doing”. Instead, I get a lot of people reaching out and opening themselves up to me, and then we have good chats. Well, of course, those people who do not like my style might have just not bothered to reach out to me. But I get many friends from doing so, so who cares?

If you’re still on the fence of opening up publicly and showing vulnerabilities online, I hope this helps. Always up for a chat 😊!

😧 Who originated the content?

When I first became a content creator, I got frustrated sometimes.

The piece of content that I spent dozens of hours to create was taken by other people to recreate into their content.

In my mind, an upsetting voice could be heard "This is my content!"

But as months went by, I came to realize there isn't such thing such originality of content and I shouldn't care about it at all.

👉👉👉 Read the full story here​

🎈 A great #BuildingInPublic blog

I came across Allison Seboldt’s blog and I loved it! I want to share why it is such a good example of #BuildingInPublic.

1. She is very transparent about her goals, progress (revenues), and thought process.
2. Her blog is a public reflective space of her own. She doesn’t care about “marketing”, that’s why each of her blog post is titled "Feb 2021" "Jan 2021".
3. From her writing, you can see that she is reflecting and challenging herself in building this product. She asks herself “How do I get Fantasy Congress in front of potential users?”

She is a great example of #BuildingInPublic because

1. Sharing deep thoughts, lessons learned, struggles are the best way to help and inspire others. It organically attracts others to follow her. I did! 🤩
2. Many people wonder if they need to #BuildInPublic everyday. No, from what I see, Allison writes one blog post a month and that's her #BuildingInPublic approach.
3. You don’t need to write for others. You can write for yourself and still help others.

Check out her blog here. You'll learn a lot.

💡 Inspirations

​Nearly 50% of digital subscribers are zombies​

We often look at how many followers and subscribers someone has to decide “how great” they are. But honestly, there are a lot of zombies online.

If you go to some Twitter accounts, they have 30k followers yet no one engages with their tweets. So it is much more important to look at engagement numbers like open rate, click rate, reply rate, etc.

​A portfolio of small bets​

If you’re creating on the Internet like me, this is a good lesson to learn.

Don’t try to spend too much time creating something without any traction. Always build small and see how people react. When they react well, build more. I wrote about it a few weeks ago.

Most things don’t work out and this is a way to increase your chance of success.