It’s always nice talking to people which whom I haven’t seen in five or more years. Whether it’s people at my college or high school, it’s always nice to sit down and talk.
Over the past few months, people were very surprised by the fact that I grew from some shy kid in high school to founding a company through a side hustle and of course, people start to talk to you differently.
I never really like to say I founded a company, but through the conversations I’ve had with my past friends, putting that in there matters. Showing what we accomplish changes the tone and grants you a bit more respect, which I find kinda weird.
With speaking gigs in Ohio and North Carolina next month, I have a job to tell my story and that starts with a journey and the best example I can give is the story of how I built My Food Job Rocks to be good enough to generate some amazing opportunities. Here are some essential tips I used to craft how I tell my personal journey.
Nobody cares when you start, they will only care about what’s happening now, and how you got there.
Done is Better Than Perfect
I’m working on a few audio projects, mainly to help a couple of people get off their feet. On one project, I told him to edit our episodes and he really doesn’t like the content. We’ve generated dozens of hours of content already he is taking forever to pull the trigger. What would generally take 1 hour of editing now takes 5 hours because every little detail needs to be perfect.
I recall the second episode of My Food Job Rocks where I stupidly did a podcast inside a chocolate factory with a crazy amount of machinery going on in the background. It was a short 20 minutes of terrible audio quality but I still posted it. Now in the 150 episode range, our audio quality has vastly improved and the questions and answers are much more insightful.
Regardless of what you think of Gary Vaynerchuk, one of his messages is very true in the fact that you should document the process. What documenting the process does is shows your audience the imperfections and improvements as time goes on. People always want a perfect product, but that might take years for it to happen.
One example of this is the growth of JUST Inc and Beyond Meat. JUST started with a mayonnaise as their first product, and then SEVEN years later, made JUST Egg, which is their biggest seller. It took seven years, slogging through PR hitmen, and millions of dollars for JUST to finally have the recognition they deserve but that took seven years!
Beyond Meat has the same story. Ethan Brown started selling textured soy protein, then eventually extruded soy chicken, and then the Beyond Burger happened. This was a decades long process.
The point being, is that getting things done is better than the perfect product because it stimulates you or the company to keep on going and by being persistent, you find opportunities that you would never find possible if you didn’t start. This is exactly what is happening with my Food Job Rocks right now.
Failure is a Plot Point
In most iconic stories about superheroes, there is a failure. This usually takes place in the second heroic act because the final act is when the hero redeems itself.
Many people have different opinions of failure but many only see the forefront of it. They don’t take the steps to see that failure can create some interesting stories.
Adding failure to your story adds a sort of humility to your personal brand and even humanizes you for the better. However, there are some influencers who use failure wrong. You might have seen people who capitalize on failure with a simple structure saying they lost everything and failed their way to success. People dub it “failure porn”. Though we encourage failure, we also don’t discourage it enough.
Many people don’t talk about the pain of failure. It stings. Failure hurts, but you remember it and overcome it. The challenge in making a compelling story is to make the failure sound painful and give the image that it motivated you to succeed.
In essence, it is very difficult to inspire someone out of failure. It sells very well, because it humanizes the brand but to be truly inspirational takes a lot of craft. Though there needs to be this fine, uncomfortable edge where it scares you.
Fake It Till You Make It?
I used to say this a lot in college. Now I don’t say it at all. Perhaps I’ve made it….
In any case, all this means is that we can tell people what we want to tell about our lives. Success is how you talk about your story. Nobody needs to hear about the failures and successes until you’re ready.
There’s a point where faking it works and there is a point where it doesn’t work. Most mid-twenties have a lot of fun talking about how much debt they have and won’t sympathize well when you say you’re happy with your life. Faking it leads to impostor syndrome, which can have dire consequences to your mental health. However, some personalities need to fake it to give them the belief that they will get to where they want to be someday.
Overall, telling your journey is like a slab of stone, and you have the ability to cut and sand any part of that slab to create a work of art. You can choose to create a masterpiece, but most likely you won’t. But that’s why you try again.
