why smart people fail as creators

Transcription

Matt: Deciding to post on LinkedIn is a huge change. It's a change in your identity. It's a change in how you spend your time. It's a change in who you hang out with online. It's a change in how other people see you. It's a change in how you see yourself. There are so many things that change as a result of LinkedIn and the human mind and the human body doesn't like change. So I wanted to break down four reasons that I've learned in school. They're kind of fancy terms, but I'm gonna try to make them as easy and simple to understand as possible. Break down these four terms and explain to you what they are because understanding what change you're going to go through and what your mind is going to go through as a result of posting on LinkedIn will be an important exercise to try to keep you in posting on LinkedIn long-term and getting through the cringe mountain that everyone has to climb at some point. Daniel: The first core mechanism or reason we don't like change is because of loss aversion. And what loss aversion is a fancy way of saying is just that we don't like losing something more than we like gaining something. So if we lose $5 and gain $5, you would think that your emotions would balance out after doing both of those things. But that is not the case. Losing $5 makes you feel worse than gaining $5. Even though the dollar amount is the same. And even though the upside of posting on LinkedIn is really bettering yourself, you're losing things as a result of posting on LinkedIn. You're losing time that you were doom scrolling. You might lose some people who you were hanging out with before. You're going to miss on a lot of posts. That's going to feel like losing a lot and going to feel like being rejected. And those rejections are going to feel much worse than when the successes inevitably hit. And you might lose out on things as a result of content. And the point of bringing this up is to help you understand that these losses are gonna happen. They're gonna make you feel much worse than the gains will. But you have to tell yourself that the upside is going to be much greater and you have to fight this loss aversion. Because if you can't fight this loss aversion and the next three things that I'm going to cover, you won't be able to climb cringe mountain and be a successful content creator on LinkedIn. Matt: The next thing I want to cover is the status quo bias. And the status quo bias simply means what we're used to feels safer than the unknown. People are always hesitant to try new foods. If you haven't tried kangaroo before or something, you're gonna be super hesitant. Or even if you haven't tried a certain vegetable prepared a certain way, you're unsure. And that's why people are so hesitant to try those foods in that scenario. I mean, there are a million other examples beyond food, but like that's why people just like having the same breakfast every time. It's just, it's a status quo. It's what's familiar to them. It's what's comfortable to them. Daniel: And there is some comfort to the status quo. Like your brain uses less energy on the status quo. That's why it likes it so much. I've been running for a while now. So when I'm running six days a week, my body and my brain is used to waking up and running. It took me a few years to get it to be like this, where it's much easier than if someone who's never run before to wake up early and run. It is going to be much harder for that. But because my status quo has made it easy, now it's easy to run. And that also means if you're used to doom scrolling or if you're used to doing something else, and now you're going to start posting LinkedIn content and start commenting, it is very hard to break that status quo bias and break what you were doing with the rest of your time. Because it's going to be much harder for you to start on LinkedIn as opposed to someone else like me, who's been doing it for a while. LinkedIn is now in my habit. I have a status quo to doing LinkedIn. It's that easy for me. But for a lot of people, you have to get over this status quo bias of trying to fight and it's really mental warfare to try to get yourself to get in the habit of LinkedIn because your brain's going to tell you this is something new. This is something hard. I don't want to do this. I can expend less energy by doing other things. So that's the status quo bias. Your brain likes doing easy things and you have to tell yourself that the upside of LinkedIn content in the long-term is going to be well worth it after fighting the status quo bias and getting over cringe mountain. But we still have two more things to cover. And the third is identity threat. And this one's pretty straightforward. How people see you and how you're gonna see yourself will change as a result of LinkedIn. You're gonna have imposter syndrome thinking, am I worthy to post on LinkedIn? And you're gonna worry more about how people perceive you as a result of posting on LinkedIn. This is normal human psychology. Just like if you were to join a basketball team, you're all of a sudden a basketball player now. That is part of your identity. And the same goes when you do something like LinkedIn and spend five to 10 hours a week on it, just like you would a basketball team or any other hobby. It's part of who you are now. And that change of who you are now is very difficult to deal with because at first you might want to play it down, especially if you're not getting that many views like, oh, you know, yeah, I've like tried to do it, whatever. And if you can never get yourself to admit that this is something you wanna do and that you see yourself doing and really will your LinkedIn success into existence, you won't be able to get there and you'll burn out and you'll never get over cringe mountain. Part of getting over cringe mountain is getting over this identity threat and trying to change of who you are. And it's tough. People still struggle with imposter syndrome every day. I do. Daniel: I all sometimes wonder, like, should I really be posting this? Am I worthy? And the answer is always yes. And I think now reflecting even on this video, part of me wanting to make this is to show you more specifically what the mental warfare is that you're going to face when posting on LinkedIn. So far, we've gone over loss aversion, losing part of yourself, losing how you're spending your time and how that's worse than how our brain thinks of gains. We've gone over the status quo bias, how the way you spend your time and the way you see yourself and the way others see you is going to change. And also the identity threat of who you are is changed and trying to make sure that you see yourself now and see this as part of your journey. Because if you never admit to yourself, you're gonna be a LinkedIn content creator. You won't be able to have the confidence to do it. And changing your perspective on this really helps and has helped me a lot. And the last thing I want to cover is cognitive load. And I know I make a lot of analogies to exercise here, but if you've ever heard of fast twitch versus slow twitch muscle fibers, there are essentially two types of muscles in the body. There's ones that if you're in zone two on a long, easy run, they're firing up, you know, the longer muscles that you're using for a longer period of time. Whereas the fast twitch are the ones you would use when you're sprinting. Two totally different muscle groups. And the same goes with your brain too. I was always like crazy to learn about this in school, but pretty much there's system one and system two and system one is immediately responding to a question. So if you ask me, is the sky blue? I'd say, yes, that's system one. But then system two is subconsciously asking myself, why is the sky blue? Or when I'm talking to my brother, system one might tell me, oh, he's happy. Like, awesome. I'm happy for him. But then system two kicks in and it's like, wait, why is he happy? So then, you know, that's kind of to give you a sense of system one and system two. And the reason this is important to talk about with LinkedIn is because at the start, system one and system two have a lot to do with making good content and how you use LinkedIn. Because at the start, you're using system two. LinkedIn hasn't become a habit for you yet. You're having to constantly tell yourself that you have to lock in on this and not be distracted by the a million other notifications we have on our phone, which hopefully should be turned off, but probably aren't like mine. Like I get way too distracted, but you have to use system two to lock in and tell yourself that this is what you want to do. So every like five or so seconds, every distraction you have, you have to fight and tell yourself that, yes, I'm committed to LinkedIn. I want to better myself and I want to build an audience and build a community. And when it comes to writing, you don't want to just be in system two the entire time. Daniel: And I know I've said this in a lot of previous posts and podcasts, which you should listen to if you haven't already, but the way to go viral on LinkedIn is to have words that are so easy to understand that even a fifth grader can read and also trigger emotion. And when you're in system one and you're thinking and you're just dumping words on a page, that's where you get that emotion that just triggers people. And that's where you can write so simply. And then when the system two comes along to edit of when you're thinking too many questions, like, is this too simple? Is this not controversial enough? So then you might tweak it to