Alt title: Tongues can clack!?

The dirty secret of becoming popular in today’s world is that popularity = haters.

We imagine that our accounts will grow and grow, and that we’ll be universally loved. But especially now, increased attention means increased negativity. Many people are taken aback to discover the onslaught that comes along with a post that breaks the algorithm and gets greater reach than the others.

Turns out when some numbers go up, all numbers go up!

These moments can rock us to our core, but it’s important to remember that from ancient times to now, the opinions of others have very little to do with our own development.

Marcus Aurelius said as much nearly 2,000 years ago when he called these opinions the “clacking of tongues”.

Just remember, you aren’t doing this for them: you’re doing it for yourself.

Joseph Campbell’s seminal work The Hero with a Thousand Faces defined Hollywood storytelling for 75 years.

All of our favorite films, from Star Wars to Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money have relied on the same narrative arc, known widely as “The Hero’s Journey”.

The formula is so well-defined that the beats of our favorite films, movies, and brands adhere to the playbook almost down to the minute. And yet we still eat it up. Because it works.

Today, the independent creator and entrepreneur follows a similarly predictable archetype: The hustle with a thousand faces.

The hustle works like this:

Step 1. Carve out an area of the internet that has relatively low competition—it could be anything. Homemade Christmas ornaments? Yep. Hand painted DnD figurines? Yep. How to automate anything with AI and Zapier? Yep. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s a Blue Ocean.

Step 2. Gather a following online. It could be as few as 1,000 True Fans.

Step 3. Create a paid community and charge $50-100 per month for access. If you get 1,000 sign-ups, you’re now making $50k per month, easy peasy.

Now that you know the formula, you’ll recognize it everywhere. And yet it still works. The trick is just figuring out the current niche du jour.

…you can’t lose.

Before giving a recent speech, I went to the reopening of Casa Bonita in Denver.

As a child, eating the food at Casa Bonita was a >75% chance of getting food poisoning. That’s why my entire life, the only thing I ever ate there was the sopapillas. You couldn’t enter the experience without buying the food, so they basically forced food poisoning on an entire population. At least Black Bart’s cave was worth it!

So the day before an important speech? To go to Casa Bonita was madness. What if I got sick? What if I couldn’t talk?

Well here’s the thing about good stories: Let’s say the worst happened. Let’s say that I got food poisoning from Casa Bonita, and that’s why I couldn’t give my talk. Any dyed-in-the-wool Colorado kid would see that as a badge of honor.

I could think of no better story than to have a speech cancelled for that reason.

If we reframe our experiences as potential good stories to tell, it takes a lot of the pressure off of the outcome.

Imagine having your life turned upside down, when you realize that your daughter has Type 1 Diabetes at the age of 5.

As it turns out, managing the meals and medications of a small child is not only a full-time job, it’s also surprisingly confusing. It’s no wonder that so many parents struggle.

My friend Sam Glassenberg (who has had a successful game studio for years) sees everything as a potential problem that games can solve. He’s built an incredible career on it.

Now he’s turned his attention to creating a game called Level One, that teaches people how to manage this complicated and scary diagnosis for themselves or their children.

As we enter a world of VR, AR, and a digital-first landscape, games have tremendous power to bring good into the world, and to help things get done that simply aren’t getting done.

If you know a parent who needs help, send them this free app.

Here’s an agency hack I’ve never talked about.

When we define a client’s universe at my agency, we ask questions about how their brand should look, sound, feel, and talk. Some brands are more aggressive, some more gentle. Some more quaint, some more futuristic…

One of the first things I do when working with a new brand is find a song that represents their tone of voice.

While we never share this song publicly, we have the song playing internally while making critical design and copy decisions.

If a brand’s song is death metal, you’ll make very different choices listening to that vs. say, relaxing ambient nature music or soulful 70s funk.

While I can’t prove it, I believe that this strategy makes a brand’s expression more unique and cohesive than creating work in the void.

Synesthesia is the ability to see music in anything; everything.