Daily Content Machine

I just want a few seconds of your time because I know the last thing you need right now is a 20-minute video of 10 tips on how to stop procrastinating.

The only thing you need to acknowledge is the amount of care you attribute to this task.

We all scramble at the last moment because we care more about flunking, getting fired, or getting an angry email from a client than we do about simply not doing the work.

The things you care about in life don’t get procrastinated.

I’ve got a question today from Nick in the Community. He asked, “Sean, if a TV network offered to build you your dream studio and paid you plus the team if you brought seanwes onto tv, would you do it or would you keep seanwes online under your own brand?”

I love this question. Essentially, he’s asking, “Would I take a bunch of money to have my entity on someone else’s platform?”

The answer is an emphatic no, absolutely not.

I’ve spent years investing hundreds of thousands of dollars building my own infrastructure and platform, so I wouldn’t do that just to give it up to another company. I wouldn’t give up the freedom and control of how I operate the business.

You have to know your goals going into business.

My goal is that I want to help people and I want to do that in the best way I know possible. To be able to do that, I need to have full control over the platform.

Earlier today I saw a tweet going around that had thousands of retweets. It was a photo of some Star Wars fan art.

Now, here’s the thing: it wasn’t just a photo of their art, it was a photo of their art promoting prints that they were selling.

I have a lot more to share on the topic of fan art, but let me get the most important piece out of the way: it is 100% illegal to sell fan art.

You cannot sell derivative artworks made of copyrighted characters, and the only exception is if you have written permission from the copyright holder.

For some reason, people think it’s ok because they see tweets like this going around with thousands of retweets of someone’s Star Wars fan art where they’re promoting their posters for sale.

That’s not legal, but it’s easy to think it’s legal when you see a lot of other people doing it. That’s confirmation bias.

You only see the people who are getting away with selling derivative artwork, you don’t see all the people who are getting taken down.

Yesterday I told you that I’m writing three books in a month.

In July of 2016 I’m going to be writing three books called Overlap, Curate, and Reciprocity.

The first book I wanted to write is about this thing I call The Overlap Technique which is about getting from a soul-sucking day job to pursuing what you love to do—doing work that fulfills you.

Curate is about niching down, finding your focus, and growing an audience. The third book, Reciprocity, is giving value to that audience and building a long-term, sustainable business on timeless principles.

I mentioned that these three books are going to be available as hardcover books. Now, that sounds kind of crazy at first because I’m self-publishing and this is going to be pretty expensive, but I don’t think of this as a way to make money.

I’m not planning to make money with these books, I’m planning to invest money. I think it’ll probably cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce these books, but I’m seeing them as an investment in my future.

I’m writing three books in one month. Now that I’ve said the crazy part, let me tell you a little bit about the story because I want to bring you along this journey.

Two years ago, I shared this concept called The Overlap Technique. The Overlap Technique is a down-to-earth, practical, step-by-step guide on how to get out of a soul-sucking day job and do the work that you love and that fulfills you.

I actually started writing this book, The Overlap Technique. I got about 20,000 words in and then I decided to scrap it, because I started writing the book that I wanted to write, rather than the book people needed to hear.

I spent the next year researching, talking to people, having conversations, figuring out what their unique struggles were and then I started writing the book again based on those new findings.

The problem was I wasn’t very purposeful about the book writing. I didn’t set a deadline or say when I was going to finish it and it ended up being put on the back burner.

Some of you just want to pay your bills while others want to make a lifestyle business—that’s where you have a business that makes enough to support you and enable you to do basically about whatever you want.

Others of you want to create a world-changing business or a disruption business—something that’s going to change the world or really impact people at scale. Maybe you want to build the next billion dollar company.

All of these are great aspirations, but if you really just want to build something small, you can build a business in almost any niche to around the million dollar mark with just yourself and maybe a few other people helping.

If you are dreaming of something really big, something on a huge scale, I’m not here to tell you you can’t build the next billion dollar business. I honestly believe in you, I believe that you can, but you need to understand the size of your market, because not every market is a billion dollar market.

In yesterday’s episode, we talked about outward bounds vs. inward values. We’re talking about defining your brand and what you stand for.

It’s really easy to think in limited terms by defining the outward bounds of what our companies are, but if we look inward to our values and what we stand for, you might find that you’re about more than whatever you may be doing now. There could be room to grow and there could be room to scale.

To scale purposefully and to take the greatest advantage of the name you’ve built, you first want to establish what will become your umbrella brand.

That umbrella brand is what will cover other sub-brands that will come later. When you have a really good umbrella brand, there’s a reason you attach weight to it.

What is your company? What is your brand? What do you stand for? What do you not stand for?

Most of us define our companies by the outward bounds. We say, "We cover everything up to this point. We do all of these things." We define the limits, but I want to challenge that idea.

Rather than look at the outward bounds of what our companies are, I like to look inward to what the principles and values are. What are the things that you stand for? Rather than focus on what the outward bounds of what your brand is, focus inward on the values of what your brand stands for and could be.

You may find that what you do isn't limited to what you previously thought or that what you're about can actually have a greater potential and reach than your initial scope.

If I were to ask you about the last bad customer experience you had, could you remember it?

Most of us can remember almost immediately when asked. Think about how powerful that is—you have a negative experience with customer service and it stays. It stays to where you can remember it months later, almost instantly.

If I were to ask you to recall a positive customer experience you had, you're going to be able to remember one almost immediately too.

We remember customer experiences.

They're very powerful. It could be something as simple as greeting you with a smile or calling a company and instead of an automated system, it's a real human being who answers within just a few seconds. Maybe it's someone who's cheerful to you when you were going to return a product and ask for a refund.

As a business owner, the way you can conduct yourself with customer support affects the brand and the customer. What do you do in your business if something goes wrong? What if a customer has a negative experience, how do you fix that?

What's even more powerful than positive experiences and negative experiences is a negative experience that turns into a positive experience.

What is your brand perception? Everyone has a brand. If you have a business, you have a brand. If you don’t have a business, you have a brand.

Every person is a brand.

It doesn’t just have to be a brand name or a personal brand. I’m talking about everything from your handshake to whether you smile or not.

What does that smile look like? How does that handshake feel? What do you share on social media? What do you say? What do you not say? What do you comment on? What is your angle to things?

Everyone has a brand. Are you intentionally crafting that or are you letting it craft you?