If you don't promote yourself, nobody will 🤷

Here’s your daily dose of truth:

Opportunities usually go to the people who are most VISIBLE, not the people who “deserve” them.

Think about all the people you’ve seen get hired/promoted despite being completely incompetent.

I’m thinking about the boss I had who was a VP and literally didn’t know how to center text in Powerpoint.

I vividly remember him turning to me and trying to act all nonchalant, like he just forgot some obscure piece of trivia that was on the tip of his tongue and said “Hey Finn, can you remind me how to make this go in the middle of the page?”

Mind you, this guy was 39 not 70, so he didn’t have the excuse of being a boomer— he was just that incompetent.

He may have been a clown, but I’ll give him credit where it’s due:

He was incredible at self-promotion. He was great at putting himself in the spotlight, and making sure the right people saw it- and that’s why he was my boss.

And there’s so many people out there like him.

It’s ironic: the people who DESERVE opportunities the most don’t get them because they’re humble people who don’t seek the spotlight.

It would be great if you could just keep your head down, focus on doing great work, being a cool person and the world would reward you by dropping opportunities on your lap— but as we all know, that’s not how it works.

I was proud of the things I’d done— design for brands like Febreze, Swiffer, Hollister, and Red Bull; writing for tons of international magazines and websites; sold 7 figures in courses for CreativeLive, etc.

But the harsh reality is that nobody cared. People who worked with me thought I was good at what I do, but nobody else really cared.

I felt totally invisible.

Which is the entire reason I started my YouTube channel back in 2017: I was tired of losing at that game.

Waiting to be “noticed” almost guarantees you’ll stay invisible.

I knew that if I didn’t promote myself, nobody was going to do it for me. I learned that lesson the hard way.

To make a long story short, it worked. I got 130 million views on YouTube, quoted in NYT, profiled by Billboard, interviewed on No Jumper and The Futur, and more— honestly, I never expected it to get that big.

And it changed my life. I’ll never feel invisible again.

So here’s my advice:

Don’t let the world push you around or ignore you!

YOU DESERVE TO BE SEEN.

I mean this from the absolute bottom of my heart:

It might be a little uncomfortable, but you owe it to yourself (and the world) to put yourself out there and make yourself un-ignorable.

I don’t care if you do it on YouTube, LinkedIn, or MySpace… just do it in whatever way works for you.

(MySpace somehow still exists btw, I just checked)

When you have an audience, you play by totally different rules than everyone else— everything just gets easier.

→ High-quality inbound, from people who are already bought in

→ You’re rewarded (not punished) for showing up as your authentic self

→ People default to saying yes to collabs, partnerships, etc (instead of no)

And the rewards compound over time: as your audience grows, you get more returns (ie $$$) from the same amount of effort.

So my advice? Start now!

I promise you, IT WILL BE WORTH IT. 

PS - If you like my emails, reply to this and say hi! I don’t have any room for new clients right now so I have nothing to sell you, but I always like talking with people.

PPS - About that idiot VP. After he was finally “coached out” of the company, he went to FitBit. I asked my (new) boss “Is FitBit public?” He replied “I think so, why?” and I said “If they hired [VP], we should short them.”