Blowing Up Slow

Blowing up slow

To most of my friends, it’s felt like I’ve “blown up” pretty quickly. 417K followers in my first 11 months making content.

To new creators, this feels like the dream state…blowing up fast.

The truth is, you actually don’t want to blow up fast. It’s a trap.

Here’s why…

The real objective of this game is not to blow up. It’s to unlock the things that come as a result of blowing up (money, fame, influence, power, free stuff, access, time freedom, etc.).

But what’s important to remember is that those things start coming gradually over time. It’s not as though once you cross a certain audience size all of your wishes are granted.

That means in order to unlock those results, you’ll need to keep creating and producing at a high level once you’ve blown up.

And here comes the big issue…

When you blow up fast, you haven’t had the necessary time to develop the skills required to continue producing the level of content an audience/brand would expect at your “post-blown up” size.

So now you’re stressed.

You feel 100x the responsibility for creating “higher quality” stuff for your huge audience and brands that are paying you 5 and 6 figure deals, but you don’t know how.

This is a metaphor I like to use.

Let’s say a brand is willing to pay you $100K to cut through a thick piece of rope with a knife.

You get one slice to do it.

Every rep making content is another knife stroke on the sharpener, improving the blade.

People who have spent years grinding to grow an audience have an extremely sharp knife. It’s a proxy for their skills.

When it finally comes time to cut the rope, they have no problem doing it. It’s routine and stress-free because their skills developed before their growth. This is blowing up slow.

Take the other scenario…

If you blew up too fast, your knife is still dull. You have underdeveloped skills. When you go to cut the rope, you struggle. The brand isn’t happy. Your audience isn’t happy.

Your skills lagged your growth.

The goal is to use the audience incubation period to learn the skills necessary to be able to cut the rope when the time comes.

The stress you’ll feel from not being able to cut the rope will far outweigh the impatience from never getting a chance to do it.

All this to say, don’t focus on blowing up…focus on sharpening your knife.

— — — — — — — — — — — — —

If you enjoyed this post and want more like it, you should subscribe to me weekly creator journal, Blueprint. Each week, I share metrics, ideas, frameworks, and experiments designed to supercharge your thinking about content & brand building in the modern age.