4 days until I start my journey to $2,500,000 in 12 months and it’s funny when you frame life in a certain manner. What I mean is that we never look at life with a blank slate. There is always some filter that things must go through.
That is one of the scary things about being a parent. You become the first thing to help shape a baby’s perception of the world. And it’s not in just the things that you say. It’s the things that you do.
For example, I was thinking about the questions that would drive my Curious Hypothesis for this challenge. What I landed on was something that I didn’t have an immediate answer for which is a good thing.
What was the question?
How do you get 20,000 people to not only notice you but always pay attention to you?
The things that I do have to get and keep the attention of these people because just using my words isn’t enough. Everything that I do is some form of communication for this audience.
The babies (you…well, I don’t mean to call you a baby, but work with this analogy for a bit…) are watching how I communicate.
The Pygmy Marmoset
This brings us to the Pygmy Marmoset. I know this is weird, but you have to hear me out on this one.
Marmosets travel in troops between two to nine individuals. That’s it. They have their people and their people only.
What’s fascinating about them is that they communicate using a complex system of vocal, chemical, and visual signals.
What does this have to do with the question above? This is how you keep the attention of a group of people. You have to communicate with them in a way that feels specific to them.
This works for two reasons:
- Most of us feel that the 50,000 messages that hit us daily aren’t targeted to us so when something does, it really stands out
- We are constantly seeking acceptance into a group. This goes back to our oldest ancestors. There is safety and comfort when you’re in a group with others that are like you.
In essence, we are constantly seeking our troop. This is why it can feel awkward when a friend invites us to hang out with their other friends that we haven’t met. When you show up, it feels like they are speaking their own language, which makes you feel left out.
This is one of the strange things that happen when you have kids. As they start to adopt the communication style of the people they hang out with, it starts to differentiate them from the family communication they grew up with.
They are finding a separate troop and that’s because that troop aligns more with what they want to be.
So if I’m going to get 20,000+ people to consistently pay attention to me, then I need to communicate in a way that makes them feel a part of the troop.
Why Pickleball Won
Now, this is where it gets interesting, and it can provide some insight as to why nobody gets to stay at the top of the market forever.
Maybe you’ve heard of a sport called Pickleball. I’m not going to explain it but the synopsis is that it’s tennis for people who don’t want to move as much. That’s no shade on the pickleball people.
I think it’s amazing to look at.
But why did it blow up?
Because it targeted the people who felt left out of tennis.
People saw tennis and wanted the outcome. Fun exercise with someone else, but didn’t like the mechanism. Running around like crazy chasing a ball.
Pickleball made the outcome more accessible for people. It spoke their language. It wasn’t supposed to attract the people who love tennis. It attracted those who desired the outcome but needed a different mechanism.
Now, pickleball people have their own communication. Once you pick up pickleball you feel part of a troop.
It’s what makes talking with these people so annoying. Like talking to a yoga person or a vegan when you aren’t into those things. And that’s kind of the hard part about this.
It’s easy to say you want to find the communication that everyone can understand but it doesn’t work that way because eventually, someone is going to communicate with a specific group and take them away.
To put it another way, did you know that rabbits don’t really eat carrots or other root vegetables? If you give them too much they’ll get sick.
They are more inclined to eat hay and yet some of us run businesses where we are constantly trying to force rabbits to eat carrots.
Not good.
Normal Never Wins
This morning my wife sent me a Reel from a buy that talked about a study on ADHD people and their cerebellums. The gist is that our cerebellums are wired differently which makes developing habits difficult.
This is why the common productivity advice tends to fall flat with us.
The gurus are teaching us how to taste wine through smells when we don’t smell at all!
Learning about this can instantly make you feel out of place. Why can’t my cerebellum be like everyone else’s? But the truth is that when you’re trying to get a group of people to pay close attention to you, you don’t want that thing that is similar to the larger group.
You want to hone in on those things that the smaller group wants.
And so, with this journey, the game plan is simple. Acquire fame with a small group because that’s the only path to success that I can see working for this Challenge.
How do you get 20,000 people to not only notice you but always pay attention to you?
You find the thing that makes them feel like part of the troop. You find the thing that everyone else seems to be missing and instead of carrots, you give them hay. You create pickleball instead of trying to make a better tennis racket. You create a Cheese-Rolling race that screams, “This is for you!”
Don’t worry, we’ll get to the cheese thing in a second.
And this doesn’t just apply to my Challenge. This applies to your business right now.
- When someone is part of your Troop who are they?
- What makes your smaller Troop better than the larger one?
- Are you trying your best to feed people carrots when they want hay?
- Are you trying to get them to play tennis when pickleball is more up their alley?
If we were to talk about this 30 years ago none of it would make sense because we were limited to who we could reach.
Rolling Cheese
For example, there is this race. It’s the most peculiar race that I’ve ever seen. It’s called the Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling Race. Seriously, look up a video of it.
Anyways, it’s hard to think that someone in Zimbabwe would be interested in this but what can happen today is that someone could see a video of that race and think, “These are my people“.
That’s exactly what you’re about to see with me and this Challenge. I’m going to dive deeper into the people who are like me because I want their attention.
That means a lot of you will lose interest in these emails, and that’s okay. Hopefully, you find your own Cheese Race to run (or stumble if you watch the video).