The Seductive and Profitable Lure of a Mimicry Epidemic

When I started blogging in 2009, I wrote about my own stories and my own experiences. Then I started seeing that there were a lot of people who made money talking about blogging. So I started writing blogging advice on my personal development blog. I even tried to create a membership site for how to build a blog using the interviews I conducted. All of these ideas fell flat. They hardly made any money at all, they took up a shitload of time, and they didn’t excite me all that much.

Then I decided to be a “social media consultant” whatever the hell that means. Getting traffic to a somewhat popular blog didn’t really qualify me to do that at all. And social media consultants were a dime a dozen. To top it off there were a lot of people much better at it than I was. At a certain point it seemed like calling yourself a social media expert was career suicide. You would just blend into a sea of sameness. Just do a search for social media expert on twitter and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Somewhere along the way I decided to abandon all these maps for a compass. I’m convinced that’s where your best work comes from. It’s never the byproduct of some guru, thought leader’s or successful entrepreneurs online course or formula.

It comes from something intuitive, something we feel deeply compelled to make, something we want to see exist in the world.

It’s a lot more fun and far more interesting. But is certainly not a shortcut to profitable work that matters. In fact it might take a lot longer. As my friend Paul Jarvis wrote in what may be the most important thing i’ve read all year:

What appears to be a big break for other people is really just the result of not knowing the backstory. The actor that won an award who we’d never heard of prior spent a decade learning her craft and making connections. The business person who’s company blew up over night started four companies before that and two of them failed in the first few months. There’s always a backstory and it involves hard work and taking action towards something that may not pay off.

My friends at Misfit Inc have been grinding it out to master their craft for nearly a decade. They didn’t start out putting on conferences with such an incredible attention to detail, every other event you go to for the rest of your life will pale in comparison. They slept on couches, and even exchanged work for room and board.

The backstory is one of the most critical ingredients of sustainable success. Without a backstory we take our achievements for granted. We don’t appreciate them nearly as much. But with a backstory, we don’t treat any opportunity as if it’s something we’re entitled to. We see it as a privilege.

Nothing will poison your work and sink a ship like entitlement.

Getting to write a book is a privilege. The minute you take it for granted is the minute your work will suffer.

Getting to serve an audience is a privilege. The minute you take them from granted or try to squeeze blood out of a stone, is the minute they’ll disband. As Jon Acuff said to me an interview “don’t ask what I can sell people. Ask how I can help people.”

The lure of participating in a mimicry epidemic is seductive and profitable in the short term

• A podcaster gets into a new and noteworthy. They launch a course on how to do that. And what’s worse is that the temporary surge from this accomplishment, plummets almost immediately after the podcast falls out of new and noteworthy. What we’re investing in is a temporary dopamine boost.
• A client goes to a life coach and figures out her calling is to be a life coach. Watch this Dmitri Martin sketch.

The list goes on an on. But when we’re willing to ditch the script, we start to uncover what is true for us, our ethos, our legacy and the unique gifts that we can give to the world. To me this is a lot more interesting and much more fun.

I’m the host of The Unmistakable Creative Podcast. Subscribe to the podcast viaiTunes or Stitcher.