Being The Loudest In The Room - Issue 03
I’m Brian and each week I publish content on personal growth. Sometimes it will be things I’ve learned in my own growth experience, but most times I’ll be answering readers’ questions about personal growth. Send me your questions, and in turn, I’ll do some research & interviews and humbly offer the best advice I find.
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Q: America seems to award people who are self-promoters, loud, or even offensive to others. Do you think you have to be loud to be successful today? Do the biggest self-promoters win?
Social media is very loud and in your face! It’s nearly impossible to escape and has become a need for a lot of us. All the influencers on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Tiktok, etc can make you feel like you have to be an ultra promoter in order to be successful. After all, those platforms are filled with ultra-promoters. So is the White House.
Let me just make this clear: western media definitely rewards the loudest person in the room, and kids know this. It’s the reason why they would rather be YouTube and social media stars over anything else.
Regardless of how you feel about that data, we’re all responsible for it. I’m also afraid it’s not going to get any better any time soon. If anything, I would expect more online businesses to launch, and reaching younger and younger audiences will require appealing to their means of consumption.
Data like this has created a conundrum where many of us who are not natural self-promoters and don’t want to be famous feel like we have to lean into that in order to be successful. I’m in that boat too.
I’m going to dive into a few things here that might support folks who may not want to be the loudest in the room. Specifically:
🤷♂️ When do I need to be loud?
🥁 Can I be loud and humble at the same time?
📈 Can I be successful without being the loudest person in the room?
Per usual, let’s have some fun with it.
If you’re creating a personal brand or monopoly, you have to be loud.
If the thing that you’re building requires a “face” of the company, then you’d better get loud and fast, because there is more competition than ever.
One way to think about this is “does what I do exist separate from me?” If the answer is yes, you don’t need a huge personal brand. If it doesn’t exist separate from you, then you will! I would go beyond just being loud in this case… you need beyond loud. You need to build a cult following.
Once you have a cult following, no one can take it from you. It becomes your own personal monopoly. And personal monopoly’s are valuable.
Just ask Joe Rogan. He’s the loudest podcaster; so loud that Spotify bought the rights to his put his podcast on Spotify for $100MM. Do you know what Joe Rogan thinks of humans? He thinks we’re a planet:
“Filled with people who have hundreds of different languages, they’re all full of shit, they lie to each other constantly, they send videos through the air, they have weapons that they can blow each other up with.” - Joe Rogan
That’s a direct quote. It’s mostly true… kinda harsh… but it doesn’t matter because he has a cult following.
One of the great things about having a personal brand is that you can leverage it into many other things. It’s part of why Kim Kardashian West and Rihanna all have billion-dollar beauty brands. It’s also how the Rock and George Clooney both diversified into Tequila and Dr. Dre got people to wear over-ear headphones again.
Those are outlier cases, but it also applies to selling a course on how to be a better writer or if you want to sell a bunch of stuff people don’t really need from Amazon. Self-promotion will be key. And, if you’re not a big self-promoter, this is an awesome growth opportunity!
These are some places where massive self-promotion is either required or would be insanely helpful:
🎺 Music and entertainment
📝 Selling your own online course
🇺🇸 Politics
📢 Coaching
🦾 Personal Training
📬 Writing a newsletter (hello!)
You can be loud and humble.
I think part of what drives the question around self-promotion is that it’s easy for loud people to come off arrogant and self-centered. Social media really tips in favor of people who are anything but humble. There are stories of people who started out with good intentions, then social media turned them into assholes.
The key to being loud and humble is to make sure that helping and serving other people is priority #1 over even your own self-interest. Maybe you’re trying to inspire others, coach them, or sell them a service. How it looks can be different, but the root driver is helping others and you can be humble in how you approach it.
If anything, if self-promotion is not your thing, maybe focusing on how you can impact others will help you lean into self-promotion a bit more. Think about some questions like:
💜 Who isn’t being helped because you don’t speak up?
⚖️ Is the support you can provide worth you doing something uncomfortable?
👬 Are people who look like you or share your background being served?
When you let their needs be bigger than yours, self-promotion becomes easier. And as long as their needs remain bigger than yours, humility will drive your message. In full transparency, I think users can tell if you’re being humble & honest versus when you’re full of yourself.
A team that I think does a good job of this is the entrepreneur couple behind Create and Go. Before they starting making courses explaining how to use Pinterest to grow your business (which works phenomenally), they built a company using those very tactics called Avocadu. They failed a bunch growing Avocadu, then started sharing with other people how they turned Avocadu around. I felt like they were humble about it and loud in how they shared it, and they shared a lot of it for free.
I think they’re very different from a bunch of other online course providers. In a lot of cases, you’ll find people online selling you their service on how to market your business online, when the only business they’ve marketed online is the one they’re selling you.
You can sell a lot of stuff telling people they’ll make millions of dollars. In my opinion, it’s not very humble and it’s more about the speaker than the person being served.
So you can make money both ways. It’s really up to you which you want to be.
Pro Tip: Keep a couple of people around you that will let you know when your self-promotion is leaning away from humility. My friend, Arthur, has permission to kick me in the shins if I start doing things from clicks.
Build a loud brand that’s not about you.
Investing a bunch of time in your personal brand will take away from time spent on building your business if the two aren’t related. If I am running a Podcast, my brand and my podcast are pretty much same-same.
If I am trying to disrupt the travel industry, take healthcare online, or even build out a bunch of gyms, those businesses aren’t about me as much as the solution I’m offering, and I can invest time in building the business brand instead.
This works when the end customer doesn’t really care who the CEO or creator is because they just want the product or the solution.
People who are building hard, standalone brands don’t always invest the time in being loud; they’re too busy building their business and they clearly don’t care about being famous.
When I write this, I’m thinking about people like Brian Chesky, who in spite of building Airbnb seems to not give a shit about what you think of him on Instagram. He hasn’t posted in over a year.
Or Kyle Vogt. He founded Cruise and they build self-driving cars. GM bought it for loads of cash a few years back, but his all-time Tweet count is 116. I don’t think he cares what you think of him on Twitter and he clearly doesn’t waste any time on it.
Obviously, both of these guys are outliers, and they have strong personal brands, but they came from producing results for their business, not from being personally loud. The social media accounts for their businesses have many multiples the reach that the founders do personally.
When you build something awesome that grows, some people will end up knowing who you are from it, but you don’t have to spend a bunch of time tooting your own personal brand horn to be successful. They’re wildly more successful than nearly every person you know that has 1 million followers.
I’m just thinking about all of the pitch decks I’ve seen recently. People you’ve never heard of are trying to:
🥓 Make fake bacon taste as good as real bacon (yum!)
🦷 Make your toothbrush tell you if something is wrong with your health
🏠 Fix housing shortage issues in American cities
💵 Create bank accounts for the billions of people around the world who don’t have them
I’m glad these people don’t care about being famous; they’re building cool stuff instead.
Bieber versus Buchheit
Being the loudest doesn’t mean you’ll have more reach, impact, or financial success than someone who isn’t. I learned this back in 2014 in an interesting way and it’s stuck with me for a long time.
In 2014, I was in the Winter Class at Y Combinator and a man named Paul Buchheit was one of the partners. If you’re not familiar with Y Combinator, it’s a network you can join if you’re starting a tech company. They invest in you, take a percentage of your company, and help you raise grow and raise more money, faster.
This was also back when I was drinking coffee and I was at a Starbucks in Mountain View when Paul Buchheit walked in. What followed was really interesting to me: NOTHING HAPPENED. No one, other than me, seemed to know who they guy was. No-one stopped to shake his hand, ask for a picture, or sneak a picture while he wasn’t looking. You might still not know who this guy is, so I’ll tell ya!
He was an early employee at Google and he invented Gmail, which you’re probably using to read this newsletter.
At the time, Justine Bieber was probably the hottest pop star on the planet and he was valued at about $100MM dollars in 2014. Paul Buchheit was valued at 6-times that when he walked into that Starbucks. Justin Bieber cannot just walk into a Starbucks, unnoticed; he’d be mobbed. I remember asking myself if I wanted to be like Justin Bieber or Paul Buchheit.
Justin Bieber is a random person to compare Paull Buchheit to, but the point is, you’ve probably never heard of him or read one of his 241 all-time Twitter tweets:
Yet, he’s probably had more of an impact on your life than Justin Bieber. There are 1.5 Billion Gmail accounts, but you’d be more interested in seeing Justin Bieber at a Starbucks. Fame is a funny thing, isn’t it?
The point is, you can build some pretty cool stuff without ever becoming famous. I think there are plenty of opportunities to be a Buchheit, where you build a solution and very few people know that you’re personally responsible for it. Do you know who built UberEats? Yeah, me neither.
But, you’re always enrolling.
Overall, there are some industries where I think you do need to be loud. If you don’t want to be that loud, I’d either focus on how you’re helping other people so you can be loud or go build something else. The competition in self-promoter filled spaces is so hot that I do think the loudest in the room will win.
Regardless of if self-promotion is the way to go for what you want to build, you’d better be getting after whatever you’re building, and that will require enrolling people.
Maybe you’re enrolling them to work for you, or invest in your company, or read your newsletter, or marry you. We’ll talk about enrollment another time.
For now, I’m curious if you’ve decided to be the loudest person in the room or not?
That’s it for this week! Hit me up if you have any thoughts, feedback, or insights to share.
If you found this valuable, consider sharing it with friends, or subscribing if you aren’t already.
Cheers!
Brian ✊