SNM276 Make This Year The Year You Have Your Breakthrough with Darin Kidd

Jonathan Green: Make this year the year you have your breakthrough with special guest Darren Kidd on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Builderall. They are my favorite all in one solution for your online business. Everything you need to start your online business, from landing pages to emails, to selling your first products, all without breaking the bank. Find out how Builderall can help you grow your online business at builderall. Announcer: Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated?

If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now, then you've come to the right place. Welcome to Serve No Master podcast, where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host.

Jonathan Green: I'm really excited by a lot of what you talk through because I discover that there are so many people that get stuck in paralysis analysis or they can't take action. And most of the time when people I see people who fall to the wayside, I've been doing this for twelve years, it's in their heads, it's more in their decision making process or how they dedicate their time rather than the actual processes.

We get stuck in our head going, I don't want to make the wrong decision, I don't want to look like a fool. And we're so afraid to step out on a limb or exit our comfort zone that we never change our life. Darin Kidd: Absolutely. Yeah. So first of all, Jonathan, thank you for having me on your show and congratulations on all the amazing things that you're doing and going to do. I see you got a lot of great, exciting things that you're planning.

Yes, that's true. I mean, 25 years ago I was bankrupt, car was repossessed on government assistance, applying for food stamps, living in a small town in the middle of nowhere, Virginia college dropout on depression medicine and felt like I had no hope. And I learned that anything we ever achieve and we win, we achieve and win in our head first. And so we have to get crystal clear on what it is we really want because those reasons come before results and we're never going to feel.

So if you're afraid of failing, if you're going to have success, no matter what area of life you have those goals, you're going to fail. And when I started looking at failure as my friend, then that really changed. Obstacles lead to elevation and when you start looking at, hey, the only way that I learn is I'm going to have sometimes that I fail, but as long as I'm failing forward and the way that I look at failure is I don't fail.

I either win or I learn. And when you start having that perspective, it changes things. Jonathan Green: I think that's really interesting because a lot of people, we do whatever we can to avoid failure, and that means we avoid all risk, because it's impossible to succeed if you eliminate failure as a possibility. And I think in a lot about more and more, my generation and younger, we have these really vague definitions of what we want. It's what do you want? I want to be famous.

For what? I don't know. Just being famous. Or what do you want? To make a lot of money to do what with it? I don't know. How much is a lot of money? Just lots. And we use these really vague terms, and it becomes immeasurable. I'm someone who and I talk about this a lot.

I always have struggled with my weight, and the only way I can hit a goal is if I go, I want to lose this much weight, because if you go, I want to lose a little bit of weight. And in your head, you're saying 20 pounds, but you lose five. You go, this is good enough, and then you bounce right back. It's only if you get very specific, and I'm on a very specific timeline with very specific tracking.

I weigh myself every day because I can tell with how my body is. If I cheat today, my weight will go up two pounds tomorrow. It's always happened. So I have a really tight measurement, whereas if I stop measuring and I get casual, my weight balloons. A couple of months ago, I wasn't paying attention for three months, and my weight got the highest it had been in three or four years. And I was like, okay, I got to get real strict.

But set specificity that I think is so critical in goal creation. And everyone says, Write down your goals. So nobody wants to do it because it sounds boring. But we don't even have specific goals anymore for what we want. Like, why do you want to be rich? I want to ride around in a private airplane. Where are you going to go? Right? You don't even think about that part of it. You want to be in the plane just doing circles.

And there's this so much about presentation that it's hard to anchor it when we don't really want it, because we don't really know what we want. Yeah. Darin Kidd: And a lot of times, if any of you are listening or watching, have you ever felt burned out or know? And I know the answer to that question, and everyone says yes. And I learned from a billionaire mentor of mine. He goes, Darren, it's not burnout. It's not lack of motivation. It's lack of clarity.

Clarity gives you focus, and focus gives you energy. So it all comes down to what do you really want? And there's a thing called seven levels deep. If you go, hey, what do you really want? Why want to make money? Well, I mean, you can make an extra dollar today, and you've made more money. So like you said, you have to be very clear. So if you go, Why do I want to make money? Well, I want to help people.

Why do you want to help people? Well, I want to do this, and by the time you go four or five levels deep, and I would spend some time really getting crystal clear on that, then it goes from your head to your heart. And so that clarity, that gives you focus, that gives you energy. The clearer the picture of your goals and your dreams in your head, the more goal directed your actions are on a daily basis.

And if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there, right? So if I go, hey, I'm going to leave today on vacation, where are you going? I don't know. We're just going to drive. Well, if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. You have to know where you're going. And like you just said, evaluate where you are. Here's where I'm starting. And then look at the process. Go out and visit.

For example, you visit your future body, right? And go, hey, here's exactly how I want to look. I want to gain health. And sometimes it's not even the weight. It's, hey, look, I want to be 190 pounds with this percent body fat. I want to have energy. I want to do this and do that. Then you go visit your dreams, run into the future, visit your dreams and come back and look for the stepping stones that we need to have to get to that place.

And then make sure you have accountability and a way to measure it. Because performance measured is performance improved. So if you're tracking it, that awareness leads to change. And the other thing that you just mentioned, Jonathan, that's really important. We're not going to feel like it at first. It's complete discipline. But if we create our habits and our rituals, then eventually they create us.

So I have habits and rituals throughout my entire day of when I get up, what I listen to, who I pay attention to, what I let in my space, who I let have my energy. I have movement breaks throughout the day. I have all kinds of things that I do throughout the day. Water. I track how much water I drink. I have accountability in every single area of my life. And those simple things that we do on a daily basis, here's the key.

Today they seem like they didn't make that big of a difference. If I go eat a Big Mac, french fries and a milkshake today, you're not going to really see that big of a difference. But walked into a McDonald's and someone's on the floor and they had a heart attack and they died, we go, what happened? If they ate that today and it killed them?

We would never do it again, but it was they were digging a grave with their teeth over a period of, you know, great points. Jonathan Green: A lot of people there's kind of two approaches that people have when they try something new, whether it's a diet or it's a business program or it's a form of personal wellness. There's one type person that's like, I'll do whatever it takes to make this work. And that's the minority.

Most people in the majority are like, I want to prove this doesn't work, right? I want to prove this diet doesn't work. I want to prove this business system doesn't work. They're coming in, planning to be a negative review. They want to be that negative. Yelp reviewer, the one starer. And I've seen people like this because people on Amazon, sometimes they get a review. I look at their profile. Well, this person's reviewed 400 books, all one stars. Why are they still reading books?

And they're always looking for something to hate. And a lot of people, I've noticed, they're looking for any excuse to quit. And the first obstacle, the first challenge, they find out, oh, I have to work 10 hours a week to build this business. I'm not doing that. I want 1 hour a week. The same people, right?

We go to college for four years, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, hundreds of hours of studying and education and testing, all in the hopes of getting a minimum wage, job or middle management in ten years. But we won't put that same amount of effort in almost anything else, because we want to be really successful, but also for it to be easy, which are very often mutually exclusive. It's very hard to do no work and be really successful. I've never encountered that.

But why are people so stuck? And is there a way for someone who's that's why is there a way for someone who's thinking, how can I prove this isn't working? To change their mindset, to go, no, I do want a better life. I do want to change this thing, whatever category of their life it is, whether it's business or personal or health. Darin Kidd: Yeah, I could go for several hours on that. So I'll give you the really condensed version.

In order to get something different, we have to do something different. We know the definition of insanity is doing what we've always done, yet expecting to get something different. So the same thoughts and behaviors that got us where we are are not the same thoughts and behaviors that get us to the next level. And when I had a mentor of mine many years ago, go, Darren, you don't make what you want. You make what you are.

And if you want to make more, you have to become more. And I had to start evaluating things in my life like, number one, clarity. And your brain does not know the difference in reality and what you tell it. So by the time we're 35, we're thinking 70 to 90,000 thoughts a day. The majority of our life is subconscious. Our decisions are made by our subconscious mind.

And when your brain doesn't know the difference of reality and what you tell it, when we visualize a goal, a dream, an experience now science proves we produce chemicals and endorphins as if the experience actually happened. So we can experience an experience before we ever experience it. And why is that important? Because we move in the directions of things that we're familiar with, good or bad. So if we feel like bad things happen to me, why does all you know I'm a magnet for negativity.

When you live in a home and you feel like you should be there, you're going to stay there. But when you start focusing on what you want, not what you don't want, where you want to go, not where you've been understanding, it's time to start thinking about what you've been thinking about. And then when you have that clarity and we move in the direction of things we're familiar with, we magnetize the condition that we seek.

The late Bob Proctor said look, if I can see it in my mind, if we can see it in our mind, we can hold it in our hand. Everything starts in our mind and our head first. So the key to your goals and your dreams is right between your ears. So when you take time and have clarity, then you start understanding our brain. And I've got five kids from almost 30 down to almost 15. And I continually reinforce.

Your brain is the most powerful supercomputer ever created. Be very careful what you let in the portals because when you start to take it in, you're programming that machine. So if we get up and watch negative things in the morning, for example, I don't watch the news. I used to watch news, but it's negative. If it bleeds, it leads. So now I have when I get up in the morning, my first part of my day is purpose development.

My first hour and a half to 2 hours, hour and 15 minutes is purpose development. I'm listening to a message from Rick Warren or one of my favorite pastors and the Bible on audio. Then I do my personal development where I'm growing because I know I'm growing or declining every day, maintaining as a myth. So I've created these habits and rituals in my life that continually fuel the positive, block the negative and keep me focused on the right things.

Now you can't see my office, but I have a success environment. Set up pictures of my family, YouTube videos of places my wife and family and I like to travel. I've got affirmations, I've got all of these things around me. I have playlists when it comes to music. That keeps me uplifted and motivated. I do things about my day to change my physiology and my energy and my body, whether it's push ups and squats. So understand that anything you ever want is in your head.

Then when you take and you go to people that have what you want and mimic what they do. For example, if you can see this, most of you are listening, but if you see this video, you're not going to ask me for hair advice because I have none. And if you buy people's opinion, you buy their lifestyle. So finding people have what you want, modeling what they do, shaving years off your learning curve, having accountability.

And that's another thing, Jonathan, the reason that people look for things to keep them where they are, because a comfort zone is designed to keep us safe and it looks at sameness as security. So anytime we start to get outside that comfort zone, we go right back to where we were. That's why it's important to have that accountability and to get comfortable being uncomfortable. It makes a huge difference.

So those are a few little tips that I believe can make I know will make a massive difference in your life if you just start focusing on those things. Jonathan Green: Yeah. A lot of people, when they say, what's the difference between me and the people who've given up? And they always say, oh, are you a genius? And my wish, there's always people smarter than me and there's a lot of people dumber than me that are a lot more successful than me. Right.

I grew up thinking because I was smart. Oh, smarts is the secret to success. It's not always the case, and sometimes it is, but what it really is is finding your one thing you're great at and consistency. Like the difference between me and everyone else is that I work seven days a week. I remember one time my father gave me a piece of advice a year ago. He goes, you should never work more than six and a half days a week.

And I go, that's when you know you're a second generation workaholic. When your dad's take a couple of hours off once a week. And I work shorter every day because I work from home. I would never do 12 hours a day. I don't want to live lifestyle. But I built out a schedule where I can spend time with my kids every day as opposed to just the weekends.

But we have this idea that we can do shortcuts and work small amounts of time and get really big results. But it's the same thing with going to the gym. Imagine you go to the gym and you just work out super hard for 12 hours and then you don't work out for two months. It's not going to stick. And business is the same way. Right. I get emails every day that I need to respond to within a day or two.

I can't check my email once a month because by the time it's a month. I've forgotten who's emailing me and they've forgotten the messages. But that consistency. Sometimes it's hard, as you mentioned, because whether doing something healthy or doing something unhealthy, the results are really far away. Like it's going to take me six to twelve months to hit my weight loss goal. That's really hard to look at. If I just look at that far away goal, I'm not going to do it.

I know that because I failed so many times. So it's this consistency that we have to create and you call it habit. I'm a big fan of ritual as well. Is that creating the right mindset for what you're going to do? I have a different approach to perform recording a podcast versus writing. If I have, I was supposed to have a podcast with you, an hour break than another podcast. There's no way I can be productive that hour in between doing something else.

I can't sit down and start writing blog posts because I can't switch gears like that. I know once I start my first blog I'm only thinking about that until I finish the last podcast recording or only blog to blog, I can't jump between tasks and it's that knowing myself allows me to create efficiencies. That's why I only do my podcasts all one day of the week.

I do a longer spread as opposed to doing them on separate days because I know whenever I have podcasts it becomes all I think about. I want to make sure I get there on time, set up the lights and do everything in that place. So consistency and ritual are so important. I'm also very interested in some of the things you've done to grow your business.

I see so many people who ask to be on the show me a link to their TikTok and they have less than 200 followers. I'm like, Why are you doing that? They almost give you it's like when you go to Sat, they give you certain number of points for signing up. TikTok gives you a couple of hundred followers just for putting in a username. Some people with no videos have over 100 followers.

But I've noticed you've had really explosive growth and I'd love to know first of all, the mindset of how you decided to do it and the ups and downs, because a lot of people, they post two or three videos and quit. And I know a big part of this on TikTok is doing a lot, doing consistency and really going for it. So tell me a little bit about your process and mindset and you can answer some of the other stuff I said as well.

Darin Kidd: Absolutely. Yeah, you made some great points and I agree with you about hard work and here's the way that I look at it. Okay. We know that hard work is not the key to success because we know a lot of people that work really hard and do not live the life of their dreams. However, peter drucker says, it's not how much we do, it's the effectiveness of what we do.

So when you have crystal clear clarity on what it is that you want, I believe you can have it all if we do the right things. I got a budy of mine, he's like, look, darren, my goal is to work less than 20 hours a week and go on seven vacations a year with my family. And he made multiple seven figures last year working less than 20 hours a week. But he didn't do that in the beginning.

There was a season of sacrifice, and he learned how to work smarter. Yes, hard, but he learned how to be more effective with the time that he works, because no matter who it is in the world, the only thing that we all have exactly the same resource or the same amount of is time. So I agree with you. Every week I'm trying to optimize. I spoke at a biohacking event this past weekend, and it was pretty powerful.

John aseroff from the secret, and some guys in there, one guy's company did 300 million the year before. There was another guy, his people, their company did over 30 billion. And it was fascinating how to biohack our body, how to biohack our breathing business. And yes, I'm constantly working and hiring and having mentors that teach me how to be more effective with the things that I do. So I absolutely agree with you. And I'll tell you this. People say knowledge is power.

How many of us you talked about being smart? Well, IQ has everything to do with how successful you are. And you go, I thought jonathan just said it doesn't not that right, because I dropped out of college. I barely made it through high school because I wasn't interested. I just wasn't excited about what I was learning. It's the IQ. The I quit quotient. How quickly will you give up on your goals and your dreams? So, to me, it's that grit.

It's not IQ how smart you are. Everybody has their talents and gifts, and the world tries to grade us on how smart we are by just a few certain standards and processes. But that's my opinion on that. Now, with TikTok years ago and understanding that the same version of me that got me to where I was is not the same version that gets me to the next level. And I've had experience with franchises. I did network marketing for 28 years.

I've done online stuff, all of these things before I became a coach, a business coach, and a trainer and consultant, all the things that I'm doing now. But what I did, I go, look, what's the fastest way for me to go have success in anything that I do? Well? It's either me spend the next, for example, I've been in business for 30 years. I'll be 50 in march.

They can either go through 30 years of business like I have, make millions of dollars of mistakes, invest multiple six figures in their education, I've invested multiple six figures in the last 24 to 36 months in me. So just because I don't have a college education doesn't mean I'm not educated. I spend at least 2 hours a day consuming content.

And so I can either go spend the time, make the mistakes, go through all of that, or I can hire someone like I did one of the top 20 YouTubers in Forbes, pay him a lot of money, fly out to Vegas multiple times, shave years off my learning curve. I'm buying his experiences and I just hired him again last year going look, I'm getting ready to revamp my YouTube channel. I've had to take down some videos because I'm no longer in that career path.

And I'm like 4 hours was a lot of money, it was more than I used to make, probably in a year when I first got married. But again, it saved me years, compressed timeframes. So then I hired one of the top social media in Forbes years ago when I had hauling, no social media following. Now it's approaching a half a million. So with any of those I understood that money follows attention, money follows eyeballs. And when you learn the principles, the platform may vary.

One day TikTok is blowing up, the next day it may be banned. There are people saying hey, it may be gone from the US in the next twelve to 24 months at the latest, maybe the next presidential election here in the US because they're not complying. I don't know. Here's what I know. Platforms come and go.

But if we learn to do the right things, learn how to market, create a message that appeals to our ideal client, we give them that pain to solution, which I know you have done phenomenal things with in your world, then it's just a matter of applying it to the platform and it's a matter of tweaking and being consistent and persistent. And I don't care who it is. There are people that no one knew.

And I've seen people take and grow a massive following with taking a hammer and breaking glass and making all these beautiful pictures and stuff. So your vibe attracts your tribe. So no matter what social media platform, it's thinking about who I'm trying to market to thinking about what problems they have, how can I give them the solutions? And then it's incorporating certain things on different platforms to attract more people. And to be honest with you, the TikTok started out as a joke with my daughters.

I did a zoom one night and they came out, they were doing a little TikTok dance and I go, you know what, I'm going viral. And they laughed and they go in their words, no one wants to see a cringy middle aged man dance, right? It's so me just having fun, but knowing how social media platforms work. I just danced around, found a song that I figured would resonate, and I think that video had 750,000 views.

I put on 20,000 followers in a few days, and they were blown away. Right? Now, the challenge with that is you got to be careful what bait you put out, because then when I go back to posting, it's okay if you mix it up. But that was really my beginning of TikTok. So all of a sudden, I had thousands of middle aged women that wanted to see me dance, but they weren't business potential unless I wanted to do something else, which I'm not.

But anyway, so, yeah, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook last week, I'll give you an example on my business Facebook page. And I'm in the process of hiring a new social media manager to help me with my stuff. So I go. Okay. It's Monday. Most heart attacks happen on Monday. People don't want to go back to work. They're discouraged. How do I want to make them feel with what I'm getting ready to post? I want to give them some encouragement, some inspiration.

And I put up a post, and it's got 7000 likes, almost 800 shares. So there are little teeny things that you can do in the social media world to attract people to you, to become hot prospects and eventually customers. Jonathan Green: Yeah, that's really interesting, because a lot of people this is something I encounter a lot. They build these large TikTok followings that are broad. Right. They're doing comedy, which is the hardest niche to monetize. Right.

Because your audience is so wide, none of them like the same things. And you're exactly right that knowing who you want is so critical when you're building out. And it's very interesting. You have such a, I guess, specific approach, because a lot of people kind of shotgun social media, right? Or they talk about whatever they want. This is why I don't really use Facebook anymore.

I have a few people who I still use Facebook Messenger, but I hate looking at the I look at my Facebook feed if I want to feel bad. It's just like the news. It's become a place, this, where people just want to share the opinions. I just want to look at pictures of my nieces and nephews or things like that. I don't want to know how you feel about a Supreme Court case. This like, I see stuff like that all the time.

I don't know why you think, my plumber thinks I want to know his opinion on what's going down with the state supreme Court or with some trial. It's so become this place. And it's exactly right that people are looking for a positive energy. And the reason I've been drawn to TikTok over the last few years is that TikTok what they're doing, whether TikTok disappears or not, the idea is that. They allow virality.

Again, I haven't seen a viral post on Facebook, and I'm going to say twelve years on YouTube in six or seven years. YouTube constantly recommends videos to me that I would never want to watch. I'm always having to tell it, stop recommending this channel, I don't watch this type of content. TikTok allows you to be judged based on the quality of your content, which is why it's the purest platform.

I know there's a lot of stuff wrong with it, but I know that more platforms are trying to copy that. They're going, oh, maybe we should give people what they want instead of what we think they want. And it's that one core idea. I was watching this documentary about MySpace recently, and I have only positive memories about MySpace. On MySpace, there was no cyberbullying. People weren't mean to each other. Everyone was like making friends.

And it was all about if you could be the top eight friends on someone's page and you could make your page look however you want because you had total control over the code on the page. You could put music and all sorts of crazy things, and people had nightmare pages and really nice pages. And the Internet was a place where if something was cool, you saw it and virality was really positive. And obviously things have changed a lot in the last 20 years.

I know I'm sounding like a dinosaur, but that's the Internet that I want is where I don't care who tells a joke. If it's funny, I want to hear it right? If something's interesting or someone's doing something good like you talk about, people do stuff that I would have never known. Whether it's artistic or creative or they're building things or restoring things, I want to see that. And that's the purity that we look for.

And it's very interesting that when you create your content, you're very specific about it because a lot of people go, oh, it's Monday. I guess I'll just do a Monday type post, right? Like I hate Mondays. Just like Garfield. And it's interesting because so little content catches my attention. I'm really notorious because I write business books. I ghost write for a lot of people in our circle of friends. I've written probably half the books that you think someone road.

I've written for a lot of those people and I never read business books. It's like the last thing I want to read because that's my job. It's like, I don't read business books. I don't even like to read my clients books. Like when I'm doing a coaching job, I'll go, I'll read the book once after the rough draft is finished, because if I keep reading it throughout the way, then it'll be a nightmare to get through once the rough draft is done.

Because I only read science fiction. If there's someone jumping out of a spaceship or it says the word space marine, I'm reading it, it doesn't matter if it's bad. I sometimes read book I'm like, they definitely paid an AI software to write this book. I'm still reading it, I don't care. But it's that entertainment part that we're so often missing. And that's what's so interesting, is that you've captured that idea, that understanding that people want to feel good.

And so much content I encounter is like, I'm rich, you're a loser. Right? Here's my private jet. Or here's what I have. Or, I'm watching a lot of stuff about fitness influencers lately, right? And there's so many fitness that are clearly on the sauce. Like, they're just way too big. You can't be 60 and like 200 pounds of lean muscle on top of your frame, and it's just not how bodies work. I wish, like, I'm in my know now.

I can't do what I could do in my have someone I'm friends with who's training for Mr. Olympia. Okay. And I know what he's doing, and he's huge, and he's still not as big as these guys. But there's this disconnect between, oh, you have to aspire to what I have, but it's not what everyone wants. We sometimes it'd be nice to see more content.

That's about making us feel good instead of making us feel envy, because I feel like envy is the centerpiece of what we see on the Internet way too much. It's like, my life is better than yours, my body is better than yours, I date better people than you. But that's what's missing. So I think that's what's interesting about your content is that it doesn't make me feel bad. Darin Kidd: Well, here's the thing too, with a few ways to look at it.

Number one, social media we don't own. And I learned this from Periscope. I don't know if you remember Periscope. It came out I put on 40,000 followers in a few months. And the mistake that I made not thinking about social media is rented land. We don't own it. So you need to take those followers and get them on your list by creating a lead magnet, freemium, whatever it is, because platforms come and go. But if you have that list, then you can continue to stay connected.

Let them know, hey, I'm on this new platform. The next thing, I want to just encourage everyone, if you're listening right now, going, man, I'm consistently posting content, but I'm not getting that traction. Sometimes going viral is not a good thing. Actually, the majority of the time it's not a great thing. Because when it goes viral, like that dancing video, you can attract a lot of people that are not your audience.

So I would rather have 1000 quality people that are my person than 100,000 that are not my people. And here's another bit of encouragement. I was listening to a story recently. This guy was getting twelve videos, but he was doing it consistently. Twelve views, I'm sorry. On his videos. One was his mom, one was his grandma.

But one happened to be when Oprah Winfrey was looking for someone to hire for O magazine, someone saw this guy's, one of the views got to Oprah, and she hired him and completely changed her life. You're going to be bad before you're good, no matter what you do. The most successful people I've ever met are the biggest failures. But my philosophy is if I'm going to be bad before I'm good, I want to hurry up and get it out of the way. There's one video.

This young lady dances in the bathroom. Now she's dressed, but all she does is lip syncs. Dances around while she's getting together. It's a lady in the bathroom or whatever it is. And it's so funny. The first time she popped up on my For You page, it made me smile and it made me vibe with her. Right? And so, look, she's got seven or 9 million followers. She's never did. I think I would go viral getting ready. I think she's got a child.

She's married, just having fun. But what I try to do and again, that's why I'm looking for a new social media manager, so we can get this flow cranking again. I've been so busy traveling, speaking, everything, but I try to mix it up. Can I give you some humor? Can I give you some encouragement? But I make sure there's intention with the things that I post. Like, what is the intention? How do I want to make you feel? Is there a call to action?

Am I sharing things that I know will get you to engage? Like this previous post? I know I have a lot of people that follow me that they have faith in a higher being. So when I put look, hey, you woke up today. Good news. God's not finished with you yet. I knew that would get a lot of engagement. I knew, and I believe it. And then almost 800 shares.

So it reached tens and tens and tens of thousands of people because of the engagement, the inspiration, the encouragement at the right day. And there are sometimes we bomb, and that's okay, too. I could go post today and get 20 likes. Doesn't really matter. I think we've also gotten spoiled where we used to have to go into a hotel room, pay for all these things, invite massive amounts of people to have ten people show up.

And now sometimes we look and go, oh, my gosh, only got ten views. It's okay. You never know when that one view, one connection can change your world. Jonathan Green: Yeah, I think that we have this. It's so much easier now. When I got started, I remember when my blog hit 3000 visitors a month, I got a call from a publisher. I was like, I'm getting 100 visitors a day. I'm a superstar, right? And I got a call from a publisher that changed my life.

That book would change everything for me. Now, if I post a video on TikTok and it tanks, I get 250 views. So if I post ten bad videos a day, I get more videos than I got. And that took me five years to build. That five years of building. Now I can get it in the first day. And that's ten bad videos, right? That's what's so amazing, is I can get 200 or 300 views.

If a video tanks, you cannot get and that usually generates even that generates usually about ten people to 20 people visit my website off of bad videos, off a video that doesn't hit. And that's the thing, is that it's so easy. But our measurement of failures now is like, oh, if I don't and I've had videos, get 750,000 views, and that feels really good, but it's always about stuff that's not my normal content. It's always when I talk about Amazon FBA stuff, my audience loves it.

I don't do Amazon FBA day. I'm interested in because I live in Asia and I know a lot about prices differences, and I buy stuff here for eight cents, and I look online, I go, It's $40 in America. So I like to talk about that. But that's my audience. That always goes viral for me, but it's not my core content.

But it's very interesting to me to see how people are like, oh, I only got 100,000 views today, or, I only have 10,000 followers, or I have a million followers, I haven't made any money yet. I met someone a few years ago who had 500,000 Instagram followers. I go, man, you must make a full time living. That's great. He goes, I've never made a dollar from it. And I was like, that's not how I approach my business, right? I approach it.

My measurement of success is dollars. If my social media is working, are people joining my list? Are they buying my products, or are they generating revenue? That's the metric I look at whenever I'm talking to someone who's, like, thinking about becoming social media manager, or they're doing any type of service. If you have a client, first thing they're going to look at is, are you making more money than costing? If you are, you're bulletproof, right?

If you cost me $1,000 a month to make me 1200, I'm not even going to do oversight. I don't care because you're profitable, but as soon as you're not profitable, now we're looking at, okay, how many emails are we getting? If that's not working, how many followers we get? If that's not working, how many videos are you posting? That's when we start to get granular and you start to get the magnifying lens on your work.

And that's something that a lot of people miss, is that even if you're an employee, you have to generate more than you cost lost, or you're going to lose your job. Now, larger corporations it might take a while. We've seen some of the biggest corporations in the world have just done these massive downsizes, right? You're like, oh, I'm working a company worth $100 trillion. They'll never fire anyone.

I had someone one time email me from one of these companies that just did a massive firing, goes, I work for this company. They don't fire anyone. And I wonder if he was part of the 10% that just got downsized, right? The decimation. I always think about that as the old Roman term. We think decimation is like to be destroyed. It's like, no, kill one out of ten. And how often do we see these large companies? They go, oh, we're firing 10%, right?

And it's 10% across the board. It doesn't matter if your department is successful or not. I've seen a lot of people like, oh, I'm in the only successful department. They come, they go, yeah, we're still firing one out of ten. It doesn't matter. Decimation company wide. So there's all these things that kind of we don't look at the right goal. I one time had a social media manager who was like, oh, the most important thing is Reach. I said, no, that's not a real thing.

If I can't hold it in my hand and touch it and measure it, it's not reach is how many friends you could have. That's like me saying, in high school, my reach was 500 people. I could have had 500. My reach for friends was 500. I didn't have 500 friends. I had three. So I don't believe in reach. I want to know how many people are actually following how many people watching my videos. Sometimes I see these YouTube channels.

They have 5 million subscribers, and then their videos are getting, like, 100 views because they've lost that audience. Like, the memory is still there. I'm sure I'm subscribed to knows. I don't watch anymore. So I'm really interested in a lot of what you're saying. I think it's really powerful. One thing, sometimes people hear this stuff, they go, okay, you tell me what to do, but tell me what not to do.

What are some of the biggest mistakes people make, or even mistakes you made before you started getting coaching? Like, when it comes to social media. Darin Kidd: Well, it's, oh, my gosh, that's a lot. Here's what I would say. Make sure you do. Make sure that when someone researches you, people go, well, I don't have a brand. Yes, you do. You are your brand. And so as soon as I start talking to someone, I immediately go look at their social media.

And I've had people that have come to me and say, hey, Darren, I want to hire you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, listen, evidently you've been talking to someone. Go back to that person like, no, I'm not doing business with that person. Why not? Go look at their social media and ask yourself, would you want to do business with someone that posts the type of things that they're posting?

So as long as you understand if I'm posting bad stuff, controversial stuff, negative stuff, and you're like, hey, I don't care, and that can affect your business because your vibe attracts your tribe. And as I'm working with organizations, it's interesting, if they have a great culture and they're doing the right things, they attract amazing people. But when we start posting the wrong things on social, and I know a lot of you, maybe you're just going into the starting your entrepreneurial journey, it's different.

You're not branding a company, you're branding you. So do you have, whether it's Facebook, a good, clear quality picture of you smiling? It's called Facebook for a reason. Does your cover photo maybe say two or three things about you and who you are? Are you into faith, family, fitness, finance, whatever it may be, when you're posting, are you posting with intention? And you don't have to start out doing 15 different platforms. Like, where do most of your ICAS, your ideal customer avatars, where do they live?

Some of you, it's LinkedIn, some of you it's TikTok, some of you, it may be Facebook, it may be Instagram, and laser focus on those platforms, and then you can later on get a little more advanced. Like again, because I left after 28 years. I sold my franchises out of network marketing pretty much. I've got a little bit of ecommerce stuff going on, nothing like you. But now what I'm getting ready to do is revamp the YouTube.

And there's a bunch of different things, but when you get to the point where you're honed in on where you want to go, who's your ideal customer avatar, there's things you can do to multipurpose. So when I revamp relaunch my video podcast coming up here in the next two to four weeks, I can do one video podcast. I can pull that off. I can put it on buzsprout, go out to all the different Apple Spotify, so on and so forth.

I got a video editor that breaks it up into TikToks to reels on Facebook personal business page, reels on Instagram, TikTok videos, YouTube shorts, YouTube video. And you can just do one piece of content and multipurpose it. So there comes a point where you can start working smarter, being more effective. Then you have someone that can take and listen to the interviews today, maybe pull off some quotes and make images that you can share on different social media platforms. But here's my warning to you.

The warning is you can spend all day, every day trying to look good, smell good, feel good on social media and be broke if you're not doing it with intention and you're not focusing on the money making activities and the high payoff activities. So those are a couple of suggestions and warnings. Jonathan Green: I think that's really good. There's so much distraction now that we often go, I don't know, I'm going to try and be in every network.

I'm going to try and do everything at once. And this is where people get really lost or exactly they don't know what they want to do with their audience, and so they build a general line to go, I'll build a following, then figure out what I want to do. I think this is really helpful. And often we're so often told old that controversy is the best way to build an audience.

Yeah, if I post something really controversial on Facebook, I'll get a lot of replies, whether it's political or religious or something that really gets attention. But it's exactly that that people do look later and judge you for it, and it can come back. We all see someone who posted something on Twitter ten years ago and it comes back. And now that there's controversial, everything, well, here's controversial. Darin Kidd: Here's how you could do controversial. How many of you heard knowledge is power?

I'm telling you it's not true. How many of us know a lot of smart people that are completely broke and unsuccessful? Right. Knowledge plus action is power. You can know a lot, but do nothing with it, and it doesn't get you anywhere. So you can be creative and in a positive way, create a little bit of traction like that. But when you start posting the political and all of these different things that you know you're going to cause a lot of friction.

And the other thing too, Jonathan. I don't like to engage in the negativity when I realize, look, I got a bucket of energy and I'm very intentional. Who I let in my space and who I let get in. My head because how many of you have been having a great day and one person say one thing negative and jack up your whole day?

I don't want to read it, I don't want to engage in it, because I'm going to spend my time focusing on what I can control, where I'm going, what I can do, not what I can't do. And if somebody's in my life and they're being negative, I'm telling either be positive or be quiet. Get rid of your stinking thinking. And then John Maxwell says, if you can't change people around you, change the people around you.

I've never been more intentional about my associations now than I have in 50 years of my life than I am right now. Anyway, that's another thing. Be careful who you associate with. Jonathan Green: Yeah, it's very interesting. You can see who people watch or listen to because it starts to affect your content. Like, I'm very intentional that I never talk about politics, I never talk about environmental issues, and oftentimes I've gotten emails from two opposite political beliefs that both think I'm on the other side.

And my philosophy is, I don't care about your politics. I just want you to be rich. Like, I just want to affect one area of your life. Like, I have a personal trainer. I don't ask him as political. I just ask him to shout at me when I'm working out. And it's that we want someone who's an expert in one way area. And it's very interesting that you can exactly the association and say you become the average of the five people spend the most time with.

That could be the people you spend the most time with online. Like, every once in a while, there's one of these TikTok battles where two accounts are like, having some sort of fight, and then everyone else is talking about I don't know who the two original people are. I don't understand the thing. I don't know why it's on my feed. I see it on YouTube. There's one happening right now where there's some fight on Twitter and now it's turned into hundreds of videos on YouTube.

I'm like, I don't know what anus is about. I watch stand up comedy on YouTube. Why is this appearing in my feed? I watch stand up comedy and advice for the video game I'm trying to beat when my kids are at school. That's what I look for. And yet we get these caught up in these debates, like, oh, just because I'm interested in something, I think my audience is interested in it. And we see people divert from their topic.

They go, oh, normally I talk about video games, but today I'm going to talk about some someone else who did something I don't like. But I want to put it on this channel because I have a large following and we get distracted. Exactly that. We put this negativity like a few years ago, I decided to stop reading the news online because I realized it was affecting my personality. There's only two things in the newspaper that matter. The weather. Is it going to rain today?

Do I need an umbrella? And what time are the movies? Everything else in the newspaper is a waste of time. Those are the only two things that affect what you do today, right? And it's like, what time is the movie playing? And do I need an umbrella? Everything else in the newspaper, you can't affect it. It doesn't affect you. It's usually about people that live far away. It's always negative. It's never anything happy. It's never anyone succeeding. It's only when they lose.

It's not about someone becoming a chess champion. It's about someone being accused of cheating at chess. I just saw that, I was like, Why is that on my feed? I couldn't name a grandmaster. Now I know two grandmasters that are suing each other because one accused the other one of cheating. That's the kind of like, what? Can I ever see something? Why? And again, that's why I'm drawn towards TikTok. Because TikTok the secret of TikTok is that it shows me what I want to see.

So it shows me a lot of the type of content that I enjoy, and I never leave TikTok feeling bad. That's why I have a separate phone for TikTok. It's not on my main phone because I know it's so addictive, right? They have it really figured out. They go, oh, just show people what they want. I can't believe that's, like, a crazy idea, that they were like, what if we just show everyone what they want to like, that shouldn't be revelatory.

But all these other social networks, now they're copying it. Of course. Right? Exactly. Talk about Reels and Idea Pins and everywhere else is like, oh, we better do it, too. YouTube is now like, let's focus on shorts. Let's switch from being the long form content channel to the 32nd content channel. Darin Kidd: And maybe that'll work for Stories, too. Yeah, from what I'm hearing, YouTube stories as well. Jonathan Green: Yeah, they're all copying each other, which is unfortunate, but you're exactly right.

And I think there's something so important you said, I don't want to miss it, is that the networks come and go. I think of all these people that were crushing it on vine, and then they tried to jump to TikTok. What did Twitter do? They bought vine and then they just turned it off. Like, what a great investment. Right? And then what happens if you're a vine star? You have to move that audience to your website, to your email list, to your other social platforms.

So you have diversification because yeah, I've seen people with a million followers on a social platform, and then they just get banned. Nothing you can do, you get banned. I see people every day. Someone like, oh, I got banned by Twitter. I got banned by Facebook. Facebook deleted my Facebook page, whatever it is. I don't see people getting banned from LinkedIn a lot, but I see people get banned from everyone else, and it just suddenly you're out of business.

And that's so scary when you don't own your business. So I think that's of everything we talk about, the most important thing is to make sure you're focused on getting the right people, not the most people, and then pulling them into your audience. I don't have a huge TikTok following because I'm always pushing people. I just say, don't follow me. Give me your email, jump on my list. So I focus on that type of growth because that's where my business is built.

I've been marketing a long time. I'm an email marketer. That's really my core competency, and so that's really what I focus on. But a lot of people, they get so excited, and then they lose that account, and it's so devastating to realize. And you learn that lesson the hard way. It's like, oh, wait, these things can come and go. I was so good at MySpace. That's why I waited so long to get good at social media. I got so good at MySpace.

And then everyone just stopped using it. I remember those days when bands didn't have a website, they had a MySpace page. That's gone. If the website that we thought was running the world can disappear, then any of them can disappear. Darin Kidd: So true. Yeah. Well, anything else I can help you with on the social media side? Jonathan Green: Well, this has been really good.

I want to dive into as we come in for a landing, you have a book that's come out called I Will Until. It's very interesting. You have a nice rhyme to it, which I like. So I'd like to talk a little bit about your journey of creating a book. What kind of was your motivation and how it's going to help people, like, what people will get from going through that experience when they read your book. Darin Kidd: Yeah.

So the book that I have, I'll tell you how it came about. And I don't know if anybody can relate to this, but 25 years ago, being a college dropout, being on government assistance, applying for food stamps, on depression medicine, car was repossessed, being a college dropout, living in that small town, I didn't have a lot of hope.

And it was the day that I walked into my bedroom, closed the door behind me, went over, grabbed this Coca Cola plastic piggy bank where I told my daughter, someday we'll use this money to go to Disney, put your money in the bank. And then one day she walks in, and I am going through her money on the floor, picking up change just to go get some milk and some bread and some peanut butter, whatever we could get to last a couple more days.

And she walks in, sees me taking the money, and runs out crying because Daddy's taking her money for Disney World. And that's when I learned someday leads to a town called Nowhere. My dad passed away a decade ago saying that someday we'll do this and someday we'll do that. But also learned that some people's, some days are other people's everyday days. So when she walked out of that room, that was the day that it hurt bad enough. I go, I've had it.

And it went from, I want a better life, I want this, I want that, to I will. And I walked in the other room, put on a three by five index card, I will until and that was the mindset people go, I gave it my best. No. I was going to do whatever it took and I did to go out and change my life. No one was betting on Darren Kidd being in that position.

25 bankrupt, depressed college dropout, failed at life to go out and succeed in anything. But that attitude is what completely changed my world. And so this book, it's short, sweet, it's just snackable content. It's the way that I like to read it's. Just a few golden nuggets on each page. You pretty much can open it up to any part of the book. Very easy read.

Probably going to read it in an hour to 2 hours, but I wanted to at least get a sample of me out to the world, give some encouragement and let people know, hey, look, if I can do it, they see all the speaking on stage in front of 25,000 people or being in the magazines or on an advisory council with John Maxwell and interviewed by Grant Cardone. What they didn't see was what I just shared with you.

And that's the most exciting part of the story because if they see the other side, a lot of them feel they can't get to that place. And the other thing, like many of you listening or watching, I knew that I was created for more, but yet I wasn't living my full potential. And I believe that not everybody believes what I believe, but I believe we're made in the image of our creator. We're created for success, and the world tries to program us for failure.

And we're told more on a daily basis about our limitations than our possibilities. And so my goal is to impact millions of people this year through that message, knowing, hey, look, you can be more, you can do more, and you can have more with your potential. Jonathan Green: I think that's a really good message. We have this unfortunate culture where we like to say someone's an overnight success or that we compare our lives to someone's front of house.

Like, what I project at work is not how I live at, right? Like, I'm not going to come here on an episode and talk about me and my wife had a fight today, or one of my kids had something happen, right? Because that's not what people want to see. And so then they compare. They go, oh, Johnson, him and his wife never have fights. I never trust I do have one friend who says him and his wife never fight. I don't trust that.

That to me, sounds weird. Like, never. Not that you've never had, like, come on, that's like me and my kids have disagreements. It seems to me like a normal part of life. It's part of it. You're always going to have something. Darin Kidd: But he hadn't seen her in five or ten years. Jonathan Green: Yeah, we love to watch that rags to richest story in the movie. Like, we want to watch Rudy and we see him we only remember the end of the movie.

He plays for Notre Dame. We forget where. He went to a school across the street for two years and he came over and just painted helmets every day, where he trained outside every day. He spent three or four years to play, I think, for four minutes in a game, in a play that didn't matter. And it's like all of that struggle, that's the part that we often think we often think is the east. Interesting part of our story, but it's often the part as a ride.

Like when I'm riding someone, that's always what I look for. Tell me about the bad part because then people can ride with you. They want to know that you feel how they feel, that they went through what you went through. They really figured that out. On these talent shows where you have twelve underdogs competing with each other. There's no favorite. All twelve of them came from something bad. And that's what people can relate to. But we often want the success without realizing. There's a grind.

Like, people tell me all the time, like, oh, you just rose to the top so bad. I lived in my mom's basement for a year and then on my friend's couch in a studio apartment for a year and a half. That's two and a half years of grind I couldn't afford rent building something towards it. And we so often, I think circling back to we talked about the beginning is like, why don't people want to keep going? I think that it's that grind.

They want to jump to the overnight success without realizing, no, there's something before that. I love when they say this band is an overnight success. And then I look, it's their fifth album. Don't you wish you were overnight success on the first album instead of five that no one liked until you got there? But I think this is a powerful message. I think people are going to dig it. Tell us where people can find your book, where people can find more about you online.

I know people are going to start following you on TikTok because they're going to want to see those dances. Darin Kidd: Yeah. So if they go to Iwillintil.com pretty simple, iwillintil.com they can purchase the book.

And then there's also a planner because I believe we have to be intentional and proactive and instead of being reactive and just living each day like a ping pong ball in a wind tunnel, I heard a guy say one time and so what I did was I just created a very simple planner. Iwillintil complaner and that way they can download it, start planning their day before it begins.

You'll see just some simple things on there that can be effective in helping you get clarity on what you really want. And the other thing I would recommend too, this is a little different approach. A lot of times we'll do more to avoid pain than we will to gain pleasure. So when you're getting clarity on what you really want, also write down what's the pain you're going to experience if you don't go out and accomplish your goals and your dreams.

Will it be missing moments in your kid's life that you never get back? Will it be your spouse possibly having major health issues because you weren't able to retire them from their job? Is it your kid continually getting bullied because you can't pull them out of that one school system like I had a lady sharing with me.

So when you get clarity on what you want, when you write down the pain you're going to experience if you don't go get it done, that push and that pull makes a massive difference. But, yeah, they can also click on all my social media links on the website as well. And we're going to have a lot of new content coming your way, so appreciate the opportunity, Jonathan, having me on here.

Jonathan Green: Thanks for so much for being here again, everyone that's Iwilluntill.com thank you so much for being here again. Darren Kidd. This has been another amazing episode of the Serve No Master podcast. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Making that first dollar online doesn't have to be daunting. I've got you covered. Get my free guide on how to make your 1st right now@servemaster.com. Announcer: One k. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of The Serve No master podcast.

Make sure you subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next week with more tips and tactics on how to escape the rat race. Please take a moment to leave a review@servnowmaster.com. Itunes. It helps the show grow and more listeners means more content for you. Thanks again and we'll see you next week.