Signal from Kenzie Collins - audience psychology, brand strategist.
For six years, I've kept notes on the things that don't get said. The stuff that actually works and never makes it into a course, a caption, or a keynote. Today, three of them are yours.
They come from Sam. You know him from these emails. What you might not know is the scale behind the name. He and John built 1DS into the team behind 20 billion views, for people you'd recognise, with their own names almost nowhere on the work.
On Wednesday, Sam teaches the whole system live, free, and I want you in the room for it. Think of this e-mail as your prep. Save your seat. Then, come back and read it.
Not everyone's going to play the peer, post the unpolished, commit to the uncomfortable. The ones who do tend to pull ahead, online and everywhere else they show up.
Walk into Wednesday already three steps in front of the room.
One. There's power in being a peer, even when you could play the expert.
Sam could talk circles around almost anyone on marketing. He doesn't, with the team or with clients, and that's exactly why people trust him. When we're ideating, there's no expert and no junior. The best idea wins. Doesn’t matter whose mouth it comes out of.
Showing up as a peer is what pulls the best out of people; your team and your target audience. It builds openness, earns respect, shows people that you are who you say you are. You say it like it is and you're never afraid to ask - or answer - the obvious question.
The same instinct builds authority online. Expertise gets you reach. Talking like a person gets you trust, and trust is what compounds. The more we know, the more we reach for the language that proves it, and that’s when we lose people. Knowing your stuff has never meant saying it so nobody understands. That's a big piece of what Sam teaches tomorrow.
Two. 80/20 your perfectionism.
Perfectionism is a skill in some places and an anchor in others. The job is knowing which is which. If you bring your best energy to everything, you bring real energy to nothing. Sam told me that when I least wanted to hear it.
“But I want to bring my high standards to everything,” I said.
Moving is a standard too, he’d remind me. Shipping on time, getting the rep in, letting the work out before it's perfect- that's a bar most perfectionists never think to hold.
Online, perfectionism is the quiet killer. We sit on the draft, rewrite the caption, call it refining when it's really delaying. And we miss the only thing that moves us forward, the data that tells us what landed and what didn't.
Posting is the input. Improvement is the output. You can't reverse-engineer that from inside a Google Doc.
Three. The answer is usually the thing you don't want to hear.
People come to us all the time hoping for a shortcut. Something that gets them out of the work they’re avoiding. Sam is the biggest proponent of a good old reality check. And this one is the most important to building a personal brand.
There are some parts you just can’t skip. Getting the reps in, building the foundation, moving before you're ready, speaking human-to-human.
It sounds simple. Doing it well is the whole game, and that’s where all the depth lives. John says the same thing in different words.
Platforms change. The psychology underneath doesn't. People want to feel something before they're sold to, and to be seen before they're spoken to. None of it is new.
So here's the honest version of Wednesday. You'll hear plenty you haven't heard before. The psychology beneath it is the same as it's always been. What's new is the system we’re sharing, and the way it makes those old truths easier to apply.
One more thing… because I’ve already given away too much.
The better human you are, the better in business you are. I've watched Sam stay on the phone for people who couldn't possibly help him professionally, longer than he had time for. That's the quietest currency in business and the one that compounds the longest.
That’s exactly why we’re doing this.
The version we usually only run inside client work. What took me years to learn beside people like Sam and John - yours in an hour. It's free to attend. There's a recording, but it's part of the paid upgrade, so the free way to see it is to be in the room.
Go on. Save your seat here.
Wednesday 8 July, 4 PM PT / 7 PM ET.
- Kenzie
Head of Communications, 1DS Collective
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