Inspiration to do “the thing”
I’ll be honest: this isn’t my first blog. Or rather, this isn’t my first attempt at a blog. About a year ago I had the idea for Platinum Trophy Living, a website that took Sony’s PlayStation concept of collecting digital trophies while playing video games and applying that framework to real life. On PlayStation, you earn trophies based off completing certain tasks within the video game: the harder the task, the rarer the trophy. Trophies come in four tiers: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum, with Bronze trophies being the most common and requiring minimal time and effort while Platinum trophies are the rarest – you can only earn one per video game and it’s only earned when you’ve collected all the other Bronze, Silver, and Gold trophies. I thought that applying this framework to our goals in real life could be a great, fun way to “gamify” goal achievement. Say you had a lifelong goal of becoming a published author. A Platinum trophy you could set for yourself is “Become a Published Author”. A Gold trophy within that “video game” (the “video game” in this instance is your “path to becoming a published author” – admittedly I still had some kinks to work out in this Platinum Trophy Living philosophy, but I was getting there) would be to “Write a Memoir”. The Silvers would be “Write Chapters 1-3” and “Write Chapters 4-6” and so on, all the way down to the Bronze, which may be something like “Write two pages of Chapter 1”. In essence, the idea was to reframe the concept of goals by linking smaller steps (Bronze and Silver trophies) to the larger achievements (Gold and Platinum trophies) in a fun way.
I still think there is something there worth exploring with Platinum Trophy Living, but that’s beside the point. Just before I was about to launch the blog, I hesitated. Doubt began to rear its ugly head. What if no one reads this? What if it’s a bad idea? But the most pervasive questions were: How will I ever distinguish myself in the hyper-saturated realm of blogging? Especially a blog about goal setting? Aren’t there a million other blogs that say the exact same thing I’m saying, and saying it better?
I think this is a common occurrence in many people who want to delve into content creation (or business, for that matter) of any sort. Blogging, starting a YouTube channel, starting a podcast, writing a book, building an art portfolio, launching a Twitch stream of you playing Minecraft, whatever it may be – the question that always seems to arise is “what’s the point?” Content creators A, B, and C already do what I want to do, and everyone already watches them or reads their stuff or listens to their podcast, and so on. It’s a paralyzing thought, one that stops you in your tracks. It paralyzed me with Platinum Trophy Living. I remember sadly unsubscribing from my Squarespace account and thinking what a fool I was for trying to attempt something so “outside my realm”.
A year passes.
And then out of the blue, I stumble across Sam Sulek on YouTube.
In the world of YouTube, fitness channels may be up there with gaming channels for the most saturated content on the platform (both of which are right behind cute cat videos, of course). If you’re a guy or gal looking to start a fitness channel on YouTube and turn it into your day job – good luck. Might as well play the lottery, you’d have better odds. At least, that’s what I would have said before I came across Sam Sulek. On a platform that is slowly being taken over by the short-form video wave made popular by Tik-Tok, Sam has found enormous success-and seemingly overnight success-through long-form, “simple” style lifting videos. He chats to his audience in his car on the way to the gym, films himself lifting, and then chats in the car while leaving the gym. No flashy music, no fancy editing, just straightforward videos being filmed from his iPhone. I’ve been watching his content for a little over four months now, and in that time, he’s gone from roughly 400K subscribers to over 2M. Insane. I was and still am mind-blown that this guy came virtually out of nowhere and is now one of the top dogs in YouTube fitness with a filming style that goes directly against the grain.
Ok, so what’s the takeaway from Sam Sulek? I think there are two things:
The world is big. The Internet is big. Just because you think that a particular market is hyper-saturated, doesn’t mean that it is. Most likely, it’s not, and far from it. So don’t use the excuse that “it’s already been done”. True, millions of people have a blog, or a YouTube channel, or a podcast – but there’s also millions (if not billions) of people who haven’t accessed that particular market yet or who don’t like the current content creators of that market or who aren’t yet old enough to enter the market. There is plenty of pie for the taking.
You don’t need to follow the trends to gain followers (or whatever metric you deem valuable). Sam is dominating in a short-attention span world with long-form videos. It highlights the vast diversity in content format preference. “Oh, no one reads books anymore so what’s the point in writing one?” – FALSE! This is false for any medium. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone starts up a carrier pigeon communication company for the “retro” aspect and starts a new trend. (I’m only half joking).
The below quote comparing the Internet to Tokyo comes to mind.
“If you go to Tokyo, you'll see there are all sorts of really strange shops. There'll be a shop for 1970's vinyl, 1980's whisky, and so on. That doesn't make any sense if it's a shop in a Des Moines suburb. In a Des Moines suburb, to exist, you have to be Subway; you have to hit the mass-market immediately. But in Tokyo, where there's 30-40 million people within a train ride of a city, then your market is 40 million. And within that 40 million there's definitely a couple thousand people who love 1970's music and 1980's whisky.
The Internet is Tokyo. The Internet allows you to be niche at scale.”