- Hey, everybody, this is Roberto Blake of robertoblake.com,
helping you create something awesome today.
So, today, I have an interesting question
that I need to answer.
It's one that I get from a lot of people,
so I can't credit this question to any one person,
because I think it comes up at least once a week.
And my response to it is usually the same,
but I wanna share it with you guys.
So the question I think I get asked the most lately is,
what if I had to start all over again?
I think that a lot of people take for granted
that I talk about the way I got started
with everything all the time.
Like, I talk about this regularly
in my livestreams on Periscope.
I talk about it in Twitter video responses to people.
I've talked about it on this YouTube channel constantly.
And, remember, when I started doing
some of this stuff with YouTube,
I'd already been doing blogging before.
I got more financial freedom
being an entrepreneur eventually,
and I'm very happy with where I am at financially
as a result of that.
So, I get asked the question, if I only had
like, $500, a laptop, and a smartphone, what would I do?
I'd do exactly what I did, which has been
documented on this channel ad nauseum,
because that's literally what I had to start with,
was about, maybe a little over 500 bucks,
a laptop, and a smartphone.
What I went out and did was I bought
a camera that you can now buy for $350,
the Nikon D3200, I think it was a little bit more back then.
I bought $100 worth of lights.
And I think that was just about it.
And I think, at the time, I bought a shotgun microphone
before I moved to the $20 lapel mic that I use even now.
So, literally, I started there,
I started with doing weekly content.
Mostly, I didn't even use the camera,
I used screen recording software,
usually free screen recording software, actually,
to screen record Photoshop and Premiere tutorials,
and that's where I got started with
the YouTube side of what I was doing.
Before that, I was doing cheap web hosting,
and I did my personal blog,
interviewing other creative professionals,
sharing my knowledge, and doing tutorials,
but I felt like the photos and walls of text
weren't cutting it, so I went to videos.
That's literally how I did it.
And I did it from, at the time, it was
a $350 laptop, before I got the old iMac,
and, again, that's an old iMac, it's like a 2011 or 2010.
At the time, it only had four gigs of RAM in it,
before I did all the upgrades, and so, yeah.
I didn't have a ton to start with, but that was it.
And then it was consistency.
It was creating more and more content,
it was following up with people, it was doing things.
So, what would I do if I started over?
Well, if I started over, I wouldn't just do what I did.
I'd be even more aggressive and consistent about it,
because I was doing one piece of content a week.
I would've ramped that up and did
two or three pieces of content a week,
even if I still was working a full-time job while doing it.
It's exactly what I know it takes to be successful faster.
Not necessarily because you will grow more subscribers,
more people on your email list,
more traffic to your website, more clients,
or anything like that quicker.
It's because you will learn quicker,
you will become more comfortable.
It took me forever to become truly comfortable on camera.
I think 50, 60 videos in, I still wasn't
very comfortable on camera.
I wasn't natural, I wasn't emoting, I was very stiff.
I really hate those old videos a lot sometimes.
The information is solid,
but my stage presence was horrible, no energy.
So I like that I'm a lot more fun and informative today,
and I would've gotten there faster
if I had just done it more often
and gotten used to the idea of talking to the camera
like it's a person, like it's one of you.
So, I think that all of those things are important.
And I think it matters.
I think speed matters, so, the way you get fast,
the way you get speed, the reason I went to daily content
was, I wanted to get faster.
I wanted to get faster at editing,
I wanted to get more comfortable on camera,
I wanted to get better at everything,
so I had to do it 100 times, 200 times, 500 times,
1,000 times, as quickly as I possibly could.
So if I was gonna go back in time,
and I was gonna do anything from scratch all over,
here's what I would do.
Number one, I would produce daily,
no, I'm sorry, scratch that,
I wouldn't produce daily content.
I would do content two to three times a week,
and as soon as I crossed the threshold
of doing that and getting 50 to 100 executions,
I would say, my process should be good enough by now,
and I'd go to daily content, probably immediately afterward,
and that's me, and here's how I did some of those things,
was, I cut out my hobbies, I ditched people in my life
who are unproductive, I stopped going out,
I started spending almost all of my free time
invested in things that made me better.
That meant doing more photography, more artwork,
doing the creative things that feed me,
doing things that made me money.
I dropped all of my entertainment.
I stopped watching TV, I stopped going out to the movies,
I quit Call of Duty, all of it, done.
I dropped friends, and it mattered.
And, again, I don't mean completely ditch your friends
and create bad relationships.
I mean, I did things with my friends
that were cool that also gave me a break
when I needed to, but I realized
I didn't have to say yes to everything.
So that's super important.
I prioritized.
The other thing I would have done differently
is I would've started my email list as soon as possible.
I would've started a free giveaway,
whether that's an ebook or a video download
or a template or something,
I would've started that a lot sooner,
and I would've hammered that home,
I would've grown that email list,
would've done the YouTube videos sooner,
and been consistent about that,
gotten all of my branding in order where that's concerned,
and just hammered content after content after content,
and scaled that and grew that
pretty much the same way I did.
Again, I just would've been more focused.
I would've been more aggressive about it.
I would've been more determined,
and I would've set some clear objectives.
I think one of the things I did right
was I completely ignored views and subscriber counts,
didn't focus on that.
It was just about the work.
It was like, make this video suck less,
get the lighting better, get the audio better,
get the editing tighter, get better on camera.
I focused on the work.
I didn't look at, I can't tell you
when I got my first thousand subscribers.
I have no idea.
I'd have to go to webarchive.org,
I'd have to go into the Wayback Machine,
and I'd have to pull that data for you,
'cause I don't know and I don't care.
I'm dead serious about that.
Don't care, nope, not interested.
Because, again, that's why I missed
that milestone and never celebrated it,
because I was focused on all of the things
I didn't like about the content that I was producing.
I didn't worry about what other people thought,
aside from if they made comments that were constructive,
in the fact that it's like,
hey, the audio could've been better,
oh, that was a good video, and everything like that,
but you need better lighting, and that was important,
because that was going to
make me improve the actual quality.
The quality of a video, whether a video is good,
is not judged on the views or on the interaction
or even on how it's received.
On some level, it is, don't get me wrong,
but the main thing is to actually do work that is good,
regardless of what people have to say about it.
I mean, I worked in creative, I worked in photography
and web design and graphic design, and do you know what?
Even to this day, there are haters.
There are people on this channel that tell me things like,
you're not good enough to teach,
because we don't think your work is good enough.
You know what makes the work good enough?
The person writing the check
decides whether the work is good enough,
and they decide a lot of things that
I might not like about the work, personally,
that I think, wow, the five other drafts of this
were superior to the thing that you picked,
but, oh, that one's your favorite color?
You're writing the check, have at it, Hoss.
That's the real world of business.
But the real world of creative, for me,
and success, comes down to the process.
More than the end result, the process
that leads to the result matters.
Because, the thing is, the result
comes from the process,
and the result is usually subjective
according to the marketplace, and the fact is,
there are things that have been great products
that weren't well received by the market.
They were ahead of their time.
There are great ideas that are ahead of their time.
Uber, Gary Vaynerchuk brought this up.
Uber was Magic Cab.
And it failed, even though it's a brilliant idea.
So the guys who did Magic Cab, brilliant idea.
The execution of it wasn't as good,
and the timing wasn't right for the marketplace.
Uber crushed it.
WebTV.
WebTV was 20 years ahead of its time.
Now, smart TV, crushing it.
Apple TV, crushing it.
Amazon Fire TV, crushing it.
Netflix, crushing it.
So, you can say, and I do, that the market decides.
Doesn't mean the market's always right.
Which means that you have to really
look at what you're doing, and you have to judge it
based on the merits of the work that you put in,
the process, and your satisfaction with the result.
I base everything on accomplishment
and not on acknowledgment,
and I think that makes a difference.
And so, that's the other thing, is,
I would've tunnel-visioned down on the work
and ignored the results, even beyond what I actually did,
'cause sometimes, I did let it get to me,
when I thought I did something that
should've performed better, and it didn't,
and I would double question things.
I would go back and I would tell myself not to do that,
and I would just focus on making the best quality
product or result that I possibly could.
So, if I was starting over, it comes down to that.
The other thing I would've done earlier is,
I would've done more networking earlier.
I think I took that for granted.
I would've volunteered for free,
and went to more conferences, and networked more
and got to know people and asked questions
and sought out help and mentorship.
That would've mattered.
I would've put some of my money
into doing paid mentorship programs
or mastermind groups, things like that.
I think that those things actually matter.
I was doing a lot of self-education,
free online courses, training tutorials,
and really just fiddle around with things myself,
more often than not, but I think having
the networking relationships
would've made a huge difference for me early on,
in everything that I'm doing, whether it's YouTube,
whether it's the paid writing deals,
whether it's the public speaking.
I think that I could've gotten everywhere
that I am today faster if I had networked more, so.
I can't stress that enough.
There's a book, Conference Crushing by Tyler Wagner,
great guy, good friend of mine, that I met at a conference.
Link is in the description below for Amazon.
You can get that, and it does come
with a free audiobook version if you grab that,
so I would check that out.
Also a link for Audible.
Those are affiliate links of mine,
so you can help me out with that.
That's the other thing I would've done earlier.
I would've done affiliate marketing earlier.
That's super lucrative.
I can't stress that enough from a revenue standpoint.
Those are the things that I think I would do
if I were starting over today,
and I don't know if that helps you or not.
But that's what my whole thesis
and my whole journey looks like, is,
these are the things I did.
My answer is, if I had to start over,
double down, triple down, work harder, network more,
focus even more on what I'm doing,
and not how people feel about it.
Again, not that you don't want people to feel good
about what you're doing, but initially,
when you're getting started, looking for acknowledgment
is the most discouraging thing in the world.
You shouldn't do it when you're getting started.
I was an artist and an illustrator and a photographer
and all of these creative things
before any of you knew me, and nobody claps it up
(claps hands) for creative people
before the internet exists, so,
if I had people caring about something that I was doodling,
that was a lot, before social media.
I'm 32 years old.
I lived in a world where there was
no acknowledgment for artists
unless your stuff was in a gallery or in a movie theater.
If your stuff wasn't in a gallery or a movie theater,
no one gave a crap about you as an artist.
World of social media changed a lot of that.
I still lived the far majority of my life
in a world where social media didn't exist,
'cause I'm old, (chuckles) so that matters.
So, thank you, Zucks, for helping change the world.
Thank you, Mark Zuckerberg, thank you, Jack Dorsey,
thank you, everybody who invented YouTube
for making it considerably easier for creative people
to get acknowledgment, because sometimes, we do need it,
and we need encouragement to go on.
I'm not saying we don't.
But the other thing I would've done
is I would've been a part of more creative communities
that do encourage that.
And if you need something like that,
then I would definitely look into Facebook groups.
I think that can be a great source of encouragement
for you when you're getting started.
Yeah, so, those are all the things.
Those are the things I would do
if I was starting again from zero.
And by the way, every time a new social media platform
comes out, I am starting from zero.
Every time I do a new spinoff brand or a new idea,
I am starting from zero.
And so, to me, I know you're not gonna be a fan
of me saying this, but starting from zero isn't special.
Everyone starts at zero.
The most successful people in the world,
and the people who are the least successful in the world,
all start from zero, all have the same 24 hours in the day.
How badly do you want it?
Because my success came at the expense of sleepless nights,
of a lot of emotional pain and baggage,
at cutting the negative people out of my life,
at cutting the majority of my entertainments
out of my life initially, and then slowly adding back
the things that mattered most to me
and taking joy from them.
And so, if you want to be successful
in whatever you're doing,
that's the price that you have to pay,
and you have to look in the mirror and say,
do you want to pay the price for that,
'cause the price for success
is years and years of discomfort.
So, how much does it meant to you?
Anyway, I hope this answers that question.
I'm sure I'll get it again, but now,
I can just point people to this video.
If you still have questions,
leave those in the comments section.
Happy to have a conversation about it.
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A lot of free resources, encouragement,
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As always, you guys, thanks so much for watching,
and don't forget, create something awesome today.
Take care.