I went from “I guess I’ll finish this book one day” to “oh shit, I really have to finish writing this book.”
The difference?
The first book: I wrote without an audience. It took 5 years.
The second: I had an audience waiting for me to finish the book. I finished it in 9 months.
I learned a very important lesson, building an audience can fuel your growth.
It keeps you accountable.
That’s just one of the many reasons you need to build one.
The phases of unhappiness:
There are different phases of the global unhappiness problem and it’s linked to how effectively you can build an audience or community.
Phase 1: The rise of unhappiness, which shows up in different forms as stress, sadness, anger, is due to a multitude of factors such as fragmented communities, financial and food insecurity, and lack of satisfaction at work.
Let’s double click the last factor.
Phase 2: People are unhappy because of dissatisfaction at work.
Satisfaction is directly correlated to the work you do and the people you work with.
When you’re chosen by a company, you choose neither. Your work is already chosen for you and the team is already built, except it’s a very early stage business.
The only way you can choose who you work with and what you work on is by actively attracting an audience aligned with your message and values.
It’s that simple.
You can build a business around that, fund a mission, organize a community, sell your project outputs.
But then another problem pops up.
Phase 3: People don’t build audiences because they think it’s “attention-seeking.” They say, building an audience gives them the “ick.” They’d rather complain about uninspiring managers.
They think the people building audiences are desperate, starving for attention.
So they never start.
They never turn that lever that can minimize the unhappiness in their lives.
I’ve found that building an audience can be one of the most meaningful things you can do in this century.
How building an audience can fuel your growth and drive meaning.
In 2021, coming out of the pandemic was quite the experience.
My business was on the rebound. I was about to publish my second book and had just gotten into NFTs. I was a little all over the place like an AMC stock.
In the midst of all this, I signed up for a program on MindValley (a life transformation program). There was an exercise that stayed stuck in my mind. I printed out the paper workbook. Vertical lines divide the paper into three segments. At the top were the titles of each column: “Experience,” “Growth,” “Contribution.”
These were three areas to write down intentions for the type of progress we wanted to make in each area of our lives over the next 10 years.
I wrote down what I wanted to experience in the present, the skills I wanted to grow, and the things I wanted to contribute my skills to in the future. I still have that paper with me five years later. At the time, I thought it was another woo woo thing. But years later, it has really brought a simple framework on how to live with intention and find meaning in life.
Now I realize that building an audience is an activity that touches on all three areas.
Here’s why:
1. The activity that keeps you in the moment:
You can only experience the present.
The past is just a memory. The future is just a vision. You experience both of them in your mind, at the present moment – now. There is nothing as important with what you do than what you do in the present.
You have to actively find the joy of doing things.
Building an audience is an experience you can actively engage in. You get to interact with people. Understand their challenges. Learn about yourself. Realize what you’re capable of. Fine-tune your interests.
When you take on audience building as a project, the experience brings value to your life.
There’s value in the process. Let go of the outcome and start building.
2. The growth practice that gets better with time
Get 1% better everyday.
Building an audience is a habit. With it, you actively participate in your growth. There are very visible signs of growth that you can target. You can focus on the number of subscribers, book readers, replies you get, revenue to your business.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t grow it.
I’ve found that having this activity gives me a weekly thing to keep track of. I recently built an app that tracks and analyzes my growth on LinkedIn. Tracking this growth has helped me build and learn something new: an app that I wouldn’t have built otherwise.
When you build an audience, you don’t only have the tangible variables of growth but you have internal growth metrics – particularly, learning more about how you can serve your audience. It builds your communication and persuasion skills. This is one of the most valuable skills you can develop.
Building your audience is a growth practice. Start practicing.
3. The outlet where you contribute your skills
Live for yourself, you’ll live in vain.
Live for others, you’ll live again.
Those lyrics from Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, play in my mind over and over. If you zoom back to the core reasons of unhappiness, besides satisfaction at work, another reason is fragmented communities.
Building an audience is the step to building your community.
When you build an audience, you can actually contribute the skill you have picked up in your growth phase to the community. Entrepreneurs share their solutions. Artists share their art. Designers share their products.
Anything you learn, you’ll be able to effectively use it to help people.
Don’t wait for some profound moment to contribute, start building your avenue to do so now.
Final thoughts:
When you’re not clear what you want to build, start building an audience.
Attract like-minded people with your values, vision, and vibes. When you build an audience, it can infuse tremendous meaning in your life. It grounds you in the present, facilitates your growth, and provides an outlet to ultimately contribute to society.
I hope you start building today.
Yours truly,
Nifemi
