The Transition to Full-Time Content Creation | Dealing with Trolls, Balancing Growth and Burnout, and Seeking Support

You're listening to Digital Creator with me, your host, Dylan Schmidt. I'm really glad to be here today. I mean, I'm here every week, but I'm particularly glad to be here today because I feel like I got a really juicy episode. There are so many things that I wanna cover and I've kind of talked about this on the podcast before, but, not every topic deserves, like, 20 minutes. That's why I do my best to break up these subjects or kind of findings, insights, relevant news, things like that into chunks. And then I do 3 chunks per episode because last thing we need is just rambling about something that doesn't need to be rambled upon. And especially in this day and age, 2024, we have more information than we've ever had before. And so if I can do my best to just give you, like, the pieces, the insights that I think are most valuable, I'll have done my job, and I hope you feel the same way. So I just wanna, like, kick things off by saying I'm grateful. I'm grateful for you. I'm grateful that I even get to share this with you. This podcast has evolved, and it's something I really look forward to doing every week. With that being said, there's not any, like, major interesting news that I thought I would, report to you this week. And like I just got done saying, I don't want to just add fluff in here. So I wanted to go really deep into 3 relevant topics for creators, that I think are evergreen. Meaning, they're applicable year round and it's not just a seasonal thing. Number 1 I'm gonna be talking about today is how fast can you make creating content your job, and what are some pitfalls you should be thinking about? Let's have a quick reality check on what that means for you. It's something a 100% of creators experience. It's part of the game, but I think trolls touch on something that is much deeper than just a a comment that tries to bait you into giving them attention. And then number 3, let's talk about how to balance growth and burnout. There's this tension between wanting to grow and create something epic with being able to manage our own energy and not burning out. Most creators I talk with struggle with burnout on some level, and we've all seen the YouTube videos of people saying that they need to take a step back. I have not taken a step back, and I am not burned out. Actually, in fact, I feel invigorated by keeping going. How can I do it? How can you do it? Let's talk about it. So right off the bat, one of the bigger questions, and this comes up in the creator club, either explicitly, meaning it's meant to come up, or like this undertone, kind of wondering is how the heck can you transition from this idea or this side hustle of making content to making it your full time job? So I just wanted to share my thoughts on that because I have firsthand experience with this stuff. And I've been watching now a few years, people make the transition, they go into it, and then they step back and they go, you know what? I'm just gonna take a normal job. There's no wrong or right path for any of us doing this stuff, but I do think it will be helpful for me to share my perspective, just what I've learned. So I wanted to transition from working behind the scenes in digital marketing to making my own platform, which was initially called Digital Creator, turned into Digital Creator or sorry. It was called Digital Podcaster, which turned into Digital Creator, what you're listening to today. And I started from 0. I started an anonymous account. Nobody followed that account that I knew. My wife actually followed the account, and then I removed her as a follower because I was like, this is too weird. I don't know. I just wanna, like, experiment. She follows me now, but at first, I was like, nah. This is too close. So I wanted to transition from doing this digital marketing thing to being in front of the camera on the microphone like I am now. And that was a weird transition for me because I have no experience with this other than doing it for a lot of other people. And I thought that would be a strength because if I could share my experiences like I am now, then I could empathize better, and I could also work with clients better as well because I know what to look out for versus never doing it and then just telling someone how to do it. It's kind of like a fitness trainer giving fitness advice about what to do in the gym, but they've never been in the gym, or they've only watched people in the gym. You know what? Actually, a better analogy is when people watch UFC or MMA fighting, and they go, yeah. If they just did this, and it's like, what? You've never even been in a fight, let alone a mixed martial arts fight. Right? It's so different. And I look at that similarly with content creation. It is like a sport, if you will. And so I wanna say even with the right plan, life can get in the way. There's a lot of strategies out there. I share a lot of strategies. This is almost a strategy in itself that I'm sharing here, and life gets in the way. So you could plan all you want. You could think you're gonna do it one way, and then an emergency happens and you need to move and you can't do what you were doing. Right? Anything can happen at any time. You know, we always hope for the best, plan for the worst, but, like, who really plans for the worst? You know? And when we're being ruthlessly optimistic when creating content and building this platform and putting ourselves out there, it takes a lot of optimism and courage and these and resilience. And so to plan for the worst, I don't know that many people that actually have I don't know anybody that has a plan for the actual worst, but acknowledging that life can get in the way. And even if you have the best plan, just knowing, sometimes you just have to go with the flow. Similarly with fitness, there's setbacks. There's times where you get sick and you can't make it to the gym, but do you let that derail you from taking the rest of the year off? Some people do. What's important is that you just make baby steps. And gets me to this idea of planning where you wanna go in the 1st place. So if you're taking baby steps and life gets in the way, where do you keep going when you're back on track or you're even going in any direction? You have to have some idea, some type of plan, some type of vision for what you wanna create. And the clearer the vision, the quicker you'll get there. I just shared on, I think it was my TikTok, a video that I was inspired to make from another video which was about how to draw a straight line. And the quickest way to draw a straight line without any ruler or anything is to focus so intently on the endpoint of where you want the line. So I'm describing this because this is audio only. If you wanna draw a straight line, you look at the endpoint, and then wherever your hand is, you just draw to that endpoint without taking your eyes off that endpoint, and you'll draw a great straight line. It works every time. The same is true for shooting baskets. I have a friend who is a trainer. He's trained NBA athletes, and I was on a call with him last week. And I was like, you know what? I've been thinking about this idea because I've been playing with my daughter's toys, and I've been, like, throwing them in the basket across the yard, and I've been hitting them from far distances. We're talking, like, 20 feet. I've been making them these little buckets. And I asked him because he has all this experience training NBA athletes and, like, there's something to just staring so intently on the rim. Right? And he is like, yeah. In fact, all of the highest level NBA athletes that I work with, he's like, they have this relaxed stare where it's not like they're focused physically intently on it. It's just like this deep zen like state where they're focused, he said, on like the back of the rim. And why I'm bringing that up is because that same level of focus, if I had to ask you, someone that has a idea where they wanna go or someone who is in that zen like state of where they're gonna go, which one would you think would get there faster and more efficiently in better shape? Obviously, the zen like state one. Right? So something for all of us to consider, especially when we're talking about making creating content a full time job is, are we creating that vision? Are we so intently focused on where we're headed that we have that Zen like stare on like, this is where I'm going. Doesn't mean you have to be a jerk about it. Doesn't mean you have to throw everything out the window. But just by simply focusing on where you wanna go, such a game changer, that is such a cliche word to use. It's such a game changer when you're focusing. Another thing to think about too is you're formulating a plan on going full time, because I know a lot of people who listen to this podcast, it's not bringing in the money, even if they're working on it regularly, is asking yourself, what kind of creator do you wanna be? And this idea, I don't know if he still talks about it. I went to a Brendon Burchard event 10 years ago or more, and he talked about this thing that's still relevant today, which was, are you a reporter or an expert? There's 2 main seats. Now content creator wasn't a popular term then, but it stuck in my mind ever since on, are you a reporter or a expert? A reporter is someone like Joe Rogan, even though people look at him like an expert. He has an expertise in certain things. Right? But he's really a reporter. He is interviewing other people and he is giving a platform for their expertise. And he doesn't need to be an expert in all the things. He's just essentially reporting. Now he's letting them do the reporting. He's bringing that out of them. So you could call it an interviewer or a reporter or whatever, But it's completely different than being the expert. I would say when it comes to expert, like that's more of what I'm doing here, Right? There are a lot of examples here. Alex Hormozi would be like an expert. Brendon Burchard, who I'm getting this idea from, is an expert. Tony Robbins is an expert. Even though he takes all these different modalities or whatever, he has his own expertise that he's created and he is teaching essentially. And knowing what kind of creator you are, the reporter or the expert, goes a long ways in shaping that vision, that plan, that you ultimately set out to follow, to achieve. And the reason I bring that up is because there's pros and cons of doing what you wanna do full time. And it could take longer to go full time, especially if you need to replace some type of income that you need to weigh. If you're a reporter, like, you're gonna be bringing in different money than if you were the expert. Right? Experts tend to have services. Like, I have ContentClips, which is a done for you editing service. Right? That's because, like, we're content creator experts, and it's our job to do that, fulfill that. I also do consulting and things like that. That's a expertise. But a reporter interviewer for the most part is going to partner. They might do affiliate marketing of some sorts, things that they believe in. They could also get sponsorships and brand deals, things like that. That could happen just as fast, if not faster, than what an expert would do through their own services and things that they might fulfill on their own. But recognizing those key distinctions is gonna save you a lot of time and pain because you're not looking at selling digital products. You're not doing any of that. You're so intently focused. You have that zen like stare on the back of the room to look for the things that support you being in that reporter seat. I hope that makes sense. Last thing I wanna add on this is when you're weighing the risk of something that you gotta do for yourself when it comes to stepping into a more full time role with content creation, I highly recommend. I would say I a 100% recommend my with every ounce of my being. Don't weigh everything alone. Don't make it in a vacuum. Don't make it in isolation. Highly recommend finding a trusted source that can support you and help you think through the decisions you're making, not to help you make a decision, but just to kind of help you think through. It is so hard to do this stuff on our own, and you could look at the spreadsheet. You could do all this and, like, I wanna be like I read all these stories of self made people and things like that. No need. It is so much harder, and it doesn't need to be that scary. We're talking about your livelihood. We're talking about years of your life here. It is so smart, and you never know what might come up if you can just find that trusted source, think through something, and you never know. You might realize, oh, actually, maybe I need to wait 6 months or actually maybe I just need to take that leap. It's different for everybody. So being able to think through what you're working on is absolutely crucial to do with someone else. It's a night and day difference. Next, let's talk about troll comments. I know we all get them, but we don't all react the same way. I get them on the most random things. I just got another one yesterday or the day before. And it's funny because it triggers, like, a fight or flight response in me still to this day, even all the work I've done around it. And I almost liken it to maybe, like, a road rage thing. Right? Some of us in traffic will get road rage. Right? You'll see a lady by herself in the car who's, like, 50, 60 years old Get road rage. You'll see someone younger. Get road rage. Like, it's not, it doesn't matter how old you are. It doesn't matter your background. Like, we're all susceptible to these things. And the fact of the matter is, like, trolls don't understand what being in your seat is like. They don't understand what it is to put yourself out there continually. It's one thing to publish one video. It's one thing to publish one video every day or publish multiple videos every day. At that level, very few people know what that's like. And regardless of how you respond to trolls, the fact is, like, there's going to be emotions associated with being a content creator, and trolls can touch so deeply on insecurities. I was going to therapy regularly when I first started a digital podcaster, even well up until recently, and I highly recommend therapy to anybody. And that's one of my skill sets is finding a good therapist. So if you need help, just shout out. I can point you in the right direction. But even though I felt like I didn't need to talk about things that were maybe coming up around the topic of trolls and just putting myself out there, I really did need to talk about it because that visibility doesn't come normal to me. And even if it does come normal to you, I feel like there's still stuff to work out there and just kind of share again with other people. So what's worked for me is being able to fit in perspective checks. Now this isn't something I've necessarily done just with a therapist. I still do it outside of that too, but helping to remember that social media and content are far from everything. They're absolutely real parts of our lives. To say that it's not real, I think, is doing it a disservice. So many people spend so much time online, and we are putting our lives into what we're creating. It's part of our livelihood. So to take it seriously or to not take it seriously is a disservice, of course. And the more you invest in it with your time and your own money, it becomes very real. So to say it's like, oh, it's not real. It is real, but it's not everything. So understanding that trolls are part of the game has also helped me deal with them better. It comes with the territory, which is easier said than done, of course, but knowing that right from the beginning, posting and facing any sort of resistance is just part of it. These days when I'm dealing with trolls too, I do my best to try not reason. Now I don't do this as well as I would like to, something I work on, but there's no reasoning with trolls. Right? They are not coming from the same angle. They don't want to understand. They just want to get you to be riled up about something. And that's why they say, don't feed the trolls. I wanna go where I'm wanted, and sometimes the algorithm messes up. That's just part of the game. Last up here, let's talk about balancing growth and burnout. I see many creators struggle with growing and balancing the burnout that is associated with that, and there's a bunch of reasons why creators burn out. It could be from doing too much and getting back too little, not filling up their own cup enough, whatever. Even self aware creators still battle with the same problems that less aware creators, struggle with too. We all struggle with this. Things like the psychological toll of being a public figure, even if it's just in a small niche, or transitioning from your ideas to implementing them and learning how to ask for help, or the complexity of having unpredictable revenue streams, or learning how to set and manage your personal and professional boundaries, or considering the long term impact of career choices that you make today. While these are all things that everyone has to deal with on a professional level, there isn't such a clear linear progression for creators like there are in some other careers. And creators need support, and we consciously or unconsciously seek out support through the content we consume or the conversations we have, that will either help us or hurt us. And seeking support out of insecurity or desperation can hurt us in the long run because the sources of support can wildly vary. So my recommendation is to seek out support that encourages you but doesn't only encourage you but doesn't just give you the cheerleader hype up to say keep going. It's the support that calls you out on your BS. If you are missing that perspective, if you find yourself making the same mistakes or struggling with the same things over and over again, find support that can just say, you know what? You're talking a lot about this, but you're saying this, but you're saying you wanna do this. When are you gonna stop? And when are you gonna start? Because it's one thing to share your highs and encouraging from a place of safety, which we all need to share our highs, and social media is, of course, made for sharing the highs. But just as importantly, if not more importantly, you need an outlet to share your lows. And that's really probably, if I had to say, the number one thing that creators struggle with is not having a place to share their lows, not to just, like, wallow in the lows that they're going through, but to have a witness, to have somebody that also said, like, you know what? I've been there. And just a reminder, when you share it with someone, you you're instantly reminded it's temporary, but it makes it real. And when you're just holding on to things yourself, it can be heavy even when we're just talking about creating content. That's why I said we're gonna go deep today, but we went there. And I'm glad you stuck around to listen to the end. So with that, my only real call to action for you today is take good care of yourself. What is one thing between now and at the end of the week that you can do for yourself? It doesn't have to be related to creating. In fact, it could be something totally off the wall, but something that you can do to take care of yourself because you deserve it. I'll catch you in the next one.