The Psychology of a Content Creator | Dealing with Delayed Gratification, Navigating Impostor Syndrome, and Embracing Constraints

Welcome to Digital Creator. I still wanna say digital podcaster after all of this time. Super glad you are here today. We got a fun episode. And what I'm gonna be talking about today, let's just dive right in. Number 1, we'll be talking about getting comfortable in the practice stage of content creation. I'll explain what I mean by that in just a moment. And we'll also talk about social proof, which is likes, views, comments, all that engagement that we see from big creators. How do we know they're big creators? Because they have social proof. And then we'll be talking about falling into the gear trap. Do you need to upgrade your gear? Is what you have good enough? What I say might be different than what you're thinking. And, also, before we hop in, I will give you an update on something I didn't actually talk about on this podcast, which I should do a longer segment on in the future. A couple months ago, I had moved my podcast from Buzzsprout, which was my original podcast host, to Spotify for podcasters, because I wanted to see what it would be like. I speak with a lot of people that use Spotify for podcasters. I have never used it myself, but I wanted to see what it would be like, so I moved over there. And what do you know? Lo and behold, I ran into issues right away, and I had to reach out to support. Support was a nightmare to say the least. Took me a while, but I got up and running. And I kind of wanted to, again, just do this as an experiment to see what it would be like using Spotify for podcasters versus a paid service like Buzzsprout. Now, what did I miss immediately? A bunch of features. Things like being able to upload my own transcript, things like being able to add timestamps or dynamic ads or dynamic episode footers. There was a lot. Also, not to mention the whole magic mastering part of Buzzsprout, which I absolutely love. There's a bunch more features that I missed. So happy to say Digital Creator is back on Buzzsprout now, and it took me moving to Spotify for Podcasters to realize just how significant Buzzsprout has been, in making my podcast experience enjoyable. This isn't an ad for Buzzsprout. I'm not trying to I don't have a special link to give you. All I'm saying is that if you're a podcaster using a free platform like Spotify for Podcasters, I'd highly check out something like Buzzsprout. Alright. Let's dive in. So let's talk about that practice stage. Like I said at the beginning, what I would talk about today is getting comfortable in that practice stage. When you're first starting out, it can feel like you're getting a bunch of reps in. I like to use an analogy, kind of like going to the gym. My background is in fitness, believe it or not, like, feels like many years ago now, but my one of my first jobs was working in a gym and then I went on to do personal training and that helped me pay the bills while I was doing more of my passion project, which was music and getting in the recording studio, things like that. Because, as we all probably know, it's not easy making money in the music industry, unless you're a big artist or you're established. So I was doing a lot of personal training and when I use analogies like that, it's just because it's really comfortable for me, but I also think it's practical because there are a lot of similarities between content creation just as a whole and getting better at a certain skill set or a sport. And with creating content, it can feel a lot like you're going to the gym because you're getting in these reps. Right? You're practicing at the thing you want to get good at, but then you're also consuming content from other people that you either enjoy or you're looking up to and looking for ways you can improve what you're doing, and it hits you. There's so much work involved in this thing, just like simply making a video. If you've ever tried to edit a video, you know how difficult it can be to get the just one little thing to happen on the screen, and then you scale that, like, I'm gonna do this every week or I'm gonna do this a couple times a month, it all starts to add up really fast. And if you overcome that block of not being active to being active in doing it and then you get over the impostor syndrome, you put yourself out there, and then you set up the camera, you hit record, you start doing it. You're practicing the thing that you wanted to practice. And there can be this thing that starts to set in. I know for myself is, like, creating content, it's like you feel like you should be further along or you feel like you should be seeing more results than you're seeing. And it can be really discouraging to look at what you've made and then look at what you've gotten in return, if you know what I mean. For example, you put in 30 hours on a video or multiple videos, and you look and you're like, that cost me all this time and money, and I've got nothing back. The delayed gratification for creating content is not talked about enough. Like, you have to put forth all of this effort, all of this energy, time, money, and you don't get much back in the beginning. You put yourself out there. You hope to get views, likes, comments, all that stuff. Rarely does that ever work out. And if you have an existing platform, believe it or not, you also don't get that immediate feedback because sometimes you'll make something even with an existing platform and it will just flop. You had one thing set in your mind and the audience has maybe just not that interested in it. You might be doing things one way and your audience could move on to something else. I see it happen time and time again with people that already have established audiences and have been publishing content for quite some time. So just because you reach some level of comfort or success, in one vertical doesn't guarantee you success as you keep going. And that can sound really tiring because I know, for myself, originally, there was this idea of it's gonna get easier. I'm gonna just, like, hustle. I'm gonna grind. I'm gonna put forth all this energy, then it's just gonna get easier, and then I can take a step back and coast because I've got all of this stuff in place. And I'll tell you what, like, watching others, doing this for myself, helping others do it, like, managing all these different things, I can tell you with certainty that it doesn't necessarily get easier. You just get better at managing all of the things that you're doing. You find these little shortcuts of weeding out the inefficiencies, so that you can only really focus on what moves the needle. And you have to go through a lot of inefficiencies to get to the efficiencies, because you don't know what the efficiencies are in the first place, which is bringing you back to what I'm talking about here is, like, the practice stage of figuring out being in that practice stage, What are you looking for? Like, what's actually going to get you better? So that it's not so that you can just take a year off and everything just runs on autopilot. It's so that you can do what you enjoy, you can do it consistently, and not feel like you're burning out, but instead feel like you're lit up by it, so that you can be in your zone of genius. If you've read the E Myth Revisited, great book, fantastic for content creators, even better book for entrepreneurs, but I think there's a lot of overlap between anyone starting of a business and starting up their own content like business as I refer to it. And there are these 3 hats that you wear. Right? There's the visionary, I believe it's called, the manager and the technician. In the beginning, we're wearing all of the hats. Our goal is to move into that visionary where we can just see things that other people aren't seeing, and we can manage, but we also have to be the technician sometimes. And it's okay that we wear all that we wear all three hats. But what's not okay is that if you're wearing all 3 of those hats and you don't even know why, because you're not sure if you're even moving in the right direction. So if this resonates with you, an exercise you can do is just simply document what you're doing. If I was to watch you in your processes just by simply watching it, not even you explaining what you're doing, you would probably start asking yourself, like, actually, I don't need to do this or I don't need to do that. And just by simply documenting what you're doing, you're setting yourself up to be able to outsource it later, and you're also showing yourself what's important. It's by documenting not just the external content that we're putting out into the world, but the internal systems and processes that we're running that we start to grow as real creators. Moving on, let's talk about social proof. Social proof is an interesting thing that's built into social media that we overlook on a daily basis. It's, like, as obvious as the way we breathe, but we don't consciously focus on our breath at all times. Right? Social media is set up in a way that's intentionally designed to highlight certain, I don't know if it's dopamine, certain receptors in our brain that make us want to use it more. So when we go on YouTube, there's this FOMO, this fear of missing out, that starts to set in when we see a video with a thumbnail that's really intriguing, and then we see this thing has 37,000,000 views, I have to click this. I have to see what it is. That's social proof in action. Social proof can elicit responses in us. It can make us overwhelmed. It can make us anxious. It can make us happy. It can elicit all of these things because we see that other people have engaged in this and we're tribal creatures, at our core. So social proof plays a crucial role in the journey of a content creator. But the problem is, when you're starting out, you have virtually no social proof, and you know how hard it can be to grow from 0 just to 1. Right? You can maybe get your friends and family to like and view your content. Hopefully, maybe leave a comment, but long term, if you're doing this seriously, you have to expand and get, more audience. And social proof plays into the imposter syndrome of creators. It can play into the ego of creators when they're seeing, like, oh my gosh. This got so many views. I knew I was cut out for this thing. And then then, you know, you're feeling on top of the world. And then the next day, it absolutely is the opposite. You're like, what? This thing was awesome and nobody enjoyed it? What? Nobody viewed it? I don't know if it's me. I don't know if it's the algorithm. I mean, it has to be me because that last video did great. Maybe I don't know what I thought I knew, you know. And that can really mess up the psychology of a creator, because we're looking for certainty. We're looking for ways to be a predictable pattern, so that when we make, a, we get b, which will equal c. And it just doesn't work like that in the beginning stages because why? Because we're experimenting. Because there isn't one way of doing things for every creator exactly the same, if you wanna be a unique creator that is. Right? And that's absolutely abstract and terrifying and overwhelming on so many levels because as a creator, like I said, you're looking for certainty. You're looking for predictability. It's probably the reason why you even listen to this podcast is because you're looking for some way to move forward. And I wanna give you some tips on how to rethink social proof so that it's, more advantageous to you as a creator who's not rocking, like, millions upon millions of views or maybe not even thousands upon thousands of views. So let's get into it. Number 1, when it comes to social proof, there's the external metrics we see like views, comments, likes, things like that, but there's also just the things that you say. So if you're saying topics that are relevant to things that other people are thinking about or doing, you're tapping into a larger conversation. So there's the social proof of the analytics, but there's also just social proof of knowing what you're talking about is tapping in. Like, you know who does this great is, like, sports, because there's always something new and relevant in sports. And if you're talking about something that millions of people are talking about, that's gonna lend itself to social proof really easy because you're tapping into that conversation. Another thing I'll say is, like, so many people want these higher profile guests and it's not always that those guests will do large numbers for your show, but for later on that someone else might see, oh, this person's cool with you. A good example of that is who I've had on this podcast before, Danny Miranda. Danny Miranda has done interviews with so many different people. Tim Ferris, Gary Vaynerchuk. I'm sure so many people I'm absolutely forgetting, Alex Hermozzi. And just that social proof of, not even, like, him having the biggest podcast, but him having those guests on there is social proof, still that, hey, if they thought he was okay, I could go on there. And he can use those people in the thumbnail and other people will likely tap into that because they're seeing, like, hey, I saw this other thing from this person. It's a really easy connection to make, and seeing those two faces together, for example, Danny Miranda with a Gary Vaynerchuk, it's positioning Danny as an expert of his craft, just simply because he's in the same room as Gary Vaynerchuk. And people will perceive Danny's content to be of higher quality, simply because they perceive Gary Vaynerchuk's content as high quality. And the last thing on social proof is, if you're going after analytics, it doesn't hurt to spend some ad dollars. And again, this is, like, with a grain of salt, because everyone has their own budget and things like that, but on YouTube or Instagram or these different platforms, getting to learn more about their ads platforms and consider taking your existing higher performing content that's already working organically and turning that into an ad of some sorts could be a smart play to grow more of your content and just to grow your platform as a whole. Now, as far as, like, how much to spend and all that, it really is, like, too granular to make any broad suggestions here. But a lot of these platforms, like YouTube or Instagram or Facebook or TikTok are set up because they want the creators to spend money on ads. You don't have to spend a lot of money on ads to get a result. So to sum up, what I'm saying here is social proof can be earned, it can be bought, and it can be a mixture of both. But social proof does play a significant role in the viewer's decision to watch a video, to click whatever link, to join your email newsletter, or how they perceive the quality of your content. And lastly, I wanna talk about the gear trap, falling into the gear trap. And I have fallen into this more times than probably not as many times as Alicia Keys has sang that song, Fallen, but I was gonna say more times than that. So here's what I look at, like, the gear trap. Like, I've seen this happen time and time again, where a creator will start making content and then they'll look for reasons to why it's their content is not as effective as they feel it should be. So then they'll think, maybe I need to test this thing, or maybe I need to test that thing. So they buy the new camera, they get the new microphone, they download the new app, they make all of these tweaks and they start falling into the whole gear trap, which is using the gear as an excuse rather than a superpower. Most likely, you've seen my social media videos. If you haven't, come find me on any of the social media apps, platforms at the Dylan Schmidt. And you can see, like, my videos are high quality, 4 k, like, great lighting, all that stuff, which is great. Like, it didn't start out day 1 just like that. I was super awkward on camera, so it didn't even matter if I had a 4 k camera at that point, which I did, I believe, but I don't know. I felt pretty, really awkward when I was, like, first starting out. Anyways, the camera, like, the lighting, all of this helps act as a hook in some ways in the videos, because when people are scrolling, you know, it's one thing to see, like, a phone recorded selfie video, which I've been testing, like, the differences of what if I just recorded a video of me talking to my selfie cam on my iPhone versus me using the nice Sony a 7c mirrorless camera at my desk with a fancy lens. Which one would be more engaging for audiences and testing those out, and what I've found is, at the end of the day, it's still just easiest for me to use this nice camera at my desk. But that's what I'm using right now. And it's funny though, because, like, I have this nice setup and I've gotten all this way to using it, like, trial and error and a lot of money spent on all this gear. And then I'm going all the way back to just my phone and maybe the phone thing is the best. You start looking at lights and maybe I need a better light. But isn't there something cool about someone who does something with so little? Like, I came across this YouTuber, a couple years ago who had these beautiful videos. This was on Twitter before Twitter was x, and they were talking about their video style. And then someone was like, wait, you shoot your YouTube videos with your phone? They're like, how? It's so smooth. The footage is in 4 k. It looks amazing. Like, you would have never guessed this was with their phone, and it totally was. They're like, oh, yeah. I just have this little it was like the selfie sticks, which I don't see people have anymore, but maybe they do. It's this selfie stick kind of thing, and he would just film all of his videos like that and had this beautiful buttery b roll. Looked amazing. People were just like, oh my God. I'm so overthinking the gear when it comes to YouTube videos. And something is so cool about that though. Like just using one tool to do the job. He just uses his iPhone, and it looks as good as you could possibly need. And oftentimes, we don't even know the gear that people are using. We assume it's this fancy elaborate gear, and then sometimes we'll find out, like, oh, that was just an iPhone. Like what? Or it's something older and we have something newer and we have something newer that looks worse than something older that we're seeing somebody else use. And I've fallen into this because I know that the gear doesn't equal the quality, but I'll still see something and I'm like, wow, that's amazing. And then find out like, oh, they just used their phone for that. It wasn't this fancy camera. All that to say the tool man is more important than the tool itself, and I say this as a reminder for all of us because the likelihood of all of us making the best of our current tools is probably pretty minimal. Right? I read a few books on minimalism, so I'm mixing up which book it was from, but it was, like, imagine all of the things you own, even if they're deep in your closet, to have strings to you, like, energetic strings. And for so many of us, that would be incredibly overwhelming if that was the case because we have so much stuff. And we're over here looking for more reasons why there might be something else we need to make better content. So my challenge for you is this, the current gear you're using to make content, don't upgrade it. How can you work within the constraints that you have with your already existing gear? Ask yourself, am I using the gear that I currently have to the best of its ability? It's gonna help you with the future gear that you acquire because you'll have known your current gear much better. Think about how you can get by with less features, but using all of the features on what you already have. That's the mindset. That's it for this episode. I hope you're having a great day, and I'll catch you in the next one.