SPI 706: Who Wants Recognition?

SPI 706: Who Wants Recognition?

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, a perfect day in his mind always includes the three F’s—fishing, family, and food. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: I had a really important thought that I wanted to share with you and it’s about recognition. Right? Recognition is something that many of us, most of us human beings want in some way, shape or form. We want to be recognized for the great work that we do. We want to be recognized as a person. We want to have other people care for us and, and just our efforts we want to know are worth it, right? That’s just basic human needs.

And the reason this came up is because I had a message the other day from a creator who came to Card Party. Now, I’ve been talking about Card Party quite a bit lately, but this is a particular principle or strategy that was purposefully put into place that I wanted to share with you about this event, and this relates to not just community, but just humans in general, and it’s something I want you to, after this episode, kind of reflect on so that you can use this power for good, right?

You can, you can absolutely use this power for good. And at Card Party, unlike a lot of the other events that happen around the collectible space, which are generally just larger convention halls or convention centers with a lot of vendor tables and it’s buying, selling, and trading, and that’s the majority of what happens, there might be an activity or an event here and there, and there might be some celebrities or a voiceover actor here and there that you can stand in line for. But at Card Party, I wanted the to be on the creators coming right and not just like here are the big headliners and you’re gonna watch them speak on stage but hey they’re gonna be there and they’re gonna be a part of the crowd with you here’s all the creators that are coming. And one thing that I really wanted to do right from the get go knowing that this was gonna work and guess what fast forward yes it absolutely did but I wanted to put the creators on the website for the event and of course the usual suspects if you will are there the headliners.

In our space in the entrepreneurial space, it would be the equivalent of yes Gary Vaynerchuk is there and Tim Ferriss is coming too. Okay, that’s cool. What I really wanted to do was recognize the smaller creators in the space because they’re creators too the people with 500 subscribers. Not 500 000. The people with a couple thousand subscribers. Not a couple thousand people working at their firm. And something beautiful happened. Actually, another person came up to me.

PowderTCG is his screen name. He said that when he saw that his picture was on the Card Party website and he shared it with his mom, his mom said, oh my gosh, this Pokemon thing is actually something that is working out for you. And he was so happy to hear that he got his mom’s approval for this thing that often she was kind of ridiculing him for.

Oh, you’re just wasting money on those card. Those are never gonna amount to anything. And then here he was on this website. And this was a first year event, right? We were not proven yet. We are proven now. But again, the recognition to have a person’s name, to be seen meant so much to these people, and in fact, I would bet that the smaller creators who were featured, and there were over 60 creators featured at this event, most of them smaller creators, I would bet that more of them drove more ticket sales and more excitement for the event and talked about it more than the larger creators did. And that’s because the larger creators always are so busy and they have so many things to do, so many things to talk about already. For many of the smaller creators, the, the, the Card party was the thing they were talking about for months leading up to it.

And, sure, they might have only a few fans come, percentage, but a larger percentage of their audience is coming. And so, they’re able to meet their fans, and the fans are able to meet them, and they now had a place for all this to happen, which is what Card Party was for, is this interaction between fans and creators.

And, it was just so awesome. So, the question I want to ask you is, In your space, in the niche that you’re in, in the market that you are tackling, that you’re trying to solve problems for, what other players, creators, people, authorities, creators, if you will, I think I said that, but you know what I mean, what other creators are not getting the recognition that you think that they deserve? Who else out there is working hard just like you, who you could step up and say, You know what, I want to point you to this person. Sure, they just started, they’re smaller, And they still have some time to prove themselves, But you know what, this podcast episode of theirs, or this video of theirs blew me away, and I wanted to recognize that person for that.

When you do that, they will notice. When you recognize and create, like, for example, a blog post, a top 10 articles by, you know, creators in 2023. And they’re all the top level, like Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, Ramit Sethi, all those big names are on there. It’s like, cool, nice list. These are people I’ve seen before.

But when they’re people that not a lot of people maybe have heard of before, not only does it help introduce new people to your audience, but It also is an amazing way to start a relationship with these people and to start to gain support from them. And that’s something that I’m noticing now in this Pokemon space that I’m in, even though I’m only two years into this, I’m now being supported in a way where it’s like, Pat, whatever you need, dude, like we’re here for you.

And I know, and I’m confident that if something were to happen, or if there was, you know, trolls coming up on my stream or, you know, a video that somebody came out with that, like attacked me for whatever reason there would be a gang of people who would counter that and say no, you’re wrong. And they would come out in droves.

And again, I’m not saying this because I’m like, hey, look at me and how awesome I am. It’s a result of recognizing the other people in this space. You know, I feel very blessed to have this audience now and recognition from where I am, but I want to pass that forward. I want to bring other people along and a lot of these creators now are literally going out of their way to support.

I mean, sending me stuff to give to my audience and, you know, offering to come to Card Party next year to work the entire event just because they want to give back. And when again, people just want to get recognized. So I want you to really think about that. Who else is in the space that you know is not getting the recognition they deserve yet. And I think that when you go through that exercise it’s not only going to help you determine who else you might be able to reach out to and point people toward and build a relationship with but it might also reveal that maybe you aren’t as involved as you should be because you don’t know who these people are, right?

I’m gonna call some of you out right now and say I would bet that you are so focused on your own stuff and you’re so much in your own little bottle that you haven’t looked up to see who else is around there that’s doing amazing things that you could recognize and team up with and partner with and collaborate with.

And just because they might be smaller than you, that’s not a reason for you to ignore them. In fact, many of the, in Smart Passive Income, there were so many creators along the way that I reached out to and focused on and partnered with who were much smaller, but then grew much bigger, much, much bigger. I mean, I can even go back to when I first met Lewis Howes, I had a bigger platform than Lewis Howes, and look at him now, he’s absolutely crushing it, and guess what, we’re friends, we help each other out, when he has a book, when I have a book, we, we support each other.

And that’s just one example of how we support each other, because we’ve supported each other along the way. John Lee Dumas. Right? The man, the myth, the machine who’s created his entire empire, Entrepreneurs on Fire, and for a while was doing seven days a week on his podcast, right? I had already been an established podcaster.

I was guest number one on his show. And he continues to thank me today and say, Pat, I can’t believe that you gave little old me, a nobody in the space, your time to be guest number one. And again, it’s, I wanted him to get recognized because I saw something in him and I knew that he was going to bring something different to the space.

You have the authority to do that as well. Look up, see who else is there. Support them and guess what? You’re going to get so much support back. I’m so grateful because with all that support, I feel like I can actually take bigger risks. Meaning, the risks required to try something innovative and new knowing that even if it were to fail or if it didn’t go the way I would hope it would go, that I would still have support from the community.

And at least they could potentially see it as an attempt to help versus if I was just me and didn’t really focus on anybody else could just be seen as very selfish or just, you know, recognize those who don’t yet have the recognition, find those up and comers, be the ones, and this is the beauty of, of like, if you are not at the top of your industry, this is how you get to the top by banding together with others and being the one to look up. Because the others aren’t going to do that, especially the, the ones that are higher up being the one to recognize who is out there, get to know them, take them out to coffee, meet them at events.

Befriend them, support them, and they’re going to be blown away that a larger creator or somebody out of nowhere like you is making time for them. And guess what? They’re going to go out of their way to make time for you. So thank you for making time for this. I appreciate you. And I look forward to serving you in the next episode.

You won’t want to miss it. So make sure you hit subscribe. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!