Time Machine Tweets CLIP SHOW

And I've been able to meet all these interesting people, find a creative outlet for myself, and also find all these incredible opportunities that have the potential to not so far ahead, provide a whole living for me. Imagine if I had started back when I was 18, I would be freaking miserable. If you're thinking of doing something just start. And I wish that we just started to use letter earlier. I wished I started my entrepreneurial journey earlier.

Everything that I'm doing now, I wish I started earlier. If I could write a tweet pet to my old self I'd of like, just quit and take the shot. You're 23 years old. And honestly, what's the worst that can happen. You have to go get another job. And I've done that before. I've quit and tried to do something. When I was working with my father and it didn't work out to the level that we both needed it to.

And I got back and got a job and I'm working with my dad still, if you're 23 years old, 24 years old, and you don't have any responsibility, as you're thinking about taking a shot, like take a shot. I wish I would have done that. Start sooner. Don't wait. And I should have been doing a B2B sales community 10 years ago, and I should have written a book 10 years ago. Start with what you know, and with what you have. Could you explain that a bit more?

A lot of people, or at least for myself, I went to buy an online course because I didn't know what I didn't know almost. And I got a lot of imposter syndrome because I was teaching something to teach other people that I didn't really have any experience on. So I didn't realize that back then. I only knew about traveling. So I could just start talking about traveling and then. Grew more as a content creator, then I would talk about how to create content.

That's my advice to someone is whatever journey or situation you are in right now, there is somebody out there who is one step behind you. So whether you only have a phone, the internet, which is what you need in order to spread your message, you have enough, like what, you know right now is good enough. So that's what I mean. That would start with what you know, with what you have. Back to my store. It was ends March actually, because the March cohort starts in April.

So that was actually the first day that I made Twitter just for shift 30. So I would have told myself, just discover more about yourself, which is actually what I was doing. Like I was discovering more about myself. So I would tweet to myself, discover your true colors, just that, and everything else will come. You know who you are and don't ignore.

When I was working for a radio station and I was a radio presenter for a couple of years, I worked in the creative department for radio station, basically writing radio ads. I think then I would tweet that person and I'd say, don't be so damn self-important because I think that there's a certain amount of time when you need desperately to believe in yourself.

And when you're believing in yourself, Then you start being a little bit too arrogant, and I think that's a regret, but in terms of starting pod views four years ago, now, I think I would probably tell myself patience is a good thing and make sure that you focus on the things that matter along the lines of the mental health conversation. I guess it would be something along the lines of, yeah, just take it easy.

But I think, I don't know if it would have been good advice because I wouldn't be here today if I wouldn't have gone through the shit. Secondly, I don't think I would've listened to it, sweetie. If I didn't listen to my mom, even one mental model that I really like is the concept of tension and release, which is I see it everywhere. So it's like in, in computer science is like the zero or one states. It's either on premise.

I think like mental states, it's either you're focused or wandering in muscles. It's like after you have your muscle flexed or it's relaxed and understanding this concept a little bit earlier, I think could have improved some of the aspects. So even. Health aspects around. I know that I have to go hard, but if I do, then at least I need to relax a little bit more. And I guess that would have been the tweets as to when maybe 10 years ago.

Anything before that my mental capacity wouldn't have been there to even consider it. You are intrinsically worthy. I think that's it. I could add some other things, but essentially it's, there's that sense that the real estate that you stand on the planet and that your tree is not having an existential dilemma about that. There being a piece of shit Oak, it just funnels life energy and does its own thing. Its full expression of oakiness and we all have that.

And so I think that sense of the intrinsic worthiness is what I mean by that. And when I say we're not broken, that's also what I mean, like that fractal within us, that plugged in to the life force that animates the universe is complete. It is not broken and it is worthy by definition. Our existence validates us. Ah, there you go. That's what our very existence validates it. So since that you are intrinsically worthy and our very existence validated.

I think you could fit both of those in a single tweet because we exist. We are intrinsically worthy of our existence. There you go. That's the sentence filter for the positivity follow, who is bringing positive engagement to your life and just get rid of the noise block and mute what isn't benefiting. Probably it would be, I'd be re tweeting bill gates, his tweet, so that I could see that I asked that guy question and he answered it in a very, I think, compelling way.

And that would teach me a couple of things I didn't understand for years, how important that tweet was. I was very wrapped up in my own ego and thinking, oh man, bill gates responded to my tweet, bill gates. I didn't stop to think. Provocative and important his message was. So those would be the two things. Hey, it's pretty cool. It'd be like, oh, you can reach anyone. If you have something interesting to say, you can reach anyone in the world.

And then the other part of that big learning would be an example of LA mucho. Like my time is worth a lot and I'd want to make sure that throughout my life I'd respected that. And in some cases I haven't, and I wish for that time. Make a lot of friends create a lot and create a lot of content. And then I would say, be patient and learn to enjoy the process. I think that was really the three things.

I think a lot of people, they do it alone or they think they just have to bootstrapping means there. They just have to go in a hole and just start building stuff. When in reality, I think that a lot of your success comes from who, you know, but also who knows you again, this whole practice of borrowing other people's audience. A lot of that comes through relationships and networking and who can make an intro for you.

And so I think friends and just allies are super, super important on that second bit around just create a lot. But I think I did a good job of my reps and sets in with like products and projects, but not on the like content production side of things of what am I learning? Who am I, what do I know? What's my domain kind of knowledge and expertise. And the content creation part is really what helps you to build an audience, to get an unfair advantage around again, who knows you, right?

And, and then once you have an audience, then you can figure out what to sell them or what to build for them, how to build a business around a group of people that you love and you want to serve, but it's always a grind. And another thing happens on time. Everything takes longer than you think. And so learning to enjoy the process, I think is a big part of it. Just to give yourself some longevity and stay sane along the way. Cause it's not. And so do you want to go back and rephrase your tweet?

Now say three steps to success. And four years make as many friends as you can share everything and build a habit of doing the things that you love. There you go. If you're a creator, you're either creating for yourself and you have to let go of the expectation. You're creating for an audience. And you're like very aware that you're playing that game or you're finding a blend of both. And it's been a very recent realization for me.

And so I would love to send that back to 19 year old, a socially inept and emotionally challenged Cole. But at the same time, I don't think he would have been able to hear it. And that's the irony of those types of questions. I think I could go back and give them all the answers, but sometimes that's the whole point of the journey is that's how you learn. Don't worry about niche, just start publishing.

And I'm still there where I'm still a little bit hesitant to proclaim a niche or focus on a niche, but I wish I would have started writing and publishing on whether it's on sub stack or elsewhere. So it would have been more about just start writing, getting it online in a catalog library type format. And that'll help you find your way a lot faster than just thinking about it, because the more we think about things. Get paralyzed by our thoughts and ideas.

And I think if we just start writing stuff and getting that feedback on them, whether it's our own perspective of feedback or other people's feedback, that's going to get you so much farther, so much faster. So my tweet would be, don't worry about niche. Just start playing. Building on top of a platform is, is a really great way to launch and get traction as long as you have a long-term plan for becoming the main dish or the main thing.

Because at some point, as I found out the hard way with medium, they can pull your, pull it out from under you and all of a sudden you're in a bad. When you are consuming content. If I'm reading something for three hours and I'm not taking down notes, it's basically like Netflix for me, I'm just forgetting it. Your mind is a very unreliable thing to rely on for all the information.

And so you really need to take notes and the moment you take, the better you get at writing in a nutshell, it would be like when you do consume content, note it down. My start would probably be when I was in college and I started posting on LinkedIn and my advice would be to myself to start on Twitter. Instead. I think if I had started on Twitter back then instead of LinkedIn, let's take an extra three, four years headstart. The path would have been huge.

LinkedIn is great, but it's, you have to be careful like who your audience is and how durable it is. Yeah. My advice would have just been to start on Twitter instead of like, I would try to tweet back to me the day I joined Twitter, which is like somewhere in 2009. And I was just really tell myself to try providing value in every single interaction, like trying to help people and empower people every single time you start typing something because adding value to interact.

Is generating this whole flywheel effect. People are interested in you because you give them something meaningful that they didn't think of before they look at you. They start following you. They start being interested in what you're doing, and this is the whole building public thing in a way, because people start rooting for you. They want to see you succeed. So they will help you case in point is the product launch later today.

And even the product hunt launch ended a year ago, which is on the, I think the 30th of June last year in 2020. When I went to Sierra to sold, I had 4,000, some followers back then on Twitter, which is already substantial. And they helped me get to, I think it was number two product of today because I had been giving them stuff value every single time I talked to them.

And I only understood that in 2019, at the end of the year, when I started really using Twitter, not just as a place to lurk on, but also a place to engage and interact with. So that would be my message. I would probably give it an a, in a more succinct way than saying, provide value every time you engage with somebody, but that would be the most tweetable. So I guess that would be, yeah.

I think that I would probably send the tweet back to when I started my influencer marketing agency, that was 2015. And I would tweet to myself to focus on helping creators directly rather than indirectly. What I mean by that is that when I started the agency, I was really excited to bring brand sponsorship opportunities to creators. And, and that was, again, that's like an indirect way of helping them with money. But what I learned was that's really not enough.

It doesn't get at the root of the issues that they experienced in their businesses as creators. And if they don't address those one little brand deal, isn't going to help them turn their business. Into something sustainable and scalable. Could you dig in on that? Yeah. So again, yeah, if you don't have a comprehensive strategy, especially if brand partnerships is a big part of your business.

In my experience, what happens with most creators is they work with a brand and then they literally never talk to them. Like they fire themselves from their nine to five job every single month. And it's a big part of what I teach is a lot of creators have never had a real job before, so they don't understand what professional business rules. So, like, they don't understand how to operate within those.

They don't know how to build relationships so that they can turn those from this, these one-off deals into a protracted partnership. And so if you don't have that mindset and you go in and you get a brand deal, what's that saying? Where if you give a man a fish or you teach them to fish, right? It's, it's the same type of idea, which is, I want to be in the business. My north star is like helping teach creators to like how to think about this much more holistically.

Yes. Brand partnerships are great, but how can you turn that one deal into low gear, long ambassadorship or year long partner? For all of your brand partners that you're working with and you turn this into an actual career where you have recurring income and you don't have anxiety about how you're gonna pay your bills next month.

That's really the mindset that you need to have, especially, or a social media creator, because you can make so much money and just have a much more peaceful existence and be able to concentrate on what you truly love, which is creating content rather than hustling to find your next deal.

I joined Twitter back in March, 2008, it was all the rage at that point because of south by Southwest interactive that year, and everybody was talking about it and it was like, what's this, let me go check it out. And we didn't know what to do with it. Back then everybody was like, okay, 140 characters. And people are just like, Here's what I had for lunch. That was like the big joke posts. Would you add for launch? Cause we didn't know what to do with it.

So it took a while before we started figuring out how valuable this tool really was. But I would probably send a tweet to myself when I first started saying just add value and just have fun. I would tweet back to undelete who was at the time, I think unhealthily invested in the commercial viability and the commercial potential of podcasting. I would say to him be way how you frame impact, because this doesn't matter just because.

Of your sense that this is going to take over the world and make you irrelevant, broadcasting talent and stuff, bathing off the glory of showing people you pick the right wave, just serve people, concentrate on that. It'll be good. It'll work out. So I would say the way how you frame it impacts focus on serving people and good things, right. I think I would emphasize the value of working in public, creating and public more often.

And I think that's something that I've always tended not to be as public about the work I'm doing now. I'm a little bit more so than I used to be, but I've always tended to be more focused on the particular students I'm working with or particular colleagues I'm working with. And I'll use Twitter a little bit. Generally. I'm not out there publishing a lot or, and I think that's something that I could have done more of all along.

So writing more medium posts that aren't a hundred percent perfect, or that aren't a hundred percent of my vision of something starting newsletter sooner, doing more audio work sooner and more publicly, even if it's not a hundred percent, um, high quality perfect material, I think just to tie a typo. The tweet, I would be lowers the standards. I think people have very high standards for themselves.

If they're ambitious people, if they're accomplished people and sometimes that prevents you from really doing your best work, because you don't put your work out there and you continually wait until it's better, right. You continually plan for more time or effort this or that thing to be ready. And then you just don't do as much.

I don't do as much in public and putting stuff out there in public is where it really has a chance to resonate with other people and get feedback and improve and so forth. And so I think that would be the, the tweet would be lower your standards because that will allow you to, to be imperfect in public. And that's helpful. It's important to be there's something in between the sloppiness and perfection. That's a better aspiration. Send myself a tweet back.

It would be 2011 when I first moved to the U S from India. And I was so naive. I was 21 year old. And I think I spent a lot of time. I utilizing some of these legends in Silicon valley or tech in general. Cause I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always wanted to be a tech founder, but I spent so much time, maybe 2011 to all the way maybe even 20 16, 5, 6 years idolizing them and trying to look like them on the surface. Forgetting that what I was born with was enough.

The point is not trying to be the next Steve jobs. The point is being the first KP. And for that to happen, you need to basically stand up and act. Should we be proud of your story, your flaws, the history, your mistakes, and your limitations, and put them aside and say, okay, here's all the stuff that I can't use them in my future, but here's the stuff that I can absolutely use, which is your skills. All of us have been given some random facts. Skills.

Now that skills combined with your curiosity as a torch will take you into the future forever. If you are billing in public, the one piece of tweet that I would have given myself is that KP shut the fuck up and build in public. And, and you're doing all this shit privately. Cause I did so many things, not on the internet. Please send me a tweet from James clear. I hope quotes like Albert Einstein's calling out components just as the eighth wonder. And I was like, what? At the time?

But now I fully understand that like everything that you do come pop, if you don't do things that compound over time, you are royally screwed. It doesn't matter if you got better at a skill, but if you do things that compound, so building public or putting out content, podcasts, whatever, all of this actually compounds, if you have intentions. So to get that down to 280 characters for me, I'll say this. Unique and valuable stop trying to be someone else be authentic and building public.

Yes. So I would send it back to 2012 ish. When I really started doing digital internet work, I started doing freelancing and then you tried to build some websites on the side and I would send something that says finish what you start and yeah. Put enough effort into it to see it through to the end, because I think I wasted a whole lot of time starting things and not finishing them or starting finishing, and then not putting any effort into growing because my expectations were wrong.

I needed to manage my expectations. Yeah. Traction. Doesn't just come out of nowhere. Like you have to put a lot of effort into building traction and things compound over time. And I didn't understand that back then. And I think I wasted a lot of time, not building things out would compound over time and rather building abandoning building again, abandoning again. And I think if I had started in 2012, I would have been so much further along today and I'm starting today.

What I wish I would have started in 2012. Reminded myself to stick with it and finish things out and put enough effort into it, to see the traction come in, instead of just giving up so easily be consistent. And I know it's nothing original, but it is really the key. I've written newsletters for three years, every single week. And it's something I do really well now. And it's not something that is a burden on me because I love doing it.

I got a really big on Tik TOK because I was consistent with my content for the first four months. Two videos a day. And then I scale up to six videos a day, and then I scaled down to one video a day, but really just staying consistent is the hardest part of it because it's not hard to grow an audience. It doesn't mean that it's easy, but it's quite simple. The steps are really simple, but you just have to do them every single day. I think that's the biggest thing.

Yeah. I think people really underestimate the value of doing the same thing enough times that it starts to make a dent. And then the other thing probably that I forgot to mention was know your outcome, because if you're just shooting for vantage of metric, you can get 300,000 followers because one of your videos goes viral and it gets 20 million views and you get thrown a thousand photos of the process.

But if you don't know what your outcome is, you're just going to have to grant a thousand folders. They will not have converted. You won't really be able to talk to them because you don't know how to reach them with the algorithm. And maybe you want to convert some of them into YouTube. Maybe you want to convert them to Instagram, to a product, really know your outcome and be deliberate in choosing a platform or a lifestyle for that matter.

That actually suits what it is you're trying to achieve because when you live other people's dreams or when you say, oh, he's got 3000 followers, I want to bet too. You have to know why you're here. Since coming back on Twitter on March 6th of this year, I started my account. I think in 2009, I had a hundred followers and people from way before when I was in Ottawa and I had no reason to be on Twitter, no reason to build an audience, no reason to engage.

And also, I thought that Twitter was a place where people come to argue where you only come. If you have like super strong political opinions and you really want to argue with them about them in public, which I wasn't interested in. So I didn't engage, I didn't build an audience or anything. So I would send a tweet back to when I started. And I would say just put out something every day. Maybe back when I was making the app in the first place, which was my first year of university, I was 19.

I was turning 20 that year aim higher. But other than that, keep doing the same thing. I wish I would have no, that's, that's a pretty good answer. I mean, aim higher, but keep doing the same thing. I feel like that's pretty good advice. Keep doing the same thing as having the same input because aiming higher is going to drag that input a bit higher as well. I'm a big stoicism believer.

And I think at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey, I really did not focus on the things that I can control. Like in every situation there's things that you can control and there's things that you can't and being acutely aware of the things that are out of your control is very liberating. Oh yeah. I get flack from people all the time for not being. Emotional about something that I have zero ability to affect. Yeah, absolutely.

And no, when I think about the darkest moments that I've had in, in startup and my startup career, it's been times that I am so emotionally and mentally and physically up. In whatever this outcome is or whatever this thing is, that's actually entirely out of my control. So if I were to send a tweet back into myself back in the day, and I'm still trying to remind myself this on a daily basis, pretty much is focused on the things you can control, acknowledge and accept the things you.

That's all awesome. That's the startup life. You've got to accept it. You're going to get a lot of shit thrown at you throughout the journey. And you just got to accept that some of it is not your problem and not your burden to bear. Yeah. I think that's a lesson. Many founders learn a little too late. Yeah. I tend to agree. And I think in a lot of ways, yeah. It's so applicable outside of like outside of entrepreneurship, we all just experienced the global pandemic.

How much of this is in our control? And are you going to be stuck at home upset wallowing because we can't go to the store or whatever, or of course not, there's more to life than things that you can't control. There's a whole section of things that you can't worry about. Those things. It's hard. Nobody's saying this is easy, but it's gotta be a conscious choice and we're conscious beings. We have to accept that and choose.

Keep doing what God told you to do last until he tells you what to do next. And I think that should be what I would tell myself at the beginning of any journey. I would tell anyone if again, of any journey, just keep doing what God told you to do last until he tells you what to do. Next, only focus on what you can.

And let God handle the rest because I've noticed that on-site try to control things that I can't, my mind just goes overdrive and I start overthinking and other bad things started setting in. And now I just want to focus on the thing that I know I have full control over, which for example is my physical wellbeing, my work ethic and my mindset.

Let the other things be not try to force any outcome of any event, but make sure that I give at least a hundred percent of my effort, at least a hundred percent. I like that attitude. If you could send a tweet back to your start, what would it be? Oh, damn, that's too hard. I'm going to go back to, ah, it's so hard. I mean the past not taken, it's just an unknown. I think this lines up from everything I've learned about you is that you don't have any regrets.

You're here living in the present and you're doing the things you want to do. You're building the things you want to build, and you're not letting anything else stop. You I'm really stubborn. I don't know that I would've liked keep it my own wisdom. Even now if my 42 year old self told me some advice, I'd probably be like, yeah, well thank you. But I'm going to like kindly disregard that for now and go do my own. Stick to the vision, but focused on how you feel.

That would be the thing, because the, how is traveling, don't be too aggressive because sometimes I'm so aggressive. When I chase something that I do step on some toes unintentionally. I think that's a cost, but the return of being aggressive is a lot higher. So I would tell them. You will step on some toes as you get aggressive in marketing, but it will give you an edge in life.

Being aggressive is not necessary for success, but we'll give you an edge for life because the person that puts their hand up, for example, listening to this on a podcast, they're like, holy crap, Mario does this business. I could maybe work with them, but they're too shy to actually pick up the phone and message me on Twitter, or send me an email saying, Hey, maybe we could work together and follow up and follow up. There's stories of people that have done this, that ended up working.

And you might bother me, but that's fine. It's a worthwhile risk in terms of potentially getting me as your business partner, et cetera. So my tweet would be, you will step on some toes along the way, but as long as it's unintentional keeps stepping on those toes, just keep going. You're doing it. Because as much as I want to give specific direction, don't trust this person.

Yeah. But also what if life unfolded how it was supposed to, and even if I'm not happy, what if this is just the middle of the story and it's supposed to unfold a certain way? Why would I go in and try to redirect what I would say is keep going, you're doing it. Can we tell my 25 year old self, just keep going.

The only thing that matters in this as whether or not you've quit don't and I do believe that because I do think that's genuinely the only correlation that I've found between anybody who's found any, as they define success for themselves. That is the only thing that everybody has in common is that they just have not given up. Yeah. I think that's one thing that can never be discounted, especially.

Where your returns really do compound is that if you don't give up for long enough, you can eventually get traction a hundred percent and you see it in every single platform, whether it's blog newsletter, people on YouTube, every single person that has whether they have ultra success or they just get to make a living doing something they love, which is way more than enough. Trust me every single one of them, but that's. All right. I don't think I've told this story publicly. Before.

I mentioned that before I came here, I worked at a company called top tail, and that was the first job that I ever really had outside of college stuff. So I ran my own web development company for, I don't know, half a decade or so. So I did that for a long time. Then my first job was building community at this hyper-growth startup with super smart people. This was back when community was just getting stuck. My job was to fly around the country and host happy hours.

And it was a little bit more complicated than that, but like I was getting away with murder. In fact that they were paying me actual money to basically host events with really cool people. That was my whole life for years. And at some point my grandfather passed away and I was there when it happened. And it was one of those moments where you're just reminded of how short life is. You can't live with that awareness every day you'd go crazy. But every once in awhile, it sinks in.

I remember I wanted to be a writer. I didn't want to be an event host and I was just getting really good at events. So I made the decision to leave and that was. Really hard because I was walking away from the best money I've ever earned with no clear path to doing this thing that I wanted to do, and no idea of how I was going to be pulled off. I just knew that I had to do it. And if I didn't do it, then it would just never, I never tried.

So that was a big turning point for me, that was two years ago. And if I was to tweet back to that person, I would just say it works out. I'm now working with our way cool company, some of the coolest people ever. Doing some of the coolest work. Like I can't believe this is a real job. So that would be, it works out. And for anybody here, who's creating something right now.

There's not always a clear path from where you are to where you want to be, but it can still work out in ways that you'd never predicted. And the only way to figure it out is to give a shot. So that would be. I would send a tweet probably to myself around like 20 years old. Just tell myself to calm down the whole messages. It's going to be fine. Calm down. Would you mind digging into the bit what was going on then? How would you not calm? Gassy gets back to that big goals that you alluded to.

Yeah, I think my early twenties was filled with a lot of angst as I think it is for a lot of people. There's this pressure of time. You feel like throughout the next decade, you need to do all the things, whatever all of the things are, and you need to focus on the external metrics of success. I think also at that time, like I was going through a fair amount of stuff, personally, it was very difficult and I was like being cracked open in terms of what the heck is life.

And so I would just say, it's going to be all right. Just keep moving. Day by day, I put one foot in front of the other lay one brick down today. Just keep going and follow that kind of inner compass of what you enjoy doing and stop telling yourself these stories about how you need to be XYZ. Like we talked about the very beginning of this conversation. I think a lot of times the vision of what we think we should be doing, actually screws us up from doing the thing that we want to be doing.

Um, and the thing that will be most successful and happy. Mental health is critically important. And I have struggled in the past with depression and with anxiety and with the whole FOMO thing. And does it make me not a real founder or does it make me unfundable all this kind of stuff, especially coming from the music world where that stuff is romanticized and it's not romantic, it's just painful. And it took a long time for me to realize reaching out for help.

Talking to people and reaching out for support and going at your own speed. These are basic concepts in a way, but they're very hard. And if I could tell myself it will be fine. There is life after failure, focus on mental health relationships, work out well in the end. And if it's not working out right now, it means it's not the end yet.