How do we stay motivated and get through all of the failures that happen especially when it comes to posting on Steem?
In the seven years of my business online, I've been through a ridiculous number of things going wrong. I just got my Facebook Ads account disabled last week after $120,000 of Ads spent. When I upload new songs on YouTube, I'm losing 50+ subscribers every time.
After Dislikes, Criticism, and Disappointment, How Do We Stay Motivated to Keep Creating?
Check this last song out that I uploaded, there is minus 58 subscribers within a week or so of uploading.
This new song, 4 likes and 13 dislikes.
You see, when we put ourselves out there, we likely will get back a whole lot of negative feedback.
How do we stay motivated when we encounter the two worst things?
The two worst things are, first, we expect all these people to get excited, watch and love what we do. We put our live stream out, we put ourselves vulnerable, we hype ourselves up, and then no one or hardly anyone watches it. Or we do our whole live stream and there are zero people the whole time or there's one.
I did an event once where I advertised the event, I planned the whole event, I rented a conference room at this office, and not one person showed up.
Not one person showed up!
So, I did a completely different topic.
I did the same thing again and no one showed up for it.
Not one person showed up for it!
You know how many failures like that I've had working online?
You might look at a video like this and see 4 likes, 13 dislikes. You look at a video like this other one where I lost 58 subscribers.
When you start out, it takes a while to get 58 subscribers.
I lost 58 in one video!
What keeps me motivated is to remember, why am I doing this?
Am I doing it so people will like me?
I think what helps me a lot is I look at the number of likes. At least people are watching. At least people are listening to this song enough to go through and say, “This sucks. This sucks.”
When people are on my live stream, come along and say, "Oh, nice live stream, Jerry. 200,000 subscribers and 3 viewers."
At least someone took the time to notice.
Any attention, we might say, is good attention although a lot of us are very sensitive. We're trying to record videos and put ourselves out there and sell courses, any attention is helpful for growing our business.
Even sometimes you might say, "Well, how is losing 58 subscribers on one video, how is that helpful?"
It helps me to have a more focused audience.
I can afford to lose a lot of subscribers because a lot of the things I've done have got subscribers who aren't really interested in following me for whatever I create.
They're only interested in very specific things and in that case, it's good to help those people not see my videos.
Another one I was really excited about, this new live music station and again we can see the dislikes.
I've got 18 likes and 39 dislikes on it.
This was a live stream. I was really excited about this live stream and I was just filled with the wave of sadness and disappointment that day, and every one of these opportunities is a really good opportunity to adjust our strategy.
After this, what you might call disappointment, I adjusted my strategy. I got motivated to start filming, what this video is a part of, the "Complete Live Streaming Course" I'm doing.
I got motivated to start thinking,"Okay, what can I do to help other people? What can I do to buy myself time?"
"As I'm making this live music station it's obvious this is not going to be an overnight thing. I'm not going to just live stream and everyone's going to come love my music and watch it overnight."
"What can I help people with today? What is the most good I can do?"
After a day of sadness because I was so excited about doing this live stream, and very few people were watching it most of the time, just 1, 2 or 3 people, I got motivated to say, "What I'm going to do is start scheduling live streams because I just throw these live streams up and most of all the live stream I have done, I just threw them up with no warning."
I wouldn't do very well with that following someone.
If someone I'm following doesn't let me know when they'll be live there's very little chance I'll show up, and for this live stream, I was not available to answer questions or talk to people.
I realized people want to interact with me and that motivated me to set up a live streaming schedule, which I will talk about more on other videos in this course.
You see, when we get critical feedback, when we get a disappointing performance, like you might think depending on where you are at, that 700 views, 18 likes and a few comments, people on the live stream, is great.
All of us are in relative positions.
For me, this was a very disappointing live stream session with my music because my expectations were too high. If you are expecting one or two people to watch your live stream and nobody watches, that's the same level of disappointment.
It also helps to set lower expectations, to say that however many people watch is fine, and to respect that I have a duty to create what is most needed. We can see it's not urgent that I make this live music station. What I learned out of making that is what people following me really would like is a look at how I do all the live streaming and how I get all this done.
That's what motivated me to start the "Complete Live Streaming Course" that this video is a part of.
That failure you might say helped to inspire the next thing and I'm guessing this live streaming course, and again with expectations, I think this live streaming course has the ability to be one of my bestsellers ever.
Why?
Because it's a very in-demand skill and I've got a very unique experience that few people in the world are capable of making a course on, and out of the people capable of it, few will take the time to go through and do everything I'm doing in this course, to show how all these live streaming things I use work together, how to do it on so many different platforms, all the equipment I use, etcetera.
So, you see, it's the relationship among all those successes and failures that builds what we think of as success.
Do you think some of the musicians that you might love who are rock stars today, started out making things that everyone was just putting their hands in the air and cheering about?
"Men, like yeah! That's amazing."
The fact is almost all of us start out at a pretty low level.
Look at a baby.
My daughter is two and a half years old. When she came out she could barely do anything except cry. Apparently, that is a built-in skill.
Other than cry and complain most of us have very few abilities that we can simply do without practice, without starting off awkwardly, without failing.
I'm grateful that someone on DLive who was watching my video, messaged me today saying, “I appreciate your courage to just do what you love without having it conditioned on what people think of it or how people react immediately to it."
I've noticed that some of the songs I've just discovered and listened to, were recorded 30, 40, 50 or 60 years ago. I just realized a little while ago that Bob Dylan was the original artist of "All Along the Watchtower." Up until this point, I thought it was Jimi Hendrix and I didn't even hear "All Along the Watchtower" that often until I started watching Battlestar Galactica.
You can see that these things took a long time to transpire. My lesson that I've been repeatedly having the chance to learn is patience.
It gets really easy with this technology to get impatient today, to look at a music video I just released an hour and a half ago, that a hundred people have already watched, and feel like I've already failed within an hour and a half.
When live streaming the patience element is horrible because we go live and five minutes after we're live no one has watched, or hardly anyone, and all of a sudden we're like, "Where is everyone? What's going on? Why am I failing?"
That's why I'm planning and intending to put this video up in the very front of the course. Staying motivated, the mindset, is one of the most critical things because live streaming will trigger unbelievable amounts of impatience, and live streaming is one of those things that sets up a whole lot of failures right out in front of people.
It's worth doing because all these things I've done that have gone wrong, all these things that have been challenging, all these videos I made that people have hated — I have a video that something like 200 people disliked and like five people liked.
Some of my first videos on YouTube were horrible and got almost only dislikes. Now, that helps me to change my strategy a little bit. When people are consistently providing negative feedback that's often a good opportunity to learn and grow.
Sometimes when we're learning and growing we may get almost all negative feedback. That's why it's really important to have friends and family that we are connected with who help us.
I'm not able to do this all on my own motivation and will power. I am grateful for the messages from friends, family and followers. All those messages help me stick with it.
I saw someone commented on my live stream and said, “Jerry, please keep doing this. I realize not everyone likes it, but I love this. Please keep doing these. Please don't stop ever doing these.”
That feedback is just amazing, and yet my friends did the same kind of thing from the very beginning. My friends watched my YouTube videos and thought they were funny, even though almost everyone else that found them who wasn't my friend hated them.
When I first started doing live streams the quality was very poor. On this last live stream, even after doing hundreds of live streams, the quality still didn't end up very good because I tried something new.
What I hope you can see is that we are fundamentally at the same point. I don't want you to look at where I'm at and think that somehow I've gotten somewhere that you need to get to.
You're at the exact same point.
We're here together.
Every single time I go live, I face the messy ugly failure, and today it's just if someone is brand new to live streaming versus me, the failures just look a little different.
It's kind of nice if you’re new to streaming or putting a video up and you just butcher it, and no one watched it, "Hey, no big deal."
I put something up today and I butcher it, a lot of people take the time to let me know, "Jerry, this really sucks. Jerry, you are a horrible person."
People take time to flag stuff and send nasty messages.
In other words, the more people we get watching us, the more people we get following us, the more every failure is likely to hurt, the more every failure is liable to make us look dumb, the more we have to lose, when we think of it based on how people are thinking of us.
I'm grateful today it helps me to do this that I don't condition what I do based on what people think of it. I do it because I love to do it. I do it because I find these kinds of things helpful and I do it out of making a world I would like to come back to anywhere, where I wouldn't necessarily remember anything this particular body did, but I'd like to benefit from its work and its service.
I'm grateful for all the feedback today I get, even the dislikes, even the people who say, "This was bad."
"Okay. I'll try something new."
I just tried something new in my music videos.
We can see literally two more dislikes while filming this in 10 minutes.
Today, I tried something new because I realized, "Okay, this background I'm on is kind of boring."
So, I tried a new background. I put a stock video of the earth rotating. I'll try that new background and see what the feedback on that is.
Every failure, every demotivational thing, helps motivate and inspire flexibility and change.
Ultimately when we look at things and say, "Wow, that's really well," it's usually the result of a dance that's been done so many times that finally, almost by dumb luck, everything just lines up perfectly.
I can very clearly picture having a hit music video one day that goes viral, that has a ridiculous amount of views, or I can picture my live stream with thousands of people watching, and then people coming in and saying, "Wow, that's amazing. You are so successful."
You see, the key to that is being willing to do it wrong a whole lot of times first, being willing to fail-fail, and even when things go well, realizing you still need to keep changing. I've had courses making tons of money before, and guess what?
Other people make new courses.
The demand in the market shifts.
I get banned from Udemy.
Things are always changing and our feedback encourages us to stay flexible. When we are demotivated by the things that happen to us it's a test of faith.
Are we here as a means to an end or are we here because we love being here?
I'm here because I love being here today. When videos get disappointing responses it's a test of faith, and again, I'm here because I want to be here, because I choose to be here, because I love being here.
I'm not a prisoner here compulsively putting YouTube videos out trying to make everyone happy. I'm essentially doing my job, a duty to give back to others and help others to have the same opportunities I have today, which I love and I'm grateful for.
Thank you very much for experiencing this video which is a part of the "Complete Live Streaming Course" showing you how to go from beginner to world-class live streamer, that I'm filming on my website at the University of Jerry Banfield.
I love you.
You're awesome.
Thank you for making it all the way to the end of this and even if I never see any feedback specifically, I appreciate our time together today.
Final words
Thank you for reading this post, which was originally filmed as the video here and on YouTube below.
If you found this post helpful on Steem, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj
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