#164 Ross Harkness – The Path to Self-Mastery

On episode #164 of Kickoff Sessions, I sit down with Ross Harkness as we explore the path to self-mastery. Ross, a peak performance and personal branding master, helps 250K+ people chase their potential through mastery and peak performance. As the Founder of BrandBldr he assists 6, 7, & 8-figure entrepreneurs in establishing authority and monetising their personal brands.

In this podcast we dissect the three components of self-mastery - the mastery of our mind, our actions, and our environment - and how they work in synergy to help us realise our dreams. We also discuss how discipline, hard work, and a relentless spirit can transform adversity into advantage as Ross shares his journey, touching on how he harnessed these traits to build an authentic online presence.

If you're ready to take charge of your destiny, transcend limitations, and soar to new heights, this podcast is tailor-made for you.

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(00:00) Preview Clip
(00:50) Self Mastery and Unlocking Potential
(07:40) Building Discipline and Overcoming Challenges
(21:03) Finding & Pursuing Your Dreams
(27:41) Goals, Resistance, and Building a Future
(36:27) Motivation and Adjustments in Business
(40:57) Understanding and Building Your Brand
(49:03) Build an Online Presence and Network for Growth
(57:28) Focus vs Enjoyment in Business
(1:05:57) Psychology's Role in Content Strategy
(1:12:35) Balancing Ethics and Profitability
(1:19:01) Navigating YouTube and Growing an Audience

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Transcript

Ross Harkness: 0:00

You know, if you have an audience that you can drive traffic to the product, you can, but when you're just starting out you can't. So once I realized that wasn't working, I started going on YouTube. You know I was like, well, what can I do? Sort of thing, and basically try dropshipping, try Facebook ads, try copywriting, try email marketing, like you name a business model right, you name it. I likely tried it or the very very least considered trying it.

Ross Harkness: 0:21

I think this is an important thing to realize is that whether you're trying any business model or you're trying to sell a course or whatever, your first one or like, if you're trying to sell a service, either your first go at a particular type of service or your first month or two or outreach into someone on that service, or if you're selling a course, your first one is likely going to be shit. I don't think you'll ever have that level of motivation when you had no money, when you had no clients. It's incredibly easy and it doesn't matter what level of success you have. I don't think it matters whether, like your, alex or Mosey or your somebody else has just had 5K a month, 10k a month, 20k a month, whatever you've had.

Darren Lee: 1:00

Let's kick off. I want to start with a quote from yourself, which I quite enjoy your writing. So your business is a reflection of you. If you want to, if you want your business to succeed, you need to improve yourself and relevant areas. Why is that important to you?

Ross Harkness: 1:15

It's important to me because it's something I realized that was holding me back, because I realized I was bottleneck in my business. So, for example, if you're not getting sales in your business, whether you're selling products, selling services, whatever you're selling, it's likely I say it's likely it's because you're lacking in either your ability to create offers, your ability to market, your ability to sell, like there's a fundamental skill that you're lacking. So if you can improve yourself and build that skill, you're going to be able to fix that problem. So, for example, if you have a sales page and it converts at like, 0.1% on warm traffic, which is really a low conversion rate, you improve your copywriting, or you improve your offer, or you improve both by building the copywriting skill and you increase that conversion rate to 2%, 3%, and then it's a much better result. So any problem you have Instead of blaming outside factors.

Darren Lee: 2:14

I want to dig into the self mastery side. So why do you pursue self mastery?

Ross Harkness: 2:19

I think it's the answer to all your problems. It's also, in my eyes, the only way to reach your true potential. Like because my greatest fear has always been lying on my deathbed. And like looking back and being like I could have been fucking great, but I'm not. I'm lying here. I've you know that there is like you see who you could have been and you're not that person. I always have that fear. I don't know if it'll happen. It might not happen, but I always have that fear. So I want to reach my potential. I want to build something great and, in my eyes, self mastery is the only way you can do that, because self mastery is three things in the way I see it. So it's mastery of your mind, so you remove limiting beliefs that are holding you back. You build empowering beliefs that push you forward. Master of your actions, so you get it done when it needs done, regardless of how you feel. You just get the work done.

Ross Harkness: 3:11

A mastery of your craft, which is basically, I see, your craft. What do you choose to do? As an extension of yourself, because I believe it reflects what you value and what you're interested in. So you need to master your craft so that you can do what you do at an exceptional standard and get the results that you want, that you feel like you deserve for earning them. So when you master all three of them areas, I think it's impossible not to at least catch a glimpse of your potential, because you you've removed the mindsets that are holding you back. Now you have things pushing you forward, so your mind's no longer holding you back. You can do what you need to do. You're no longer productive, productively procrastinating, you're no longer wasting time, you're focusing on the lever, moving tasks. And then you're mastering your craft because you can do whatever it is, whatever skill you're choosing to do, whatever you're choosing to build, you can do that at an exceptional level.

Darren Lee: 4:05

What brought you to that realization?

Ross Harkness: 4:08

Oh man, I don't actually know. I don't think there wasn't a big turning point. Everything for me, everything I've ever done, achieved, realized has always been like a combination of small events. I've not had any big world changing revelations where this thing happened. And I woke up and it was this, it's more just so.

Ross Harkness: 4:32

It initially started a mastery of your craft. That's what I would end up mastering your craft, whatever you choose to do so for, like. For me, my craft is basically writing or content creation. So I was like I need to master that. I need to master that. That's the foundation of everything I do, pretty much. So I got a book it should be back there somewhere mastery by Robert Green and a fantastic book, highly recommended, and I get into mastering your craft. But then I realized you can master other areas and if you combine them, you're sort of going to, Because mastering your craft is like one avenue and if you master your craft you're going to unlock a bit of your potential. But there's other things that are holding you back and I basically deduce them down to craft, obviously, actions and your mind.

Darren Lee: 5:19

I think as well. The fact that you said there about multiple different areas is interesting because you're obviously a healthy dude similar to myself, like you're into fitness, into all that sort of things, because you do those things gives you confidence that you can do other shit. So that was the biggest thing. That kind of held me back was the fact that I had this background in finance and tech and then was in this career where I was capped, so I was making like 100k a year, right, and that was it. So I'd fucking worry. Eight hours a week, six years a week, 100 hours a week. I make 100k a year.

Darren Lee: 5:50

That dug at me really deeply because I couldn't change that factor. The only way to change it was by to go off and do something else, whereas in all other aspects of life writing, podcasting, fitness, training I can exponentially get better and then obviously have incremental improvements. So I've reached that kind of ceiling for myself, but it looks like for you you have had a blank canvas in many regards Because you fucked with loads of shit on the internet, but you're able to build from scratch, which is super unique to be in, especially for the age you are. Yeah.

Ross Harkness: 6:24

Like I initially started building online just because we take it back a few years when I was in high school so between the age of like 12 to probably 16, I always wanted to create content on the internet. Like, no, like when you're 12, when you're 12, you have no interest in making money, right? Money is not a thing to you, right? So I was literally just I was obsessed with creating content. I had like 10 different YouTube channels because every time, like my schoolmates would find out about one, take the piss out of me, I would delete it and just create another one. And I did that for like four or five years, got to 16, had exams and also I stopped all of that there.

Ross Harkness: 7:05

And then, during COVID, I just happened to stumble across. There's this guy actually on Twitter. His name is Chris Johnson and he was posting all these screenshots of, like affiliate sales he was making from people selling his products. I was like holy crap, affiliate marketing, this is what I need to do. So I started a new Twitter account, got on Money Twitter, which is like what that corner of Twitter is called Tried affiliate marketing realized, okay, you can't make any money doing affiliate marketing, especially if you have no audience. You know, if you have an audience that you can drive traffic to the product, you can, but when you're just starting out, you can't.

Ross Harkness: 7:40

So once I realized that wasn't working, I started going on YouTube, you know, and was like what can I, what can I do, sort of thing, and basically tried dropshipping, tried Facebook ads, tried copywriting, tried email marketing, Like you name a business model, right, you name it. I likely tried it or the very very least considered trying it, and I did that for like probably 18 months. But throughout that whole 18 months I was building my audience on Twitter. So I was just building and I'd never even thought of monetizing it. Like didn't even cross my mind. I was like I'm building a business whatever that business is or business model, I'm trying and I'm building this audience. And then one day I just was like holy crap, I have this audience here. Why am I not trying to monetize it?

Darren Lee: 8:25

And then yeah like yeah.

Ross Harkness: 8:27

So I had like that blank slate that you know I'd built up quite a bit of goodwill with my audience from not trying to sell them something for like two years, basically 18 months, and yes, then I went down that there path, monetized my audience, built a few courses. Some of them flopped Like I think this is an important thing to realize is that whether you're trying any business model or you're trying to sell a course or whatever, your first one or like if you're trying to sell a service, either you first go at a particular type of service or your first month or two or outreach into someone on that service, or if you're selling a course, your first one is likely going to be shit, it's likely not going to work, because you know why would it work? You haven't put in the wraps, you haven't built the competency and skill in that area. So the first couple of them sort of field, and then eventually I stumbled onto some stuff that worked.

Darren Lee: 9:19

Man, you didn't stumble, you stuck with it, and that's the difference, right, cause that's when everyone gives up 60 days, 90 days. I saw a sa-ha bloom recently. You know, last year he mentioned something about like 30 for 30, 30 minutes a day for 30 days, and it's how, basically, like I actually developed like any sort of like really difficult habit because of the fact that most people crack and give up. Or it's like when they get the shot at dopamine and then they get the instant drawbacks, hoping like when, negatively, you didn't get to call, you didn't get the meeting, you didn't get the client, you didn't sell your first course. That's when everyone gives up and goes back to other stuff. But you've had that shred of just relentless discipline, right, and that's just evident across like a lot of other aspects of your life. So that feeds into your mindset, almond. So, like, how have you built up that character trait that so many people you know have failed to put together?

Ross Harkness: 10:08

It's a weird one, I do believe a lot of it goes back to the gym. So I started working out when I was. Everybody goes back to the gym yeah, it really does. I tweet about it all the time. But, like, I think the gym is the gateway, or at least the major gateway, to like the self-improvement, self-mastery world. I just like it. Once you start there, you realize because when you start working out you realize the importance of hard work, the leg, gratification, discipline, consistency, all of these traits that are so fundamental to success in any area, any area of your life business relationships, mental strength, anything right, Anything them traits are fundamental.

Ross Harkness: 10:51

So when I started working out at 16, I started competing in Olympic weightlifting, which is like really tiny niche sport where you do a snatch and a clean injure. There are the two lifts you do and I start competing. I was relatively good at it. I won a British weightlifting championship, one of few Northern Irish championships, held a few records. So I was decent and because I was decent I was like really committed to it, right. So it sort of fed into it. Because I was decent, I was committed. But I was decent because I was committed and so I never missed training. I never skipped meals, like the amount of parties, birthdays, things I missed because I had a competition in two weeks and I was thinking about I was cutting weight and I had to get my sleep, I had to get my nutrition, I had to get my training sessions in. So for like five years I just worked out and never skipped a session, never nothing. So I think that level of discipline initially started in the gym, but I feel like there was also a few mindset shifts, realizations I had, but I could never really externalize them or put them into words until I think it was Alex or Mosey said this and I heard him say it maybe like a year ago, and it really clicked on me and like that's what it is. That's why I have been able to, no matter if I fucked up, if I failed, just keep going.

Ross Harkness: 12:12

Is that? This is what hard feels like? See, when he said that in a video, I was like this is what hard feels like and that is. I feel like that is why so many people quit, because you know it gets hard and you know if you ask anybody, they want to achieve a goal, they want to get a sex pack, they want to build a business, whatever it is. If you ask them, is it going to be hard? They'll all say yes, but as soon as it gets hard, they fucking quit. And I think that's because they don't understand that hard means hard. You know, this is what hard feels like and it's like you said most people are going to quit when it gets hard. So if you can just push through, if you can just push through and keep going when it's hard, you're going to separate yourself from the pack massively. I think a lot of that comes down to.

Ross Harkness: 12:58

There's a mentality I've had is just do one more, so like when you feel like quitting, right. So let's bring it back real simple. I'm a big fan of reading. If you want to, if you're reading a book and you feel like quitting, like stopping reading, I don't want to read anymore, just read one more page. Like that is super small, right, You're reading the book, you want to read one more. Like you don't want to read a book, stop reading. No, just read one more. And when you take that like small habit of like, when you're doing it, when you're reading to, you build it up to, you're trying this business, you're trying to build your brand. You're trying to do whatever. You seem to be getting no results. Just go one more day, Just do one more day, See what happens tomorrow, and just repeat that over time with them, to mindset I think is so this is what hard feels like. And just do one more every single day and I think if you have them you'll be fine.

Darren Lee: 13:49

It's fucking sick man, because what you learned there as well from physical sport, is the fact that, let's say, in your cutting weight example, when you're losing a body fat or losing weight, you need to keep going. So if it's 25 minutes you're on the bike and you're 23 minutes, you're hot and sweaty and you feel like shit. You need to get to 25. So then when you're doing your cold outreach, when you promise yourself you're going to do 10 messages a day, there I'll hope you're personalized, which what I do I don't do automated emails at all At eight you're like fuck this, I want to go downstairs and eat. I want to take a break on this. But I actually remembered those thoughts when I'm doing it. I'm like I've done this in the past, especially when I was competing when I was quite young. It was horrific and now funny. You say that.

Darren Lee: 14:31

So when I was dieting when I was quite young, I used to hate it. I used to, you know, 10 months of the year I'd be thinking about it, and then two months of the year I'd hate it. Now I'm doing 20 weeks of dieting and every day is perfect. I have same meals, perfect, wake up, wake up half-way, just start chipping away at it and yeah, it's half seven now, but then we finish being nine a little bit hungry. I'll go to bed and get back up and do it. So what I'm trying to say is that that activity gets easier and easier and easier and easier.

Darren Lee: 15:01

And another aspect of that, too, which I thought was quite interesting is the fact that when I look at your business and I look at your brand and look at your content, it's so polished, right. But I think what you've learned is the fact that it's not just about going to the gym and just going to the gym. When you go into the vortex of like, let's say, fitness, there's performance in the gym, there's nutrition, there's recovery, there's also all the other, like the small nuances, which is like reviewing your numbers, making sure your weight is going the right direction, making sure all these small things, so they all feed into each other. But unless you do the first thing, you're not going to be obviously enticed to fucking measure your body weight right Every single day. But it's like you realize how much spokes there are of the wheel.

Darren Lee: 15:41

Eventually, and in the same, in the business sense, right, I have to make sales, otherwise I don't make money. But at the same time, I need to fulfill clients and at the same time, when you get to the right amount of reviews and I need to put it back to the content and they need to write about it, and then I need to convey the story so you realize how deep you need to go to actually achieve mastery by picking something and just going fucking 100% at it.

Ross Harkness: 16:04

Yeah, but like there's two lines of thoughts here, I think. Once you realize, like, how many spokes are on the wheel, right, once you realize that you sort of think, right, if I can do this one bit, you know that's a bit of, that's a wrap, okay, you do one, you manage one spoke of the wheel, you do a wrap. With that wrap you build combat and see, then you build confidence, right, and you're able to say, right, like you said, it carries over. Okay, if I can dial in my training, because loads of people can do that, loads of people can go to the gym, follow a program, but then their nutrition is shit. So you can use I like to view it as like momentum, especially if it's in a wheel. Right, you can look that as a wheel. First one's training, okay, use the momentum of completing your training to perfectly do your nutrition. Okay, Now you've nailed your nutrition, let's nail your recovery, you know, so you can do all your ice baths, your sauna, that sort of stuff.

Ross Harkness: 17:02

So it's like also one thing I think that is really helpful there is trying to link the pain, the suffering, the challenge to not the pain, the suffering or the challenge, but to the result that it creates. So you know, like, when you're in the gym, most people go on the train right and most people relatively enjoy training. But when you're doing a fucking bicep curl and your biceps on fire, you're not sitting thinking my biceps really sore, you're really thinking, okay, this is getting me the result because it's turning down my muscle fibers and they're going to come back bigger. So, realistically, you are linking the pain, the suffering, the challenge to the result. I think if we can tie that over to anything else. So like, if you're doing cold outreach, you know, and when you're in your if cold email and you have two more to do and you're like, fuck this, instead of thinking, oh fuck, I have to do another outreach, think this could be the one that gets me the client.

Darren Lee: 17:59

You know, you can use that there 100% man, and I think that's great because you look at the feedback from that then. So of course, you've got the shit feedback initially, where it's all negative, negative, and then you'll start breaking through. It's that compound effect where it's just like exponential, right. So it took me two years to get 3,000 subscribers on YouTube. It took me one month to get 30,000. So this is what happens in the end, right? I want to go through some of the aspects of like how you have this individual thinking, right. So I would say that I would think quite independently because of the influences that I've had through my podcast, but I'm also a victim of the world. So, as a result, I'm obviously taking the external influence of other people, because that's how the world works. You think very independently. How did you come to that? I guess? Fucking endpoint.

Ross Harkness: 18:52

I've always been very independent. I've always like, if you picked me up right now and you free me on a fucking deserted island, as long as I have my laptop and an internet connection, I'm going to be fine with it. I'm going to sit there and I'm going to work, I'm going to find a fucking log or a branch to do pull-ups on. I'm going to be fine. I have always been very, very independent my whole life. I think it's because for the first so I'm 22,.

Ross Harkness: 19:21

For the first 10 or 11 years of my life I was an only child and then I had a younger brother born. So, because my younger brother was born at that age, so the first half of my life, only child, very used to just parents being at work, me at home, going to school, coming home till they come home at six o'clock or whatever, and then doing whatever a child does. Then, when my brother was born, because I was at that 10 or 11 years where you can start to look after yourself you can't cook food for yourself, but you can be left alone in the room and you're not going to destroy the place. So I feel like then all the focus went on my brother. So I've always just been very good at being left alone and just then curating, obviously, what I'm watching, what I'm interested in.

Ross Harkness: 20:08

And if we want to go deeper into that, I think as I got older, because I got into the gym, I start consuming gym content. So the likes of Rob Lipset, Mike First, and all the OGs like Kristen Guzman, all the OGs from back in like 2016, 17 or whatever, start consuming their sort of content and then I feel like that again, the gym being the gateway to all this, you end up going into other areas of how to improve yourself and then you end up going down, you end up curating what you're consuming and then when you I suppose when you are I'm quite like self-reflective, quite like introspective. So when I'm consuming all that, when I'm trying to chase my goals, I can then sit down and just realize, okay, this is what I'm doing, this is why I'm doing it. It's very, but I've always been independent, always.

Darren Lee: 20:58

That's quite interesting because, as you mentioned before, I'm messaging, we're going back and forth. A big thing that I get from people on my podcast is the fact that they're always like, how did you go do this? Like how did you go build this? Or how do you live like here, and how did you travel there and how did you do that, especially in Ireland. Now, I do not think this is Ireland specific. I think it's. I think it's location specific. Insert any country and it can be quite small minded to some degree, there's an element of the natural part, the traditional part, and then trying to like leave that. So were you ever drawn towards that aspect? And then how would you advise someone to kind of leave that pattern, because they're clearly unhappy, like there's an element of dissatisfaction, so how do you walk away from that?

Ross Harkness: 21:47

Yeah, well, like I was always like that's the thing that made it.

Ross Harkness: 21:50

I was always good at school.

Ross Harkness: 21:51

You know, I was not one of these entrepreneurs who you know, which came the same as to my common, the entrepreneur space, where, like bad grades at exams or don't go to school or whatever, I was always like great at student, really good at school, able to just sit down and like study ours upon ours. So the traditional path was it always sort of was in my head but at the same time, like so the way I would actually phrase it is, it was a path that I was on, but it wasn't the path I wanted to be on and I just needed to find the path that I wanted to be on, which, internally, I sort of knew the whole time was going to be something to do with content creation because, like I said, from the age of 12 to 16, I was just content let's, let's make content. That was before. You know, being a YouTuber was good, like I got the piss taken out of me at school for being the YouTube kid. You know, like to make YouTube videos and all. Don't worry about that.

Darren Lee: 22:44

I was in the college. You know, man, I was a model for a two-boy.

Ross Harkness: 22:49

I remember walking into a classroom of the year above me and everybody I walked in and everybody started shouting out my YouTube tag of the year above me, you know, taking the piss, and I was like, oh crap. So I always knew it was something to do with content creation. So I think if you're trying to get out of that path, I think you need to first off understand and internalize the spotlight effect, which I'm sure you've heard of. It's basically spotlight effect, is right, you think everybody's looking at you. You think everybody's thinking about you. Are you thinking about anybody else? No, you're just thinking about them thinking about you. That is the same of everybody. Everybody is in their own bubble. Everybody is in their own spotlight. Nobody is caring or thinking about anybody else, and if they do, it's never for more than two minutes when you're doing something specific, and then they're like, oh lucky, you did that, and then they forget about it, like nobody really cares. So once you understand that, I think then the second thing is finding clarity. You need to really figure out what you want, because obviously you're on this path. You don't want to be on that path, you know that, but what path do you want to be on, okay.

Ross Harkness: 24:00

So I think I actually go into talk about quite a lot to processes I've created called life tapping and conscious alignment. So life tapping is pretty much where you you be introspective, you sit down, you think, okay, what do I want my dream life to look like? I call it utopia. So what do you want your utopia to look like? What? How do you want to spend your day? What do you want to be doing with your life? So, what career do you want to have? What business do you want to have? Do you train? What are your habits? What are your mindsets Everything about your dream life being meticulously detailed. And people don't want to do this, they don't want to sit down with a fucking journal and write up with this.

Ross Harkness: 24:36

But it is incredibly important to find clarity, because to find the path that you want to be On, you need to understand what you want to do and what you want from your life. Because if you want to be able to work in Bali for the rest of your life, you can't fucking do that. If you're sitting working in Goldman Sachs, you can't do that. So you need to find the path, you know, that fits what you want. So you need to figure out what you want.

Ross Harkness: 25:00

I also like talking about creating your nether, which is the opposite. What do you not want? What is like the worst version of your life? What is the worst version? Once you've decided on them two things that is your life tapping process you then need to consciously align your life. This is pretty much where every decision you make, every action you take, you ask yourself if it aligns with that utopia, that dream life of yours. Okay, so, like, if you're deciding to go to university to do this, if you're deciding to take this new job, ask yourself is that going to help me get to my utopia, to my dream life? If it doesn't, don't fucking do it, because it's a waste of your time. Now, there can be certain nuances there where you're at a certain point, you know where it's like. You have no choice. You have to take the job, that's right, I understand that.

Ross Harkness: 25:49

there you know, but largely you need to keep this in mind, I think, if you want to get on the path.

Darren Lee: 25:55

And that's where it becomes difficult because, let's say, they're the utopia elements. So there's the heaven. I call it the heaven of heaven analogy. I think it came from Jordan Peterson at the right now. So heaven is like how it all works out, and I think you come from like an ordinary family, so do myself, and that's where it's. It's very good for someone like us, because we're not VC fucking backed from bank of dad. Right, you really want to get to heaven, but if you are okay, then you're not. You're like, oh fuck it, who cares? I'm already rich, right, but you really want to push that heaven. The hell is what you can potentially end up in being, and that's where that's what likes to spark under your ass, like what really likes to spark under your ass. However, where most people live is in purgatory, in the middle, and that's where, to some degree, I was right, because I was like how do I do with the internet thing, like as in, like I have a podcast, I have an audience, whatever, whatever. But I was like what do I actually do? And I had that inflection point because it's like okay, do we go off and build this stuff? And at the same time as you, and that I want to.

Darren Lee: 26:51

Who was from? But I got an offer from a company in Dubai for a quarter of a million a year and my girlfriend at the time, like who? Was very supportive. She was like, yeah, like you should take it, like it's fucking great money. You know, like you're going to be like doing something great whatever. And I was like, nah, the reason why is because I will be 60, 80 hours in downtown Dubai in a fucking office at 45 degrees in the summer. I'll have no podcast, I'll have nothing online, I won't have the right content. I'd be like head of some trading platform and I'd literally be working on the weekends and, yeah, be making decent money, whatever. But I'm trying to say that even that's one variable was the money, but all the other stuff would have been swallowed Like genuinely swallowed up at that point and completely gone. And that was a tough realization and I was like close enough to like quarter of a million, probably like 200 here, some shit about a year.

Darren Lee: 27:41

And you know, you know, use of Smith, money, chance, propane fitness. Yes, I do. Yeah, you will fucking love this, right. So I always reference this. He was on my podcast and he was a investment banker doctor and then went on to become an online coach. Whatever he said that when he was investment banking in BlackRock. He said look at your manager, look at your manager's manager and check out a fundamentally happy because you're going to be your manager in four years and your manager's manager in 10 years and if they don't have the lift that you have, then what the fuck you doing it? Because you can make money anywhere, and I was also do even want the money, right, if you're making a half a million a year, but your parents, your family, your kids, your divorce, you don't see your kids anymore. You've lost custody. What the fuck is the point?

Ross Harkness: 28:25

Yeah, completely.

Darren Lee: 28:27

So, and that's what happens, these investment bankers, this is exactly what happens then?

Ross Harkness: 28:32

Yeah, and it's scary, you know, taking that leap, you know whether, like for you not declining that job offer, going all in the podcast and all like it's fucking scary. But I always the book War of Art by Stephen Prasfield I don't know if you've read it but it's a fantastic book that I highly recommend. He talks quite a bit about this thing called resistance and it's a thing really. It's a feeling inside you but it's a thing. It's like he talks about it as like an entity almost. You know there's a thing of resistance. So he uses the example of when you're sitting down he's a writer, so he's an offer. So you know he sits down to write and he faces resistance. He doesn't want to write, he's writer's block, all the rest.

Ross Harkness: 29:18

I do think that resistance goes from the micro tasks of actually sitting down to write, sitting down to record, doing whatever, but also to the bigger tasks where you know you're taking that risk, where you're making that big decision to turn down the job offer, to go all in on whatever. But resistance, in the way Stephen Prasfield talks about it and the way I also like to think about it, is it's a sign that that thing that you're feeling resistance towards is important, that it's valuable. So whenever you feel resistance against something, whenever you're on the edge, whenever you're sort of doubting, I feel like that's when you need to go all in, when you need to take the leap, when you need to light that fire and just fucking jump yeah 100%, I think, you the fact that you can write means that, like you can get better, and the fact that you can get better means.

Darren Lee: 30:09

in fact, you can do fucking great things with it. Yeah, my first three clients from my agency were $0 and I was just getting good feedback and then was able to scale from that over time. I want to go down the aspect of like your own personal desires so you mentioned there but like lifestyle design and how you want all this to work out. Like what are some of those principles that you're trying to to, I guess, achieve in terms of what you want to do online with your content and your business?

Ross Harkness: 30:39

So, online wise, I really want to have a. It sounds sort of superficial, but the reason I've set this goal is because so I want to have an audience in the next five years of 10 million people. The reason, right, the reason I have now that's saying that sounds super, super special because you know it's 10 million or 10 million people just oh, it's just a follower number. But I do believe if you have 10 million followers across platforms, the impact and change you can make in the world is insane. I think that's sort of when, like, don't get me wrong, one million followers fucking massive, massive audience. But I feel like once you reach that 10 million is when you're truly like making an impact and making change in the world, or at least if you're you, if you're using it right. So that's online, but realistically, I want to take it offline, like in that I want to like start like a gym and co-working space and all. So, yeah, like even I don't really know if I want like necessarily like a franchise, one or something, but I want like a base. You know, wherever I decide to set up, whether it's stay here in Northern Ireland, or whether it's in England or Dubai or America or somewhere, wherever I end up setting up, I want to have like a gym and co-working space. You know, and ideally, like like I say ideally how it works out. Ideally would be like a free gym. You know the way, like Mark Bell has a free gym, you just turn up, but yeah, so, but there's obviously loads of logistics behind that.

Ross Harkness: 32:11

But, either way, I want to have like a gym and a co-working space because I've always wanted something physical, like because I love building online, I absolutely love building my brand but I've always wanted, like, something physical. I want to have something physical that like I could walk out in the street and see somebody like, let's say, it's clothing, you know, see somebody wearing that? Because, like I don't know, do you know George Hayton from represent clothing? Yeah, of course, yeah, so I've seen, I see people all the time weren't represent stuff. I think that's so cool. I think, like George shares it on a story all the time people wearing represent, or they see somebody wearing represent, or I think it is so cool having something physical, like it doesn't have to be clothing, but anything physical I think is just it's cool.

Darren Lee: 32:57

That's what I want to do 100%. I want to build a podcast studio and I know I'm probably not going to make any cash out of it, but I want to build like a, you know, like the famous Tate interviews, the ones he didn't like to buy, and stuff, yeah, that style studio, like I've recorded in that studio before and stuff like that. And I like, as I record for quite frequently, a person and every time I'm there I'm always just like looking and learning and seeing and like everything. And I have no background in cinematics or production man, I'm fucking clue but that's shit and I don't even give a shit if I make money from it or not, because that's not like the core, like offer, you know. But it's just about having that physical presence and like I don't even know how much it costs man, I don't even cost that much, to be honest but I think that's like tangible Because my partner owns like a clothing brand, something similar, like an e-commerce store.

Darren Lee: 33:47

When I see the product, I'm like fuck, this is sick, even though I do a lot of stuff online. That's like interesting, but it's just like something about in real life is just like, yeah, takes the next level, you know.

Ross Harkness: 33:56

Yeah, there's something tangible which is it's nice. And that's the thing I think whenever I get questions, all the time DMs, comments, emails about like they're a lot, someone's lost, they don't know what to do. You know they have like completely no direction. And I always say to set free goals. I always like I'm a big fan of having only free goals, no more than free goals. You can have less, but I like these free goals.

Ross Harkness: 34:20

I like having a physical goal. So lose axomind fat, gain axomind a muscle, hit a PB on squat or something whatever. That physical goal is a financial goal, so earn axomind, invest axomind, save axomind, whatever it is. And a purpose related goal, so something related to what you're building. So for you it could be hit ax number of downloads per month in the podcast or whatever it is, but purpose related goals is related to something you're building and sort of the impact you want to have. When you have those free goals, they I like to call them lever moving goals you have lever moving tasks which move the business forward. Those goals, I believe, as you focus on them goals because of the areas they're in it ripples into every other area of your life. So I feel like if you improve. If you hit a financial goal, a physical goal and a purpose related goal, you're likely going to improve your relationships. You're going to improve whatever else. I feel like they're lever moving.

Ross Harkness: 35:15

Also the reason I like to tell the people that is I think the biggest bottleneck for most people is money and once you have you don't have to get the crazy money. Like literally, depending on where you live, you can get to five K a month, 10 K a month. But once you hit realistically if you're in 10 K a month anywhere in the world, once you hit that you don't really have to worry about money anymore, as long as you're sensible. So once you hit money and have enough money, I feel like that's when you start getting into the more tangible things. Like, like you may were both sitting here like, okay, we've built something fucking great online and we're going to continue building that, but we want something else. We want to have a bigger impact and as much as like you can make a massive impact online due to the leverage you create for your audience. I feel like there's the impact from having something physical at least personally, is massive 100%.

Darren Lee: 36:06

I thought what's really interesting about what you said there was the fact that you know you need to sort of to financials first because you can't do other stuff right. You know Charles Miller, charles Miller, he's on the podcast and he's a very nice guy. He was one of his first. It was one of his only ever podcasts you record.

Ross Harkness: 36:22

Yeah, he doesn't do much.

Darren Lee: 36:24

He doesn't do anything man.

Ross Harkness: 36:25

And then he said some fucking great.

Darren Lee: 36:27

He was like you know, he was like it's very easy to talk about like abundance when you have it, but if you don't have it, you're obviously going to be in scarcity. So he was like you know everyone's like oh, think abundantly, don't worry about the client, you know you'll get it, don't worry about the prospect, you get another prospect, you're getting another client. It's like, no, if you don't have money coming in, you are going to be in scarcity, which is really bad, but you can fucking use it to your advantage. Back against the wall is where you get your most results, because you're going to be hungry, You're going to be up early after outreach, you're going to be, yeah, make, might make a few discounts on some offers, whatever, just get in cash flow. And then, when you get cash flow, and then that's when you could start kind of not necessarily relaxing but, I guess, focusing on more like other aspects to get them right. You know. Similarly, you know when people like fuck up their health, you need to focus on your health, right, you need to get a fucking right.

Darren Lee: 37:15

And then she had something related to like a family member recently or someone was sick and I was like isn't this the catalyst to start getting really healthy? Isn't this? When you do it, you know and like? I gave up alcohol over a year ago and the reason why is because I wanted to go Like all, I wanted to go all in on this. I wanted to make it. Is this going to work? How can I make it work? This is going to be on and do so.

Darren Lee: 37:37

I had to give up all that kind of stuff which is making it work and all the other health aspects came from it. But I just think that, like, when you have something going wrong financial health relationships you need to go fucking fix it and go to go all in on it. And then, when people said, then, okay, how'd you fix it? It's like you can. You will only be able to fix it when you're actually fully in it, and then you'll see okay, this is the problem, this is the problem. This is the problem. Maybe my pricing is wrong, maybe my offer is wrong, maybe my alignment is wrong, and then you'll start getting to new thresholds and even where we're at now with the business, with a whole heap of fucking problems, but they're definitely not the problems we had at $0 a month.

Ross Harkness: 38:13

Yeah, and I think it's it's. It's going to sound a bit weird, but seeing you're looking back at them like early days when you, when you were just starting off, it's like you will never. I don't think you'll ever have that level of motivation ever again, when you had no money, when you had no clients. Like you, it's. It's incredibly easy and it doesn't matter what level of success you have. I don't think it matters whether, like your Alex or Mosey or your somebody else has just had five, 10, 10, 20, whatever you've had. Once you start having a bit of success, it's so easy to get complacent, like it is so easy just to be like okay and just hold it there, just maintain. But the problem is obviously with the whole world is moving forward and you're just staying still. You're actually regressing. So it's never good, but it's super easy. So like when you're in that early stage and you have that fire and you have that motivation, I don't think there's there.

Ross Harkness: 39:07

You'll never get that level of motivation ever again, when your back is against the wall and you have no fucking choice but to do the work, get the results. No choice.

Darren Lee: 39:18

I feel like you. You've probably read Purple Cow by Seth.

Ross Harkness: 39:20

Gordon, I actually haven't, but it is on my list of 250 books.

Darren Lee: 39:27

Listen to it, listen to the audio book. It's really good right, and I'm listening to it at the moment.

Darren Lee: 39:31

It was Dakota um Remet mentioned one of his reels and I was like fuck it. I listened to it and he says something so fucking interesting. He was like you know, basically like things are always moving forward, like the only way you're actually going to get better is, or make an impact, is, by constantly like innovating, changing, adjusting completely because completely adjusting. And then people don't adjust because they look at the big players, at the Colgate, the Nike, the Reebok, and they're like oh well, they don't change their core offerings, so I won't. And that's when you're actually start moving backwards.

Darren Lee: 40:04

So like to be like remarkable, which is what he, the whole thing he talks about is being remarkable and it's like really standing out. So it's not about being better, it's about like standing out. So people's marketing won't stand out. They have something that's working like a viral tweet, and they just leave it at that or to get their first client. But it's like at that point, when you start like bolting things on and adding more to your offer and making it better and making it more engaging and yeah, it's a fucking, it's a great book it's kind of like it's a little bit. It's a little bit kind of like I guess, more on like a different aspect of business less kind of like an Alex Ramosy style like, less kind of like relatable. I would say it's in that aspect, cause I don't think. Second one is exactly relatable to people, right, but he's just, he's just has a lot of wisdom to share, because he's more intangible.

Darren Lee: 40:45

Yeah, it's cause he's like seen it for like fucking God knows how many years. So therefore, he's able to exchange that which is which is which is incredibly important, which brings me onto the point of branding. So I see the blue light. I like to touch the field, or your content. What, actually? What is branding to you?

Ross Harkness: 41:03

I think it's it's what people think of when they think of you or your brand. So, like my brand is, as much as I can try to create it realistically, it is what people think of when they think of rose arkness. That is my brand and I got this from Christo. You know, christo.

Ross Harkness: 41:30

He's calling my podcast in a few weeks. Oh, amazing man, well done, he'll be a great guest. And so, christo, there was a YouTube video he had and he was interviewing this guy and was like what is branding? Because, you know, branding it's really like intangible, right. That's what I mean.

Darren Lee: 41:45

Yeah, that's what I asked you.

Ross Harkness: 41:47

It is just the thought that somebody has when they think of you or your brand, but the profit there is that you can create that, Okay. So what content do you put out? What's your setup like? What's your profile picture like? What's your Twitter header? Like Everything you put out right, Even on Twitter, everything you retweet, right that adds to someone's perception of you and therefore influences your brand. So I think you have to really really be careful and really really do everything with purpose when it comes to your brand, whether it's content, and even in content, when it comes to the wording, your tone, your authenticity everything has to be specifically curated for how you want people to perceive your brand, because everything they see, right. If you have a shit profile picture, if you have like a selfie in a black room and you can barely see your face you can see your nose from the light on your phone people aren't going to the first impression. There is terrible right. Automatically, it doesn't matter how good your content is, the first impression will ruin that person's perception of your brand.

Darren Lee: 43:02

So what's the next step there? How do you build a brand? So you're going from scratch, right. Okay, you're going from scratch on the internet. How do you get that message across in a perception aspect and from a visual aspect? Okay, yeah.

Ross Harkness: 43:19

So first off, you start with the basics, right. So your profile you need to make sure you have a good profile picture. I do not care how you take it right. See your phone, your phone. If you have a phone that is less than five years old, the camera on it is amazing. You do not need any big fancy. Where is it? It's behind me that way. Don't need any fancy like $3,000 cameras. Okay, you need your phone. You need good lighting and lighting, simple. You can either have like soft boxes like I have here, or you can just stand in front of a window. Okay, that is all that really matters. As long as your photo is half decent to start, it's a good photo taken by your phone, you'll be good.

Ross Harkness: 43:59

Your bio Then you go into your bio, your bio, preferably in your bio. You will tell people two things. There's hundreds of ways to do your bio, but you pretty much say how you help them and social proof for how you've helped them. If you have them two things, you'll be good. Okay, because you're telling someone, you're giving them a reason to follow you by saying here's how I can help you. So you help them. I don't know. Get more sales through teaching them copyrighting, whatever it is, and then you prove it by saying I've sold $20 million through my copy. Okay, so people are going to be like holy crap. Then, once you have your profile nailed, it goes into the content.

Ross Harkness: 44:36

You have to decide, first off, how people want to perceive your brand. How do you want people to perceive your brand? Do you want to be the friendly person that never tweets anything controversial and just gives straight up advice and shows no personality? Or do you want to be the person who says what's on their mind harsh truths, pure value? You really have to decide that. Again, it's intangible, but it's what you want people to perceive. And then, pretty much with everything you do your piece of content you decide how you want people to perceive your brand. So you could, for example, come up with three to five characteristics or virtues or traits that you want people to think of when they think of your brand. Okay, so you could come up with something like honest, authentic, valuable, disciplined, hard-working. Okay, they could be your five traits. Give them five traits of every single piece of content you create, be luck at them five traits and be like does this match up with them Right Over time? You won't actually need to look at them traits, because you'll be able to do it subconsciously, basically, you won't even have to curate it. But at the start, I think that's a really important step.

Ross Harkness: 45:52

Now for content you have to decide what you want to create content around. I do recommend that you have content pillars. So, for example, you can have free content pillars. These are free areas you create content around. So if you want to, if you're trying to be an online fitness coach, you can create content around okay, gym, nutrition, recovery. They're your free content pillars. But in them free content pillars you can predict them down into 100 different subtopics. Okay, because your gym, you can go into training routines. You can go into form. You can go into ways to progressively overload Nutrition. You can go into different diets. You can go into feeding windows. You can go into macros, calories, micronutrients, recovery again, so you can break everything down infinitesimally. Then, when you look at them, let's say for each. So your free content pillars. Let's say you have five subtopics in each of them, you now have 15 topics to create content around. So you just look at them and you'll be like, okay, I'm going to create content around one of these.

Darren Lee: 47:00

Question for you on that. So how do you tie the values back to that? Because I think this is the gap where a lot of people kind of might fall down on. So you're going to see my content on LinkedIn or maybe even Twitter, which I have a zero following, to be honest. I have no problem sharing information from my experiences to help people build their podcast or launch a bigger podcast. However, if I tell you the best way to write fucking hooks, it's hard to get my values true at that post. We're bringing back these values. Now. I could say something like I spent three years writing fucking hooks and I've done a billion of them and now these are what it is. So maybe that's a way to do it, but how do you integrate the values into actionable experience and advice for people?

Ross Harkness: 47:50

Okay, so here's the thing too it's going to be a lot easier to do in longer form content. So longer form content is obviously the likes of YouTube and podcasts and all are obviously longer form content, but also the likes of Instagram, carousels and Fred's. They're not long form, they're like medium form content, but they're longer than a single tweet. It is going to be much easier to display your authenticity, your experiences, your personality, your values in a longer form tweet. Shorter form it is rather hard and it can be depending on the tweet. It can be really hard to do because you have like 280 characters to do it in on a tweet. So hard to do. But the way you really do it, I think a lot of it comes down to, in short form, the tone of what you're saying. Like, if you read my tweets, I'm like no bullshit, I'm just like straight up. Here's how you do it, straight to the point. I'll call you a motherfucker. I'll tell you do this. You know like I will. Like there's no bullshit, and you can get that tone right. Even longer form that's where you have a bit more play. So if you're writing a hook for a thread, you can obviously, again, a lot of it comes down to tone. So your writing style, how you write.

Ross Harkness: 49:03

The thing about your writing style, too, is that will change over time. It will take time for you to find it. So don't expect just to go and write your first piece of content and be like this is me, this is my voice, this is how I talk. That's not going to happen. It's going to take time. Don't be afraid to experiment with how you present yourself and your ideas and your experiences, but a lot of it is telling people again, hormozzi talks about this where it's not how to, it's how I.

Ross Harkness: 49:33

You know not how to, how I. So you can say so. Social proof how I did this. Whatever your social proof is, I sold a million dollars in copy. That's how I did it. That's a really simple basic hook that I wouldn't actually tweet, but the points are, and then obviously it goes into the tone and your writing style. A lot of it does, I do believe, when the values comes down to writing style. Because, like, if you can read, you can read a tweet by me and you can read a tweet by Dakota completely different writing styles and 280 characters, complete getting our different personalities across, you know, and what's funny what's funny there is the fact that you could look at his Twitter, look at yours in isolation, and know it's his or hers.

Ross Harkness: 50:19

That's his or yours should.

Darren Lee: 50:21

I say but and again, I think this is where me in particular, many other people fall down is like how I is really is really helpful because so how I for you at fucking 200K followers, whatever you have right now, is how I 200K followers lets people, lets people understand your values a little bit easier because you have the authority, you have the big number tier, right. But at the very beginning, if I was like zero followers, being like how I grow social media following, that's my example, but like how I build my business as zero, as zero following, right. So I often I actually find this quite often like people who like sell companies in silence and they come on and they try to talk about it and they're like how I sold this company and they never build the following because no one gives a fuck, because they're like small number tier, right, yeah. So how do you provide that value where it's like you're doing, you, you're, you're trying to?

Ross Harkness: 51:17

help people the.

Ross Harkness: 51:19

thing about yeah, but the thing about social media is too. Here's the thing the only platform that you will grow on by providing straight up value, and only value, is YouTube. If you go onto Twitter, right, and you start if you have zero followers, start a brand new account you could be fucking Elon Musk and giving away the best business secrets for absolute beginners or for people trying to get to their first 100 million or the first billion. Right, you can cover all the range. Give the most valuable detailed stuff. If you have zero followers on Twitter, nobody has seen your content, right. If you're on Instagram and you do the same thing with Reels, it is slightly different now, but if you're posting a car sale on Instagram, nobody is saying it. Instagram might show it to 20 people, but if you have zero followers, it's not being shown to anybody.

Ross Harkness: 52:10

So social media is also a bit of a game. You have to play the game. You have to play the rules. The way you do that is you pretty much have to start networking with people. Okay, so you have to like if you start at zero and you're putting out valuable content. So use your example.

Ross Harkness: 52:24

Somebody exits a business for 25 million in silence, right, they start creating content. They write a friend and how they did it the most valuable friend you've ever read. If they have zero followers, it doesn't fucking matter, okay, nobody's going to see it. If they have 100 followers, it doesn't matter, nobody's going to see it. Okay, 100 people might see it and if they retweet it, maybe a thousand people see it. It doesn't matter, right? But if they networked with likes of someone who has a big audience me, danco, dakota, any of them sort of people, right, I'm like, hey, look, love your content.

Ross Harkness: 52:59

I actually just recently accident my business for 25 million, would love to shoot the shit, or however they decide to network with that person All of a sudden right, I'm now friends with that person. I see they post that for a gain. In six months I'm going to retweet it. They're all all of a sudden. It now is exposure to my audience. So a lot of social media and tell you, build your own audience is playing a game which is annoying because people don't want to face that. People want to complain about that and be like, oh, I don't want to have to network and engage in all to grow my following. Unfortunately, at least on Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn. You have to do that, you have to build that network.

Darren Lee: 53:40

It is everywhere, yeah, but it's also, like it says, also the traditional way, before the likes of social media started to drop to you. But it was like the only way to get clients before there was internet, the only way you can introduction to other people. Like that's. It's not the game of social media, it's the game of life and many regards. And I built my podcast to network with people, not necessarily in online business space, but at the time it was true career aspect, and the reason why is because I used to be able to get jobs in university when I didn't even have a fucking degree or anything was just true.

Darren Lee: 54:15

It was true LinkedIn. I would call that reach people. They would realize I wasn't an idiot and then they would recommend me to other people and I was like, wait, does internet stuff work? So like, whether you're inside the business space or not, these things are valuable. But why I think that your model works so well is because the fact that if you are writing consistently and you are posting consistently and creating podcasts and creating all this kind of stuff, that when people, when a down code does click on your page, he's like all right, this guy is not full of shit, he's not a robot and he's built the business. So I mean there's a lot of merit to that. So I built my podcast with no background like with no like, uh, nothing beforehand. You're probably quite similar in some regards. Like you know, you started like posting and I was like you built the business.

Darren Lee: 54:56

The flip side of that is like Justin Waller, a guy who was in the trenches, building a steel fucking company for like 15 years, and then came to the internet and was like this is how much money I make, this is what I can do and this is how I can help you. So obviously that that's some way. So okay, so that, so in some ways that's easier, in some ways that's more difficult, because in some ways people don't look at him because he was from zero, right. But what did he do? He networked with the big boy, big boys.

Ross Harkness: 55:22

Exactly.

Darren Lee: 55:24

Go on and so forth. So do you think, right, a fucking steel guy hanging steel in fucking Arizona could get on Instagram tomorrow and grow the way he has grown? When I met him in Dubai, he was telling me he posts, he has a hundred reels going out a week, 100 and with the network effect, that's how it all works, right? That's fucking game.

Ross Harkness: 55:48

Well, this is the thing. It's the same with everything, but like especially social media, right, it's the same, literally anything. People don't understand how hard like as much as we were talking about. This is what hard feels like. People don't understand the amount of time, effort, sacrifice and how hard it's going to be Like.

Ross Harkness: 56:07

So if you take social media, you might come across somebody who blows up in a week. Right, it happens, especially on YouTube. It can happen quite frequently. You know where you see some guy doing some prank, or one of them like gives a hundred K away to somebody and they blow up overnight, right, but most platforms you can look at that there and you see that. So that's your goal, right, but everybody else 99% of people have been doing it for like two, three years at least before they have a decent audience, you know.

Ross Harkness: 56:40

So people see the people who blow up or they even just look at bigger counts. They post for a month and maybe they're only posting like seven Reels a week compared to Justin Waller's 100 Reels a week and they're like why am I not getting the results? Because Justin Waller has been fucking posting on YouTube and Instagram for a couple of years now, I think, and he's been posting 100 a week, you know. So there's the time and the volume. You're not comparable to them unless you're putting out that same time and volume, and it doesn't matter what your experience, whether you have, whether you're Alex Ramosy. $100 million business, right, $250 million now, whatever it is, if he wasn't putting out the same amount of volume every week, he wouldn't have grown the same way he did.

Darren Lee: 57:25

Yeah, and he had. If you ever look at his content strategy on YouTube, it's like a webinar he did. I think they got up to I think it was over like 100 as well 150 pieces of content or even more a week. Yeah, and his is very systematic. He just writes tweets. If they're good tweets, he'll turn them into like a reel. If they're good reels, he'll turn them into a YouTube video. And it's so funny because, like, I think obviously you went. I remember I saw your post that other day that you went very deep on Twitter and you got to 40K before you even thought of another platform.

Darren Lee: 57:57

Yeah, so people are always thinking about like, oh, like the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, but I think it's like, when you do go deep on one thing, like one business idea, you need to master that and I want to get your thoughts on this actually. So one of my biggest pep heaves in the world is knee shopping, right. So, like, obviously I've tried different shit, right, whatever, but fundamentalist. I've done the podcast stuff for three years and this is it Every single day, no matter what. I've tried other stuff, whatever, but everything goes back to this core principle.

Darren Lee: 58:23

So when people like messaged me on like Q and A's. They're like oh, like you know, what else do you do? What else do you do? And I'm like it's this, I literally just, I just I just do this 24 seven and I go to the gym 24 seven, right. So because of that, that's why it worked. But then when I look at other people and they get like a tiny bit of success and they try to diversify or they want to go off and do something else, they end up doing nothing. So I want to kind of get your thoughts on that kind of principle of like like knee shopping and like when do you actually decide to go do something else?

Ross Harkness: 58:52

This is the thing. Focus is focus in every context you can think of right, Take it down to the micro You're, you're, I'm writing tweets, I'm writing a newsletter, whatever the fuck I'm doing If I am trying to write my newsletter but also like posting an Instagram story at the same time on my phone, my focus is split, my efforts are diverged and therefore the results I'm going to get from both cause the quality is going to be massively down. You can then take that up to, let's say, social media. You're trying to grow on Twitter but you're also trying to grow on Instagram. So your focus is split completely. So your efforts are halved. You're going to get way less results.

Ross Harkness: 59:32

So focus is focus in every context. You have to just choose something and fucking stick with it and just go in for, like, this is the thing. You have to do something for such a insane amount of time that it seems crazy. You really do Like. If you told especially back home in Ireland with the small town mentality, most people have you told somebody that you're sitting recording podcasts every week for three years, they'd think you're fucking crazy.

Darren Lee: 1:00:02

Literally, literally fucking insane.

Ross Harkness: 1:00:06

It's focus is focus in everything. Now, there can be caveats to this, right. I think if you are changing what you're doing, it has to be a very thought out decision. You can't change what you're doing because your your biggest YouTube guru is telling you you're going to make a hundred care a month and 20 minutes a day doing this. Okay, you can't get. You can't also change what you're doing because you're not getting results.

Ross Harkness: 1:00:33

Well, so you have to change what you're doing, but I wouldn't change the craft that you're doing if you're not getting results. If you're not getting results, you clearly have to change some of the tactics or strategies you're doing. But if you're going to change what you're doing, like the craft, the bigger picture thing that you're doing, it has to be a thought out decision in that you don't enjoy it. I think that is the only reason to change what you're doing. So if you're trying to build X business and you're no longer enjoying it, I think that's fine. To change to Y, okay. But if you're trying to build X business and you're just not getting results, I don't think that's a good reason to change to Y. I think you have to change what you're doing with X.

Darren Lee: 1:01:13

To go deeper on that. Why is it someone wouldn't like something? Is it because they don't like the work? Is it because they have to screw themselves, because there's usually a solution to every problem, right? So like, let's say, you have an agency that's doing 50K a month high pressure stress operations. That is miserable. However, you can start to hire and start to replace people in that role and then do something else and do the stuff that you enjoy. So you like writing content. Okay, let's bring in all the leads and bring it to 100K a month. So like do people like shit their pants, lose their mind and then just try move? I don't think. What is you don't like? You know.

Ross Harkness: 1:01:50

Yeah Well, I think that's a good point. You have to figure out why you don't like it, okay. But I do think, like if someone I think most people quit before they even get some level of success, they decide to change before. Very rarely do you see somebody get to a certain level of success and be like, okay, I'm going to try something completely different. They normally do like what you said they'll hire, they'll outsource, they'll remove themselves from the role. Or if they do change, it's because they just wanted to change that spine. But I think they've already gone a level of success with that. Okay. So they've learned all these skills that they can transfer over into this new thing. But I think most people just quit because you know they don't understand how hard it is. I do think a lot of it comes down to that.

Ross Harkness: 1:02:37

I think a lot of people expect I think it's instant gratification. You know the modern world is fucking conditioned everybody for instant gratification. You know you order Uber Eats and you get food in 20 minutes. You can order an Amazon and get an next day delivery. You know you scroll social media and you get instant dopamine. So I think everybody is so conditioned for instant gratification that when they try something, even if they try it for a month and they haven't got results, they really just get disheartened and maybe convince themselves that they don't like it. Yeah, that's a good point. I would say you have a good point there. It's like you have to find out why you don't like it and if you can fix that. If it's because If you don't like it because you're not getting results, then obviously change what you're doing in that business model or whatever.

Ross Harkness: 1:03:23

But if it's something to do with the actual work, the craft let's say you do copywriting and you don't enjoy writing. Copywriting is not going to be the thing for you. You need to change that Because realistically, I don't think you're going to learn to enjoy writing. You probably could, but it'd be hard for me. For example, right, I'm incredibly introverted. I do not like doing sales calls. I do not like. It's very hard to get me in a call. See, if you get me in a call, well done. So you've got me in a podcast, so you've done good. Trying to get me on a call is horrendous, which is part of the reason I ran a Facebook ID agency for like six, nine months. I hated it, mainly because I always had to do calls with contractors, with sales calls, whether it was monthly update calls, whatever it was. I hated doing calls, hated it with a passion. So it wasn't for me anything where I have to do loads of talking to people not for me. So now I can sit there and I can create content. I can take two or three calls a week with people I enjoy talking to, right, and that's fine. So it's like changing. I think you can probably.

Ross Harkness: 1:04:32

I think it comes down to why you chose that business model in the first place or whatever you're doing. Like if you choose something, there's likely a reason you chose it. That reason might be money, might not be, might be because you thought you'd be interested in it. But there's probably things in whatever you've chosen that you do enjoy and you can look at them and be like okay, I enjoy this part, but I don't enjoy this part. So you could then maybe try to find some business model which is the in between, where it's like it has all the parts you like but doesn't have the parts you dislike. When you try that business model to, either might be parts that you don't like as well, but I think it's an iterative process If you genuinely don't like what you're doing.

Darren Lee: 1:05:12

And again, you can always find ways to fill those gaps. So, for instance, I hate following up on invoices. I just fucking hate it, and I actually always talk about it with people too. I'm like I don't know how some people don't pay people. I was like I would never, ever not pay someone and I just like I just don't like it. And then like at the end I was like what is it 20? Everyone's in a while to go back and just see like what was paid or wasn't paid.

Darren Lee: 1:05:32

And then I was speaking to someone recently and they were like they were like why don't you just bring in someone to either automate it or to do that work? And I was like, ah, that's really smart and it takes me completely out of the soft I don't like doing, but I do like the cause. I do like the team building. I actually do like that process of putting people together. So it's leaning into where you actually, where you actually fucking, what you actually enjoy. I wanted to ask you on the different aspects of like psychology and writing. So I had to go to my podcast and like he really blew my mind with this stuff and that's when I went really deep down the rabbit hole of that and how to kind of help see people through their problems and work through their, their different aspects. From your perspective, when you're writing content, what do you, what's important to you about, like psychology, and what people are trying to consume, especially who you're trying to sell to, because I guess at that stage that has to come.

Ross Harkness: 1:06:29

Yeah, I always like to think of it as like marketing awareness levels and I I look at this from a more this is more broad in the content strategy than individual content pieces. So, like you have short form content, right, that's Twitter, instagram, tech talk. That short form content I view as like marketing awareness level one, where I'm trying to make people aware of a problem they have. You know, because there's only so much you can get across in 280 characters, right, and you can't provide a life changing amount of value in that, but you can make people aware of a problem they have and if you make them aware of that problem, you can then bring them into into marketing awareness level two, which is in my, in the way I view it is Fred's and Carousel's, so more medium form content. And when you bring them that there, you can then send them to your newsletter, which again is even more detailed, which is even more value, which then brings them down the marketing awareness level again, and then you sell to them in the marketing awareness and or, sorry, in the newsletter, where you can, in a newsletter cause you can go as long as you want you can really bring people through the marketing awareness levels.

Ross Harkness: 1:07:40

So, like you can, at the very start of the newsletter, you can talk about something that makes them aware of X problem that they have. That problem, if you're looking to sell to them in the newsletter, should be solved by the product that you're selling to them, so that by the time they get to the end of the newsletter, you've made them aware of their problem, you've made them aware that they can solve it, you've showed them how to solve it, but you've not given them the what, like you showed them. You've not, you've told them they can't solve it, how they solve it. But your product then, which you pitched them at the end, is the like, the exact step by step, the what.

Darren Lee: 1:08:16

That the how to order order for you model.

Darren Lee: 1:08:19

Yeah, fucking hell man. That's really good, because I think I guess some people try to shove it all in one go and they kind of miss the model or just completely miss it, completely like not understanding. I think it goes deeper than like users problems. So we can think about, to my example, a lot of podcasts can't grow. It's multifactorial. There's a lot of reasons. If I just tell you like like you, you should grow, you should grow, you should grow, it doesn't really do anything. But if I try to understand like the pain that's felt, as that which is like embarrassment, hearty, the loss of fucking money, the loss of time and and the opportunity cost right, because you could be just fucking selling us and it'd be grand, right. So there's like that element which I think a lot of people get wrong, though, is the fact that they're just like too focused on the product and not actually trying to like actually help people, which is like the whole point of this. Yeah, you know.

Ross Harkness: 1:09:10

Yeah, completely I think. See, I do think everything comes down to how you want to sell, because I am not a hard seller. I don't do hard sales Like. I don't personally like it. I don't like someone like shelving something on my face, so I don't like doing it to people. It's also not the image I want to my brand.

Ross Harkness: 1:09:30

So when I am trying to sell something to someone I am the way I always think about it is I am trying to help them with a problem because, realistically, if you're selling anything, that is what you're doing, right, you're trying to help someone with a problem by offering your solution. But most people, if you're trying to hard sell them, you might not necessarily care about them, whereas I think if you do more like soft sales, like I do, you care about them. Therefore, you're willing to actually take the time and go through the pain points and give the kind argument to go through the pain points. Again, there's salesy ways of doing it. There's non salesy ways of going through the pain points.

Ross Harkness: 1:10:12

Like it's, I don't like anything salesy. So you can bring up the pain points, give them a solution to the pain points, and I think one of the keys at least I like to do is always provide them value. So like if someone's reading my newsletter and I'm pitching a product at the end, I will still make sure that even if they don't buy my product, they'll have still got something from the newsletter, some sort of value, some sort of actual advice, that if they have a certain pain point, maybe there's a certain way. I've given them one way to solve that certain pain point, whatever it is. But I do think yeah, I think comes down to how you want to sell really with the pain points.

Darren Lee: 1:10:51

You're dead right. I just saw Alex Ramosy's latest video for 100 million leads and he just did like a 12 minute video and he says something really good. He was like the idea isn't to like sell to everybody, because you know when everyone's gonna buy. Right, you have 100 people like one person might buy. But if you help 100 people, so through your newsletter, you help 100 people those people become advocates then and then they'll tell their friends and be like, oh yeah, this guy Ross is actually genuine.

Darren Lee: 1:11:16

And then that person then, who is nowhere near your sphere, will actually then start to engage and then could actually be the person who buys, instead of like saying like, oh, you know, the guy Ross, like this was an example, he was like, oh, that guy Ross will be like, yeah, he's like he shipped product off, off, don't reject him because you were just trying to either hurt, sell or you have a shitty product, right, so nailing that product, nailing that service, and then just doing like loads of free shit, you know.

Darren Lee: 1:11:43

So, like I've actually been looking at like just different ways, right, and he, like you know, because everything goes back to the same shit, right, Like you're helping people do South mastery, but it's true, treads, carousels reels, tiktok videos, long form podcasts but there's even more ways you could add on that you may not want to be, what might not want to do, like masterclasses, webinars and all this, but it all fundamentally goes back to that same principle. So, like you know, we're going to record for an hour and a half, when people listen to this podcast, that the worst thing that could happen is that they could leave and be like fuck those guys and that's like the last guy ever want happening. So that's my, that's all. Was my promise? Right? People listening is that you're not going to leave with that, with that top process?

Ross Harkness: 1:12:26

Yes, yeah, man, I think I do think a lot of everything, especially in social media, just comes down to wanting to help people and selling to like. You know, it's just comes down to do you want to help people or do you want to make money Now? And obviously, when I say it like that there, I don't mean there's anything wrong with making money. Everyone wants to make money, make more money. But I feel like if you sacrifice helping people or doing it in an ethical way, maybe to make more money, I think that's when you fuck up.

Ross Harkness: 1:12:56

And I think I like to think of there's two types of creators, so or two types of people in social media. There's the business first creator, which is somebody who creates content specifically to get leads for their business. And then there's the creator first business, which is what I would consider myself more of, where it's I create content because I enjoy creating content, but then I also angle it in a way to get leads. So I think, when you like, I think the problem with the business first creators is all they're thinking about is leads, so they're not really providing the value, or at least as much value or real value, and the purpose of everything is trying to sell Like that's the thing too.

Ross Harkness: 1:13:35

You shouldn't be trying to sell in every post, you shouldn't be trying to sell in everything. I only really sell in one place and that's on my newsletter. I have links on websites and I put the odd thing up in like an Instagram story, but mainly the only place I sell is on my newsletter, and that's simply because I am trying to create content first and the business is second. So I can just put out so much free value everywhere, and then if you want to sell or sorry, if you want to buy from me, I do make it clear to everybody where you can buy from me. So if somebody wants to buy, they know where to go and they're gonna buy it because I provided them so much free value and that's a difference between sharing those values.

Darren Lee: 1:14:18

You went back to the five core values because if you're a business first individual, you're just like oh yeah, this is my fucking email marketing, fucking, whatever it is, and then, as a result, you don't have any, you already have zero values, right, you're just a fucking sell at the end of the day because you're not trying to help anybody, you're not like showing what you're actually about, because that doesn't come into your perspective. And that's why it's quite ironic, because my podcast I don't like. Yeah, like I have like a random like courses and stuff, but I'm not trying to sell people into that through my podcast. It's basically helping people, it's to help myself as well and to just learn and just to learn right. So all, even my YouTube videos, my Instagram, it's all just to help people.

Darren Lee: 1:15:00

I don't actually like, I'm not like selling a fucking podcast, yeah, I don't know. Like like fucking coach through it. You know, it's just that's what it's about. And that's the summer guys where it works right, because people go oh, this guy, I can listen, I can learn, the guests are high caliber and that's all that matters.

Ross Harkness: 1:15:16

Yeah well, it also gives them time to build trust and authority with you, or build trust with you and understand you as an authority, because, realistically, that's what it comes down to. The people who buy from you need to, first off, understand that you're in a 40 who can actually help them solve their problem and, secondly, trust that you're going to do it, you're not going to rip them off and basically believe everything you say. And if you're a business first creator and you're just always trying to make the sale, people aren't going to be consuming your content. So you will likely, in the short run, you will make more money being the business first creator, right, but eventually you're going to run out of people because you're not building a true audience, you're not building true fans who are going to follow you and support you, whereas if you are the creator first business, you're putting out value for years and somebody who followed you from day one might buy from you in two years. It might have just taken them that amount of time you know.

Darren Lee: 1:16:15

So I think in the long run.

Ross Harkness: 1:16:17

That is the way.

Darren Lee: 1:16:20

So one of my mates who was like everyone's a huge company, huge, huge company, said this to me last year he was saying that a conversation today with someone is money two years from now. So everyone's like fucking hung up about trying to make sales, all this shit. He was like no, no, no, no, you just met them. Whatever two years from now is when it comes back to you. You know, it's been a long game and that's the difference between getting into this for like a day or getting to this properly. So when I started my podcast, it was like right, I am doing this indefinitely and I will keep on going and like the best way to look at this is like so, like your account is like huge, you've done really well.

Darren Lee: 1:16:55

Of course, if you were to look at the likes of Dan Coe, mike Thurston, rob, a few other people they even had this for five to 10 years. You look through their Instagram or their YouTube. They're not selling anything. Like they have affiliate links at the bottom, like they're just genuinely. Because I work very closely with Rob. If you look at Rob's content like he just he's like yeah, like this is exactly how I get shredded. You probably want to get shredded too.

Ross Harkness: 1:17:23

Here's exactly how it works.

Ross Harkness: 1:17:25

There's a quote, and I can't remember who said it People love buying things, but they hate being sold to, right, I cannot remember. So it's like, if you are trying to really hard sell everybody, in every Instagram post and every YouTube video, people are like, fuck, that, I don't want to buy from him. Well, obviously there's a numbers game, so some people obviously will buy from me, but when you just have links to stuff in the description or you do soft sales or however you do it, people who want to buy from you will buy from you. They will find a way to buy.

Ross Harkness: 1:18:00

Okay, all you have to do is make them aware that there is a place to buy from you and obviously, look, there's times where you can mix up, like if you're launching a new product or a new service or something, you can do more hard selling, but for a short period of time. You know, there's obviously phases that you can go through, but genuinely, I just subscribe to the fact that people don't like being sold to, but they love buying shit. So if they want to buy, they will find how to 100% man.

Darren Lee: 1:18:32

Before we finish up, I want to ask you what your plan is for the future. Now, short term, yeah, short term, like how do you plan to build up the next end of?

Ross Harkness: 1:18:42

2020,. True, youtube's the next one. I've been creating videos on YouTube for probably like a year and a half two years now but, like, it's never been my primary focus and I feel like on YouTube, if you want to grow on there, it needs to be your primary focus because you know there's so much that goes into it. There's so many different skills. Like, if I'm growing on Twitter, it's just all I have to do is write. You know, this one skill is writing, basically, whereas on YouTube there's writing, there's speaking, there's the videography, there's the editing. You know there's so many skills, so I feel like it requires so much time and effort.

Ross Harkness: 1:19:16

So, since I've grown on Twitter, I had 100K on Twitter there like yesterday and I'm like yeah. And then I had like I'm like free 300 something thousand on Instagram. So I've got an audience on both of them. So YouTube's the next platform because, realistically, that's where I go back to as YouTube, creating YouTube videos from as like 12. I love doing it. I'm also really big into like videography and photography mainly photography, but I do like a bit of videography, so I enjoy the process of making the YouTube videos. I've just not had the. It's not been a big enough priority for me while I was growing the other platforms in the business. So now that I've got them at like a level I'm happy with, I think I'll go hard on the YouTube.

Darren Lee: 1:20:06

That's sick man. I think you can just focus on like your biggest tweets and your biggest posts for the first while you know and see how it grows from there, Because, like, I completely understand the feeling like there's so much that goes into it, but at the same time, you could try to like systematize it so like cameras set up one place every single time you know you drop it straight from Google Drive, that goes through your editor or whatever. Does that make sense? Like we try to make things as streamed as possible and like that's like that's like a big reason of how we've been. It's going to grow my own agencies because we just need to take something that's very complicated, which is video and nuanced, and then tie it all together and like content strategy then I think you just get better at it, you know so, like for instance like.

Darren Lee: 1:20:48

I record some videos, like I used to take fucking ages, but then you just practice with everything you know. But you'll crack it, man. But there's different ways to crack YouTube now than there was before. Like, obviously you can like rip YouTube open with it, like a lot of my clients as well, in particular, like even the really small kids, the ones that haven't blown up, the ones that haven't blown up. We get most discovery through shorts, and then the attrition is so positive as well.

Darren Lee: 1:21:17

I'm writing that down Because like they're like I don't know who said this, probably someone was smarter than me but there's like short form brain, so like people's brains are just in short form but they do build subscribers, so that's, that's CTA. That's on a video is like so valuable. Like it's like people don't realize from a product perspective, like it's a fact that it's next to the like button, just small nuances, like this, so you can grow way faster on YouTube because of that. And then if the video aligns to the shorts, it's, then it's perfectly fine. Now what I do is I just pull the video from the shorts so like I can do 20 clips a video if I really want to, and then that attrition does come completely across, because it's like, oh, I want to just explore more, but he'll explore on a different avenue. It's like out of short form brain in the long form brain or into, like you know, medium form, whatever the fuck you want to call it.

Darren Lee: 1:22:06

So, there's just different. I just the game just changes really rapidly, which is why it's a game right, but there is just new ways to crack the game for sure.

Ross Harkness: 1:22:17

Yeah, and I feel like that's actually one of the I think not problems. Problems are onward, but I'm going to use problem. One of the problems of YouTube for me has been that there's so many different ways you can do it. You know, like you could look at Hamza, who blew you up just by speaking to a bloody camera, you know. Or you could look at Peter McKinnon, who makes these pieces of art every video. Or you could look at Mr Beast, who expands a million dollars on a video. You know, there's so many different ways, which in a way, is really good, but in a way, it's really easy to like be caught by analysis, paralysis, you know, because like which I do, which I stick to and how long, and all of these different what the fuck?

Ross Harkness: 1:22:58

you're very busy.

Darren Lee: 1:22:59

I think you guys do one thing really really well Cause.

Darren Lee: 1:23:02

I've had that idea for so long. It's like, longer videos obviously get less engagement, which is why podcasts get less views, and like a fucking take on video. But at an abstract level, when you get really good at producing long form episodes, it builds, that, it makes, it makes it much easier as a result. You know, and like I think with YouTube, like, it's not about, like, how much money you put into it. It is about, well, obviously, if it's Mr Beast, but different, but I mean like, if it does cost you a good bit to run a YouTube channel, I think it's so worth it long run Cause, like, I might make a video on this like, but one of my like shorts has like 15, like million views or some shit right, and I made like 500 quid from it.

Darren Lee: 1:23:39

On the revenue, however, however, to produce that one video cost me $5,000, cost me a flight to Dubai, it cost me a week in Dubai, it cost me all the studios in Dubai, it cost me my full entire team running, running analysis on a lot of stuff, improving the quality, reviewing it, releasing it, all this kind of stuff. So, but the overall way is completely different. So it's like, again, when you're playing long game, all these variables change over time, yeah, and the goal changes. I got you mom, so I want to say a massive thank you, man. I really, really appreciate this Fucking. I knew it was going to be a great session. I must say that I want to say a massive thank you, bro, I appreciate it.

Ross Harkness: 1:24:20

Yeah, man, Thank you for having me on. I am honored and I really I really enjoyed the conversation.