How to have success in any field

Success in any field comes down to a couple of things, and I’m going to give them to you because I’m sick of watching the SAME questions pop up on every forum I’m in, on repeat, every week. Are you ready? Here’s what it takes to have success in ANY field, or ANY platform, for ANY business.

• Make something
• Spend time building a community
• Share your work with a ton of people in the right communities. Build friendship with people, not just surface-level platitudes. Help them grow and let them help you grow so you BOTH get to the next level and improve together.
• Make your work even better
• Expand your reach into new communities and increase the impact in the communities you’re already in. The deeper your connection with the people in your network are, the more they will want to go to bat for you. The goal, eventually, is to build your own community where YOU are the nexus point.
• Share your new work with a ton of people. If it’s better it will resonate MORE and you’ll be able to gain more aplomb for it. The more your work resonates, the easier it will carry through communities.
• REPEAT as many times as necessary, iterating along the way, making better work, building your network, and sharing your work until you break through to the next level.

This isn’t a step system. Notice I didn’t number anything. They are all things you need to be doing in tandem with each other all the time from the jump.

You can share your work through personally reaching out, joining groups, and forming collaborations, which is marketing….

…or you can do it through running ad campaigns, which is advertising, though I would probably hold off advertising until you have something that resonates with people deeply and have built a powerful network.

HOW you share your work might vary slightly between industries, but the underlying process is the same: network with people, grow your network, promote their work, have them promote your work, find more people, repeat.

Podcasts, courses, comics, movies, television, novels, literally everything I’ve ever done works on the exact same underlying process. Conventions, Amazon, Kickstarter, your own website…ANYWHERE you want to grow your business it’s the same process.

If you aren’t gaining traction, make better stuff, change the market for your work, network more, or share your work more either through marketing or advertising. This is why series are a double-edged sword. One one hand, a series that resonates can magic; literally a way to print money, because every time you release a new entry is a chance to find a new audience and get the word out again. However, a series that doesn’t resonate becomes torture as every volume people care less and less, and can actually be a detriment to your career.

But seriously, what I wrote above is the blueprint. It’s all you need to start making a plan. How you make something great, what communities you join, who you bring into your network, and how you iterate are very personal, but they should be the parts of ANY plan you make, and ANYTHING that doesn’t fit in one of those categories can be cut immediately so that you can spend more time on the things that matter.

Unsuccessful people are CONSTANTLY bogged down with things that don’t matter.

Now, you can stop asking in 1,000 forums. I have given you the secret of how to start ANY business. THOUSANDS of forum threads, HUNDREDS of conversations with successful creators, and my own experience have told me that in every. single. scenario. it comes back to those things. It’s hard, which is why very few are successful.

Not just business, either, but in any career as well. There are better and worse ways to do these things which are worth studying and testing, but there you go.

It’s all there for you. It’s not any harder or easier than what I laid out above. I know you want to find the secret, but this IS the secret. This is IT – the magic formula.

Now, all you have to do is shut up and just take it.