Adapted from The Obvious Choice: Timeless Lessons on Success, Profit, and Finding Your Way by Jonathan Goodman
Our social media bubble represents maybe 0.01 percent of what goes on in the world that affects us and likely closer to 0.0000001 percent of what goes on in the world at large.
There’s ego involved, sure. But it’s also important to point out the obvious yet admittedly hard-to-remember-in-the-moment fact that whatever you see on that addictive device in your pocket is less important than what isn’t on it.
Blinded to the Truth
It’s impossible to miss the huge 100,000-square-foot gym from the highway. Twenty thousand members pay a premium to work out there. Management hired me to help the struggling twenty-person trainer team.
Jenny, average height, blonde hair, black exercise pants, and a blue tank top—standard personal trainer attire—raised her hand to ask a question: “A lot of us are struggling to get clients. Is there any advice you have for growing our social media?”
The gym had twenty thousand paying members. A trainer needs twenty clients working out between one and three times a week for a full schedule. I usually avoid public math, but this one’s easy:
Jenny needs to convert 0.1 percent of the existing members into personal training clients.
And yet, her question told me that she assumed the only way to generate business was to convince random people on the internet to buy.
She showed me her phone and told me about her posting strategy. Her account had five thousand followers and 1,350 posts. The page was beautifully branded with a clearly defined style and color theme featuring an array of recipes, meal-prepping tips, and exercise demonstrations.
“What can I do better on IG to get more clients?” she asked. “Have you ever gotten a client from social media?” I responded. “No,” she replied.
I paused to let the silence in the room sink in.
It’s impossible for me to know how much time Jenny had spent on her account—hundreds of hours easily, maybe thousands. And she hadn’t gotten a single customer from it. Despite all this, she’s firm in her conviction that there’s some secret she’s missing. That the problem is her content. That IG’s the way to get clients. That if she just works a bit harder on her social media, she’ll uncover the mystery.
Social media is, in the words of Morpheus in The Matrix, “the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you to the truth.”
It seduces us into thinking that if we figure out how to get attention online from strangers, money will follow. While there might be some overlap, endlessly publishing content to the abyss in an attempt to get famous on the internet is a gloriously inefficient way to build a business.
In many ways, The Matrix isn’t fiction. It’s a documentary.
I did a tour of the gym before the meeting. Hundreds of members were working out. Only two trainers were with clients. No other staff were present. Thirty minutes later, all twenty trainers mate- rialized in the room. Where were they?
As it turns out, many of them were sitting in their breakroom with the door closed, scrolling social media and creating content while they waited for our meeting about lead generation and sales. Meanwhile, literally outside their door, hundreds of potential customers were being ignored.
Most people claim they want to be an influencer, but the truth is that they’d be happier with a simple life, impacting the lives of their customers, making a good living, and enjoying their spare time with family and friends.
But everybody’s different.
Some want to work hard and make as big an impact as possible, and others are happy to do their thing in their quiet corner of the world. Neither person’s right, and neither person’s wrong.
What’s universally true is that nobody you don’t know will be impressed if you ignore social media and focus on real-life humans for a while. In our backward world, what’s bad for our ego is often great for our wallet.
Admittedly, Jenny’s example is extreme. Most businesses don’t already have twenty thousand paying customers to pull from. The advice, however, is the same: before trying to impress people you’ve never met (and wouldn’t care about if you did), open the door.
I asked Jenny one final question: “What do you think is more valuable to your business—five thousand random people worldwide who have kind of heard of you, or twenty wealthy and well-connected people who are already in this building right now?”
The air left the room. For those struggling trainers, the answer became obvious.
I think that they secretly knew what they should have been doing all along.
No matter your goals, The Obvious Choice offers 15 essential lessons on profit and success that are timeless because they prioritize the humans who buy from you and not erratic and temperamental algorithms.
Jonathan Goodman—one of the world’s leading experts on helping people simplify their business—reveals proven frameworks for increasing efficiency, praying to the social media gods less, and mastering the art of finding your customers.