Make Your Brand Stand Out Amidst Digital Noise: Brendan Kane

Attention spans are at a historical all-time low. For example, the first three to five seconds of any marketing piece you post on social media determines its engagement level. These first few seconds are the focus of social media expert and digital strategist, Brendan Kane. In this episode, Brendan shares insights from his new book, Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World. Brendan has been working with brands for years, helping them to stand out in oversaturated markets. Brendan and Adam discuss the core pillars of grabbing and maintaining people’s attention to your brand or message using hook points, as well as insights on what has made Brendan remain resilient and successful.

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DOING THIS for 10 Seconds Can Change Your Life! Click here to watch Adam’s Inspiring TEDx Talk!

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The Hook Point: How To Make Your Brand Stand Out Amidst The Digital Noise With Brendan Kane

I’m feeling very grateful, blessed, and joyful about being alive. There’s a lot of turmoil in the world. It’s a daily dose of turmoil and things that don’t feel great. It is almost like a virus every day from so many different directions. I’ll say in full transparency, I feel almost addicted to it. I don’t know how many of you might relate to that. By that, I feel like I have to get my dose of looking at YouTube videos or catching up on the news.

Catching up doesn’t mean looking at something from two days ago anymore. Not even yesterday. Yesterday is old news. It’s something that’s happened in the last hour or two and preferably in the last couple of minutes. I learned long ago that it’s challenging to focus on the wrong things. Habitually, when we focus on the things we don’t want, we attract the exact thing and yet I find myself lured to see what’s happening in the world in almost a voyeuristic way. I’m calling myself out to say that because I’ve railed against that for so long.

I’m driving on the highway and there’s an accident, I never look. I’m always pissed at the people that are rubbernecking, slowing down to see the car that’s burning or to see the body that’s lying on the side of the road. I despise that. Yet, I find myself almost leaning into this voyeurism of the chaos and the insanity that seems to be perpetuating itself in the United States and in other places around the world. I realized that’s like a moth going to the flame. I’m calling it out for what it is. What I feel grateful for is that I have that awareness and I can even make it a loving awareness so that it’s not filled with judgment by something that I can be present too.

I’m also excited as well that I get to speak with an old friend, business colleague and somebody I’ve had the pleasure to work with and respect. It’s okay for me to say at this point in my life, he’s a young man. I’m a young man but he’s younger than me. He’s a good guy with a great deal of knowledge. Brendan Kane is an outside of the box thinker. That’s a cliché but in this guy’s case, it is true. He’s a speaker and author who empowers brands to scale by helping them stand out and beat the competition in crowded and oversaturated markets.

He is the author of an international bestselling book called One Million Followers. That’s when I met Brendan when he was first finishing up and promoting that book. We were happy about that and his other book Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World as well as being the Founder and CEO of Hook Point Agency. Brendan has worked with hundreds of individuals and brands providing business and digital strategy for many years including brands such as MTV, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and many others.

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It’s a pleasure to have you on the show, Brendan. Thanks for being with us.

Thanks for having me. It’s a true pleasure to connect with you and everybody that’s reading this blog.

Our community is going to love this conversation but before we dive in, I want to ask you this question. What’s one thing that’s not in the bio that you love for people to know about you?

Most people know me from the One Million Followers book and see me as a social media expert or whatever you think but it’s much bigger than that. Social media is one thing that I do. That’s why I decided to spend years putting together the information in the Hook Point book because I’m always looking at how I can provide people the most value and help them on their journey to be the most successful. I had to dive deep into myself to understand what is the best way that I could express that.

One Million Followers: How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days

That’s the concept of a hook point and standing out in a very noisy world that we live in now. It’s a very oversaturated world that you’ve got to find ways to win attention. We live in this world where attention is the biggest asset in terms of growing your brand, sharing your message or whatever impact that you would have on the world. A lot of people would get caught on to that One Million Followers concept in the book and they always see it in social media, but I want to help them with much more than that.

It may even be obvious or self-explanatory but explain for folks what a hook point is.

Let’s start with what the problem is. The problem is we live in a world where there are over 60 billion messages sent out on digital platforms between social media, text messages, emails, all of that accumulates to a tremendous amount of noise. There was an interesting Forbes article that did research that said the average person is exposed to between 4,000 to 10,000 ads a day. What that means is the average person is ignoring 4,000 to 10,000 ads a day.

You, as a business person, or even somebody who wants to share your message, you’re no longer fighting against your direct competition. You’re fighting against every piece of content. Whether you like it or not, you’re competing for attention against LeBron James, The Rock, Netflix, CNN, Fox News or whatever it is. Hook Point is designed to grab that attention. There are three core pillars to a hook point. One is getting somebody to stop in those first 3 to 5 seconds so that you can win the first part of that conversation. Getting them to stop so you can get to the second core pillar which is your story. What is it that you want to express? What is the message that you want to share? What is it that you want to talk about your product, service or the value that you provide?

The third is, do people trust it? Do they believe it? Does it come off credible? All three of these have to play together because if you don’t grab somebody’s attention in the first 3 to 5 seconds, you’ll never get to your story. If you grab somebody’s attention but your story is not good, you don’t retain that attention, you’ve automatically lost it. The fourth is if you have a great hook, get somebody to stop, and you have a powerful story but people don’t believe, it doesn’t come off credible then it falls apart. That’s in the essence at a high level what a hook point is.

I know there’s no one-size-fits-all. We do a lot of marketing in knowing the timing would help. It’s important that you establish that connection that you get people to pause or stop for 3 to 5 seconds. How long for the story and the establishment of trust would you say? Is it fair to say 2 or 3 minutes? Is there any rule of thumb about that?

I would say there’s no rule of thumb for it. People ask this a lot, especially when it comes to social media. How long should I make my content be? To me, it’s how long can you retain that attention? If you only feel like your message is strong enough in 15 to 30 seconds, then deliver it in 15 to 30 seconds. If you feel like you can hold attention for twenty minutes and you’re providing value, then you’ll go off and do that. I want to distinguish the difference. We live in a micro attention world, but that doesn’t mean you can’t hold their attention for long periods of time. What it means is you need to capture their attention and fight for that attention in that first part of the conversation. That’s the hard part. When you retain that attention, you have to be a good storyteller.

There are examples. You look at Joe Rogan or podcasts in general, you can maintain attention for hours. People will listen or engage in the content. It’s winning that first part. That’s the tough part in getting you to stand out. There’s no real rule of thumb like it has to be this length of time for your story. I’m sure you can answer this as well as I, credibility can come off in the first 10 to 15 seconds but you can lose at twenty minutes in if you say something that doesn’t hold true. A lot of trust and credibility is built very early on in that process because it’s not what you say. People look at your facial expressions, body posture, tones and see if it comes off authentic and people believe it.

The non-verbal cues are big. The important thing is those are done from inception. This is a tough question to answer. If somebody says, “I’ve got to grab somebody’s attention at 3 to 5 seconds.” Are there any rules of thumb about that?

I can steer you to where people go wrong. That’s one of the awful places. People treat that first 3 to 5 seconds as their story or their product. They almost overwhelm the user in that first part of it. You’ve got to think about what is going to get them to stop the scrolling, stop on a busy street, or stop in a meeting to pay attention. That’s a big thing. I don’t know if you saw the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, but it’s the perfect analogy. The algorithms are favoring the content that gets people to stop and pay attention.

In this digital world, you’re no longer only fighting against your direct competition. You’re fighting against every other piece of content. Share on X

What most people do is they skip the first core pillar and go into their story or they even go into sell mode right away when that’s not the world that we live in. You’ve got to earn the right to do that. The second biggest mistake people are making is saying the same thing in the same way as everybody else. One of the analogies I like to talk about is if we were launching a meditation app or meditation retreat. Meditation has been around for thousands of years. If you type meditation into Google, you’ll get billions of results. People will see the same thing which is meditation is the key to stillness, relieves anxiety and the key to contentment, all of those things.

If you say that in the same way as everybody else, what happens in your subconscious is like, “I already know what this is going to say. I’m going to scroll past.” Not to say that you, as an individual, don’t have a different expression or provide unique values. People have endless content that they can go through. If they think that they’ve seen it before, they’re going to skip it. To give you an example of how we could fix that, we talk about pattern interruption a lot. You’ve got to imagine, if you’re in Instagram, for example, you watch LeBron James dunk, the latest Netflix trailer, a news clip of something that’s going on in the election and then your clip comes up. What is going to break that pattern to get them to stop?

One of the tools that we use sometimes is called Subverting Expectations. Flipping something on its head. In the example of meditation, the three core pillars may look something like this. I may start the video with a headline or I may say meditation is a scam to get that stop. I’ll go into the story and say, “Have you ever felt like meditation is a scam? If that’s you, I feel your pain. When I first started meditating, I couldn’t get it to work for me. I had people telling me I needed to sit down and completely clear my thoughts in my head.

Every time I sat down, my mind would race. Is that something that’s happened to you? If it is, I want to share a few strategies that I learned early on that allowed me to turn a non-monetary. Somebody that didn’t believe in it at all to somebody that I’ll meditate every day for ten years. Will you click the link below to check out these strategies that I want to share with you?” What I did is I subverted the expectations, I flipped it on its head, but I’m not doing clickbait because it plays into the story that I’m going to tell by trying to attract people that haven’t meditated and what’s going on in their head.

I share the story that I feel their pain, I’ve been in their instance. Hopefully, by me relating to them and doing it in an authentic way sharing my experience, that will create the trust and credibility enough or they’ll take the next step on the journey. That’s an example of that. There were another two examples that we did from an organic perspective from subverting expectations that went viral and worked well. One was the old saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” We’ve heard that millions of times.

We created a video that started off saying sweat the small stuff. We dove into an inspirational thing of why you need to pay attention to the details. There was another one where the headline said, “WARNING! Safety is Dangerous.” Again, it’s a flipping perspective on its head to get people to stop to win the first part of the conversation so we can get into the story and the real information that we want to share with them.

Our company trains public speakers and people specifically that want to deliver high stakes talks like TEDx Talk, for example. The death knell to effective and impactful public speaking is to be predictable. It’s the same thing we’re talking about. You’re just using different terminology but we say that it’s not so much about being a boring speaker, even though people would call it that. It’s about being unpredictable. That’s how you maintain a person’s attention is by not playing into what is the natural instinct and what we’ve adapted to is to be able to see how things are going to turn out very quickly. You could see an ad, you could see something, you see it coming and you know where it’s going.

As soon as you know where something is going, it’s no longer interesting. It’s not novel or unique, there’s nothing to learn, and you’re off checking your Facebook again, or whatever it is you’re doing that’s distracting you habitually. It’s important that you’ve given us two things that I want to language it a little differently because you look at opportunities to take something that might be considered conventional wisdom and to do what you said, turn it on its side. Where can you do that? That’s a tangible takeaway for people. For your marketing or talking about something that’s relative to your content. Where can you debunk a myth to turn something that’s the conventional wisdom on its side? Not for the purpose of being marketing savvy because I don’t buy that.

That’s going to play into the social dilemma stuff that I want to get into with you, but to see where it is that you can take a unique perspective on someone to genuinely take a unique perspective on something that’s been beaten to death. For example, we had the wife of Richard Carlson who’s the author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. That’s a conventional thing we’ve heard over and over again. To say that, we’re immune to it. It doesn’t get in.

You’ve got to find a way to stand out. It’s not to say that there’s no value in that message. When we’re working with clients, we’re not changing who people are or their core message. We’re contextualizing it in such a way that we can get people to pay attention. Another big distinction where people go wrong is understanding the difference between what people need and what people want. A lot of times, when we’re creating companies, books, or whatever, that we’re trying to push out in the world, we’re so entrenched into it that we cannot see the forest through the trees. We know it so well and what our core customer audience needs, but they may not be there yet. We may need to bring them on a journey to get them to what they need.

Hook Point: We live in a micro attention world. What that means is that you need to capture people’s attention in the first few seconds of the conversation.

With my first book of One Million Followers in 30 Days, that’s playing to what people want. That’s a hook. Everybody wants followers. That’s what brings people in but the substance of the book, I teach people follower growth. The real journey I take them on is what you need to know to be successful on social media, which is how to test properly, the proper mindset, how to create shareable content, how to leverage strategic partnerships.

If I would have started with any of those things like the title being The Art of A/B Testing in Social Media or How To Create Shareable Content In Social Media, it wouldn’t have the impact of creating a hook, a pattern interrupter to say, “This is how I generated a million followers in 30 days so I can get them to stop and they can take them on the journey of what they need.” The people are so brilliant and smart, they’re so in their head, and it comes so intuitively and easy for them that they forget they need to convey in a way that can bring the largest audience in to pay attention to what they have to say.

Brendan, what’s the difference between contextualizing and manipulation?

Contextualizing is positioning in a way that people can hear what you have to say. We’re not manipulating the decision, we want to get people to pay attention, “This is what we’re offering. This is how we can provide value in your life, in your business, whatever it may be.” They make the determination whether it’s the right path for them or not. Manipulation is trying to convince them of doing something that they may not want to do or is not the right fit for them. That’s where that credibility and trust comes into play. Are there narcissists or people out there in the world that are good at manipulating people? Yes, but those people are few and far between. Most of us with the amount of content that we consume on a daily basis. We can see between the lines. We can see if somebody has value or somebody does not have value.

Another way of getting at the question is to ask what the ethical dilemma is because not everybody has seen The Social Dilemma. I recommend it. My eyes were opened by it. I thought I knew how it is that social media has been used and parts of it are documentary-like and more fiction or at least from the standpoint of it, it’s been set up not strictly reporting on facts. I’d love to get your beat on what is the ethical dilemma around things like hook points around figuring out the equation to effective marketing because on some level, it is figuring out a complex math problem or an algorithm.

I’m not saying you figured it out for good because you’re in this space. I’m sure if you went to sleep for the next four months, you’d wake up and you’d have to figure out some things you didn’t plan on figuring out. Let’s say you got to a certain tipping point and your understanding of how this stuff works, it can be used for manipulative things. I’m not going out on a limb to say that that’s what’s happened. Get your thoughts on the ethics of it.

That’s a great point. It can be used for good or bad. To me, I choose to use it for good. The only ethical dilemma that I see is, are you using this to better the world? Are you using this to enhance somebody’s life, provide value to them to overcome a significant challenge in their life, business or world humanity as a whole versus selling something that’s not going to help better the world or better somebody? That, to me, is the dilemma in all of this. You can say what you want about The Social Dilemma. A lot of this marketing has been around for 100 years. We’re repackaging it for this world and society.

I look at the world and instead of fighting against what it is, I try and understand how things work and then use it for the benefit of putting positive things, messages, and products into the world. If you look at The Social Dilemma, for example, I don’t have a solution for it. I’m not that smart nor am I the person to solve that. I’m the person to look at understanding how all of these things work and ensure that the people that have the ability to transform the world in a positive way, message, product, service, retreat, or whatever it is, rises above the noise of the negativity. That’s the way that I look at it.

Do you think the genie is out of the lamp when it comes to how to solve the big issues that are raised in that movie and other documentaries on that topic?

It’s very difficult to solve but you’re also talking about some of the smartest people on the planet so it is solvable and they posed it in the film. The biggest part of solving it is looking at the underlying business model about how they make money. That’s the biggest challenge.

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This might not be a fair question for you. If not, we’ll punt on it. I’ve looked at it and said to myself, “If this is a private company and they simply decided we let the genie out of the lamp and now we’re going to retrieve it. We have the ability to do that because it’s our technology, we control the data, the users, and all that thing.” When it’s a public company, I thought to myself, “Putting yourself in the shoes of any of these CEOs, if they want it to go rogue, get a conscious grow, decide we started with the most egalitarian ideals at the beginning and now we realize it’s being subverted for things that are causing great harm to many people so we’ve got to do something about it.”

That CEO of a public company would get the boot the way Steve Jobs got the boot. If they tried to change a business model, it would ultimately cause harm to the company financially because that would drive down the stock price and then you’ve got retirees living in Florida or someplace going, “I have 1/3 of my portfolio invested in your stock. Now I’ve got to go back to work at age 75 because you decided to change your business model for whatever reason.” I look at it and it feels like a catch-22 when a company is public and the number one driver is shareholder value.

The only blessing in this is that all the people running the big winners like the YouTubes, Twitters, Instagram and Facebooks of the world, they understand that if they make a drastic shift without looking at the long-term plate, some young startup will use the same principles that they did to game the system, make people addicted to it and keep going. There’s a larger shift that needs to happen of what is the future of these platforms.

How are they structured? What is the business model? That needs to come into play whether they solve it or not, I don’t know. I can tell you that Mark Zuckerberg is taking this seriously. You can say what you want about him but I see the changes. I’m in these platforms every day, especially from an advertiser’s perspective. I don’t know if you saw that they banned political advertising for at least another month where you cannot promote anything.

They’ve taken away certain targeting parameters and things of that nature. They’re trying to get smarter and better, but you’ve got to understand the people don’t give them enough credit. The level of scale that they’re dealing with is unprecedented. They’re dealing with billions of users each creating content and to police all of that and then stay in line with free speech is hard. It’s a difficult problem. I’m not saying it’s not solvable. I’m not smart enough to solve it. It can be solved or will it be solved? I don’t know. I think the people in-charge do have a good heart and they don’t want to destroy the world. They’re trying to navigate themselves through a very unprecedented problem that they’re facing.

I don’t think anybody thinking rationally would think that that’s the case. There’s so much they have to be grateful for. These folks have created something that is life and world-changing. I’m sure they’re concerned about not only their financial legacy but their legacy as well in historic terms. I hesitate to even say this because I’m not a big fan of regulation but it almost feels like helping these guys out means it’s tough. We used to do pickup games when we were kids in the schoolyard and you say, “I’m going to take one from you.”

Everybody brings in their smartest and their brightest to independently think about how you police some of the things that we’re talking about, we’ll regulate them in some way. Let me pivot for a moment to drop that term. Brendan, resilience in the moment in so many ways is more important. We’ve got a book called Change Proof: Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty to Build Long-term Growth. The book is about resilience. When we were pitching it to publishers and before we had the right one that was a good fit for us, it was called Radical Resilience. The underpinning of this book is about resilience. I love to get your take. There is this little graphic of a fortune cookie which is, “You’ve got to develop your resilience before you need it.”

If there’s been something I could say again and again in my own business career that worked well for me is that I’ve been able to deal with change before change dealt with me. A lot of people got wiped out by the wave of COVID, change, drastic moving from working in an office to working virtually, a business that might’ve been shut down, and any number of other myriad things. Your business must have been impacted like all of ours were. I’d love to get your beat on how you define resilience for yourself personally. You might have to pivot as a result of any of these things, we’d love to get the sense of how you did that. What was your mindset about it? Tactically speaking, what did you do to get about taking advantage of the opportunities?

Resilience to me is everything. Without it, you’re going to struggle to succeed because the analogy that I like to use and started telling people is being an entrepreneur is like getting punched in the face and getting back up. On a weekly, monthly, sometimes on a daily basis, you get punched in the face with new challenges and you’ve got to find your way through it. If you don’t, you’re not going to last as an entrepreneur or business owner very long. For me, a part of it is you’re not thinking forward too much and trying to tackle the challenges day-by-day in front of me because I used to think forward too far, and it gets way too overwhelming. I worked with the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University with the guy that founded it talks about success momentum.

Is that Robert Cialdini?

Hook Point: Contextualizing is positioning in a way that people can hear what you have to say. We’re not manipulating the decision; we want to get people to pay attention.

No, it’s BJ Fogg. Interestingly enough, there’s a clip of him speaking in The Social Dilemma. They don’t talk about it, but the guy that trained all these Tristan and the Founder of Instagram is BJ Fogg. He created a program called Tiny Habits, where you choose two habits to form over seven days and that habit can’t take more than fifteen seconds. The example that gives you is if you want to get into the habit of flossing your teeth, you floss one tooth a day for seven days, and then you celebrate after you do it. What he says is in the subconscious, what it does is it allows you to tackle bigger and bigger tasks the more you do it. That’s something that I held on to. This is just for me but I don’t see any other option.

There’s that story of the Vikings showing up in enemy territory, burning their ships behind them, and not giving them any other option, I don’t see any other option for myself. I’m not going to work another job. I don’t have that in me. I will never do it. It’s not rewarding to me. No matter how hard it gets and I’m not going to say that I don’t have thoughts about giving up and quitting but I then ask myself, what am I going to do? If I quit tomorrow, what am I going to do? I’m going to live on a beach someplace. Am I going to go to Thailand or the Philippines? I’m going to get bored in two seconds and then it’s not going to be fulfilling.

It’s not quitting this problem scenario or escaping this room doesn’t mean you’re not in a room of some other kind.

I’m not sitting here saying this is easy. I still get challenged with it all the time but I decide to move forward. This is for all entrepreneurs, what happens is we get into something because it truly excites us but we don’t know what it takes to pull it off. If we knew how much work in time that it took to pull it off, we would never get started.

Being an entrepreneur is being Rocky in the first Rocky movie. You’re getting hit in the face all the time.

Mike Tyson says, “Everybody has got a plan until they get punched in the face.” It’s such a relevant thing for entrepreneurship. For me, my resilience comes from, I love learning new things. I get into experiences because it excites me without understanding the amount of work that it goes in. I have this mentality of, “I don’t have any other options.” Since I burned the bridge or I burned the ship behind me, the only option I have is to keep moving forward to find the path that works.

You’re no longer employable, Brendan.

I’m not.

It’s the same with me. I don’t know when that happened but it is a weird thing. I don’t hear a lot of entrepreneurs speak about, which might be an interesting chapter in a book or something, how unemployable we are.

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That’s a good thing.

It’s not a bad way at all. I’m not implying that anybody who is employable is somehow less in some way. Once you’ve crossed the threshold and I don’t know what that threshold is which would be interesting research. For me personally, it’s those ships that have been burned. The book I wrote Pivot is all about how you pivot without burning ships. It’s a commitment device for sure but you’re making those small changes and that’s what pivot is about. In so many ways, those micro changes create momentum. You find over time that you’ve created something that can replace the thing that’s causing you the misery. I agree with you, at a certain point, you recognize that there’s an element of personal freedom that comes in doing your own thing.

You’ve got to be able to endure the punches, but you’ve also got to be able to recover. That’s what our research on resilience has disclosed. It’s a little less about the Rocky model and the ability to take the punch, get back up as many times as it takes. There is that level of tenacity that’s required but long-term, you’ve not only been able to endure. You’re not Rocky that looks too good at the end of that movie. He wins our hearts but he’s all banged up. You’re looking good. I don’t mean that because you’re looking good. You’ve stayed in the game long enough to figure things out. That’s my experience in entrepreneurship.

In any area of business, you’ve got to be in the game long enough to figure out what works. You’ve got to go through a lot of shit and a lot of not things that don’t work to be able to figure out what does work. That’s a long-term and marathon game which you can’t get hit in the face and not recover from and still be able to play the long game. We’re talking about where you run your business and the options to run it remotely more than ever before don’t have to be tied to a particular state or country. It may play into how it is that you create that longevity.

When we look at resilience, we think of it mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually. It’s all of those things. It’s so important that you are able to be in it for the long run. I love what you said that you’re addicted to learning. What better thing could life be about than constant never-ending learning? There is no question there but when it comes to your own resilience, do you have a ritual? You brought up BJ Fogg and Tiny Habits. I gave a TED Talk a couple of years ago which was, at a certain point, you and I had talked about how to name it. One of the titles we ultimately excelled on was DOING THIS for 10 Seconds Can Change Your Life! because it’s a ten-second habit. I’m curious, do you have a ten-second habit or a longer habit that you use each day on a ritual basis to help you to maintain the resilience you were talking about?

The fundamental base of it is when I first started out being an entrepreneur is when a challenge, obstacle, or one of those times you get punched in the face happen. Sometimes, it would take weeks or months to get past it. With each time that you experience a challenge, you start to understand it’s a part of the process. The more that you understand that it’s a part of the process, you can cope with it and deal with it much easier. All the way up to now, if I run into a big challenge at max, it impacts me for a few hours. Sometimes, it’s only a walk around the block that allows me to deal with it. You get better at it.

One of the things is I’ve spent months retraining my breath and I’ve been breathing wrong my entire life. Doing breathing exercises throughout the day to keep my mental clarity and energy up which also allows me to relieve stress. It’s truly amazing that most of us don’t even focus on it when it’s something that we do 18,000 to 25,000 times a day. That has helped me immensely. On top of that is having a support system and people that you can call to talk through something or listen, helps tremendously. If you internalize too much in yourself and you don’t get it out or express it, it can build up and eat you alive.

Letting go is a class that we all missed in elementary, middle of high school and college. Think about that.

I don’t understand it. Schools are so focused on science, math and history. They don’t teach us the fundamentals of how to deal with mental health and challenges. It’s baffling to me.

I knew our folks would enjoy reading this blog. Everybody knows, if you’ve not subscribed to the show, please do and let a friend know as well. If you think this is an episode that people would enjoy, pass it on. Hook Point is available as well as One Million Followers in 30 Days. Brendan, is there something that you want to leave us with? Some information that we didn’t cover that you’d feel more completed to share.

Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World

We’ve covered a lot of amazing topics. I would say that, keep taking one step at a time. If you want to achieve something, don’t give up. That’s the cliche thing to say but that’s the determining factor of whether you’re going to be successful or not at anything. Keep learning, keep challenging yourself and see a challenger. If you do get punched in the face, know that’s a part of the journey and it’s not a negative thing. It’s a learning experience. It’s something that we all go through and know that you’re not alone on that journey. We all experienced it. We’re all human beings. We all have feelings and emotions. We know what it’s like to be challenged and to face obstacles.

Those are such true words, Brendan, we’re not alone. I know you can feel that way and loneliness isn’t something that any of us have the corner on the market of. We all feel lonely from time-to-time. It’s so important. I was on a Zoom call with an organization that’s hiring me to do a keynote for them. Among the things they wanted me to focus on was the fact that there are so many people in their ecosystem who feel they have to do it alone. They’re not reaching out to people for help and they’re not communicating when they’re looking for support. What a grand opportunity it is to bring that to the table for that particular talk.

I was thinking that thing is cultural. It comes from the leadership in any organization to give people permission to ask for support, to reach out and to recognize as Brendan was saying that none of us were alone. As we wrap things up, I want to close an open loop. I referred to that TED Talk I gave and the ten-second strategy which to me, is the waking ritual I engaged. When I woke up and God willing, I get to wake up again, I’ll do it again. It’s three steps. It’s simple. First, wake up. Waking up is obvious. If I ask 100 people, “Did you wake up?” They get some laughs and not everybody feels awake. They need another cup of coffee.

If I say, “Do you intend to wake up tomorrow?” Everybody’s hands are 100%. Waking up is not just physically. It is a mental, emotional and spiritual waking up that we’re talking about. It’s metaphoric. That’s the first piece is to wake up. When you realize that you’re waking up, you can also recognize that it wasn’t a guarantee when you went to bed. I didn’t have a contract when I put my head on the pillow. Brendan, did you have a contract that said you were going to wake up?

Nobody does.

Regardless of what you’re waking up to, it could be challenges in your life, your business, or whatever that looks like, you waking up is a blessing. It’s a gift, it’s not promised, it’s not guaranteed. In that moment of waking up, you can feel gratitude. Be grateful and appreciate the fact that you’ve been given a brand-new start. Lastly for me anyway is I put my feet on the floor and I recognize what a blessing it is to be able to do that. Instead of feeling the anxiety and even the dread that I used to feel years ago when I put my feet on the floor, I put my feet on the floor and I make it a point to say something out loud. I say four simple words, “I love my life,” no matter what.

I invite all of you to create your waking ritual. Wake up first. I know everybody is going to agree to that. Find something at that moment to be grateful for and feel appreciation for. Say something out loud. We create our lives by what we say. We’re constantly bringing our lives into being by what we say. The words we speak are self-fulfilling prophecies. What are the words that you want to start your day with? You could start with, I love my life, but you don’t have to. It could be anything. I had a woman on the show, a beautiful lady, her first words are, “I wonder what miracles are coming,” Judy Whitcraft. You can check out that episode as well. It was a cool conversation. Choose your words carefully.

Thanks for having me.

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