I gained 35,000 followers in 3 months—and I’m already bored…
If you want to make a living creating content…you better make sure you love what you do.
It’s imperative that you love the process for two reasons:
First, you won’t blow up overnight. You need to enjoy the creation process, even when you have zero followers. You will gain an audience, in time, but it won’t happen as fast as you daydream.
Along the way there will be days when nobody cares.
In the last 30 days, I’ve had over 11,000 website visitors. But when I started blogging in 2018, there were many, many days I can recall when I had two website visitors: me and my dad.
In 2020, I blogged every single day for 100 days straight. At the end of that year, I had 800 website visitors total. An average of eight per day. If I didn’t love blogging, and if it didn’t bring me intrinsic personal value, I would have been an absolute fool not to quit at the end of those 100 days.
Because I loved it, I got through the dip.
The second reason you need to love the process is because eventually, when you do gain an audience, you’ll realize it doesn’t make you as happy as you thought it would.
We all use goals as motivation to keep working. But when those are reached, and you aren’t instantly happy, you’ll realize those get boring too. You need to love what you’re doing, even after you gain notoriety.
In early 2023, after a few years of “on again, off again” video content creation, I decided it was time to invest money into my video content. I paid my cousin a few hundred bucks to shoot and edit videos with me for the day. In those initial weeks, I remember calling him with excitement when a video got 2,000 views. We were thrilled to gain 50 followers in one week. Finally, at the end of 2023, after more than nine months of consistent content creation (and five years of blog writing), I started gaining an audience. On November 28th, 2023, I had 2400 followers on Instagram. By December 23rd, I had 10,000. By January 12th—20,000. February 5th—30,000. Next week, I’ll likely hit 40,000.
Guess what?
I’m bored of it already.
I always had a delusion that “one day” when I reached 10,000, or 25,000, or however many followers, that I would be happy. That life would be easy. That everything would change. Wouldn’t you know it, I have more followers now than I ever dared to wish for…and I’m still anxious about the same old stuff. I still have trouble feeling gratitude. I still get caught up daydreaming.
Now, I’m casually speaking of numbers that outweigh the audience I had for five years. “Next week, I’ll likely hit 40,000.” I just wrote that two paragraphs ago. Three months ago, I would be ecstatic. Now, it’s all relative.
But do you know what hasn’t changed?
I still love writing.
I get more value out of it now than ever. It still excites me and challenges me. I still steal away in the early mornings and late nights to hammer out my thoughts on a keyboard. I still bite off more than I can chew, wrestling to explain new ideas that aren’t quite clear to me yet.
You gotta love it. Love is the secret sauce.
A love of the game will get you there—and keep you going once you make it.
