I decided to start my own skool community last week, and I've given myself until the end of the month to have it up and running. The deadline is because I have 4 upcoming sports psychology presentations with a youth travel baseball organization, beginning the first week of June. Just in the past week, I've already managed to: - Come up with a bio and description for my about page on Skool - Create branding images for my skool community. - Structure my skool community - plan, script, and record a free course to have in the community to serve as my lead magnet - plan, script, and record a VSL for the About page on my Skool community This is a really big deal to me because I've been doing a lot of talking about starting the skool community, and I never took action on it. Last week I was confirmed for the 4 presentations, so I knew this would be a great opportunity to have my skool community up and running by then. That way, I could funnel people from the presentations into my community. I'm honestly impressed with myself because I have never taken such instant and relentless action on something in business before. I've always been told (deep down I knew this to be true) that I think and ponder too much, and I don't just take action. I've been so ridiculously productive that I realize my goals of a successful business are not that far away if I keep taking action like this. With all that being said, I wanted to say a special thank you to @Gilbert Urbina. Everything that I've managed to do in this past week has been advised and influenced by him. He helped me put all this stuff together, and I really don't know how I could have done it without him. TL;DR stop thinking so much and just take action. Gilbert will help you a lot...

Big shoutout to @Trent MacKinney. He decided to start his own Skool community and gave himself a real deadline because he has 4 upcoming sports psychology presentations with a youth baseball organization. In one week, he already: Built his Skool bio and about page Created branding assets Structured the community Planned, scripted, and started recording his free course This is exactly what we want inside The Institute Social. Not just learning. Not just collecting ideas. Installing the system, making decisions, and turning the work into something real. Trent, this is a big move. Excited to see this go live. Question for everyone: What is one thing you could stop thinking about and actually build this week?

I’m building a plug-and-play operator tool for the community. The goal is simple: build something you can actually use right away to make your business feel cleaner, clearer, and easier to run. If I built one thing for you this month, which would help you most right now? Vote below 👇 And if you vote, drop a comment telling me the specific mess you’d want it to fix. That’ll help me build the right version instead of guessing.

A couple things that stood out to me: - stop thinking about the algorithm and start thinking about the audience - not all views, clicks, or watch time are equal - the better question is: who is actually engaging? - short-term hacks usually stay short-term - if you make content the right people actually find valuable, platform changes matter less That line about replacing “algorithm” with “audience” was really good. I think a lot of people get caught up trying to outsmart platforms instead of just making things that are actually useful to the right people. Dropping his full email below because I think it’s worth reading. Every day across my newsfeed I see scary headlines about how the algorithm has changed and that we are all cooked. That social media platforms are doing XYZ new thing that is going to destroy strategies for advertising and marketing. To be clear...I am by no means the longest-standing marketer in the world, but I have been at this for almost 15 years. And I have continually outperformed the majority of my competitors. I believe I’ve been able to do that from many significant decisions, and four of them are below: 1. To replace the word "algorithm" with "audience":People love to give social media platforms a personality, like there's a big bad boogeyman that we refer to as “the algorithm” that we are all enslaved to, but if we replace the term algorithm with audience, a lot of “performance” makes a lot more sense. 2. Under the assumption of us talking to an audience, not an algorithm, it has been much less useful for me to say..."I wonder if people like this" and just simply ask myself..."Do I like this?" If I like it, other people will like it too. Make more stuff you like, not that you think other people will like. 3. No over-obsession on metrics, or rather a fresh dose of skepticism around things like click-through rates and watch times, because the reporting we get from these platforms does not differentiate the most important qualifier, which is W-H-O. WHO is clicking? WHO is watching? I know for sure that I can make a video that will get millions of views if I talk about how to get rich quick in the 3rd world, but the majority of people who click on that video are not going to be good customers. It’s the content equivalent of running a flash sale or a deep discounts. You can for sure get more clicks, but it is unlikely that you will get the best customers. The same is true for content. 4. I've almost never believed in short-term “algo hacks” because short-term hacks tend to be exactly that...short-term.Almost all of my social media and marketing strategies have been with one North Star, which is alignment with the platform's long term objectives. Most platforms' objectives are the same as a human's objectives, which is...To curate content that the user will find valuable to keep them on the platform.If you make that your North Star, then the changes they make to the math equation that they use to approximate what people want...Every algorithm improvement only benefits you and never hurts you.

Listened to a really good Sharran episode and a few things stood out to me. Here is the link. The biggest one: Most businesses don’t need more things. They need fewer things done better. That hit. A lot of entrepreneurs think scale means: - more offers - more service lines - more complexity - more moving pieces But the way he explained it was simple: If you want to scale, you have to figure out:what’s the one thing that actually matters most right now? He also broke business down into a framework that I think is really useful: - traffic = getting opportunities in - systems = converting those opportunities - skills = actually delivering the result That’s such a good lens because a lot of people try to fix everything at once when really one of those three is usually the real issue. Another line that stuck with me was the idea of building something that can scale by subtraction, not just multiplication. That’s real. A lot of the time, growth is not:“what do I add?” It’s:“what do I remove, simplify, or focus harder on?” A few other good reminders from the episode: - complexity compounds fast - the more capable you are, the easier it is to overbuild - if you don’t know your options, you don’t really have any - the right people around you matter more than most founders realize - email is still one of the most valuable assets you can build Overall, it was just a really good episode on: - simplification - scale - diagnosing the real bottleneck - and not letting capability turn into unnecessary complexity Worth the listen. If you check it out, drop the takeaway that hit you the most. Let’s build.