What Our Experiment Revealed
I launched an experiment last week that I honestly didn’t think would work.
When I asked you to share your influence challenges and engage with others, I wasn’t just testing community engagement. I was testing a theory that’s been haunting me since my business school professors insisted followers equals influence:
What if everything we’ve been taught to measure about influence is fundamentally, catastrophically wrong?
The results weren’t just surprising—they systematically dismantled conventional wisdom in ways that even I, the perpetual skeptic, couldn’t have anticipated.
WATCH: The Metrics Deception
In yesterday’s video, I break down why chasing followers is like trying to fill a bathtub with the drain open—exhausting, expensive, and ultimately futile. I reveal the three participants who transformed our collective thinking not through broadcasting wisdom, but through belonging in conversation.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Our digital landscape obsesses over visibility metrics and “best practices” while systematically overlooking what actually creates influence. It wasn’t burnout that hit marketing—it was irrelevance, disguised as optimization.
The patterns that emerged from our experiment were so distinct that they’ve formed what I now call the Value-Connection Matrix—a framework revealing why some voices cut through the noise while others, despite substantial followings, create all the impact of a whisper in a hurricane.
What fascinated me most? The inverse relationship between pursuing influence and achieving it. The more someone chases influence as the end goal, the more it seems to slip away.
I call this the Influence Paradox—genuine influence emerges as a byproduct of creating value, never as the primary objective.
This leaves us with a stark reality: building genuine influence requires abandoning the very metrics most marketing professionals use to measure it. It demands patience in an ecosystem designed for immediacy. It requires depth on platforms engineered for breadth.
Would you rather have ten thousand passive followers or twenty people whose thinking has been permanently altered by your contributions? The algorithm rewards the former. Real influence lives in the latter.
Key Takeaways
- Metrics Mask Meaning: Traditional engagement metrics systematically fail to capture real influence.
- The Authority Trap: It’s not accolades and status that create real influence, but the value you bring to conversations.
- The Connection Currency: Our three most influential participants created value without expectation of return.
- The Paradox Principle: Stop chasing influence to actually gain it.
Watch This 5 Minute Video to Discover
- Who emerged as our most influential community members
- The specific behaviors that created genuine influence
- Why conventional influence metrics systematically fail
- This week’s experiment that puts these principles into practice
It took a career-ending injury for me to realize my body was never my masterpiece—my life is. Similarly, it’s taken years of building influence from scratch, then figuring out how to ‘teach’ it to others, to recognize that what I was taught in business school fundamentally missed the mark. True influence isn’t something to be measured in metrics and followers—it’s something that emerges when you’re too busy creating value to track who’s watching.
See you back here next week,
Let’s Connect!
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