When to trust your gut

Question: When should you trust your gut?

Answer: Every time.

Last week I spent some time working with Jay on my personal brand. We've been creating great content, but follower growth has been slow.

And then we had a breakthrough. We found a strategy to help us grow, acquiring real, relevant followers, through shoutouts. And since then, we've grown from 1700 to almost 9500 followers in just a week.

Retracing my steps, this happened because I said yes to several things in a row.

First, I said yes to go to a conference last year where Tom Bilyeu was a speaker. That made me start following him.

Then a couple of months ago, he offered a business decision-making workshop, which has been great in and of itself.

And in one of the lessons there, in an off-hand way, he mentioned, by way of an example, that the key strategy to grow their Instagram account had been shoutouts.

So Jay and I started looking into that, and very quickly, we found a way to get shoutouts and grow the account quickly.

It all came across thanks to a string of saying yes to invitations.

When Life or the Universe makes an invitation, and you feel the pull in your gut, say f'ing yes.

Don't talk yourself out of it.

Every single time I've talked myself out of something like that, I've lived to regret it.

Every time it's been about the cost, and every time the cost ends up being meaningless a short while later, but the experience that I didn't have didn't change.

The biggest such example was the opportunity to meet & greet one of my favorite artists, Sting, for a mere $2,000.

It felt like a lot of money then. Today, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But the opportunity hasn't come by since.

And that's just the direct loss.

Who knows what other opportunities might have come out of it?

Impossible to know.

There's no point in living in regret. The past is the past. You can't change it.

But you can learn from it, and learn to say yes the next time.

Love,
–Calvin