Riskless Rewards - Preselling Yourself
Get it how you live, player
While learning about what it is that makes people want to know each other and how to get an introduction with anyone, I spend a lot of time learning about celebrity and status. Something interesting I began to notice was that the line between actor and influencer is becoming increasingly blurred.
I have a friend who went to a very prestigious school of screen acting, then a number of high profile sessions in LA ‘with the right people’, and they even had a high profile executive try to find an ‘in’ for them. They, by all accounts, did everything the way they were supposed to.
They’re very talented and wholesome, they are attractive and kind, and they’re really very pleasant to work with - so why was it so hard for them to get a chance?
One thing I understand better than most is the sheer sphincter-puckering effect of having to take a big risk on a large sum of cash. Taking risks is hard and not everyone can do it - heck plenty of people take risks *because* they don’t fully understand the consequences of their actions.
There are no people less risk averse than an executive whose continuing employment is tied to revenue goals, except maybe the marketing executives who work for them. The reason Marvel movies are so plentiful and we are seeing all these remakes is the effect of this aversion to risk.
What each of the Marvel, Shrek, Sex in the City, and Star Wars movies show us is that there are some franchises with captive audiences that will go see any movie in the franchise - their bar for quality is to be determined. Because of this, the studio executives can make any movie that they expect to cost less than the revenue generated by those movie goers.
Now what does that have to do with my friend and their ability to land gigs?
People Presell Everything All The Time
Not only are executives looking for presold franchises - they are looking for presold *actors*, presold *directors*, and presold *critics*.
My friend has no real public social media presence - but their friends with 50,000 followers on instagram *do* land roles, despite being less talented or attractive. Why? Because the studio executives believe that some acceptable number of those 50,000 people will put ass in chair and pay for tickets.
Celebrities are increasingly influencers who have fan bases that will consume their content in a Kevin Kelly like fervor. Just look at Beyonce, Zendaya, Ryan Reynolds, or Tom Cruise. Heck, actors and artists who are type cast like Jason Statham probably have it best because they are presold for a genre, every action film needs to consider casting him if they can. I bet he has bidding wars for that badass bald head.
Now - most of us probably aren’t trying to break into acting, but there are still lessons to be learned here. The big one is that you should be trying to do whatever it is your end-goal is as much as you can. If you want to write you should write, if you want to act you should act, if you want to code or sell… you get it.
In doing so you learn the tricks of how to be successful and also see how the sausage is made - there simply is no replacement for being on the ground and doing the grunt work. You must do this to be consistently great.
By sharing it with others you build an audience, which can lead to some nice second and third order effects, but really the benefit is that you become ‘presold’ in that thing. If people like your work, you are ‘presold’ in their mind.
Here’s a parting story:
When I was just getting started at product management and I had no really good way to break into the industry. I really wanted to be an entrepreneur and I knew PM would help me get there, but I was in the same boat as my friend. I was a CS student with the same calendar app portfolio as everyone else - I hadn’t created a mesh network, or a blockchain (as was hot at the time), I hadn’t hacked the FSB or Astroturfed anyone (as was also hot at that time).
What I had done, though, was learn that I could arbitrage some goods between two marketplaces - which I did by hand at first, then automated with Python I taught myself through MIT Opencourseware.
I made money, I got a customer list, I opened my own website and ran my own ads - and before I knew it I *was* an entrepreneur.
When I finally started interviewing for PM roles I had a bunch of great internship experiences writing code for Fortune 50 companies and how my code was deployed in government and military environments…NOTHING 🤣
Everyone just wanted to talk about my arbitrage work. Arbitrage work where I identified a market gap, developed a business plan, sales copy, customer relationships, fulfillment logistics, advertising, and all the other sundry skills I had to learn to succeed at my little side project.
I think about that a lot - I got my job because I was presold.
Where in your life do you want to go and how can you presell yourself to the gatekeepers?