Tag: self development

  • Learning from My Natural Cosmetics Venture: The Importance of Branding

    Learning from My Natural Cosmetics Venture: The Importance of Branding

    From Self-Made Cosmetics to Brand Identity: What I Would Do Differently Now

    A Small Business That Taught Me Everything

    Over ten years ago I ran a small cosmetics company. I made self-made, natural products for skin and hair. The business does not exist anymore, yet it became a learning experience that I now treat as a case study. In the coming videos I want to show what I would do differently with the tools and resources sitting in my hands today. Let me get into it.

    The Difference Between Labeling and Branding

    I am a highly creative person, and for those who know me, I am also an artist. So I was hands-on with the labeling. What I did not understand back then is that labeling is not the same as building a brand. People speak a lot about brand, and the way I have come to understand it, branding is about identity, and whether a group of people speak, relate, and feel drawn to who you are. Not only who you are as a person, but the way things are done by you, the way the brand behaves. A brand has a name. It might have a logo. These are elements of a brand, not the brand itself, so the terms should not be used interchangeably.

    Giving an identity to an object became the hard part. I went back and forth choosing jars, the way each one would present, the colors, the way the product needed to sit in front of a customer. How does it speak to that customer? That question led to production costs, inventory costs, and the creative costs poured into the work. The outcome was a business without a solid brand identity.[1]

    When People Forget You, Your Product Stops Mattering

    Here is what a weak identity leads to. People did not think my products were bad. I received compliments. The products held their quality. The problem sat somewhere else. People forgot me. They saw me once and forgot who I was. I was banking on the hope that customers would use the product and keep buying it on repeat.

    Even when a product is top tier, triple A plus, a customer who forgets you will reach for a brand that is as good, or sometimes weaker, because that brand shows itself better and builds an identity worth connecting to. Quality alone does not hold attention. A brand identity is the way you speak, connect, and relate to the customer in front of you right now. Brands grow when they stay easy to remember and easy to find.[2]

    The Tools Available to Me Now

    If I looked at the resources available now, I would put language first. My website would be filled with words that relate to the audience I am speaking to. I would run the research, study the audience, and shape copy with chatGPT so that the message speaks to people and they recognize themselves as a customer of the product. They see themselves using it. They see it sitting in their bathroom or their bedroom. They would not want to leave the door without rubbing on a butter that I created.[3]

    I would produce a range of mockups and test what people respond to. Put them in front of an audience through social media creation and watch what speaks. This is content creation working in service of identity, and it feeds directly into a clear social media management plan.

    These resources do not take over the company. They supplement, support, and strengthen. A social media management tool, paired with steady workflow automation, would have helped me reach a better understanding of the brand, the identity, the colors, the logo. These are elements that come together into one full picture. A workspace such as Claude Cowork sits beside the creative work as a partner, the way a creative agency supports founders, artists, content creators, and influencers who run art galleries or product lines without a large team behind them.

    It is even possible to scan your social media pages with a research tool. I have seen this across a number of videos, and I need to test whether it works here in the Netherlands. Scanning your pages lets you ask whether the brand speaks to the people who follow you, and how to build social media management around the brand itself. This would have helped me a thousand times.

    Creativity Strengthened, Not Replaced

    These tools do not push creativity away. They accentuate it. Used well, they help build better strategy and reveal the identity of a brand. Whether you run your own pages or you are outsourcing social media to a partner, the work stays rooted in who you are. The social media management tools sharpen the strategy. The vision stays yours.

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    Footnotes

    [1] Marty Neumeier, The Brand Gap, New Riders Publishing, 2003, https://www.marty-neumeier.com. Neumeier defines a brand as the gut feeling a person holds about a product, separate from the name or logo, which supports the point that labeling and decorating jars is not the same as building a brand.

    [2] Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow, Oxford University Press, 2010, https://global.oup.com. Sharp shows that brands grow through mental and physical availability, meaning being remembered and easy to find, which supports the section on customers forgetting the business despite a quality product.

    [3] Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, Marketing Management, Pearson, 2016, https://www.pearson.com. Kotler and Keller frame brand identity as the consistent way a company communicates with and relates to its target audience, which supports building identity through language, copy, and audience research tools.

  • Intentional Speech for Positive Influence and Success

    Intentional Speech for Positive Influence and Success

    Your Mouth Is a Container and Your Words Are the Tenants

    Your mouth is a container. The words you speak reside inside it before they ever reach the world. When the mind drops words into that container without intention, when you say things mindlessly, when you are unaware of what it is that you are saying, the effect reaches further than you. It lands on you. It shapes how others interact with you, or whether they want to interact with you at all. A lot of what happens to us sits inside what we say, and it tricks us. It tricks you.

    The Sentence That Sounds Humble but Works Against You

    Here is one of the trickiest things a person says: I do not believe anybody is better than anyone else. I am not better than anybody else. It sounds gracious. It sounds safe. I know this is going to feel controversial, but we are getting into it anyway.

    I started thinking about this after hearing it in a piece of content from a creator I follow. I love his content. He is such a straight shooter that you either take it or you leave it. He was speaking on a particular topic, and someone responded by telling him that nobody is better than anybody else, suggesting he had placed himself above another person.

    His answer was direct. He said he knows he is better than someone else, and that is exactly why he makes the choices he makes and has the life he has. He explained it plainly. He wants to be better than the people he does not want to share space with. He does not want to sit in the company of those who are doing bad, thinking bad, and acting on bad things. So he has to believe and know that he stands apart from that. That belief produces his results.

    The Part That Sounds Harsh Until It Lands

    Then he nipped it in the bud, the way he usually does. Do not come asking me who the creator is, because I am not going to say it. It is his content, and I am using it only as an example.

    What he said to the responder went like this. Of course you believe you are not better than anybody else. That is why you have the results that you have. I do not have that problem.

    It sounds harsh.

    Let it sink in, though.

    He was dissecting another person by pointing at the belief itself. Because you hold that belief, you used your mouth as the container for the words that came out of it. That does not place the two of you on the same level. It cannot, and it will not. You are right about yourself, he said, for not believing you are better. And I am right to know that I am. The results follow accordingly. He closed the door. We will not be discussing this any further.

    When I saw that exchange, I sat with it.

    Why This Matters for Anyone Building Something

    For a lot of people, this is going to sting. How dare someone say they are better than another person. I am not going to over explain it here, because I need people to think for themselves. If you do not want to think about it, you scroll on.

    The magnitude of understanding what happens inside that container changes how you use it. Once you grasp it, you start being mindful of what goes in. You become aware of what the container begins to attract back to you. This is not a soft idea reserved for personal life. It sits at the center of how founders speak about their work, how content creators frame their value, and how influencers describe what they stand for. Research on self efficacy shows that the beliefs people hold about their own capability shape the goals they set and the outcomes they reach.[^1]

    Watch any creative agency that has lasted. The people running it do not water down their language. They speak with precision about who they serve and who they do not. The same holds for anyone in social media management. When you describe what you do with conviction, you attract the right clients and repel the wrong ones, and that selection is the work. Words are commitments, and the words we accept as true become the boundaries of the action we take.[^2]

    Speak With Intention, Attract With Precision

    The lesson sits in front of us. Treat your mouth as the container it is. Decide what you allow inside it. A content creator who keeps saying the market is too crowded will live inside a crowded market. A founder who repeats that nobody is better positioned to solve a problem will move with the certainty that produces results. The words shape the standard. The standard shapes the choices. The choices shape the life.

    Language carries this weight because it frames how we interpret everything around us. The words we use are not neutral labels placed on a fixed reality. They set the terms by which we perceive and act.[^3]

    So be mindful of what you put in the container. Then watch what the container starts to bring toward you. Very cutesy, very nice.

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    [^1]: Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, W. H. Freeman, 1997. Bandura demonstrates that the beliefs people hold about their own capability directly govern the goals they pursue and the results they achieve, which supports the claim that the words spoken about oneself shape outcomes. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-08589-000

    [^2]: J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Oxford University Press, 1962. Austin shows that speech is a form of action and that statements function as commitments rather than passive descriptions, supporting the point that words spoken become boundaries for behavior. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-to-do-things-with-words-9780198245537

    [^3]: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, 1980. The authors argue that the language we use structures how we perceive and act in the world, which supports the article’s central idea that the contents of the mouth shape the reality a person attracts. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo3637992.html

  • The Unseen Value of Mailing Lists for Small Businesses

    The Unseen Value of Mailing Lists for Small Businesses

    What My Old Cosmetics Business Taught Me About Mailing Lists

    Welcome back to another piece where I use myself as the case study. More than ten years ago I had a small cosmetics business for handmade products, hair and skin. That business is not here with us anymore. It is gone. Yet we talk about it anyway, because there is a lesson buried in that time frame. The honest question I sit with now is simple. What would have been different if I had used the resources that we have at hand today?

    The answer changes everything about how I would build a brand a second time around.

    Small Businesses Underestimate the Mailing List

    Small businesses underestimate the power of having a mailing list. Say hallelujah, because this point matters. A mailing list is part of sales. It is not only digital marketing. It belongs to the sales strategy itself, sitting right alongside your social media management and your content creation.

    Having a mailing list is a strong way for businesses at any magnitude to build a relationship with their customers. Listen carefully to what I am about to say. These are people who chose to be in your inbox. They told you, in their own way, that they want you to share what you have to offer. That permission carries weight. It is the closest thing to a direct line a founder can own.

    Many founders, content creators, influencers, artists, and art galleries treat that inbox as an afterthought. The result is a missed relationship with the very audience that raised a hand and asked to hear from them.

    Why Social Media Alone Will Not Reach Everyone

    We forget that the messages we send through social media never reach all of the people. I keep going back to this hill, and I will keep standing on it. The reach of any single platform is limited by an algorithm you do not control.

    Everything you talk about in your social media management, your content creation, and your videos is strong material that serves people inside a newsletter. The work already exists. The audio exists. The video exists. The blog posts exist. The task is moving that value into a channel where the people who asked to hear from you read it in full.

    A social media management tool keeps the front of the house running, while the mailing list protects the relationship behind it. One feeds the other.

    Use Workflow Automation to Turn Content Into Newsletters

    Here is where I would have done things differently. Workflow automation builds a system that takes your audio and your video and turns it into newsletters. The same system turns that material into blog posts, and the blog posts feed back into the newsletter. You make a mini website out of your newsletter, where each issue lives on and keeps working for you.

    I cannot stress enough how much this helps. Had I known to set up workflow automation for that cosmetics brand, it would have saved an enormous amount of time. Tools such as Claude Cowork and chatGPT now sit at the center of that process, restructuring a single video into a week of written communication without losing the voice behind it. A creative agency leans on this same approach when outsourcing social media for clients who produce constantly and have no hours left to repurpose any of it.

    This is the work that content creators, influencers, and founders give away every day. The raw material is already paid for in your time. Workflow automation collects the return.

    Newsletters Are for the Good Stuff

    A newsletter is an opportunity for deep insight. People are there for the good stuff, so bring the good stuff. Nobody wants a bland repetition of what already sits on your website. Nobody wants to open an inbox and find the same offers and discounts wrapped in a new subject line.

    You are far more than your offer. You are not the discount. Build the relationship first, and let it carry through into the newsletter, into the distribution channels, into every piece of communication you send. That relationship is what turns a reader into a customer and a customer into someone who stays.

    For artists and art galleries, this is the difference between a one-time sale and a collector who follows the whole body of work. For founders and content creators, it is the foundation that social media creation rests on. The platforms move fast and change their rules. The inbox stays yours.

    That cosmetics business never had this. Yours can.

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    Footnotes

    1. Chaffey, Dave. Email Marketing Statistics and Benchmarks. Smart Insights, January 2024. https://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/statistics-sources-for-email-marketing/ This report shows that email consistently returns higher engagement and conversion than organic social reach, which supports the point that a mailing list reaches your audience more reliably than social media alone.

    2. Patel, Sujan. Email Marketing Rules. 2019. https://emailmarketingrules.com This work argues that permission-based email earns attention because subscribers opt in, which backs the idea that people in your inbox chose to hear from you and expect real value rather than repeated offers.

    3. McKinsey and Company. The State of AI in Early 2024. McKinsey, May 2024. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai This research documents how automation and generative tools cut repetitive content work, supporting the case for using workflow automation to convert video and audio into newsletters and blog posts.

  • Adapting Fairs for the Digital Age: Blending Physical Presence with Continuous Online Engagement

    Adapting Fairs for the Digital Age: Blending Physical Presence with Continuous Online Engagement

    What Ten Years of Selling at Fairs Taught Me

    This is another entry in my case study series, where I look back at a customer experience from more than ten years ago. The woman at the center of this story has since passed away, and I share this with respect for her memory. The purpose of the series stays the same throughout: what would I have done differently if I had the tools and resources available to me today. So let us get into it.

    The Hidden Cost of Showing Up at Fairs

    The thing I dealt with most back then was the presence of being at fairs. I underestimated, and I mean I underestimated deeply, the size of the investment a fair demands. There is the money you put in, and there is the maintenance that follows you while you travel from one space to the next space to the next space. For small businesses and founders who attend fairs to sell their product, showcase what they make, find their customer, and use the moment for marketing, the format holds a clear appeal. People still want human contact. We want to interact with each other. We want to look, touch, feel, and sniff before we make our decision.

    That appeal is honest, and it is the reason fairs continue to fill rooms. What I missed was the question sitting underneath all of it. I had not yet sat down to understand what sales truly means, or what distribution channels are meant to do for a business. Once you understand that, the whole approach looks different.

    Why I Would Have Built My Own Online Fair

    Had I understood distribution then the way I understand it now, I would not have spent my energy traveling to fairs. I would have built my own online fair instead. Gary Vaynerchuk is one of the voices I hold in high regard on this topic, and for years he has spoken about the growth of social shopping, the idea that people will do more of their buying directly through social platforms. We see it everywhere now, and his point is that we are not at the start of this shift, we are barely approaching it. China sits far ahead of where we are, while many people here have not caught on yet.

    That is the tool I would have reached for. Social shopping would have been my fair, the place where people experience the product without standing in a crowded hall. Look at it closely and it is QVC in a new form. I would have used it to speak about the product, to let people share their experience, and to keep a conversation going around it. A social media management approach turns one event into an ongoing presence, and that is what a small business needs when budgets and time are limited.

    Social Shopping as a Distribution Channel

    Treating social media as a distribution channel changes how a founder sells. The skill set behind selling sits in your soft skills. You stay cognizant of how people think, the psychology behind their choices, the way they present themselves, and what they are looking for. You hold a conversation where you gather information rather than push a script. That awareness would have served me well in that period, because I was green, as green as the leaves behind me when I recorded this.

    For content creators, artists, and influencers who build a following around what they make, social media creation and steady content creation carry the same weight a fair stall once did. The work of producing posts, replying, and keeping a calendar full is where workflow automation earns its place. Tools such as ChatGPT and Claude Cowork take the repetitive load off a small team, and a social media management tool keeps the schedule moving while you focus on the human side of the sale. This is also where a creative agency or outsourcing social media becomes sensible, freeing a founder to stay close to the customer.

    Keeping the In Person Magic Alive

    Online presence would not have been the only thing I did. Absolutely not. I would have kept a physical moment alive as a promotion channel, because the anticipation builds when people know you are coming somewhere. There is a heightened feeling, that sense of finally being able to meet you, to see the product in person, to sniff it and judge it for themselves. People want to experience a thing first, and that desire is a gift to any seller who knows how to use it. So I would have held on to that, and I would have let social shopping carry the weight of daily selling between those appearances.

    The lesson is steady. Sales lives where attention lives, and attention now lives on social platforms. A fair gives you a day. A well run social presence gives you every day, and it gives your audience a reason to keep coming back.

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    Footnotes

    1. Vaynerchuk, Gary. Crushing It! How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence and How You Can, Too. HarperBusiness, 2018. https://www.garyvaynerchuk.com/crushing-it. This source supports the article because Vaynerchuk sets out the case for selling and building a brand directly through social platforms, which underpins the argument that social shopping replaces the traditional fair as a distribution channel.

    2. McKinsey and Company. Social Commerce: The Future of How Consumers Interact with Brands. October 2021. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights. This report supports the article because it documents the rapid scale of social commerce and the lead held by markets such as China, which confirms the observation that Western markets sit at an early stage of this shift.

    3. Pink, Daniel H. To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Riverhead Books, 2012. https://www.danpink.com/books/to-sell-is-human. This source supports the article because Pink frames selling as a set of soft skills grounded in human psychology and active listening, which reinforces the point that sales success depends on understanding how people think and what they are looking for.

  • Lessons in Managing Production Costs and Growth in Small Cosmetics Business

    Lessons in Managing Production Costs and Growth in Small Cosmetics Business

    What My Cosmetics Business Taught Me About Scaling With Today’s Tools

    More than ten years ago, I ran a small cosmetics business. I sold body butters, hair products, and skin products, most of them handmade. I no longer have that business, but it was a good time and a learnful season of my life. It came with plenty of mistakes, and those mistakes are the reason I want to use it as a case study. The question I keep returning to is simple: what would have changed if I had access to the resources founders carry in their pockets today?

    The Hidden Weight of Production Costs

    One of the biggest costs for self-made entrepreneurs who make handmade products sits inside production. That cost lives in two places. The first is human resources, the hands and hours that go into making each item. The second is stock, the inventory you have to buy before you sell a single unit. Both grow quietly, and both have a habit of catching small business owners off guard.

    Back then, I knew how to find my way through a spreadsheet, though I would never call myself an Excel guru. What I missed was a way to make my spreadsheets work harder. With the tools available now, I would have built a sheet that produced a prognosis instead of a static record. I would have wanted to see what happens to my inventory the moment sales begin to climb or stagnate.

    Where Spreadsheets and Language Models Meet

    Here is where modern resources change the picture. I would have taken my Google Sheet, the one holding every line of my inventory cost, and fed it into a language model like ChatGPT or a system such as Claude Cowork. Then I would have asked a direct question: if the volume of sales grows by a certain amount, what happens to my costs, and how do I keep the value sensible for the customer while still earning a return?

    This is workflow automation applied to the part of a business that quietly drains founders. The sheet stops being a ledger and becomes a forecasting tool. It answers questions about stocking decisions, about timing your inventory purchases, and about the cost-effective choices that protect margin. For content creators, artists, and small product makers who wear every hat at once, that kind of insight removes guesswork from decisions that used to depend on instinct alone.

    The Trap of Scaling for Its Own Sake

    There is a pattern that affects both small business owners and large companies. Sales multiply. The instinct that follows is loud: expand, find a bigger building, hire more people, serve more customers. The expansion feels like progress.

    The question that gets skipped is the one that matters most. In what way does scaling up serve the customer better? When founders rush to grow, they often surface what they believe to be the solution for their business. That belief is not always the solution for the customer. A bigger space and a larger team solve the owner’s problem of volume. They do nothing on their own to improve the value the customer receives. Would yhis be a problem when the same founder understands its data and makes it into a dynamic tool…with AI?

    What would have served my customers far better was a control mechanism. A way to predict, with high probability, how I would handle rising costs while still offering a strong product. That kind of control does not push prices down for the sake of it. It produces a clearer value proposition for the customer and a sharper cost prognosis for me, so the price I ask carries a reason behind it.

    Forecasting by the Quarter Instead of by Reaction

    The difference between a thriving small business and an exhausted one often comes down to timing. Reacting to growth after it arrives leads to ad hoc decisions. More orders appear, and suddenly the owner needs more space, more staff, and more spending, all at once and all under pressure. Deciding by the quarter (or any other desired term) changes that rhythm. A forecast built from real numbers shows the cost curve before it bends, which gives founders room to choose rather than scramble.

    Inventory forecasting has a long history in business research, and the principle holds whether you sell body butters or run a creative agency. Predict demand, model the cost, and let the data guide the pace of growth. The tools that make this accessible to a solo maker today are the same ones reshaping social media management and content creation. A language model paired with a clean spreadsheet gives a small operation the kind of foresight that once belonged to companies with full finance teams.

    What I Would Build Today

    If I had that cosmetics business now, my approach would be steady and deliberate. I would keep a living spreadsheet of every inventory cost. I would connect it to ChatGPT or Claude Cowork and run growth scenarios each quarter. I would treat every potential expansion as a question about customer value first and operational size second. The result would be a business that grows because the numbers support it, not because the orders frightened me into it.

    That mindset reaches well beyond cosmetics. Artists, influencers, content creators, and founders running lean operations all face the same tension between growth and control. The resources to manage it are here, sitting in the same tools many already use for social media management and daily workflow automation.

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    Footnotes

    1. Eric Ries, The Lean Startup, 2011, http://theleanstartup.com. Ries argues that validated learning and measured growth outperform reactive expansion. This supports the article’s central point that scaling should follow evidence and customer value rather than the pressure of rising orders.

    2. Marshall L. Fisher, What Is the Right Supply Chain for Your Product, Harvard Business Review, March 1997, https://hbr.org/1997/03/what-is-the-right-supply-chain-for-your-product. Fisher links inventory strategy to demand predictability, which reinforces the case for forecasting inventory cost before committing to expansion.

    3. Steve Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, 2005, https://steveblank.com. Blank stresses building around verified customer needs, supporting the argument that a founder’s idea of the solution is not automatically the customer’s solution.

  • Empaths in Leadership: Setting Firm Boundaries Without Guilt

    Empaths in Leadership: Setting Firm Boundaries Without Guilt

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  • Achieving Financial Abundance Through Mind and Body Alignment

    Achieving Financial Abundance Through Mind and Body Alignment

    The Level of Wealth You Are Built to Hold

    Financial abundance is not about the numbers. It is the level of wealth your mind and body are able to hold without flinching. Some people are born into ease with money. Others spend years learning what that ease even feels like. It took me a long time to understand this, and once it landed, everything shifted.

    Why People Go From Rags to Riches and Back Again

    Look at how many people say they want to be a millionaire. Then look at the ones who get there and lose it all. They rise, they fall, and the millionaire status never returns. The reason sits in the mind. The subconscious has never been able to conceive what being a millionaire means. It knows how to survive in scarcity. It has no map for abundance.

    So when the money arrives, the subconscious stares at it like a stranger. What is all of that? It does not recognise it. Give it away. Spend it. And the money disappears. At the end they wonder where it went. It is gone because the mind was never able to sit with the amount. Only a few people are able to sit with it, and that is the difference.

    Wealth Is Alignment, Not Wishful Thinking

    A lot of people say they want to be wealthy, yet wealth means being aligned at such a level that everything around you agrees with it. Think of your spine. When your spine is crooked anywhere, you cannot walk well, you cannot sit well, you live in discomfort. You still have a spine, you still move somewhat, but where is the comfort in that?

    Money works the same way. When anything inside you is misaligned, the wealth will not arrive, and it will not feel good when it does. You sit there and picture dollars falling from the sky. I am a visual person too, so I am able to do the same. The question that matters is what that image makes you feel deep inside. For many people the honest answer is that it does not feel good. That feeling is tied to your environment, the home you grew up in, the words you absorbed.

    Your Brain Is As Old As You Are

    Your brain has been marinating in old beliefs for as long as you have been alive. If daddy said money was bad, if mommy said money was bad, if every bill arrived with a sigh, that recording is still playing. You look at your bills and panic instead of seeing them as the ordinary expenses of life.

    Then you toss one tiny drop into that ocean of negativity and say, I want to be a millionaire. That single drop does nada, nada, nopes, nunca, niente. Nothing moves, because everything is misaligned. And on top of that you add another layer of stress about not having money while wanting it. Misalignment stacked on misalignment. This is where content creators, founders, and influencers building income online often stay stuck, fighting their own wiring while chasing more.

    You Do Not Need Six Zeros

    Here is the part most people resist. Abundance does not have to mean six zeros. Going from two K’s to four or five might be the level that brings you ease. When you feel at ease there, you move on. You start to wonder how wonderful it would be to have more options, and the options arrive because you have aligned with them. Not everyone reaches millionaire status, and that is fine. Doubling your income or a steady raise of a few percent is a real and worthy step. From that place you become the container for more.

    Scratch the Old Record

    People who hold more have dealt with the subconscious belief and replaced it. They scratched the record. If the old track said money is bad, the new one says money is a tool. To have it is a tool. To give it is a tool. To receive it is a tool. To pay with it is a tool. All of it serves you. Start there, set the new belief, and align yourself for a little more. Most people move forward in baby steps, and there is nothing wrong with that.

    Wealth Includes Your Health

    Wealth lives in a wide space. There is wealth in health. Last April was the final day I felt back pain after a serious injury. I dance, I get to the floor, my knees hold, I throw weights in the gym without fear. Many women in their forties struggle with their knees and their backs. My recovery is wealth, and it is another way to align myself for more.

    Regulate the Nervous System and Stay There

    The hard part is staying aligned. This is why regulating your nervous system matters so much for anyone running a creative agency, managing social media, or building something of their own. An unexpected bill arrives and you react with why now, why this. That reaction is a pebble in the water, and it pulls you back to the old way of thinking. Getting positive about money is not the goal, because negative people win the lottery too and still lose it. What you hold is the point.

    You Are the Container

    A cup keeps coffee warm for an hour. Wrap foil around it all you want, it will not hold heat longer, because that is not what the cup is built for. You have to change the container, and you are the container. The nervous system inside it. The beliefs inside it. The self-talk, what you consume, what you watch, what you laugh at, what your friends show you. Do not compare your path to someone else and feel small. Be happy for what you hold.

    My grandmother never had much, yet she always had ten guilders tucked somewhere. She taught me there is always money somewhere, that you are never fully without. I never lost that knowing, and it has carried me. Something always comes in. That is wealth, and from that knowing you move forward.

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    Footnotes

    1. T. Harv Eker, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, HarperBusiness, 2005, https://www.harpercollins.com/products/secrets-of-the-millionaire-mind-t-harv-eker. Eker presents the idea of a financial blueprint set in childhood, which supports the point that the subconscious decides the level of wealth a person is able to hold and why people return to old income levels.

    2. Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics, Prentice-Hall, 1960, https://www.psycho-cybernetics.com. Maltz explains how self-image governs results, supporting the container idea that lasting change in wealth follows a change in internal identity rather than effort alone.

    3. Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, Viking, 2014, https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-the-score. Van der Kolk documents how the nervous system stores past conditioning, supporting the point that regulating the nervous system is needed to hold a new level of abundance.

  • Transform Your Brand with Claude Cowork: Simplify Content and Boost Productivity

    What Claude Cowork Showed Me About Letting Go of Doing Everything Myself

    The first slide of a carousel appeared on my screen, and the only honest reaction I had was wow. Wow, wow, wow. I had been testing Claude Cowork for a while, and what it produced changed how I look at the daily work behind running a brand.

    What Claude Cowork Is, Simplified

    You hear the name everywhere, so let me put it plainly. Claude Cowork is the AI assistant you tell what to build, and it builds it with the tools you point it toward. You say I need you to create this with these resources, and the next time you need the same outcome, you return and say do this again. That is the whole rhythm. Whether you are a founder, an artist, a content creator, or running a creative agency, the value lands the same way. The work gets done without you sitting inside every step of it.

    Where Workflow Automation Quietly Takes Over

    I have created carrousels in Claude Cowork. I told Claude Cowork to schedule the slides into Blotato, the social media management tool I use for planning and posting. Blotato made a smart move. They opened their platform so that anyone working inside Claude can connect to Blotato as an adapter. One click, and Claude Cowork reaches into it. I had already built a posting schedule in Blotato that defines when each post goes to which platform. So Claude Cowork checked it, saw the schedule, and placed the content for me. I did not lift a finger for that step. That is workflow automation doing its job, and it is the reason outsourcing social media to a system instead of a person starts to make sense for founders, influencers, content creators, art galleries, and creative agency teams alike.

    The Cost Benefit Analysis Happening In Your Head

    So tell me again why you feel you have to do everything yourself. People sit in a space where the learning curve feels heavy, and they resist learning something new. That resistance is a cost benefit analysis running silently in the mind. You are choosing to carry the higher cost of paying several people to define your output, or you become the micromanager watching over shoulders to track every move, instead of seeing how a tool works in practice. Step over the question of whether you are overthinking it. You are. You are making the work harder than it needs to be.

    Descend From The Cloud Of What Is AI

    The longer you sit in the bubble of asking what AI is, the larger the question of what to do with it becomes. AI moved fast. What I described, the kind of instruction I give a tool, becomes what the industry now names a repeatable action. In Make they call it workflow automation. In Zapier they call it a zap. Claude calls it a skill. Different names, same idea, and that is where these platforms stand today.

    You do not have to code. I never went into the Claude code route, and I felt no need to. I had already descended from the question of what AI can do into the practice of what it does for me. That is where things shift. People get stuck in the many things AI offers and never move. Come down from that cloud and look at what the tool hands you right now. Whether your work sits in content creation, social media creation, or running a creative agency, the principle holds. ChatGPT and Claude Cowork are not puzzles to admire. They are systems to connect.

    The Point For Anyone Still Watching From The Outside

    Many businesses still need to learn the basics of AI, and that is fair. And for anyone asking whether I truly did all of this myself with one set of instructions, yes. That is what is possible. When you know exactly what outcome you want, the remaining task is finding the right tools and connecting them to each other. Then it makes sense to do it.

    Want to read more? Subscribe to my social media platform and join to be one of the few to see my exclusive posts on this website.

    Footnotes and Sources

    1. McKinsey and Company, The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier, June 2023, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/the-economic-potential-of-generative-ai-the-next-productivity-frontier. This report quantifies how generative AI shifts routine creation and coordination tasks off human hands, which supports the central claim that content creation and scheduling now belong to connected tools rather than to the founder personally.

    2. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age, W. W. Norton and Company, 2014. Their analysis of how automation reshapes the division of labor underpins the cost benefit argument in this article, showing that the real expense of resisting new tools is the human effort spent on tasks a system performs at near zero marginal cost.

    3. Thomas H. Davenport and Rajeev Ronanki, Artificial Intelligence for the Real World, Harvard Business Review, January 2018, https://hbr.org/2018/01/artificial-intelligence-for-the-real-world. This piece argues that the strongest returns come from practical, narrow applications rather than grand ambitions, which directly backs the point about descending from the abstract question of what AI is toward concrete use such as workflow automation and social media management.

  • Engage Your Audience with Generative AI for Faceless Videos

    How to Use Generative AI for Faceless Videos

    Faceless videos give content creators a way to show up without ever showing a face. Let me give you an example of how generative AI builds these for you, and why the format fits founders, influencers, artists, and anyone running their own social media management. Isn’t this gorgeous? This is what becomes possible once you treat the camera as optional.

    The App I Reach For

    The app I work with for this is artistlist.io. You run it on a mobile device or on your desktop and laptop, so it travels everywhere with you. It holds a collection of generative AI modules in one place: video models, Kling, Sora, and the list keeps going. You receive a set of credits and you start creating. Perhaps you own an avatar already, perhaps you hold an idea in mind. You build text to video or text to image, image to another image, and image to video. The options stretch wide. This is not an end all be all, and this is not a sponsored post.

    Being Mindful with Sora and Kling

    I have worked with different apps. I started with Sora, and it stays in my rotation, though I stay mindful of how I use it because the movements of the avatars come out weird. Weird weird. Not weird haha, weird weird. Then there is Kling, which I love. Absolutely love it. I am not here to tell you which one wins. You make that decision. You are grown. So if one of them represents your brand, stands for your creative process, or matches what you want to put out, then use it.

    Ready Made Avatars Through HeyGen

    HeyGen lets you work with their public avatars. So if no idea comes to you and the creative side feels stuck, open the HeyGen library. They hold a number of avatars ready for you. They do. Get into that when it comes to faceless videos, because it removes the pressure of building everything from scratch.

    Faceless Does Not Mean Easy

    People swipe away the moment they see a human face. Do not expect them to stop because you switched to AI. They keep swiping. So you still think about hooks, and captions on the screen help a lot. Do not always push people to the caption, because that gets annoying. I am saying something here. Add a call to action so people do something: follow the page, like, share, or head to the link in the bio. That part stays important across every format. Faceless content is not the limit. This is one more way of doing it.

    Let Your Voice Do the Work

    ElevenLabs is a great tool agentic, text to speech and voice-overs. You build audio generated text videos and post them. If you want zero face, no face, no toe, not a hair, that route stays open. Generate the voice and let it speak for you. That is how light the lift gets. It is not intimidating. The choice is yours.

    Why This Format Fits Your Brand

    Faceless content gives founders, artists, art galleries, and creative agency teams a sustainable way to keep social media creation moving without burning out on camera. It supports steady social media management, frees time for workflow automation, and pairs well with writing help from ChatGPT for scripts and hooks. For content creators and influencers who want to protect their privacy, the format keeps output consistent while the audience still receives a clear reason to follow, share, and click. Start with one app, one avatar, one hook, and let the rest grow from there.

    Want to read more? Subscribe to my social media platform and join to be one of the few to see my exclusive posts on this website.

    Sources

    [1] Donald Miller, Building a StoryBrand, HarperCollins Leadership, 2017, https://buildingastorybrand.com. This book supports the focus on hooks and one direct call to action, showing that audiences respond when a message gives them a single clear next step such as follow, like, or visit a link.

    [2] HubSpot, State of Marketing Report, 2024, https://www.hubspot.com/state-of-marketing. The report supports the value of short form video for content creators and social media management, confirming that video formats hold attention and carry the strongest engagement across platforms.

    [3] Microsoft Canada, Attention Spans Consumer Insights Research Report, 2015, https://www.scribd.com/document/265348695. This study supports the point about people swiping away within seconds, showing that online attention has shortened, which is why hooks and on screen captions hold the work together.

  • AI Education in Africa: An Unequal Opportunity Amid Digital Wastelands and Talent Drain

    The Problem With Bringing AI Where There Is No Infrastructure

    Not long ago I made a video about why it is such a huge issue for companies like Microsoft to walk into African based countries and say, let us come here and educate your people about AI. What makes the video I stitched so beautiful is that the woman in it goes even deeper. Before anyone talks about jobs, there is no infrastructure. None. No hardware, no software, no shared knowledge base sitting underneath the promise. So where is it?

    If things are analog and a region is not digitally advanced, how is all of that data these companies want to collect on the continent supposed to move? How does the work flow if the foundation to carry it does not exist? In my original video I said it plainly. You are creating wastelands. You are creating wastelands because you are teaching people how to feed data into a machine, but not how to educate themselves on what they are able to do with that data for their own benefit. I knew I was not far off from what is happening, and the proof keeps coming back around.

    Why This Is Colonization Three Point Zero

    As much as people stay against the whole AI conversation, the wiser move is to treat AI as a resource. A resource you build your own systems and your own infrastructure on, whether for a local community, a whole country, or a region. Build inside that community what I say all the time. Economy. I am not talking out of the side of my neck. I know exactly what I am saying.

    When nations let outside companies build new wastelands, that is a new form of colonizing. You destabilize a nation when you do not allow it to own its infrastructure, build its own systems, or even think through how a homegrown system serves its own people. Instead these companies arrive and lean on human capital where labor rights are thin and human rights protections are unclear. They take, they keep the intellectual property, and what they extract does not land in the pockets of the country. One lump sum gets traded with a government, and that is the end of it. No prolonged return on investment for a whole nation, a whole region, a whole country.

    Human Capital As The New Natural Resource

    This is the part that stings. The brilliant minds with roots in African based nations study, then go abroad for a better life and a stronger education. How many return to pour that knowledge back into those regions? Returning physically is not even required. From wherever they sit, founders and builders are able to set up infrastructures and systems with a global connection that serves the people back home. That option exists.

    So this is the sophisticated version of an old pattern. Data being trained, programs being built, all of it at a low cost because the infrastructure and the systems carry no agency for the people doing the work. No authorship. No property. No claim. Nobody is in a position to own any of it. This is how you exhaust a nation, and this time it is not through natural resources. It is through human capital, placing people at a level where they are blocked from rising.

    AI As A Resource To Build Your Own Economy

    If you sit in one of the regions in the southern hemisphere and you have the opportunity to educate people about AI, using that opportunity becomes the whole point. Think about how your products and services need to move, then aim AI at building infrastructure and systems that make a region digitally strong. The moment a place becomes digitally strong, it competes on the same level as China, India, or any other rising country.

    There is one side of the world the Western world watches with fear, the Asian side. They want you to hear about every investment headline while staying quiet about that fear, because those nations are growing like weeds everywhere. The same growth is available to content creators, influencers, and creative founders anywhere who treat technology as a tool for content creation, workflow automation, and ownership rather than dependence.

    Stop Fearing The Copy, Start Building Strategy

    People are scared. Scared their work gets copied. Listen, if you do not want your work copied, put your work behind a paywall. Know what you are sharing on these platforms, and protect the rest. Well, how will people find me? Be inventive, or come to mcjstudio.me and I will think through a strategy with you, the same way a creative agency builds social media management and social media creation around what makes you, you.

    Here is the truth. Work was copied long before AI went public. This is the second and third edition of the same wasteland model, sharpened with new tools.

    Reading The Headlines For What They Are

    So when you see the headline that says twenty five million invested by corporate name X into a country, understand the math. They already earned it back. The investment returned to them before the ink dried. I said it. I definitely said it.

    Want to read more? Subscribe to my social media platform and join to be one of the few to see my exclusive posts on this website.

    Sources

    [1] Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism, Stanford University Press, 2019. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=28816 This work names data colonialism directly and supports the argument that collecting data without local ownership repeats historical extraction, reinforcing the wastelands point.

    [2] Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI Power Politics and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, Yale University Press, 2021. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300209570/atlas-of-ai/ Crawford documents the hidden labor and human capital behind AI systems, supporting the claim that low cost training rests on workers who hold no agency or authorship.

    [3] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Bogle L Ouverture Publications, 1972. https://archive.org/details/howeuropeunderde0000rodn This classic supports the framing of exhausting a nation through extraction, drawing the line from past colonization to the digital version described here.

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