 Okay, so a person asked, how do you balance marketing your business with honing your craft? For example, I know I should be building out some marketing content, but as I work with new clients in the present, I'm realizing how much time and effort I need to invest in best serving them, leaving little time for content marketing. So, you know, this is a really good question. And I think everybody who starts to have some success in their marketing will face this issue. It's like, at first, you know, people think, people think, I don't have any clients right now. That's a time, that means I should be doing marketing. Correct. Okay, I've got some clients now. I have no time for marketing, incorrect. Because it's like, then you always have the feast and famine cycle of a service provider. It's like, no clients, do some marketing. Got clients, yay. No clients because I didn't do any marketing. Got clients, yay. And it's like years and years of this, right? No, marketing, it's very important to reframe marketing. Well, I reframe marketing. If you wanna follow my content and if you wanna align with my philosophy, marketing is two things, in my opinion. So the typical marketing person will teach you, marketing is about getting clients, getting your brand out there, being visible, right? All the stuff that's about essentially making other people eventually buy from you is what marketing is supposed to be. And I've always felt that was uncomfortable for me because I guess I've always believed that everything I do in life has the possibility of a deeper purpose. Every activity is not just about getting someone to do something for me or having some pleasure or whatever, it's like everything has a deeper purpose. It's like, what could the deeper purpose of marketing be? And one day or over a year, it's like, is it dawned on me that the deeper purpose of marketing is two things. One is marketing, the act of marketing, I often say is the act of a business discovering its own calling. And, you know, discovering your calling is not, as you probably have discovered, you've done any kind of purpose work or whatever you wanna call it, it's not a one-time activity. It's not like you decide your high school counselor helped you decide what you're gonna be when you grow up and that's all you're gonna be, right? Or after college, probably you're like still trying to figure out what my career is and then do you decide your career? I mean, it's not like the old days where people just worked in a general motors factory for 40 years and get their golden watch and that's their career. These days we have much more nuanced understanding of purpose. So marketing is the act of on the one hand, a business discovering its calling. How does a business discover its calling? Well, most of us here, business is us, right? We're solopreneurs, we are self-employed people. So the business, our business is intimately tied in with our day-to-day activity. And so how does marketing help us discover our calling? Well, what is marketing? Well, marketing is being in touch with the world based on what we have to bring to the world, right? And so that old quote from Frederick Buchner, where Frederick Buchner was a Christian pastor, so he uses God language. So where God calls you to is where your deep talents meets the world's deep hunger. Where God calls you to or your calling is where your deep gladness or sorry, yeah, your deep gladness meets the world's deep hunger, something like that. But it's like, it's that intersections, that then diagram between your gladness, your talents, your experiences, your skills, your personality and how does it intersect with the world's deep hunger or great hunger? In other words, where's the market demand? So marketing is the act of discovering that intersection. You put stuff out there humbly offering, hey, is anyone interested in this piece of content? Nobody? Okay. All right, let me humbly offer another thing. Humble offer because you're humble, you're not expecting anything, right? And too much of marketing is very puffed up chest. I'm wonderful. I'm number one in my field and it's like, fine, you could be that, but you're gonna be pummeled by the market if they don't agree with you, right? So I say, well, let's circumvent that problem by coming to the market humbly to say, I don't know if anyone's gonna like this. I'm gonna assume nobody is gonna like this, but I'm doing it for my own public journaling. I'm doing it for my own personal growth. I'm doing it to explore my own experiences. That's why I created the piece of content. And if it happens to resonate with any of you, what a blessing. What an amazing, you know, synchronicity that happened to resonate with one of you. Wow, I got one like. Of course, everyone like means there's probably three to 10 other people who liked it who didn't bother to click like, right? So you impacted several people, right? So humble offering of content. Hey, I explored this. I just explored my experience or I just shared some things that were helpful for me. I just shared some things that were helpful for my clients. If it happens to help helpful for you, great, you know? So that's the humble offering of the content. And then eventually as you build an audience with humble offerings of content, you can then talk to your audience. You talk to your commenters and people who like your stuff. You talk to them about their wants and their needs and their purchasing patterns. And you discover through market research conversations, oh, what are you buying in my field? Oh, you're buying. Oh, you hired a therapist for that. Oh, you bought that online course. Oh, you bought a book about that. How interesting is that? Oh, interesting. I never thought of offering a coaching program on that topic, but maybe I should because that's within my wheelhouse. So market research conversations from a built audience allows you to further hone in on that Venn diagram of what is your calling, right? So marketing on one hand is the discovery of your calling. How else are you gonna discover your calling unless you publicly journal and be in touch with the market to see what they resonate with? How? Your career coach can help you to do this process, but your career coach, if they're worth any salt, they're not gonna say, let's just go in journal and figure out your calling just from journaling. No, and or I'm gonna tell you, because I'm your spiritual mentor, I'm your career coach. I'm gonna tell you what you're calling this. No, your calling is what a lot of people agree in your circle to say, you're good at that. We agree you're good at that. That's why we're gonna pay you. We're gonna hire you for that, right? Because where does money come from? Your income comes from the spending of your boss or your client or your investor or your customer. That's where money comes from. So it's like, it can't be your own journaling that you figure out your calling. You have to be in touch with many people in your market. So that's what the act of marketing is. That's why we do it continually because we're always trying to figure out what our calling is for this year because you're gonna keep evolving and so is the market. So that is what marketing is on the one hand, right? I wanna make another segment for what marketing is on the other hand. And I just wanna call forth Gregory's comment here. Yes, and authentic marketing, Gregory says, also the opportunity to deepen your expertise, insights and ways of effectively serving, absolutely. As you are exploring and humbly offering, whether it's content or a service for sale or product or sale, it's all humble offerings. You don't know if anyone's gonna buy, except expect nobody is gonna buy in the beginning, right? Now, once you have an audience, I expect that at least a few people are gonna buy. That's like my minimum now is, well, it's gotta be at least a few people at this point. But in the beginning, you expect nobody to buy, right? Humble offering so that you don't get pummeled by disappointment, right? So many people go, oh, my six-figure launch. I don't never launch anything before. I'm gonna do a five-figure launch, six-figure launch. Who the hell is telling you this? That's not a humble offering. That is gonna set yourself up for burnout and devastation emotionally and quitting your business. That's why so many people, I've worked with so many colleagues over the years, most of them are no longer around because they did marketing from a puffed up chest point of view. I'm number one in my field. I'm so great. And then when they're not always so great, in other words, when they're fixed mindset about their identity keeps getting pummeled. Their ego keeps getting pummeled. Of course they go out of business. Radical work for somebody else. I'm gonna keep getting disappointment of bad launches. I have bad launches too, but it's all humble offerings. I'm like, wow, bad launch, that's normal. That's, you know, I expect that, you know? It's like, I don't expect bad launches. It's funny, the law of attraction thing, you know, it's a funny thing. Every time the launch isn't going well, I'm like, yeah, I'm just gonna expect that. Barely anyone's gonna buy a few people buy it. And then suddenly the launch goes, sometimes the launch goes wild. So I don't believe in vibration sending. I believe in vibration sending, but I don't believe that just because we have a bad expectation, expectation of a minimum number, that's gonna have a minimum number. Sometimes it goes wild. It really, I find that to be the case. So expectations don't always, as you probably have discovered, equal results, right? The worldly results, so anyway. So I hope this helps.