 Hey everybody, it's DJB and in this video I'm gonna be talking a little bit about social media and the toxic mentality around social media. And the title of this video is very blunt, but it's also very true to my journey. I didn't want Instagram followers. I didn't start an Instagram for any fame, for any followers, for any of this that's actually happened. I think that's the only reason why it's happened for me. I wasn't doing it for an outcome, I was purely doing it to journal my journey. So back in 2017, when I started DJB Studios, I started it out of frustration with my 3D animation job. I was mad because I was bound to a computer for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I wanted something physical back in my life. I wanted to be able to make something with my hands and like touch something and have it an object in space and drawing wasn't cutting it for me anymore and I mentally was like not doing very well. So I decided I wanted to pick models back up because I was running an art page at the time and I had been running that since I was a young teenager and I did really well on my drawing page, but there was a lot of pressure personally for followers and fame and fans. And I would only post finished drawings. So it became this very negative, toxic way of creating and doing art where I felt like I needed to finish things and complete pieces in order to post them, in order to get followers, in order to be successful. And of course that didn't last very long at all because that's a really horrible way of thinking of things and that is not the way that you will get success and grow your business and you'll go crazy in the process and I fell out of love with drawing. I really did because every time I sat down I would tell myself I can't post this and then I would finish it and go well it's really nice I have to post it and then if my followers were deteriorating and my comments and my post attraction was deteriorating I was feeling like a failure because I wasn't creating enough to maintain the social media account which was this arbitrary thing for arbitrary fake followers which is really ridiculous. So when I fell into models I did not set any expectation, zero expectation on what that account was going to be other than being a journal, a diary, a progress, sharing my stuff, throwing it out there and saying I want to be a part of this community too. And DJB Studios now has 15,000 followers, purely been organic growth based on just posting everything I was doing. And it didn't matter if it was perfect, it didn't matter if it was done, it didn't matter if it got zero likes, it was just about posting something, about keeping it active, keeping it current and sharing my love of this hobby and being a part of the hobby. I think that proves in itself that like it works and having that philosophy around it will create a better outcome than focusing on only gaining attraction and getting famous and having a large Instagram account. I credit all of my business and success to the platform. All the different social medias are the way that I run my business and advertise for my business. So I believe that it is 100% valuable and important to have. But I also believe that you need a really strong mindset behind it that it is not about the followers. The harder you want it, the worse it's going to be and it's never going to be at your standard. You're never going to reach a million because you're so focused on reaching a million. Whereas if you put in the good work, you post consistently, you grow, you improve, you're a good human being, you're kind to others, you create this better platform. It's literally just like opening a part of yourself and sharing it with everyone else. Like a diary, like a journal. You can come here if you'd like to. You can leave whenever you want. You're not obligated to comment or share or like or do anything. You're here because you want to be here. So if I lost all of them tomorrow and went down to zero, I would still be okay and I would still run the page and I would still share because it's never been about that and it shouldn't be about that for you. So if that's the way that you're running your platform, you're going to go places. You're going to go far and you're going to have so much fun in the process. But if you're caught up on the idea of it and that it means something and it's a popularity scheme because it can feel like that, it's easier to sell things the more people you have following you. But people aren't going to follow you if you're constantly nagging on your story that you have no followers and you're not getting likes and your post retention is terrible and why would you even want to be here? Why is it even worth it if no one's liking your thing? It's like, well, clearly you're just here to use me as a business tool and you're not here because you want to share your work with me. So why would anyone want to follow that account if that's the way that they present it? I challenge you to look inwards and see how you are running your social media platform and how you are obtaining your followers and how you're feeling about that. And if you are feeling like the only reason that you're posting is for fame and attention, you may want to rethink that and that may just get you the results that you're looking for. So don't worry about the likes, the follows and the comments. Just do your own thing, do the art, put the work in, share if you want to, you don't have to, share if you want to and you will see that people will follow. If you do the work, the people will follow. So thank you so much for watching and I hope that you go back in your social media platform and look at where you started and how much you've grown and that should be success enough in itself.