Most people are stuck solving the wrong problems. They obsess over pixel-perfect website tweaks, compare follower counts, and replay awkward conversations in their head while the questions that actually move the needle go unanswered. What are you building? Who is it for? Why does it matter?
In this episode, we break down why small problems shrink your life and how choosing bigger, harder problems is the fastest path to growth in business and personally. We dig into the “pick your battles” framework, why the interest graph has made followers nearly irrelevant, and the real math behind creator income. One YouTuber made $1.2M from a single video while a TikToker with 1.4M followers and 360M views couldn’t cover rent.
If you want to be useful, not just famous, this one’s for you.
Topics covered: vanity metrics, interest graph vs. follower graph, AI search, hyperlocal platforms, timeless marketing, and what it means to be a student of the craft.
Chapters
00:00 Small Problems, Small Life
00:35 What Counts as Small
02:18 The Vanity Metrics Trap
04:10 Small Stuff in Your Personal Life
06:17 Pick Your Battles
09:13 The Reset Button of Social Media
15:02 Why the Interest Graph Wins
15:41 Being Useful Pays
16:10 AI Search Finds You
18:02 TikTok vs. YouTube Money
18:40 Fame vs. Freedom
19:02 The Million-Dollar Video
19:50 1.4M Followers, Can’t Make Rent
21:27 In Service of What?
22:09 The Hyperlocal Platform Model
23:09 Who Should Do Marketing?
25:32 Timeless Marketing Tactics
26:28 Students of the Craft
33:18 Big Problems Worth Solving
35:11 Wrap Up
Transcript
Amara Andrew: When you focus on small things, you’ll have small problems, but if you want more outta life, you’re gonna need some bigger problems.
Jeff Sarris: Welcome back Explorers. This is Useful Not Famous, the show where Amara says the tagline. ’cause I don’t know what it is.
Amara Andrew: I’m Amara.
Jeff Sarris: I thought you were gonna say the tagline!
Amara Andrew: No.
Welcome back to Useful Not Famous. This is a show where we gather and share the secrets that give your business an unfair advantage. I’m Amara
Jeff Sarris: Andrew. And I’m Jeff Sarris.
Amara Andrew: Hey.
Jeff Sarris: I gave you your last name back.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. Stop. Gross.
Jeff Sarris: So small problems, a big problem. This is a huge problem. Well, because it’s so easy. It was a very
Amara Andrew: big topic.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. It’s so easy for all of us, just all of us across the board, entrepreneurs just normies, whatever to focus on things that don’t actually matter.
Amara Andrew: And a lot of times you don’t even realize that you’re focusing on the small things. Bingo. So I think first what would be a small thing is sort of what we need to talk about.
Not like exact things, but just the idea of what
Jeff Sarris: is that?
Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: Like are we worried about like tiny inconsequential details? I kinda wanna just real quick touch on it from a huge systemic, uh, strategy perspective.
Amara Andrew: Be my guess.
Jeff Sarris: Because like if we’re trying to do something big and we’re focused on. What does, how many pixels to Off the side is my button on the top and the header on my website.
Amara Andrew: Yes.
Jeff Sarris: You’re not doing something big then. You’re, you’re focusing on little things. I know that’s specific, but I, I feel like the specificity helps to also apply to people who aren’t in business maybe. But you’re looking at something so you’re like, oh, that just doesn’t feel right. I should move it over a little and down, up.
Maybe the font’s bigger. No, it’s smaller. Like that doesn’t matter. Yeah, because. While you’re doing that, someone is building a spaceship to go to Mars and like just remembering big problems, small problems, what are we focusing on when we think about the little things? Too much, we’re only gonna have small problems and we’re gonna be stuck exactly where we are.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. Small problems can be, it’s funny because once you break out of only focusing on small problems, you almost can’t think of small problems, if that makes sense. That could sound self-aggrandizing. ’cause they definitely have, they’re filtered small problems still to this day. ’cause we all have the, uh, or maybe not all of us, but a lot of us have the competitive streak.
I for sure do. So if someone. If I see someone doing something parallel to what I’m doing and they’re doing maybe a little bit better using all those vanity metrics, um, thinking like social media wise or something, if it’s like views, engagement, whatever, it’s really hard to not compare yourself to that.
That’s, again, focusing on a small problem. Whereas the thing I should be focusing on is, okay, well they’re doing really well for some reason. How do I do that, but my version of it and do it even better? And then what can I build on? What can I use, like, what can I do? Um, so just focusing on making it more, uh, what’s the word I’m looking for?
Being more constructive with it instead of destructive. Mm-hmm. And like so many people get caught up in the small things, or even like how I brought up the competition thing, or people that we work with, we work with a lot of realtors, not people that we work with, but people that we have heard say through the grapevine that, well, blah, blah, blah is doing it in my market so I can’t do it.
It’s like you could do it, you can do your own flavor of it. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same thing. And like that’s, that’s focusing on the small problem where it’s like, well, they already did it. And it’s like, how many people are in your fricking town? Like you have maybe 50,000 people or a hundred thousand, whatever.
There are enough people where you can do the same thing, but like with your own little twist.
Jeff Sarris: Well, and do you need 50,000 or a hundred thousand customers? Exactly. Or clients like,
Amara Andrew: no, you need like 10 or
Jeff Sarris: 12. It depends on what the business is, but uh, like you don’t need that scale.
Amara Andrew: Exactly.
Jeff Sarris: And you told me about the thing that John Uchay pointed out with the TikTok creator versus the YouTube creator, which I think that’s Yeah.
Very important. Just ’cause you mentioned vanity metrics. Yes. But before you go there, I just wanted to. To say like in our personal lives too, it’s very easy to focus on the tiny, tiny, tiny things and never get past that. ’cause that’s the easy path.
Amara Andrew: And we all live in our heads.
Jeff Sarris: Exactly.
Amara Andrew: That is exactly where all of us inhabit.
Like 100%. You cannot argue with that. We are all in our heads all the time, and that’s
Jeff Sarris: what makes us human.
Amara Andrew: Exactly. Like we all have our inner dialogue, our inner stories, like our inner perspectives, and. If you’re only focused on that and you maybe don’t have these bigger, I don’t wanna say aspirations, but if you’re only focused on your day right now and yourself, that’s a very slippery slope to sort of unhappiness, I would say, because then you’re just stuck in the small problems, and maybe you’re wondering why.
You can’t get ahead. Other people are getting ahead while you don’t feel quite right, it’s because you don’t have that bigger problem to sink your teeth into. That maybe not only benefits you, but benefits other people too.
Jeff Sarris: Well, yeah, and just like in our personal life, so a small problem that we’ve run into that we do is like say doing the dishes or face and maybe sometimes possibly I’m not a.
Handling that as much.
Amara Andrew: Sometimes that’s, that’s a summed. Do you wanna make this a fight right now?
Jeff Sarris: I’m just teasing. But this is a thing though. It’s so small. So like, to
Amara Andrew: exactly,
Jeff Sarris: like, we can easily just s smush, smush those away, push those away. Like just swoosh them out of our mind, which I think is a valuable thing.
But of course then it’s a balance between the two of us. ’cause I push that away. I’m just like, well that doesn’t matter. That’s, uh, that’s in my blind spot. Selectively a selective blind spot for small things.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: But then I un I, it’s illuminated to me that, oh, this bothers you. I didn’t mean to bother you with it.
I didn’t realize it. So again, in ourselves, external, working with others, there is a balance here to strike that isn’t, it might not be as simple as wiping it away, but. It’s where we start.
Amara Andrew: One of the best things I’ve ever heard of, and it was just said, just offhandedly, was I used to work at UIC, university of Illinois, Chicago, and my office mate, uh, she just said like this nugget of wisdom and it stuck with me forever.
Like it was the best thing I think I’ve ever heard. And it was along these same lines of like, when I’d be like, Hey, can you do the dishes tonight? Now we finally use the fucking dishwasher like normal people. But um, but she said, pick your battles. She was specifically talking in terms of like relationships and things like Yeah, like
Jeff Sarris: not that Napoleonic war and stuff.
Not that
Amara Andrew: Well, then we got to that.
Jeff Sarris: Oh, okay.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. But first we had to start with dishes and then we went Napoleonic, then we went, you know, uh, SGA to, I was trying to think of any other, I was like, I was like the Celtic War. I was like, what the fuck are names of wars? Seven years war? I, they’re in here. I have the history in here, but I’m not even thinking about history right now.
But anyway, she said. Pick your battles. And I don’t even remotely remember what the context of the conversation was, but that was sort of like her nugget of wisdom. And I’ve thought about that ever since. Like if I have a problem, I think pick your battles. Like is this worth me dying on this hill for like no dishes?
Absolutely not. It’s like I’ll just put ’em in the dishwasher, whatever. Now we have a different system in place, so. That alleviates the, the struggle and everything. And
Jeff Sarris: I’m a systems person, so as long as we have a system
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: I can fit.
Amara Andrew: I’m definitely now fit
Jeff Sarris: in it better.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: Um, but yeah. But anyway,
Amara Andrew: yeah.
So the system is, I do it
Jeff Sarris: well. No, it just,
I’m the system is I buy a dishwasher and then you do it now. That sounds so.
Amara Andrew: You’re like, didn’t you just say pick your battles?
Jeff Sarris: Um, okay.
Amara Andrew: So, but that was so helpful to think of like not only in terms of relationship, but then maybe
Jeff Sarris: Yeah,
Amara Andrew: with small, if you have friction with different things, it’s like, is this gonna ruin my day and am I gonna let this ruin my day?
Jeff Sarris: Pick your battles interpersonally and internally.
Amara Andrew: Exactly.
Jeff Sarris: Is my small battle going to be worrying about this interaction I had? Uh, getting lunch.
Amara Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Sarris: Like, whatever it, I don’t even know, whatever it is. Like, am I gonna stick with that and is that going to, is that small problem going to be my problem to focus on?
Yeah. Or will I just let it go and go to the next thing?
Amara Andrew: Like, oh, that person was really rude to me today when I got my sandwich. And then you just let that fester in your head. That’s,
Jeff Sarris: and like we all do that.
Amara Andrew: Exactly. Especially if you have
Jeff Sarris: sex or how did I. What did they think about what I said and how I interacted Uhhuh, like they were looked, I walked funny, I, I coughed funny, like laughed, whatever it is.
And it’s like, but that’s a small, it’s nothing. No one remembers. Yeah. No one, no one thinks about us in the way that we think people think about us.
Amara Andrew: No. And if they do, it’s like five seconds and then they move. Um,
Jeff Sarris: no,
Amara Andrew: but yeah.
Jeff Sarris: I wanna jump to the John TikTok.
Amara Andrew: Oh, yes.
Jeff Sarris: TikTok famous versus YouTube famous.
Amara Andrew: Oh, this is, if you’re not on his email newsletter, by the way, you 100% should his last name.
Good fucking luck spelling.
Jeff Sarris: But this is, this is obviously useful, not famous, and we are very much about the more useful you can be, the more successful you will be.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: But the metrics online make us think when we’re not in it. We can see something and it appears the metrics of a lot of followers, a lot of engagement, whatever it is, is a metric of success.
Yes. But that’s only success. If your goal and your objective for success is recognition and fame, it doesn’t mean you’re making any money.
Amara Andrew: Before we get to the Don Yha thing, though,
Jeff Sarris: really good. I feel like, I feel like we’re deliberately teasing this out and we’re not. It’s just natural,
Amara Andrew: unintentionally.
Um. But we were watching an episode of Diary of the CEO and the host Steven Bartlett said, or if you wanna explain it, you’ll probably explain it better than me.
Jeff Sarris: Oh,
Amara Andrew: oh,
Jeff Sarris: I can, I was just being like, bingo. That’s a good one to talk about.
Amara Andrew: He’s been tracking his metrics because
Jeff Sarris: for 17 years.
Amara Andrew: Yes.
Jeff Sarris: Online
Amara Andrew: for a very, very, very long time.
Because obviously you wanna sort of tweak things as you’re going, which is what we do with our company. Maven, what is maven.com And he, oh, funny enough, he actually had a marketing agency too. Uhhuh, I just realized.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. The podcast grew out of it. Just like we have a podcast. Yeah. Growing out of it, but like that’s his main focus now.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. He noticed a huge disparity in his videos. Where,
Jeff Sarris: here, can I just explain?
Amara Andrew: Yeah, go ahead. Okay.
Jeff Sarris: So
Amara Andrew: this is why I let you
Jeff Sarris: explain. No, no, no, but it’s all good. So basically the, his growth as a platform versus his reach and and engagement. He has a chart. Month after month, I think it was for 17 years. It was a very long, so much data that he’s tracked since the beginning.
Amara Andrew: It was, it was like a huge thing of like,
Jeff Sarris: which also like scratches a spot in like my brain and our brain.
Amara Andrew: I like the
Jeff Sarris: data. I think because like having data, I track my stuff all the time all along is very helpful as long as you’re not. Judging yourself on all those things, vanity, blah, blah, blah. But
Amara Andrew: again, using it for a bigger problem, not a small problem.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. So he has a chart, and the chart has two lines. One is his growth over time, and it is a, it is a slow build. More, more, more, more, more, more, more. And it’s really big. So growth across all of the metrics of views and likes and engagement and all of these things, composite growth. Then he has a line of his.
Number of videos that have that growth, say. So he has a, let’s say, round numbers. He started with one follower, then he had a thousand, then he had a hundred thousand, then he had a million. What happens along the way is at the beginning, one view, one follower. Say in theory, a thousand views, a thousand followers.
But then as he grows the disparity between his high performing videos, so say I have a million followers, and it’s like, I wanna reach a million people, or two or 10, or whatever it is. As time has drawn on that has happened less and less, that line is almost flat compared to the meteoric rise of everything else, which is the.
That line, it’s hard to describe. The line is the average of everything. So say he’s posting a video a day and he compiles everything that he’s posting and finds the outliers, what are the ones that did best? The frequency of outliers before his best videos would be so much more frequent now. It is hard to hit the average of the videos from before when he’s 10 times 50 times more successful and larger.
And the, what he’s come to sort of terms with is every single day is new. Everything I did up until today means nothing on social media because if I’m not growing and evolving in what I’m doing here. It’s not going to grow and perform better just because I have more followers and broadly speaking, more success in that vein.
Amara Andrew: Yeah, so that’s the whole point is every single day basically is a reset button. Even for someone like him who has, I don’t even know, tens of millions of followers now on YouTube, if not more.
Jeff Sarris: I mean, his podcast is top five, almost seven days a week. Yeah. Like if you look on Spotify’s Top podcast, which of course means.
A lot of views and listens. Oh yeah. And that’s just the long form,
Amara Andrew: which is crazy because if you’re pouring hours and hours into each individual episode and then you have somebody clipping it up and everything, literally every single one of those clips is an autonomous piece. So it’s not like you’re building momentum by, and I know we beat this like so much, but having followers doesn’t mean anything.
Even my metrics for my secret hyperlocal platform, most of the people that engage with my stuff, 88% do not follow me. Only what? 12% then? Do, which is crazy. And I normally don’t look at the metrics, but I was just curious sort of what the, I was mostly curious if it was like a male or female audience. ’cause then we were looking at somebody else we work with.
Um, and their metrics were the same thing. Most of their, that’s why I looked. ’cause most of their, uh, engagement comes from people who don’t follow them. Which,
Jeff Sarris: and again, this is the social draft versus the interest draft. Exactly. So social being the people who follow you. That is a dying model for social media.
Now it’s the interest graph people who are interested in the thing that you’re posting.
Amara Andrew: And even before when I was posting art history, TikTok, like I would have hundreds of thousands of views and millions of views on a lot of my videos, and I had maybe 15,000 followers on TikTok or 2000 or 3000 on YouTube or whatever.
Like that doesn’t mean anything anymore. It means if you can create the most interesting thing today. That’s all that matters.
Jeff Sarris: And that’s when you’re going for volume again.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: Now useful. And
Amara Andrew: there has to be a why
Jeff Sarris: to it. Create the most useful thing if you treat the most useful thing that 10 people see, and one in 10 people hire you for $20,000 a year.
Amara Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Sarris: You’ve had an extremely successful video with 10 views. Yeah. And that’s something that’s hard for people to. Come to terms with, so back to the TikTok versus YouTube story.
Amara Andrew: Yes. Well, it just reminded me of one more thing. I’m sorry. But thinking about it, I’ve literally had people reach out to me.
’cause I can only speak from my personal experience where now with ai, with search, you can look up whatever your question is and instead of like a traditional Google search where you have all the results and it’s like good luck. AI just gives you a couple specific things that it pulls. I’ve shown up in multiple results for a variety of different things.
One was Etsy. One was, uh, video footage, like how to convert it for a program, doesn’t even matter. And then I think one more for art history or something. But I showed up and people told me that, oh, I found you through dah, dah, dah. Like, I found this video through. Chat, GPD or Claude or whatever, which I found so fascinating, and that’s all we focused on forever, is to be the most useful person and useful people to everyone by answering and like, uh, solving these problems and answering these questions that people aren’t.
And these videos are from 5, 6, 7 years ago now. People are still finding them, which is so crazy to me. Um, but anyway, I just wanted to throw that out there. By focusing on being extremely useful in solving these problems and documenting these things that we’ve solved for ourselves, that’s inherently valuable because also then chat G PD is like, Hey, look at this.
Somebody solved this problem like six years ago, or whatever. Okay.
Jeff Sarris: Yes.
Amara Andrew: So to John, you, Shane, now,
Jeff Sarris: well, yeah. Not even him. The, the creators. Well to the, yeah. TikTok versus YouTube.
Amara Andrew: So, okay. Let me remember exactly. Um,
Jeff Sarris: yeah. As the story goes, you have a talker. Yes. With millions.
Amara Andrew: No, we start with the YouTuber.
Okay. The YouTuber. Made, oh shit. Here, let me look it up really quickly. ’cause they’re exact figures.
Jeff Sarris: Okay. So yeah, so we’re talking social media and we’re talking, we’re talking fame here. And fame translating it into money. Yes, basically. So the reach on YouTube versus the reach on TikTok and how they
Amara Andrew: got
Jeff Sarris: it, how they, uh, compare when someone approaches it differently.
So remember, fame alone, reach, uh, visibility. Is a metric you can go for, but it doesn’t imply anything else about your success in terms of monetization and making money and building a business.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. ’cause basically the whole point, let’s make money is sort of the gist of
Jeff Sarris: everything. Yeah. If you’re doing this to make money.
Yes. Like if you just wanna be famous, you don’t need to make any money, whatever. And that’s perfectly fine. Have fun, but we’re not here. Don’t care. This is the wrong podcast. We don’t care. Yeah. We don’t care about fame at all. Like fame means absolutely nothing.
Amara Andrew: No.
Jeff Sarris: To either of us.
Amara Andrew: It has to do something.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. Like we’re here to continue to have the freedom to do what we want when we want, and build the things that we get excited about.
Amara Andrew: Yes. So this one YouTuber, he revealed that he made $1.2 million from one video. Now he does have 49 million subscribers. Um, so that is something to think about, but
Jeff Sarris: well, yeah, let’s, and let’s just say, so a single video was useful to, in some capacity, to advertisers.
To products. It doesn’t even matter. Like we don’t really care in this instance, in what ways It was useful, but it was useful for a business or humans or some combination to give. $1.2 million for a single piece of content. Mm-hmm. And not, we’re not saying that’s normal. That is not normal. That might be the most successful, most profitable YouTube video in history.
Amara Andrew: Yes.
Jeff Sarris: However,
Amara Andrew: then, uh, now a different creator. She’s on TikTok. She has 1.4 million followers and 360 million total views.
Jeff Sarris: So remember, three 60 million, that’s over a quarter billion.
Amara Andrew: That’s a lot of views.
Jeff Sarris: Like I, I think it’s, it’s worth sticking a pin in that, like that’s over a quarter billion views on her content.
Amara Andrew: But last month she quit creating content. Because she had all these views. She said 40 million Americans have watched me eat my way through New York City and beyond. But the truth is I’m not even making rent doing this full time. So,
Jeff Sarris: and that’s the, also the parallel of 49 million on YouTube, 40 million on TikTok of.
Reach is essentially sort of that where parallel fits. Uh, she had 1.2
Amara Andrew: million,
Jeff Sarris: 40 million people have.
Amara Andrew: Oh, I gotcha.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah, she’s reached 40 million people over her lifetime.
Amara Andrew: Oh yeah. Like per video. It could be, let’s say 40 million views and then his other video. Yeah. Maybe got however many. But the fact that, which this also just shows the difference in the platforms, but then it also shows the difference in what you do with your fame if you have it.
And he obviously, like you said, was useful to. Advertisers had products, whatever it is. Um, but the hard part is so many people don’t. See that they don’t see the inner workings. So like there’s a talker who,
Jeff Sarris: and I wanna say, let me put the fame before the revenue, where it’s like, oh, once I have all this fame, I’ll be able to make money.
Exactly. And it does not work that way.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: Because you’re building a specific audience. That audience, if you want to have them sell, have them buy from you, or advertisers want to reach them.
Amara Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Sarris: IE hyperlocal platforms where you’re the. You’re the conduit just saying, but you need to be the conduit to something.
Amara Andrew: Yes.
Jeff Sarris: And if you just have a sporadic mix of people who like watching you eat food
Amara Andrew: mm-hmm.
Jeff Sarris: That is a very hard sell unless you had something you’ve been working towards the entire time.
Amara Andrew: Exactly. Like having a product or a platform or something more that you then sell to people. So like
Jeff Sarris: we always say in service of what.
Yeah. So you’re, you’re building a platform in service of what? And hyperlocal, what we’ve built with our hyperlocal platform is in service of the residents and the businesses. So the residents get an inside look, uh, they stay up to date on everything in town. Yeah. It’s very hard to keep up on because there’s no one who does this.
And the businesses then can reach everyone in town. Exactly. So we’re serving, we’re in service of. Local businesses and local residents, and they both benefit in the ways that they need benefits.
Amara Andrew: Mm-hmm. Exactly. Yeah. The residents are kept up to date and then the businesses. I like that you didn’t say that into the mic.
Jeff Sarris: No, that was just to you.
Amara Andrew: So I’m just talking to, I just sound insane. That’s fun. Um, so yeah, not focusing on the, how do I become famous, but focusing on the. Sort of actually focusing on the what it is or the why, I guess, or what,
Jeff Sarris: what for whom?
Amara Andrew: Yeah. So focusing on what it is exactly. So yeah, if you have a small business, okay, well, you maybe need some, not, maybe you need some sort of platform, but what kind of business do you have?
Do you have a business that reaches the entire country, the entire world? Is it you wanna start local? What is it? Um. Because those are gonna be very different approaches to marketing. And same with then who is doing your marketing, which is something I feel very passionate about. I maybe, maybe not, but I sort of feel like the person who’s doing your marketing should be the age of your ideal customer.
Not a hundred percent of the time, but we know. A fair amount of businesses are using like 15 year olds, 16 year olds, 20 year olds, and that’s fine, but they’re not getting the results that they necessarily want. And it’s because these people, the kids running the social media, are running it for their friends.
They’re doing all the same things that they see on social media, and they’re like, oh, this is exactly what I’m supposed to do. There is no strategy behind it except, well, I’m gonna do this. And there is a strategy, but it’s not one that’s. Tailored for the exact business. They don’t, and that just drives me.
Don’t have experience
Jeff Sarris: nuts.
Amara Andrew: Exactly. No. So that’s, and they don’t know, and that’s fine.
Jeff Sarris: But I wanna ask you then the same age as the target market or not a kid, because does it matter if you’re 33 years old female or does it matter that, well, I’ve made 14, well probably almost 20,000 videos doing exactly this, so I know what works.
Like does it matter if you’re 33 or 63 in, in that capacity?
Amara Andrew: It depends on, see, no, ’cause then it depends on the person because somebody who’s 63 could have the same experience as me or maybe more. But are they familiar then with the digital realm or is that still very new to them? ’cause like I’ve only grown up in the digital.
I was like the very end of uh, like print things.
Jeff Sarris: Papyrus.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. My scrolls get my clay tablet. Um, so. I think it does depend. I feel like there is a sweet spot. ’cause yeah, if you’re hiring somebody 60 years old, like thinking of the 60 year olds that I know. See, it’s hard though because they’re not in marketing
Jeff Sarris: and that’s sort of, that’s my, the crux.
Amara Andrew: Okay. This, this is the, this is it. All marketing tactics that have survived. Through the years, through hundreds of years, as long as marketing has actually existed, as it is to this day, modern marketing, we’re not talking about old marketing. It’s the same exact tactics. It’s just different technology. So no, it depends on who the person is at the end of the day.
Like talking through this, like I read a book about marketing from 1822, and it was the exact same things, but just a different way of doing it. So like obviously there were things where it was like I would never in a million years do that now, but there are just those nuggets that have filtered through and then gone to John Cap’s and then David Ogilvy and like all these like huge advertising people.
Um, so it depends on the person, how passionate they are about what it is, and then if they actually have a strategy and a brain,
Jeff Sarris: and I think. Or is the person a student of the craft of marketing?
Amara Andrew: That’s what we see a lot with t uh, TikTok with comedians.
Jeff Sarris: Oh, good point.
Amara Andrew: Because we love standup comedy. There are some comedians they can recite.
What the special is? Who the person is. The joke like verbatim from like 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago
Jeff Sarris: and like to the, oh, that was filmed in this club, in this city on this year. And it came out on this platform. It came out on HBO in 1987. It was at the Beacon Theater. Like,
Amara Andrew: yeah.
Jeff Sarris: And it’s like, wow. Like they’re a student of it.
And that’s also
Amara Andrew: And like underground stuff too. Yeah. Where they’re just like, oh, when I saw blah, blah blah at this club and they did this
Jeff Sarris: and that was uh, who recently just. Talked about it, but So Jensen Ho, founded Nvidia. Nvidia is one of the most successful, profitable businesses in all of history. And at a time it was the most profitable business ever to exist like two years ago.
Amara Andrew: That’s crazy.
Jeff Sarris: And it’s still up there, but it, everything’s in flux all the time. And they make the chips that power every AI platform on the planet. They
Amara Andrew: Same sandwiches?
Jeff Sarris: Yeah.
Amara Andrew: Oh,
Jeff Sarris: they make every. AI chip and they’ve gotten there over all these years and it was somewhere else that someone else who had mentioned this, but Jensen, Juan specifically is a student of the craft of entrepreneurship and business.
Where like as the story goes is his office is unused. He does not use his office in the building because how he manages and runs the company is different. However, that office is filled with business books. He’s read. Stacks and stacks and shelves. He’s read everything he can get his hands on. There’s a podcast called Founders, I might have mentioned it last week actually, where, uh, David sra, he has read now over 400 biographies of the world’s Greatest Entrepreneurs.
That’s sort of the, the premise. His podcast is like an underground thing for a while. Until all of the most powerful founders and creator entrepreneurs in the world started to become his audience first, his first listeners were Jeff Bezos. Were, uh, people like Jimmy Iovine and so not, not Jimmy Iovine specifically, but all of these high powered people, uh, Warren Buffett and, uh, Charlie Munger.
Not that Charlie Munger was listening, however, because his network, the Podcaster’s network got so vast and strong, he was able to sit down with Charlie Munger who didn’t sit down with anyone. He had dinner. That’s amazing. At Charlie Munger’s house. And this is a normal person like, like all of us who decided, I love these stories.
I wanna read these books and synthesize them for people and then tell them like, if you wanna do a deep read this book, little did he know. Jeff Bezos apparently has listened to a hundred percent of the, the podcast episodes, 480, whatever episodes. One of the richest men in the world has listened to all of them because this other person did the work for him to condense all of this knowledge that he can now one hour a week, get all this downloaded and be like, huh.
Now I have these new connections in my brain that I hadn’t thought about before, but because these founders like comedians, like every, are students. Of the craft of entrepreneurship and business.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. That’s like a curation to the extreme, which is super helpful then, especially for somebody like Useful Jeff Bezos.
Yeah. Who doesn’t have time to sit and read a book maybe, or do all these different things. Like literally just putting on a podcast for an hour and just like, oh, okay. I trust this guy. I’ve heard him forever. I like the way he synthesizes.
Jeff Sarris: And the Jensen one real quick, a hundred percent business books. He has never read any of the iconic sci-fi books that everyone in Silicon Valley says.
He stated, he doesn’t think he’s ever even read a sci-fi book. He doesn’t read fiction. He reads business and he’s, he’s read dozens of books on pricing, like pricing. That’s not a fun topic. However, you get all these new threads that you can make new connections.
Amara Andrew: I was gonna say, it’s fun if you think it is, and you know that you need something from it.
And that’s what we try to do with all of our books that we read. ’cause we read together every morning. Mm-hmm. It’s
Jeff Sarris: where we get the ideas for the podcast too.
Amara Andrew: Exactly. A hundred percent. Um, or not a hundred percent of the time, but a lot of it,
Jeff Sarris: but well, a hundred percent evolved from our reading and talking about our reading.
Amara Andrew: Yes. Yeah. Because we’re basically just obsessed with what we do, and not only trying to make it better for our clients, but also selfishly trying to make everything better for us. And then it’s like, oh, okay, we realize that this works. Let’s try this for the people that we work with or whatever. Um, yeah.
Jeff Sarris: But the student of the game,
Amara Andrew: yeah.
Jeff Sarris: So. Someone,
Amara Andrew: and that’s having a bigger problem versus a small problem.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. And someone in marketing, if they’re a student of the art and craft of marketing, that’s one thing.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: But most young people. Are literal students. Yeah. Not students of the crowd. Like they, they’re students of social media.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: Of how their generation uses it. Which
Amara Andrew: that is a skill set. It’s, I’m
Jeff Sarris: not
Amara Andrew: trying to say like, no, don’t go with that,
Jeff Sarris: but it’s passive. They’ve learned it’s a different
Amara Andrew: type.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. So like they know how to reach their exact demographic. Yeah. But most businesses aren’t trying to reach 15-year-old girls on TikTok.
Exactly. Like that’s just not like. Just really thinking about it. That’s not a key demographic for many businesses.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. Like if you’re a wine bar, don’t be doing the, don’t have a 15-year-old. Also, they probably shouldn’t even be in your wine bar, but don’t have them be doing your social media like it’s gonna, they’re not gonna understand the nuances of what exactly it is that you’re looking for.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah. And it’s what for whom?
Amara Andrew: Exactly.
Jeff Sarris: So I have a wine bar
Amara Andrew: And you want it to feel elevated?
Jeff Sarris: Well, yeah. Like what is, I have a wine bar.
Amara Andrew: Yeah.
Jeff Sarris: For whom is? Local residents who are of a certain age window.
Amara Andrew: Mm-hmm.
Jeff Sarris: Like you’re obviously each wine bar will be different. You might be sort of the elder millennial, uh, younger Gen Z maybe, or maybe it’s, oh no, this is the, the staple of like the people who’ve lived here, the, the, they’ve retired.
They like, they come here at the end of a end of a day and wind down whatever it is. But like, you have to figure what for whom, and now is a. The 15-year-old social media manager going to be able to reach the 60-year-old high powered former executive. Exactly. Who you’re trying to reach. And that’s sort of how you think about it.
They don’t have to be the same person, but they need to understand psychology of how do I reach different people in different ways.
Amara Andrew: Exactly. That was a much better way to explain it.
Jeff Sarris: Boom.
All right, see ya.
Amara Andrew: Yep. I just like out, just cutting that fizzle out. Sorry, I’m a little wiped from my workout this morning. No, this is, I’m like.
Jeff Sarris: So basically, so what did we start with again?
Amara Andrew: What?
Jeff Sarris: What was the topic or the main
Amara Andrew: Oh, it was if you’re only, essentially it was just, if you’re only focusing on small problems or,
Jeff Sarris: yeah, like if your problems, if you’re focusing on the small themes, you’ll only have small problems.
But to live a rich and. Enriching life. You want big problems. ’cause big problems you can sink your teeth into and do something new. Yeah, you can. You can carve out a new path that no one has ever gone on before. And that’s what, at least to us, makes life worth living.
Amara Andrew: And big doesn’t have to necessarily mean difficult or hard.
Like you could want something different out of life. ’cause I’m just thinking if somebody’s like, well yeah, like I’m fine with where my business is at. They do want to provide for their families, have a better life, how could you, like that’s a bigger problem versus focusing on the tiny little everyday sort of issues.
Jeff Sarris: Yeah, and I think they’re always hard. I would actually push back, you said it doesn’t mean hard. I think any problem worth solving is inherently hard because otherwise you don’t need to solve it. It’s already solved. It’s easy.
Amara Andrew: Yeah. Unless people don’t wanna take action, I would argue.
Jeff Sarris: And then, and that’s the crux of all of it.
Like, if you don’t want more out of life, fine, but why are you even here? Why are you listening to this
Amara Andrew: on this earth or in the
Jeff Sarris: podcast? Um, but yeah, if you don’t want more out of life, fine. But like, I feel like we all want something
Amara Andrew: more on This would be a very weird podcast for you to be listened
Jeff Sarris: to.
Yeah. And we all want, inherently, we do all want something more out of life no matter where we are on the scale. Success and power and whatever it is that people have striven for. Strive,
Amara Andrew: strove,
Jeff Sarris: strove, trove,
Amara Andrew: str.
Jeff Sarris: I think that’s good for this week. If you want stuff like this that we never send in your inbox because we haven’t sent the email in a little bit, go to useful not famous.com and put your email in the inbox, in the inbox in the touch box and we will one day start sending sending that again.
Did you work out too, too? We’re gonna send uh, the emails again though.
Amara Andrew: Yeah,
Jeff Sarris: we’ve been doing the hyperlocal one, but we’re going to bring back the useful and Yeah,
Amara Andrew: and ’cause we’re gonna have another special project hopefully. Happening soon.
Jeff Sarris: Always building everything on this channel. I mean, we just did so much with the hyperlocal uh, platform’s.
So exciting this week, but we’re not gonna talk about that now. We’re 35 minutes in. I think we wrap here. Thanks for tuning in and be useful. Pooch. Pooch,
Amara Andrew: my name is Amara. I drive a car. I go real far ’cause I got that Tata. I hated that growing up ’cause nothing rhymed with Amara. So everybody would just use Tata.
I swear to God. That was the only. Okay. Bye.