Ayodeji Awosika: “I studied 3-star Amazon reviews”

Note: This is a rough transcription and there may be some errors present.

Alice Draper (00:00)
Welcome to my rejection story. Can you, think, to start the conversation, tell me about a time in your life where you felt rejected?

Ayodeji Awosika (00:10)
Yeah, that’s a good question. would say maybe early on when I was trying to land certain writing jobs or trying to get published on certain like prestigious writing websites where I would initially send them pitches and either they paid me no mind or they would, you know, give me a polite little rejection. You know, I dealt with a lot more rejection when it came to

getting myself in front of clients, getting certain writing jobs, guest posts and things like that when I was less experienced. And then as time goes on, you some of those same publications that I reached out to after I got a little bit of cloud or my writing got better, grew an audience. Funny enough, some of those people came back to me and wanted me to write and ask me. So, you know, I’ve dealt with lots of different rejections from writing gigs to even on a day to day basis and products. I talk to people.

I try to sell them things and the vast majority of time actually the answer is no. But getting through those nos and to get to the yeses that’s pretty much what the game is all about.

Alice Draper (01:11)
Yeah.

I totally relate to the writing rejections. I think it’s probably like part of the journey of being a writer. But in your Ted talk, you said something that I loved, which was that for every 10 year, I think I’m probably paraphrasing. I’m definitely paraphrasing. So I may not get this quite right, but you said something along the lines of every 10 no’s, you get one yes. That is like, makes all those no’s worth it. I’m not sure if that was the exact number, but this idea that kind of those actions that we’re putting out when

for writing or whatever it is, you’re pitching products now, that just that one yes makes up for every single no is something that immediately drew me to your work and your messaging. So it’s like, yeah, like we need more of this sort of way of thinking about things.

Ayodeji Awosika (02:06)
Yeah, I agree 100 % and like, I think maybe it could be a product of the way we’re brought up or the school system or just like this idea that if like we kind of grew up trying to avoid mistakes and you were really like graded on how few mistakes you made, right? But if you look at, if you look at, say like, I like to use like an analogy of baseball, right? In baseball, if you hit 300, which means if you hit

three out of every 10 times you go at bat. You’re like a top 1 % baseball player. You’re like a hall of famer if you can hit three out of every 10. And when it comes to entrepreneurship, like the numbers are similar. if you’re, if every 10 people you talk to, you’re closing a couple of them, like those are really good numbers. So like a really, a really, really successful business will still have the vast majority of people saying no, but.

the magnitude of those wins just washes it out. And I think a lot of people are worried about how it feels to be rejected because let’s just be honest, it doesn’t feel good. Whether it’s a business rejection, whether it’s you asking someone out, whether you’re trying to make a connection, it just seems like if they’re saying no, you have the tendency to take it very personally and make it seem like it’s something about you or your character when in reality, if you look at it,

Alice Draper (03:13)
Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (03:31)
you’re just gonna be like not everyone’s cup of tea. I talk to students about this all the time. I’ll say, when you get on the phone to talk to somebody and try to close a deal, there’s basically gonna be 10 % of people, they’re just gonna say yes no matter what, right? 10 % of people, they’re just gonna say no no matter what.

then there’s gonna be those other people in that middle range where that’s where some of the persuasion comes in, getting them to say yes and things like that. But even the ones who do well in close versus the ones who don’t, what I like to think about is it’s not like they rejected you per se, but it’s like the strategy you went about doing it at the time just wasn’t sufficient to get the yes. And the strategy is something.

that you can change, right? So I’ll have students, I got on a bunch of halls and they didn’t close. It’s like, yeah, you’re not that good at sales yet and you need to get better at sales and then more will close. But it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, where if that same person would have ran into you a couple months later when your skills are better, they would have said yes, right? So it’s something that, it’s a variable that you can change, but I think probably the number one inhibitor of success for any individual is the fear.

rejection and embarrassment and like the way we relate socially to other people and it’s not really that we’re it’s not so much that we’re afraid of getting rejected it’s that we are afraid of some like whatever failure component involves other people knowing that you failed other people that like that level of embarrassment that come from falling flat in front of your face in front of other people

It can be a real deep visceral fear that people have, but it’s the way to pretty much all the big dreams that you want, like you have to go through that one door, which just a lot of people are understandably unwilling to, but it’s something that if you want your life to be good, you have to figure out how to get around.

Alice Draper (05:30)
love that so much and you touch on a lot of the topics that I’m like, I can’t shut up about. I think very much there is this, it’s survival. It’s survival that we’re scared of failing in front of other people because if we do and it doesn’t go well and that they, you know, kick us out, like that lizard brain of ours interprets that as well, you’re gonna die. Like you’re gonna starve to death and.

I think that we are not always aware of how much that sort of old, not very evolved part of our brain is controlling our actions and holding us back from kind of taking those next moves. So yeah, I that you kind of touched on that. And I always find that failing in front of people I know is scary, like the scariest thing. Like pitching strangers isn’t too scary to me, I guess, because I don’t, maybe my like…

subconscious brain doesn’t associate them with my survival. I’m like, well, they’re not, they’re not in the tribe yet. They’re not keeping me alive so I can make a fool of myself in front of them. But going to past clients and asking them for referrals, sending them my like sales deck or whatever, reaching out to people in my network is always the scariest thing. And I think it might be like, what if this changes their perception of me? What if this is the thing that kind of makes them kick me out?

So I’m really excited to jump into your story. But before we do that, I want to talk to you a little bit about your writing journey. I believe you’ve self -published three books. I know you’ve written three books. You’re also, am I right to you’re working on your fourth book? I think I heard you talk about that somewhere.

So yeah, I’m curious to know a little bit about that journey. I took a like squiz on Amazon and saw hundreds and hundreds of reviews. So looks like you got some pretty healthy sales going on in this space. And I loved reading your book, like the Honest Guide to Self -Improvement. It was honest and very refreshing to read. So.

I’m curious to know a little bit about the self -publishing journey and how you have, I guess, sold in the A to Z of like from conception, ideation to writing to publishing and then post publishing the sales and marketing side, which is often the tricky side of writing a book.

Ayodeji Awosika (08:02)
Yes, when it came to the books, writing books is something that I always wanted to do for a really long time. I stumbled into writing, long story short, I was working on some self -improvement stuff to fix my own life, because my life wasn’t doing so good at the time. After I started doing that, I started sharing little things I was learning online. A friend of mine asked me to write an article for his website. I said yes, wrote one article, fell in love with it.

literally been writing every day since, never stopped, right? So at first I was writing for his website, a couple different blogs, and then I got this idea that probably about a year in that I wanted to write this book. So I actually took a course on

how to self -publish books. It was called Self -Publishing School. And they walked me through the process, like pretty much A to Z, so that was very helpful. But basically the process looks like this. So first thing you to do is like come up with, you have to come up with a book idea, right? And there’s an exercise I like to use to come up with ideas and it’s writing down 10 ideas every day. I used to do that for writing,

headlines for different blog posts I was working on. So I learned that from this writer named James Altucher, one of my favorite writers, right? So for the book, what I did is expanded it out to 50, right? So I had 50 different titles that I wanted to browse through and figure out would be a good idea. I kind of had the sense it was gonna be like a general self -improvement book and I was just gonna like fill out my ideas with it. And so I’d always, I kind of had this idea in my head that

I wanted to write about how to figure out what you’re destined to do, like the things you’re supposed to do. And so that’s why I landed, I eventually landed on the idea of the Destiny Formula. And then in terms of like how the research went, what I do is I go look for different books in different categories on Amazon that are related to my book.

And then I’ll go look at the three star reviews of books, because three star reviews tend to be the most honest. Like five star reviews, sometimes they just really like the author and they’re just gonna, whatever he said. Usually people who write one star reviews are kind of negative people who just are just trying to be haters. But if there’s like a three star review, they’ll say, okay, this is what I liked about the book. And then this is what I didn’t like about the book. Right, so I look at a lot of different books in the category and say, okay, what are some of the things that people wanted to see across most books? Then I’ll keep it.

Alice Draper (10:12)
Yeah.

Mm -hmm.

Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (10:31)
And then what are some of the things that they said they didn’t like? And then that’s where I come and try to fill in the gaps with my idea, right? So that’s kind of the idea formulation process. Then after that, I think probably the most critical thing that you need to do for a book is two things. One is a mind map. The second thing is an outline, right? So a mind map is basically where either you take a notebook, you take post -it notes, but you try to scribble out and storyboard, like, all right, what is everything that’s going to go in this book? What could the chapters be?

What are the subtopics underneath each chapter? And then I would go again and do mind master each chapter. Like what are the sub ideas in this chapter and what are some of the sub ideas underneath? So you kind of just, you want to get it all out of your head and onto a piece of paper. And that’s like the messy version of your idea. Then you come back later and then you turn it into a formalized outline, right? Like I put it on a Google Doc. So these are your chapter names, subtopic names, bullet points. So it’s really…

A lot of the problems get solved before you sit down to write. It’s like, feel like if you sit down and you just try to write a book from scratch, you’re gonna be in for a nightmare. You have to spend the most time figuring out what ideas are gonna go in the book before you do it, right? And then after the outline, I’ll just write the book however long it takes from start to the first time. It took like 30 days.

It’s like write the draft from start to finish. Like all you do is wake up, write, and you just do it consecutively until it’s done. And you don’t want to judge the first draft at all. The only goal is to get the draft done. And then after that, you go through different rounds of editing. So usually I’ll go through like five, six rounds of editing. And the intricacies of editing can get like a little bit complicated, but.

First pass, you go through and you just look through and see does the general shape of the idea look good? That’s where you’ll probably notice there’s probably sections, chapters that need to either be removed or moved around. Then as the edits continue, it gets more fine -tooth comb sort of thing where you’re going from overall structure to line by line, does the sentence need to be there, to fine -tooth comb, then…

Alice Draper (12:25)
Mm.

Ayodeji Awosika (12:44)
I pass it off to a professional editor to go through and do another round of edits.

Alice Draper (12:50)
Okay, so all this time you’re the one editing until you’ve done multiple rounds and then you pass it off to professional, is that right?

Ayodeji Awosika (12:59)
Yeah, I’ll do multiple rounds and then pass it off to a professional. So especially like with my last one, I really wanted the hammer at home. like, was like, let me get a couple of cracks at it myself. Then let me put it to a professional, right? So for the first two books, I just had copy editors, which are people who are like primarily focused on

Alice Draper (13:04)
Okay.

Mm.

Ayodeji Awosika (13:20)
the grammatical structure type of stuff like that. But the third book I actually had hired a developmental editor and the developmental editor looks at the entire structure of the whole book. Like, does like the narrative arc of the book make sense? Are the ideas good? She would double check and it’s like, okay, what do you have to support this claim? You she was really hard on me, which I appreciated. She was like trying to make sure that the ideas are really strong.

Alice Draper (13:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (13:45)
And so always want to get an editor at a minimum proofreader for sure.

Alice Draper (13:50)
Yeah, having gone through the process of you developmentally editing your book yourself and then the third time hiring someone to be a developmental editor, would you recommend that authors make that investment? Do you think that that’s a worthwhile investment, investing in the developmental editor? Or is there like a certain point in your career where it would make sense?

Ayodeji Awosika (14:11)
I would say it makes sense to get a developmental editor if you’re at the point where you feel like you have a book that really has a chance to take off and you kind of want it to be your flagship book that people come back and over and read and opens doors for opportunities for you and stuff like that. So I would definitely say so. Probably if I were doing it over.

I would spend a good chunk of time building up an audience and building up some critical mass before publishing my first book. I think I maybe jumped the gun a little bit too fast jumping with the first one, but I’m still happy that I did it in the way that I did it. But yeah, I would say if you want your book to do serious numbers, would have a developmental editor to make sure that the ideas in there are really good so that people want to read and share with other people for sure.

Alice Draper (14:54)
Yeah.

I mean, I’m thinking like, you you say you maybe jumped the gun a little bit, but I think what you did is so much better than like the alternative, which is waiting for everything to be perfect. Like, you know, you have the funds for the editors and you have everything going before you kind of make that move. Whereas I think studies, research, know that studies and atomic habits by James Clear that show like doing like putting in the reps of actually creating something is the only way we can get better at it.

So the fact that by the time you wrote your third book and you had a developmental editor, you’d also written two books before also would have played a big role. And I mean, your first two books did really well from what I could see. So it’s not like they, you know, no one read them.

Ayodeji Awosika (15:47)
Yeah.

No, they did pretty good. think probably as time goes on, people think it’s the opposite. They think it’s when you write multiple books that it’s going to be easier for you, which I would say on the one hand, the mechanics of the writing is easy, but your standards go up and you’re more judgmental of your work. So sometimes I read my first book and I’m like, ugh.

Compared to what I’m in it, what I would write right now, know. know, honestly though, writing the first book was huge for me. Just one was something I always wanted to do. Two, it got the monkey off my back. Like I wrote a book, now I know I can keep doing it. Three, people…

Alice Draper (16:23)
Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (16:41)
People respect you more as a writer if you have a book versus if you don’t. Like it’s a clear, it’s just a night and day difference where people, some of you tell people, I wrote a book, they’re like, my God, what is the book about? Blah, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, it’s been an amazing experience, all three books I would say for sure.

Alice Draper (16:45)
Yeah.

I think even the like practice of writing a book, even if no one reads the book, takes an immense amount of self -discipline to just put those words on the page. So even just from having that and you know, the fact that the book actually has people reading, but you’ve brought up a really great point, which is that, you know, as you progress and you get better at your craft, you will be more judgmental because your standards are higher, but that just means that your future work is going to be better. I think someone on this podcast was saying if you go back and read James Patterson’s first books.

they were really not that good. Like obviously he’s known for his blockbuster like the Da Vinci Code, but he was publishing long before he was, you know, as good as the work many people know now. So yeah, I love that. So your next parts of the process, and I love also kind of how you captured the book writing process because I’ve never heard a kind of nonfiction self help.

right to explain it in such tactical, in such a tactical way. Especially they’re going to the three star reviews and doing like intense market research to kind of figure out what are the gaps and what do people want to hear more of. In the green room, I was just telling you that one of the things I really liked about your book is just how different it was to other self -help books I’ve read. And that rarely happens to me anymore because I’ve just read so many self -help books.

And so it’s very clear that market research worked. And I think that a lot of writers kind of have this idea and think that it’s revolutionary because maybe their clients are telling them, wow, no one’s ever said that to me. But just because no one’s ever said it to their clients doesn’t mean that no one’s written about it. It just means that that information hasn’t entered the client’s orbit yet. And so I love that you did thorough research to figure out like what.

What isn’t actually being spoken about in your books? So yeah, to carry on with the conversation of kind of that process. now we’re kind of figuring out the writing phase. What did it look like post publishing? What was your process with actually kind of getting eyes onto this book and getting the sales up? And just one thing quickly before we continue, do you mind shifting slightly?

Ayodeji Awosika (19:17)
Yeah, I would say for the the promotion part of the book it got It got more Like I would say like aggressive and intense with each book So the first book I really didn’t have much of an audience to sell to like I didn’t have an email list or anything like that Second and third book I had an email list like probably plenty of people have told have probably told you this before but if you want to sell books

Alice Draper (19:18)
to this way. Yeah, yeah. Just so that if I do video clips, I get your face. Thanks.

Ayodeji Awosika (19:46)
having an email list is crucial. Having an email is one of the best ways to sell anything. I telling people, if you’re a writer, business owner, whatever, build an email list, collect emails from people. So at that point, through my blogging on medium different places, I had built up an email list. And the second book, basically what I did was…

Alice Draper (19:53)
Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (20:11)
sent a fair amount of emails about it. I probably sent like 10 emails about it. Just hyping up, like hyping up the book before it came out and then when it came out

running like, I think I ran like a specific price promotion. So like back at that time, I was doing like the, like the algorithm kind of hack thing where you price your book really cheap, you price it like 99 cents or something like that. You try to get a bunch of people to buy it. Then you switch it to the full price and then Amazon doesn’t know the price. It just knows that your book’s selling a lot. So it’ll start pushing it for you. And then, you know, you’ll start making new sales at that new price, right? So that was pretty much what I did with the

second book. Third book I put a fair bit more thought into it. A couple things I did, I created, so I had like a launch window week for the book and I created some, like I created bonuses that you could get for buying the book, including like free mini courses based off of the topics in the book, stuff like that. I think I had like PDF copies of my old books that you would get, but it was only during this specific window.

And then like a deadline. like there was a real push to get a lot of sales that first week. I also had a lot of different people in my network who were like, they were affiliates for the book where they would send out emails to their list about the book. You know, they would get some commissions and stuff like that. Not huge commissions, but a lot of them were, a lot of them were good friends of mine. had a network at that time. So I’d like a few dozen other people sending emails about that book to their audience too. So there’s a lot of.

Alice Draper (21:19)
Mm.

Ayodeji Awosika (21:48)
critical mass involved in that. And then the bonuses I think were really key. Like I took the course, I took the book and turned it into a course and just took the ideas from it and made them actionable and gave it away in exchange for that. And that was really helpful. One thing that I didn’t do, that I see a lot of authors do that I will do in the future is spending a lot of time doing like a…

podcast tours, right? So usually if you see someone comes out with a book.

like the big, names, they’re on every podcast and they’re just going through. There’s this guy, Hal Elrod, he wrote this book called The Miracle Morning. And actually when he published it, the sales were pretty lackluster, but he basically went on podcast for two years straight and all he did was talk about his book. So I think that’s another, the podcast tour method works really well. But for me, that last book, Craig Bodes is for the book that they can only get during launch week.

have other people promote the book. Also there’s things like the launch team, like you wanna have a launch team which are, there’s a group usually like, however much you can swing, 50 to 100 people who are gonna read the book before it comes out. Then they buy the book on day one, leave a review for it, help get some velocity for it. They’ll share it with their friends and family. Also, I email to everyone in my personal network. Just people I knew, people from, people.

people from my Toastmasters club, old friends, family members, friends of friends, like, hey, I have this book out. I worked really hard on it. You should buy it because you like me, right? So just reached out. That was that point where I tried to pull every favor that I could possibly pull at that time and just really try to get as many people as possible to buy the book during that first week and then let the sales carry from there.

Alice Draper (23:40)
Yeah.

This is such a great, thanks for like kind of taking us through the whole marketing process because, yeah, I don’t think that there’s a lot of transparency on this and you highlighted, think fantastic tips, which is, rely on partnerships. So getting people to kind of send, send the book through like through affiliate programs, that sort of thing. the bonuses really smarts something that I did also during the podcast launch, and launch group.

Ayodeji Awosika (23:59)
you

Alice Draper (24:13)
also very smart getting that kind of hype squad going. on the, and also leaning into the community. And I’m going to speak on that in a second and ask you about that. But, on the podcast thing that, that’s actually exactly what my business model is. So, my clients, we book them on podcast tours for their books. And I mean, one of our clients, he has like 2000 followers on LinkedIn or something. And his book was number one on Amazon the day it launched in its category. And he had been.

going on podcasts a long time prior, but he’d also been telling the host, please release this episode in book launch week. So the week the book launched, there’s like this sort of influx of episodes going out that tells the algorithm, like, this is a big deal.

So it’s also like timing, but something that’s very hard, and I think that a lot of authors struggle with is the fact that writing the book is such a big time commitment and then doing the like,

promotion and kind of building that momentum going is hard. It’s hard to put that, like prioritize that. So I’m curious to know a little bit about that, but I’m also curious to know about, you know, that pulling in the favors and emailing everyone in your community is really really effective. I’m like obsessed with this podcast, so I think I’ve been trying to do that, but it’s also really scary because this is like people we know, right? And like,

What if they hate the book? What if they think I’m weird? These are all the thoughts that go through my head. So not for, I haven’t written a book, but for other things that I’ll be working on. So I’m curious if you had any of those thoughts and also how you manage the time of prioritizing, not just have it writing a book, but building up all this momentum towards the book launch.

Ayodeji Awosika (26:43)
I think by that point, so by the time I read my third book, I had been writing for a couple years and I was very confident and then I read through it, I was like, nah, this is good. So usually the first two books, I wasn’t sure if they were good or not. And for a while wasn’t sure if my writing was good or but I read this last one, like, nah. I’m like, nah, this one’s pretty good. They’re gonna like it. So I really have a problem with that. And then like,

Alice Draper (26:55)
Yeah.

This one’s good.

Ayodeji Awosika (27:11)
I mean yeah, it had just been a product of, and really at this time, everything was like, everything was fired on all cylinders. Like I was highest earning writer on Medium. I have dozens of friends and dozens of friends and other writers. I was super tapped in like.

Kind of felt like peak of my powers at that time. So I was just like, let’s just get this thing out there. in terms of like time management, time management, like I’ve never been the best person at time management other than like, I always am doing something. So like there’s that, but I would say, I would say it would be important to separate your time out into sort of those like,

maker versus manager hours where I like to stack my first part of the day where I’m doing like maker stuff, where I’m making things, where I’m writing. So if I write a book, the very first thing I do, very first thing in the day is write the draft of the book. Like that box just has to get checked. And then once you have your couple hours where you’re doing your highly creative stuff, then in the afternoon, that’s when you can manage your certain tasks and things like that. I’d also…

hired a virtual assistant specifically for that project to manage all the emails and the replies and track the replies and set up the affiliate links and all that stuff so like I didn’t have to do all that stuff personally. So having that assistant coming in to help around that time was really powerful because I had little some money that I could delegate to that. But I would say really it’s the way I stack my day. Where I feel like people, they stack their days incorrectly. Where you should stack up all those important…

Alice Draper (28:47)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Ayodeji Awosika (28:53)
Whatever things are going to be most taxing mentally during the day, do those first. And then the things that more managerial admin stuff, do after. Would be my number one piece of advice.

Alice Draper (29:04)
Yeah, it’s so great. Such a great piece of advice. I’ve heard it before and I like, I think I’m also not great at time management. You know, I’m great with pushing things all out when it gets close to a deadline, but like kind of general day -to -day stuff when they aren’t big impending deadlines. so I always think, I should do the thing that like takes the most mental energy or that like I’m.

kind of have the most resistance towards. And I just always find myself like wanting to gravitate to the things that feel natural and easy and just like a constant battle. But I have one more question on the sort of self -publishing route. And my final question for you is, did you immediately know that this is the route you wanted to go for? And why did you opt for self -publishing versus some of the other models, which would be hybrid or traditional?

Yeah, just, or do you have any thoughts on those models? Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (30:00)
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think for a while, I kind of had this anti -authoritarian ban where I was like, I don’t want to have to kowtow to these people and beg them to buy my, beg them to shop my book and them having all the creative control over it and them taking most of the royalties as well. I had heard a lot of things about

people who would publish, traditionally publish books and like they didn’t sell very well because Even if you’re with a publisher, like a lot of the book marketing is gonna be on you, which is like why a lot of publishers aren’t even gonna take you unless you have an email list with tens of thousands of people on it and stuff like that. I’ve probably since changed my mind where maybe after this book, I would be willing to shop for a book deal. But at that time, I just wanted to get it out there and I felt like…

The process was just too much red tape, too many people involved. And probably like, honestly until like, for the first two books, I didn’t even think a publisher would want to take me based on where I was anyways. Maybe by the time I got to my third book for sure, but those first two I was kind of up and coming. So it just didn’t really cross my mind.

Alice Draper (31:18)
Mm.

Ayodeji Awosika (31:19)
I was just sold on the idea of self -publishing and just, because there’s really one in the book out there, so I knew that the best way I could do that is if there was just zero middlemen involved in the process.

Alice Draper (31:29)
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that. I think that from various conversations I’ve had, you were spot on on a couple of things. Like one, nonfiction. The biggest problem that people have spoken to on this podcast had was the fact that they needed to be basically famous. One person was advised by her agent to buy Instagram followers so that publishers would look at her. Not, it wasn’t her agent, sorry, it was an agent that was like, prospecting her.

and someone else, Jason, he talks about, building out an Instagram following literally to get the book deal. Like that’s how he amassed his 140 ,000 followers. So there is very, that is very much a very real thing, but also interestingly, you might be interested in. No, I spoke to a literary agents who represents nonfiction authors for this podcast. And she said that, for nonfiction authors in the self help space.

that’s like a very difficult space to get into, kind of career development space as well, versus it’s much easier if you kind of are writing about something topical, current affairs, like did you write a biography on Kamala Harris and now she’s like the nominee for the Democrats, like you can get a book deal for that, but if you are kind of really sharing your expertise, she was saying she actually advises people to self -publish and that self -publishing can be more beneficial because you’re keeping the royalties.

and like she’s listed some other reasons. So I just thought that was an interesting perspective. yeah, that aside, why are you considering working with a traditional publisher for your next book?

Ayodeji Awosika (33:08)
So there’s this guy I respect, his name is Nat Eliason, and he kind of wrote these contrarian arguments about traditionally published versus self -published, and the quality of the editing team and the creative team and stuff like that.

He kind of said that they were a lot more involved than you might think. They actually had a lot of insights that might be valuable for you than you might think. And then he also was making the argument. He’s like, yeah, I mean, if you get a book deal and you just get that advance up front, then you could just kind of just focus more on the writing without having to do all the marketing, song and dance that you might have to with a self -published book, too. And he said that they give you a lot more support than you want. Also,

Selfishly I want to get I’d like to see my book in a bookstore and I know it’s very difficult to get a self -published book into like a regular chain bookstore even though know even though know like bookstore sales most of the sales still come from Amazon but like kind of having this the book in the store is cool, right and

Alice Draper (34:07)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (34:21)
It’s and like for like bestseller lists and stuff like that like if you know I’d like to make a run at like really like yeah I on the New York Times list and stuff like that. I know you got to be either traditionally published or maybe if you’re like the only examples I’ve seen people end up getting on the Times list is like maybe people like it’s like David Goggins he self -publishes book but then it took off so much that it got picked up by a publisher then got put in the bookstores and stuff like that so

those would be some of the reasons and I have a couple colleagues who yeah they’ve gotten some pretty sizable advances and stuff and they’re it’s actually been a delight to work with the publisher so

Alice Draper (35:03)
Yeah, yeah. If there’s a big advance, can definitely see the, yeah, like it kind of gives you that security to focus on the writing process. And I think that for people opting for the self -publishing route and the hybrid publishing route, your book’s not necessarily, it’s not not making, it may not ever make you money, but it’s definitely not making you money in the creation phase. And so you have to keep the business running and all the other things kind of running that you.

probably can’t give the book as much attention as you could, I guess, if you got like a big fluffy book deal. So this was fantastic. I want to steer the conversation a little bit more towards you. I know a bit about your life thanks to your writing and I really enjoy reading your writing. You have this very real, say it as it is tone and I’m not a fan of jargon or fluffy writing. I often find that it’s kind of.

obscuring the fact that maybe there isn’t a lot that the person has to say. So yeah, I like your writing was like very straightforward, but then also that kept me like going like, whoa, that’s super profound. So I’m not sure if that makes sense. But yeah, I in your book and on your website, you wrote that you were the kid with potential and you also wrote

I avoided everything that required effort because if I failed, my smart kid image would shatter. And I relate to this in my own way. I wrote a newsletter about always being told that I have unfulfilled potential throughout my schooling career. Like, I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with that, but anyway. So yeah, I’d love to hear a little bit about who Iodg was before he started writing his writing career. Who were you?

kind of as an adolescence and young adults.

Ayodeji Awosika (36:53)
Yeah, that’s a good question. would say like, definitely, definitely would say like, at least a lot of other people told me like, you know, very bright, learn things like very, very quickly. I kind of got it early on that I like.

Like my brain process information like faster than some of my students always sort of smartest kid in the class sort of thing I could be like, but I like to talk a lot too knows a kind of troublemaker and it’s kind of bored like maybe maybe not stimulated enough whatever whatever and then it would be like there’s a lot of situations where I enjoyed like the the intellectual aspect of learning but not like the

the tediousness of like, things that I didn’t feel were necessary. Like I remember in college, I had this one professor, he was like a marketing professor. I’d show up in class and I’d be like, heavily engaged in conversation, like talking through everything, but like I wouldn’t do any of my homework. I wouldn’t do any of the homework, I wouldn’t take the quiz. And he was like, I don’t understand you. was like, you’re clearly very intelligent and you like, you’re into the ideas, but you don’t like doing your homework. I’m like, and in my head I was like, well, clearly through like the way I was talking about it.

during class, it seems like I know what I’m talking about. It’s like, why do I have to do the homework? So was very little respect for authority figures, very little respect for the traditional process of doing things. I didn’t do my homework. I didn’t do my homework, however. I never studied until maybe the last minute when I needed to always skate it by. But then…

As time went on, it got to the point where it went from me not doing as much as I should in school to me not doing anything. So when I was in college, I didn’t go to class. I drank every day. I drank every day. I was drinking every day, smoking weed, girls, whatever I wanted to do aside from studying. it wasn’t like I had this extremely bad, I got a good upbringing, but I kind of found every way to mess up what I had going on, right?

So in the back of my mind, I always felt like there was some potential for me to do something, but pretty much all throughout adolescence and high school and college, I just did not take things very seriously. And I guess, as weird as it sounds, I always had in the back of my head, I like, I don’t know how, but I’m gonna be successful. I’m gonna start a business. I’m gonna be rich. It’s gonna happen at some point. But I just took a lot of detours, I guess, along the way, because I just…

For whatever reason, I just didn’t feel like doing a lot of the other things that most people seem so concerned about like, I got to get this perfect job and I got to all of my don’t get my grace blah blah blah. Didn’t I really just didn’t care. I don’t know. And then whatever, like I would always be into these little I’d always have these little hairy brain schemes that I would like get excited about. So I did like the

I do the MLM company as a random sales job. I was always looking for that little shortcut. I didn’t want to have a job. I’m kind of lazy. I think that’s kind of my biggest strength. I was just lazy. I was trying to find the most optimal way to do things where I didn’t have to go to a job working eight hours a day or slaving away doing homework that manifested itself in other ways.

selling weed and doing some other stuff maybe I shouldn’t have been doing right. But I always had it me where like that whole conventional path of living like I guess it just personally I could tell very early on that it didn’t make sense for me and that’s like not how things were going to turn out. But then again I was also just lazy like I could have did my homework like that but that’s just how it ended.

Alice Draper (40:41)
Yeah.

Thanks for sharing that. I’m gonna ask a very off -back question. And I’m only asking this because your story is like, I’m a different person and I have a different life. I think I started caring about my like performance when I was like 13 years old. But a lot of what you said very much resonates with me. I was always just not doing homework, not listening, daydreaming.

looking for shortcuts. Even when I did start caring about my performance, I was not going to study everything in the curriculum. I was going to like figure out what three questions are going to be asked in that exam and I will study one tenth of the curriculum so that I get ace the three things that are. And, you know, I often noticed that I didn’t follow the way of learning or thinking that the system wanted me to follow. And

It was a weakness when I was younger and now I look at that laziness as a strength. I figured out a better way of doing things and working. And I also only realized in adulthood that I had undiagnosed ADHD my whole life and that’s kind of probably that very different way of thinking. So my very off the back question for you, which may be totally off the mark because I’m not a psychologist, but is, you have ADHD?

Ayodeji Awosika (42:09)
Maybe, like I’m pretty sure like, I’m pretty sure if I looked my, if I just started hunting around the DSM -5 or whatever, I would find like a half dozen things that I have probably. But I think, yeah, probably, I don’t know. Like I think probably, I think for me though, I kind of always, I just focus less on that and focus on.

Alice Draper (42:25)
I mean, that’s also the danger of these labels, right?

Ayodeji Awosika (42:39)
I kind of see all of my quote unquote flaws or perceive things as a strength, right? So it’s like, I do have a very, I do have a difficult time with like being organized and disciplined and very methodical about things. But then I think that also like contributes to my creativity in like me, like me always being distracted and kind of these pie in the sky things and dreams and like.

led to me making them real and figuring out how to do that. So I like, maybe

I probably do have ADHD, but I don’t see that as a bad thing. If anything, it’s kind of like a super positive. There’s one way I saw it put by this person where basically if you have ADHD, you have more of a you have more of like a hunter’s type of brain, right? Where you’re,

where you like, you’re finding that shortcut. You don’t wanna sit on the farm all day and till the farm, right? You just wanna go hunt for a couple hours, catch a wildebeest, and then just go chill for the rest of the day. And I think that society is more optimized for that sort of agrarian lifestyle of…

Alice Draper (43:52)
Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (44:01)
be going to the same place, doing the same thing for eight hours a day. And people with these sort of hunter brains or the hunter lifestyle who prefer to just go out there and eat what they kill type of thing. Society is just not well equipped for people like us. So it’s like, maybe that kid has ADHD, but maybe also he doesn’t need to be sitting in a chair for eight hours. Maybe just let the kid go outside and like.

hang out and go play with bugs or something new. Maybe he does have them and maybe, I think it’s always looked at as, never look at, maybe people see it the way it you have something wrong with you. Or it’s like, maybe you’re the way you are, it’s just fine. And maybe you’re the environment around you, you have something wrong with it. And if you just change the environment, it’s that whole like.

Alice Draper (44:51)
Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (44:54)
You know, if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it’s going to think it’s stupid, right? That’s why I think a lot of people who maybe aren’t neurologically wired the same as everyone else, maybe there’s nothing wrong with that at all. They just need to find an arena in which like that’s a strength for them instead of a negative.

Alice Draper (45:14)
I completely agree with everything you’re saying. And I just want to say disclaimer, just for anyone listening that I’m not sitting here diagnosing you with ADHD because I don’t have the qualifications, but I am diagnosed with ADHD. So I can say that. And I guess I went to a psychiatrist because I was like, I’m just curious. I want to talk about this. But my psychiatrist told me he also has ADHD and he was saying like, evolutionarily, there’s a reason we exist, which is like.

think of it as, you know, there’s a tribe and everyone is kind of following the path, following what’s ever is in front of them. Maybe you’re picking the berries and someone else’s, like, bad or hunting, whatever the makeup is. And the person with the attention waning, and I think the term attention deficit disorder is a bad term to describe, like, the way our brains work.

But the person who’s not thinking the way everyone else is, is the one that’s noticing like, there’s a poisonous snake in the bushes, guys get out, we’re gonna die. Or like, there was some sort of study showing like people with ADHD can like find more effective ways of picking berries because you’re like looking at all the other bushes. So I think that the way it’s been termed kind of looks at it as a disorder, but this comes into something that you actually write about in your book, which is systems and.

how the school system has been built, which is to create us into kind of following a system, not challenging the system. And those of us with kind of more divergent ways of thinking struggle with that. And that’s not because there’s something wrong with us, that’s because the system is just not built for people with our brains. But something you highlight, and I hope I got this right, but in your book you highlight that it used to be more beneficial to…

follow the system. In fact, I actually wrote a quote down somewhere. Let me just find it.

Yeah, anyway, I’m not sure if I’ll find it, but it used to be more beneficial to follow the system and kind of like go by the rules. So that’s when you kind of might enter that traditional structure of being in corporate or something. But it’s not always the case anymore. And I don’t know if you feel this, but I sometimes feel like because the general workplace is so unstable, like people have to pivot careers every like two years. The idea of staying in one role, like sitting at your office for 40 years is

not very common anymore, it’s increasingly rare. I find that having the adaptability and generally just not, like that sort of entrepreneurial way of doing things, not settling, like always having new ideas and wanting to start new projects can be more beneficial than kind of having a very straight and narrow way of approaching things and just following the rules, whereas…

In the past, think maybe it was more beneficial to be a more organized, rule -following brain thinker. I don’t know if that makes sense. Is that something that you would agree with? Is that the point you were trying to make in your book?

Ayodeji Awosika (48:26)
Yeah, 100 % where like, let’s say a couple of decades ago, you would have like very high levels of job security where if you go like look at the traditional family structure where it was like, one like, even when like women worked at home or whatever, like, the whole thing was based just from like a financial perspective, you could be like one guy, you can work at a regular factory, you could support a wife and kids and have a car and all that. You can’t live like that now.

It’s not easy, like it’s not possible. Right? So your incentives to go find like more leveraged styles of income makes more sense. And I feel like if you’re reliant on, if you’re reliant on a third party for your…

for your income, it kind of lulls you to sleep, right? So there’s this passage from this book, Antifraud, by Nassim Taleb, and he’s like, consider a turkey that gets fed every single day. With each increasing day, he has more confidence that he’s gonna continue to be well fed and survive, but then Thanksgiving comes, right? And then, you know, all 364 days of…

security for the turkey were erased in one day, right? So if you look at it, if you are working at a job where you have built your entire lifestyle around the certainty of receiving that check, you’re not that many checks away from your life completely falling apart, right?

And we, you know, we’ve seen that we’ve seen that with recessions. We’ve seen that with, we’ve seen that with COVID. Like we’ve seen that with all sorts of different, things that have happened in the economy where if all of a sudden your job becomes no avoid, like, and you have no backup skills and you’re not, you’re, just picking your berries, right? Where you’re not looking around and saying, like there might be a threat to my industry versus someone like me, like, sure. Like my income fluctuates a lot, but it’s almost safer in that I’m constantly.

Monitoring it and tinkering with it right so they even have like an analogy that street signs Sometimes places with more street signs can cause more accidents Because people are like lulled into a false sense of security and they’re not paying as much attention Where if you see people like in these other countries like India or they’re on the Autobahn and stuff like it seems chaotic But since people are actually more paying attention to maneuver around like it’s actually can be like counter -intuitively safer, so I think that’s like a good parallel for

what it’s like to have your own leverage sources of income or just even hedging a little bit. So it’s not necessarily that you have to be an entrepreneur, but it could be like, maybe you have a nine to five job, but maybe you have this side hustle thing. Like you freelance on the side and you’re making a couple hundred extra month and you got some investments and stuff like that. And you see a lot of people now where they’re like,

Most people, like a lot of people have like a little thing now, like they’re doing some freelancing or they got another job or they’re doing DoorDash or they’re trading crypto. I think everyone’s kind of realizing that you can’t just like sit and chill in your one little job and just expect that it’s just gonna be there permanently, especially with the way even industries and stuff are changing so fast now.

Alice Draper (51:38)
I love that you highlight this idea of the false sense of security. And I’ve very much kind of had my eyes opened since leaving South Africa, moving to the Middle East. Many people on my network are from Sudan. My partner is Sudanese. And like, I don’t know if anyone knows about what’s happening in Sudan right now, but you can’t live in Sudan. Like, there’s pretty much no country there.

there is no economy. so coming from a space like that, I think it’s opened my eyes a lot to just how unstable systems are, banks, countries, economies. And it seems really nihilistic to plan for the worst. But I think that diversifying and the way we kind of approach things, the places where we can live, where we keep our money.

where we’re working, it’s not really gonna backfire, it just, I don’t know, like things are less stable than we know and I think living through eras of war can show that. But something I wanna talk to you about

in your book, you talk about, like taking accountability for our lives and, you, you know, you kind of highlights, I think you had a chapter called nobody is coming to save you. and I love the sort of concept of this because I think that you touch on topics that is often missing in a lot of self -help books that I’ve read, which is this idea that circumstances can be different. some people, you know, I think a lot of self -help books will tell you, you know,

get rid of your limiting mindsets and put the things in action. And you highlight the fact that like for a single working mom, it’s harder than it is for someone who is like upper middle class and has money. And so you had some of your own circumstances. You know, you speak about your mother’s background, like coming from generally kind of difficult background, poverty, think in the U .S. Your dad being from Nigeria, but that you

you this point where you realize you couldn’t be a victim to circumstances, you being a black American having, I think you’d been incarcerated, so you had like a criminal record at the time, is that right? And this topic is fascinating to me, this idea of like not being a victim, because I totally get it and I totally support this notion, because like we have to take control of things to change things.

But it interests me when circumstances become extenuating. So like I just touched on just now, like my partner and many of my friends being from Sudan and I am always blown away by how much like everyone I know from Sudan does not have a victim mentality. And I think that that’s what keeps things moving. That’s what like, you know, how they’re alive and functioning and supporting lots of people. But yeah, I’m just curious kind of like,

what it means to be resourceful, even when you don’t have resources, because I know that this is a topic you touch in your book, and I just think it’s generally an under discussed thing, and I’d love to hear straight from you what it means.

Ayodeji Awosika (54:57)
Yeah, think it just all comes on to the question is like What are you gonna do about it? Like what’s so like let’s say someone comes up to me and they’re like, hey, I I’m a single mom. I’m diabetic left -footed lesbian discriminated against I’m like Okay, but like that’s your life Like that it like that’s what your situation is. So you could either wait for society

Alice Draper (55:15)
Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (55:24)
to rise all the boats to the tides, whatever that saying is, or you can get on with your life and figure out what you can do, right? So here’s what I would say. I would say that on the one hand, I’ll grant you, there are tons of factors outside of your control that affect how your life is, 100%. But I think people should ask themselves, have you on a personal level exhausted every single potential resource that you could?

in order to fix your situation and if the answer is no, you have to look in the mirror and figure that out. So like a lot people are like, this, this, and this, I don’t have time, I don’t have this, this, and this. So like, okay, do you watch TV? well yeah, I watch a couple hours of TV. are you on TikTok? everybody do that. do you go out and hang out with your friends sometimes? Blah, blah. And the point of me saying…

all that stuff isn’t to scold anyone, being like you shouldn’t watch TV or you shouldn’t do this. But what I am saying is you have to understand the consequences and trade -offs of your decisions. So, let’s paint an imaginary world where you didn’t watch TV, you didn’t watch Netflix, you didn’t go out.

and you sat down and went and watched free YouTube videos on how to make money and studied copywriting and sales and marketing every spare minute or hour of your day and reached out to get clients every single spare minute of your day, your financial situation might change. But you’re just not doing that. And no one’s saying that it’s fair to you or unfair to you. Because to be honest, in a lot of situations,

Alice Draper (56:49)
Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (56:56)
based on whatever your immutable characteristics, you might have to work twice as hard as someone else to get the same result. You might get discriminated against. But if that’s the route to get it, that’s the route to do it. I think for me, concepts of fairness, I think that they’re noble in the long term, that we should have movements.

Alice Draper (57:04)
Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (57:23)
And we have had movements related to fairness and equity that have helped people out. But I just don’t know if you on a personal level have time to wait for all that stuff to get sorted out. Because maybe by the time where there’s this perfect equilibrium, where someone in your position has the perfect opportunity, you might be old or dead. Like, so you, it’s your life. You got to get on with it what you have going on right now. And in the internet too. I think the internet is so powerful where

Alice Draper (57:48)
Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (57:53)
You can learn how to do almost anything for free. You can learn how to do it for relatively cheap. As you ascend up, you can have people work closely with you and mentor you and do different things. There are so many opportunities. And again, not saying that everyone has to be an entrepreneur, it’s like figure out the best possible lane based on your characteristics. So even something as simple as I saw this video from Alex Hermosy and it was like how to triple your income.

It was like, if you’re working some low wage job right now, you could go study to be a phlebotomist and you could get a job starting at $25 an hour, $30 an hour. All you have to do is like study and take this one test. It’s like, it’s like something that you could go do. You don’t have to be working at the $8 an hour job, $10 an hour job if you want to. can go get that thing in triplet income right now, but you’re not going to do it. Those types of things. No, not a lobotomist, a phlebotomist, right? So it’s like.

Alice Draper (58:42)
A lobotomist? Sorry.

Ayodeji Awosika (58:48)
You like draw, like learn how to draw people’s blood or something like that, right? Go get a little, you can go get a little certification like, or if you hate your job, go get a better job. Like no one’s telling me that you have to be like, I think what a lot of people, and again, what I also say to people when it comes to their decisions, like let’s take like someone who has a situation where like some people reach out to me and they’re like, well, it’s easy, easier for some people to say like they don’t have kids. I was like.

Alice Draper (58:51)
Okay, that makes more sense.

Ayodeji Awosika (59:15)
with all due respect, like nobody put a gun to your head and told you to have children. Like you chose to have children, right? And so even with stuff like that, it’s like everything that goes on in your life is how it’s part circumstance, part personal, part choices in decision -making. And I think that choices in decision -making gets underrated quite a bit in society. And I think that you have a lot, like you have a lot more choice of what you could do than you might think, even if

Alice Draper (59:37)
Yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (59:44)
And if we’re talking about America, I think another reason why it’s been very difficult for me to feel sorry for myself or ever feel disadvantaged is because I have my dad’s Nigerian. My mom grew up very poor. My grandfather, her dad told her, we don’t have no money. We don’t have any money. Here’s a library card. Go read every book in there.

get a scholarship, and that’s what she did. She got all the school paid for. She went to the library, read free books, got real smart, got scholarships, graduated high school early, got a master’s degree, a lot of stuff. She grew up poor, but education, even down to level, you can go to the library and read books for free. They’re free. You don’t need any money. You could be dead broke and go to the library and learn something that’ll help you out. So like, if you boil it down like that, like…

Alice Draper (1:00:32)
Yeah, yeah.

Ayodeji Awosika (1:00:40)
there’s always a path to figuring it out, especially if you’re in America compared to other places. Like my dad’s side of the family, they always tell me, they’re like, you don’t know how good you have it growing up here versus where we had to grow up. It’s total cakewalk compared to what they’re going through. So lots of different thoughts on that.

Alice Draper (1:01:02)
Yeah, yeah. I love this and I think that it’s always such a hard thing to talk about, at least for me, it’s struggle to talk about it because often you see people talk about kind of being stuck for whatever reasons, there’s children, there’s financial restrictions or whatever. And I always like, I’m reluctant to say like, you know, you can fix things or there are things that you can control because obviously I can’t speak to those circumstances and the thing is like circumstances are real like…

As you said, you might have to work two times harder than someone else to do the thing you want to do, or even 10 times harder if you are like, you know, in a disadvantaged country or you don’t have access internet or something. having this idea that things need to be fair before you can take action is extremely dangerous. And I think if you’re in a position to focus on changing the systems and that’s a choice you make, that’s okay.

And like that’s admirable and that’s great. But I think it’s also okay to choose to focus on upleveling yourself. And in the process, you probably will uplevel other people. Cause I think like, at least in my experience, when someone has sort of broken past being in a disadvantaged space, they’ve generally brought up many, many people along with them. And in your book, you write, taking responsibility for yourself is painful when you have no scapegoat.

because you feel the weight of your own inaction. And I think that’s kind of the heart of it, right? Is that for many people, rarely taking stock of what they can do and not externalizing it and blaming the external forces, which can be at play very much, can be, is scary because you also now have to look at the things that you could have been doing and perhaps you haven’t been doing. There is that kind of place of, I need to take action.

And it’s reaching that point of self -awareness that I think is hardest for many people. So my second to last question for you is, do you have any advice on how people can reach that point of self -awareness?

Ayodeji Awosika (1:03:13)
Yeah, I think…

In order to reach that point of self -awareness, just have to like, you have to have some sort of brutally honest assessment of your situation, where it’s almost like…

turn off the daydreaming for a little bit and like assess. So I think one thing that happens to a lot of people is they get wrapped up in this idea of their potential where like they kind of imagine themselves like what they would be like if they turned on like if they turned it on and like that everything they know are supposed to be doing and then you can kind of cling to that idea that like I could be that person but I just haven’t done it yet right and what you’re really afraid of is actually putting all your effort into it and finding out that

Maybe you aren’t cut out for what you thought you were. Maybe you aren’t who you think you are. And I think it’s better sometimes to take a step back. I’m all for visualizing the future. We have to look at the reality of your situation and assess it and take the attitude that, at least for right now, your behavior and your outcomes, that’s who you really are.

a lot of the way your outcomes, that’s an internal reflection of the way you really see yourself. you also have to understand that part of it, on some level, as strange as it might sound, you want to be in the position where you’re at right now. And the reason why is because…

One of the things that’s one of the most things that one of the things you get addicted get addicted to most is familiarity. Like you’re just addicted to like that level of life that you’re accustomed to. Even if you don’t like it, the alternative of like facing the uncertainty might be worse. And I think I think all of us have those like all of us has that whisper in our head of like we all know what to do. We know what we’re supposed to be doing.

We know if we don’t like that job, we know if we’re settling for that partner, we know if we want to be making more money, we know what career we would be doing if we knew it would work, we know where we’re selling ourselves short, we know what part of circumstances and what parts on us. Like deep down we all know. And I think it’s, sitting down and having that conversation, like, I sometimes literally, if you gotta talk to yourself in the mirror about like whatever you gotta do, just brutally honest self -assessment and…

kind get out of that la la land where you’re either picturing a potential future that you’re not doing anything towards, or if like you’re putting a lot of your energy, and I see this happen a lot lately with like social stuff or politics or things like that where I think a lot of people are putting so much energy into it as a way to like…

almost drown out that voice of like, well, it’s really like, there’s really things that you could be doing. It’s like, yes, the laws affect you. Yes, politics is important. Yes, all that stuff. like you, you individually, like you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna overthrow some corrupt political system, like by yourself. And I think putting your energy into that is.

So it’s not a number one, I don’t think it’s very healthy for you mentally. And number two, think you can have like, you know, a greater ripple effect on your own. Where like, you look at like, I guess even look at my story, like I’ve written books, passed on knowledge. I’ve had people who’ve read my books go on to make, start their own businesses, put money in their own pockets, do things that they didn’t see previously. I’ve gone and I’ve gone and give his speeches, gone and give his speeches for

high schools and people, youth groups and students and you know, so like I’m not changing the world maybe but like there’s a little ripple effect around what like what I’ve been able to do and like then if those people they have a little ripple effect like it’s like I feel like if everyone kind of minded their own thing and like put theirself out there then like that collective like sort of ripple effect would be a lot stronger than this sort of like end around collectivist like methodology that I think a lot of people are.

to.

Alice Draper (1:07:34)
Yeah, yeah. And I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. And I obviously I can’t speak to people who are actively involved in like social advocacy because I, you know, I’m not in that space and I don’t know what it means to be. mean, don’t know the intricacies of working in that space, but I had like, you know, one of my core values is social justice. So making the decision to be an entrepreneur in the beginning felt like kind of morally corrupt. Like I’m choosing myself.

And I’ve found that like for myself, it’s meant that I can really hold a lot of agency over helping things that I care about. I have a lot of room, having money helps. can put your money where you care, like in courses you care about, but you can also help up level other people, mentor people. You know, there’s a lot of agency and I’m working with entrepreneurs on sort of social, socially driven projects. And I’ve

spoken to people who worked for sort of NGOs and gone, I guess, the more noble route where, and many of them have told me that they feel really frustrated and like there is no room to change things because they’re sort of boxed into a system that they’re not controlling. And I’m not going to sit here and say like, which routes people should take, but opting for the route that gives you the most control and agency is often, you can have that, as you said, that ripple effect in the way that you impact people.

Yeah, so my, I don’t know if you want to add anything, I’m going I thought it the last one.

Ayodeji Awosika (1:09:05)
I think the only distinction I was trying to make was like, it was less so talking about people who were like, actively involved in those organizations. I meant more people who were like, almost like kind of like armchair activists who like they sit on Facebook all day and pour their energy into that and they think they’re doing something where I would tend to disagree. Where I think where people get overly invested in sort of like…

sharing the stuff on social media, arguing with people, and they’re always up to date on what’s going on online and stuff like that. This kind of happened. If you work for an actual organization devoted to something more, if you’re an actual activist, yeah, that’s your mission, that’s your calling. But I think a lot of people are using it, armchair activism is kind of like a shadow calling, to talk from their real one.

Alice Draper (1:09:55)
Yeah.

And it’s really bad as you pointed out, I think, for one’s mental health. And there’s research on this, because when you are an armchair activist, you really can’t do much to change things. And so it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating spending time looking at stuff. I used to do a lot of that when I was in university. I realized that this is not.

bringing any good to the world is just making my mental health suffer. So yeah, thank you so much, IodG for your time today. My final question. So in your TED talk, you said a line that really stuck with me, which is, sure, you might feel like a fraud the entire time, but deep down, you understand that you’re living your truth. And this is something that struck me because I feel like a fraud hosting this podcast. Like I feel like a fraud every time I’m interviewing someone who…

is extremely successful like you and has, you know, done all these things. and, you know, I felt like a huge fraud when I had a call with you previously asking for your endorsement in the podcast, but I’m doing it anyway. I like have this belief that like, I, you know, the confidence will be a byproduct of the action. And this has always driven me and I care about the mission more than I care about my feelings.

So my final question for you is, do you have, this may be also a little bit off the bat, do you have any advice for me on how to grow this show? I have a big mission. I don’t want it to be a niche show and I feel like you have a lot of smart branding and get sort of partnerships expertise. So I’m curious what your advice would be.

Ayodeji Awosika (1:11:38)
Yeah, I keep doing what you’re doing and being like, the one thing that made me respond to you is that I usually get cold pitched a lot of times and like they’re usually just so terrible. And like I could tell that you have some sort of knowledge in that area because you offered some sort of like reciprocation sort of energy. Everything was very succinct. Like it made it a pretty easy yes. And I think for people like

especially when you’re trying to pitch yourself, like people want to say yes to you, but you have to, it’s almost like they can sense like the level of seriousness that you have. And I think it’s just like continue doubling down. But I think the main thing that happens when you’re trying to grow a business or an audience is like, if you get one thing to work, like, so right now you have this pitching thing that works, right? We have this weird tendency where we want to…

start fumbling around with too many different things. Whereas if you get one thing that’s working really well, you want to hammer that home until it stops working. So in your case, take the names of previous guests, continue leveraging them. It’ll help you keep getting better and better ones. And then through people sharing it and stuff like that, it’ll create that compounding. So honestly, it’s…

haven’t like taken your original plan and just continuing to stick to it for a long enough period of time until it works and then you’ll just continually get better right your your podcast you know your podcast podcast and production will get better your speaking will get better all that stuff will get better so like i remember even like the i don’t think at the time for the first time i did like a youtube video

like my cadence, my delivery, my tone versus the way that it is now, it just gets much, much better. And you just continue to grow and grow and grow. And I also think that, especially when it comes to business models, I just like, I’m more of a fan just copying what works. Right? So I would like, I’m not extremely familiar with what the podcast industry does, but like whoever the, whoever the people who are growing, growing the fastest in podcasts, what the methods that they’re using, like you can largely just copy them.

and add your own little twist to them. But I think you’re on a good track, so just take whatever you’re doing and do more of it, maybe more often, more frequently, and then as you continue delivering new episodes and stuff like that, you’ll just continue compounding.

Alice Draper (1:14:12)
Thank you. That’s really good advice. And you know, I, I’ve like given this advice in other contexts where it’s like, you know, if you’re building a business focused to social media platform, you like stop trying to be on every platform. But I never really thought of it in this context. Cause I do have this like sense of like, I should be everywhere. Like there are so many strategies that you can implement to scale a podcast. like now that you’ve framed it that way, I’m like, that totally makes sense. you know,

you have something that works, double down on that thing that works. And only when it’s not working or when you have a lot more capacity, you start expanding. So thank you. And thank you for being such a great guest. I really enjoyed today’s conversation. I learned a lot. I’m sure the listeners learned a lot. So, yeah, I know you’re a writing coach, anyone listening who’s looking for support. Where can they find you and what kind of support can they get from you?

Ayodeji Awosika (1:15:09)
Yeah, I think the best place to find me would be on social media. On Twitter, LinkedIn. So like my handle is I am the author, so AYO the author. I do have a newsletter if you want to put that in the show notes or something where I use a lot of my strategies about writing, making money online, landing clients. Those can be found in my newsletter. All I think is…

Yeah, yeah, basically those.

Alice Draper (1:15:40)
That’s fantastic. Yeah, the link will be in the show notes for everything, social media and newsletter, and of course the books. So I’m giving away a copy of Real Help and Honest Guide to Self -Improvement to a listener who subscribes, but also order yourself a copy on Amazon and you can also get a copy of some of his other books and see if the writing really has improved, you know, over time or if it’s just your hypercritical mind.

Thanks so much for your time, Aodhiji. This was a really great conversation.

Ayodeji Awosika (1:16:12)
Thanks for having me.