Breaking-Point #3: Braith Leung. The man who lives ‘ex-vicariously’. Hip-hop artist turned LinkedIn podcaster & video specialist.

Hey! Excited to hear your thoughts on this one - but just quickly before we start, Braith and I will be going LIVE ON LINKEDIN THIS TUESDAY FROM 5:30PM (AEST) onwards if you want to ask him any questions :)

Look forward to seeing you there!

Introduction

“F*ck vicarious”.

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Oh yeah. Does this guest even need an introduction?

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Like many of you, I’ve been watching the works of Braith Leung ?? for a while now, and literally in the past year, watched 3 of his breakthroughs as a 22-year-old game-changer – LIVE.

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Somehow, I’ve caught the time to interview the man who interviews everyone.

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Actually, not just anyone: Forbes 30U30 leaders, TEDx speakers, 8-figure founders & Olympians. ?

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You’ve probably seen his videos pop-up on your feed asking daring questions to people who dared to dream and made their dreams come true.

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Well, now more recently, probably him on a basketball court running around talking about the outburst of ‘LinkedIn video’.

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No matter where you’re from, if you have LinkedIn downloaded on your phone – you’ve seen this man and it would be a shame for me not to interview him as our official 3rd guest on Breaking-Point nt.

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So, without further ado – I promise you want to read until the end of this one (est. 4 mins).

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Enjoy ;)

What to expect:

-??Why he stopped making music after hitting 300K+ streams as a rapper at Sydney’s top-ranked high school

-?How he pops up on your LinkedIn feed every day

-?The magic of challenging your limiting beliefs – for anyone building on social media

BREAKTHROUGH #1 – Viral musician to Viral Tiktok creator

Last year, North Sydney Boys High School officially broke a 27-year run to become the number one-ranked school in New South Wales (the biggest state in Australia).

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And you may be surprised to hear that Leung was not only a part of the class of 2020, but also probably the most unique student that the school ever produced.

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“I’ve always been a very creative person…but everyone is either studying or gaming at NSB”.

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He didn’t fit in and it was obvious the moment he shared with me that his first ever dream was to become an inventor. His first idea?

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“What if you could create a car that doesn’t need petrol or electricity to work? Like if you just positioned magnets around the wheel to make them turn…I wanted to become an inventor before an artist”.

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But as impractical as it may sound the will never fell apart. The will to take action on ideas his curiosity slapped across his mind each night. The will to stop living vicariously – in other words, through other people’s dreams.

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“I would watch all these people living their dreams on TV – be it fictional or non-fictional, Suits for example, I wanted to be the Harvey Spectre.”

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“So I decided, I was really into hip-hop at the time – why not start rapping and putting myself out there as an artist…I had a friend that was a producer and we started putting music out on all platforms.”

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“But the moment you step out of line of the ordinary, yes you do get noticed and an immense level of positivity – but also hate. Luckily for me, the positivity was larger and so I kept going.”

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Within just a few months, someone had added one of his singled, ‘3am situationships’ to a 1000+ listener playlist and Spotify blew it yup to 300 000+ streams.

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By the way, he was in year 11 at the time.

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“It’s funny, I was balancing my academic workload with the music during year 11 where I performed better than year 12 and was getting the most streams. I stopped the music in Year 12 with the intention to focus fully on studying, but I didn’t do as well that year”.

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But Parkinson’s law – the work ended up filling up the time and Leung realised soon after, that there is no reason young people can’t pursue both academic and professional ambitions. Nevertheless, he graduated as a HSC all-rounder, achieving a 90+ mark in all subjects.

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“Why can’t you have both, if you have more professional ambitions with societal and familial pressure, but you have more creative dreams that may be a bit more risky…why can’t you do both? You can.”

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“Okay, you’re going to have to work harder, sacrifice time you spend partying…but you can like get everything you want if you want enough and you try hard enough”.

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But after spreading his wings by starting to perform with the Sydney University Hip-Hop Society and meeting other ambitious marketers in the Sydney Marketing Society – he became obsessed with marketing and AI.

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“I started my psychology degree and at the same time decided to start a TikTok account to motivate people through quotes for their ‘mental fitness’”.

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“After a video hit 1.7 million views, I wanted to start automating the process so I spent three days straight, no sleep, learning how to code in Python to create fine-tuned GPT models to help me write captions, hooks and save me from the manual work”.

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The funny thing – being extremely creative, Leung tells me NEVER believed he could do the technical skills. It struck a familiar chord at home with me too.

?Why can’t you do both? You can.”

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The coding, the websites, the back-end development, he never in this life thought he could do it, but once he actually sat down and realised it wasn’t that difficult – he developed a skill for life.

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Both times, as a musician and creator on Tiktok during while pursuing his education – he ensured one fundamental value stayed at the core of his work.

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A fundamental value that’s honestly helped me, more than it has compared to so many others to which I gave more importance to. Consistency.

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And a deep desire to live ex-vicariously ;)

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“Most people are so scared of their limiting beliefs that they won’t even try to reach them.” – James Clear in Atomic Habits.

BREAKTHROUGH #2: LinkedIn blogger to LinkedIn video creator

The reason you know him for.

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‘It’s that guy from LinkedIn, right?’

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Now let me tell you how he did it.

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Whilst in the deep end of marketing and reading Noah Kagans, ‘Million Dollar Weekend’, where he tested his sales skills, ending with a dud website which he decided to re-create for a different purpose. ?

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But as he spent the time creating it, the purpose became blurred and naturally he felt that he wanted to improve his writing so he decided to start a blog.

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“I launched it, but then immediately thought who the hell is going to read this.”

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Finding a keen interest in founders – it was at that time did the LinkedIn start.

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“That’s where my audience was…I somehow managed to interview ?? Dan Brockwell well”.

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Brockwell is a well-known figure on LinkedIn within the start-up industry in Sydney, being a TEDx Speaker and the founder of tech sales school, Earlywork.

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“First it was to highlight cool stories…it was ‘dream-makers of the past, present and future’”, says Leung.

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“But at the end of the day what I was most interested in was talking to dream-makers, and they kept happening to be founders”.

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As did I, you may have first come across Leung through his newsletter, ‘ex-vicarious – How dreams become reality’. Within 20-30 editions, he stopped and decided to grab the opportunity staring at him in the face for the past few months.

?“I launched it, but then immediately thought who the hell is going to read this.”

“I’d been interviewing these people for so long, why didn’t I just film it and make it a podcast…the main thing actually was a lot of people knew me as ‘gnuelz’ [my rapper name] and so I procrastinated for 2 weeks asking myself if launching the podcast meant I could ever return to music again?” says the 22-year-old.

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Conflicting personalities – but obviously, an ex-vicarious lifestyle means pushing through that.

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‘44% of podcasts have less than 3 episodes. So I’m dropping 4 tomorrow.’, was Leung’s caption announcing the ex-various podcast to the world which received whopping support with a combined @LinkedIn newsletter and YouTube subscriber count of 746.

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But the sudden switch to LinkedIn video?

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“I would post these podcast snippets twice a week but the hook is not very interesting…the question is not going to be an interesting hook on LinkedIn”.

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“But then I saw Louis Butterfield ld do a pod with Lara Acosta ta but his hook was filming himself moving around and talking about stuff and that made his hook much more interesting. If he’s doing it, why don’t I?”

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The common theme - why live vicariously?

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So, as you saw, every week, Leung has been reiterating, making his videos better and more engaging by the edit – where one day, one of his videos hit 200K impressions.

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“I had 20 inbound leads come in asking me about LinkedIn video”.

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“Sales is more important than marketing…now I need to learn how to close”, he tells me.

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Now, he’s on a mission to help people grow their brands on LinkedIn through the power of video – but he also very recently started helping people start their own podcasts too.

2 QUESTIONS:

With Leung’s truly ex-vicarious journey until now I had to ask him these two questions:

1.??? What do you define a breakthrough to be?

2.??? What would you say to young people who are looking for their next breakthrough in life?

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And this is what he said:

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1)?“You see something is very daunting whether it be a goal or a dream and it looks like a tower you can’t climb, but once you start climbing you realise how small it is”

2)?“What’s something you’re curious about and you can start doing something about it. If you’re curious about music, why don’t you just try write a song or post a beat. If you’re curious about start-ups, why don’t you just go to a start-up event and then write about your experience and post it online. I think the best thing is always putting yourself out there to the public because you active feedback. Sometimes it will be positive sometimes it will be negative but you’ll get feedback regardless. And I always go into a new thing with I need to be consistent. Make sure you stick to it. Once you do, the results that you’re looking for will come.

So, the breakthrough is a much more internal thing to me – it comes right after you ‘press post’ for example. But the rewards, they will come after you’re being consistent for a while. Curiosity is what will help you find what you want to breakthrough in, consistency will help you breakthrough.

Key Takeaway:

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Don’t stop. Just don’t stop when you’re trying to achieve something. You have to give yourself a set amount of time and commit to consistency during that time – whether it be a daily video, a weekly post or a monthly article – to actually see the scale tip over in your favour.

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Every time Leung adhered to that principle and doubled down – you saw what happened.

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The TikTok’s started growing, the rapping blew up, the blogs gained traction and now the videos too.

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The only thread was that the moment he caught himself living vicariously – within seconds he converted that feeling to action.

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That’s the difference between talents and game-changers.

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And, Braith Leung ?? ung my friends, he’s definitely a game-changer.

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WRAP-UP

WOW, we did it - the 3rd ever edition of the newsletter.

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Thank you so much for reading Braith Leung’s incredible story and the breakthroughs he achieved.

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But every time I read something like this, I always want to know the intricacies.

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The intricacies of how the person worked, what exact steps they took to go from A to B & things that worked for them.

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Which is EXACTLY why I’m SO EXCITED TO ANNOUNCE, THAT…

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BRAITH AND I WILL BE GOING LIVE ON LINKEDIN ON TUESDAY NIGHT (5:30PM AEST) FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO ASK HIM ANY QUESTIONS ABOUT HIS JOURNEY.

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This is a free opportunity, that you’re likely not to get in a while to pick the brain of someone who has built a personal brand to such a high level that most people dream of.

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Don’t miss out.

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Hope to see you on Tuesday!

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You can connect with Braith here:

Braith’s LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/braith-leung/

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If you enjoyed this read, it would mean the world to me if you hit subscribe – so it reaches as many other people as possible who are looking for that insight so that they can breakthrough to the next stage of their lives & careers, too.

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Tune in next time for edition #4 (no pun intended) with another, very familiar face...