You Ain’t For Everybody [Which is Good]

Around 2014, I had a great idea.

I was transitioning from basketball to entrepreneurship at the time, and my first venture was professional speaking.

Problem: I had no prospects, and nowhere to begin.

Then, I got a bright idea. I could speak at my old college!

I remember, as a student, my school would bring people in as speakers to talk to the students. They called it the “Distinguished Speaker Series.” There would be politicians, TV stars, authors, etc. I found out from my professional speaker colleagues that colleges had budgets specifically for this stuff.?

Perfect!

I played sports and graduated from my school. I’d been a professional athlete for almost a decade, and I had a thriving, rather large online presence. On top of all that, I had plenty of useful material to give to students who were ~10 years younger than me.

How could they NOT hire me??

I crafted a professional and well-worded email, and sent it directly to the alumni relations office.

The alumni relations manager responded within 48 hours.

She commended me on my career progress, and told me that she liked what I was up to. Finding out that I was based in South Florida, she was excited to tell me that the director of alumni relations, as well as the dean of students, would be on a fundraising trip to South Florida in a few months – we should all meet in person at that time and talk.

Sure thing.

That meeting did happen, at the Biltmore Hotel in Miami, in 2014.

For two hours, I sat with the dean of students, director of alumni relations, and another guy from the alumni office. I told them about my background, playing sports, and the business I was headed into at that point.

The alumni director told me that our first step would be to engage with me by having their alumni newsletter do a quick interview and write-up on me, and then we’d take the next step from there.

We did that interview, and that write-up article was published the following week.?

By this point, it was early 2015.?

The day the article came out – published in the alumni email newsletter – I was excited.

Even though an alumni newsletter interview is far from a paid speaking engagement, it was at least a first step in the right direction – on my first try! We were getting somewhere.

I shared the interview link with a bunch of people I knew, and wrote an article on my own website directing people to it. A few of my college friends who saw the email messaged and congratulated me on the piece.

I was still riding that wave of satisfaction the next day when I went to the school website to see that my article had disappeared.

After refreshing the page a couple times and checking back on the link from my own email to make sure, I reached out to the alumni director by phone to find out what the problem was.

“We had to… remove your article from our website,” she said solemnly.?

Why?

“After the interview was published… a few people from our community reached out to us… and had some issues… with some of the language on your website. Our dean of students told us that we needed to remove the article.”

I pressed on this and got a bunch of different forms of the same information.

The “language on my website” was a mere pretext.?

Pretext: a purpose or motive alleged or an appearance assumed in order to cloak the real intention or state of affairs.?

It was a good-sounding reason, but not the real reason.

I went to that school for long enough, and my name was prominent enough, even then, that someone in the school community – possibly an active university donor – had an unfavorable opinion of me and my work (and the language on my website).?

Maybe it’s the funny story I told about my no-work senior year internship.

Maybe I’d dated some girl who was now married to some guy who now had pull with the University.

Maybe – I highly doubt it, but it’s possible – they really didn’t like that I used profanity on my website.

That person (or persons) made a phone call, and threatened to either pull their support, or leverage their muscle within the university community if the school didn’t remove themselves from association with me. After all, it was the dean of students — not the alumni office — who’d made the call to remove the article.

I don’t know who this person was, but knowing what I know about University politics, this is my best theory as to what really happened.

To this day, I have never been hired to speak at my alma mater. But, I have been hired at plenty of other places ??

***

You ain’t for everybody.?

If you’re going to carve out space in the marketplace, a space that makes an impact and has lasting power with a specific audience, then it’s a guarantee that some people will not jibe with your approach.

They don’t like your opinion on a certain subject.

They hate your race, gender, or sexual preference.

They cannot accept your political leanings.

Because of this, no matter how useful the quality of your material, they will never be in your audience.

They will never buy from you.

They will never come to your event.

They will never follow you on TikTok.

Fuck ‘em.

These are not your ideal people.

They are not your audience.

You should spend zero of your time trying to convince them to do something – liking you – that they clearly don’t want to do.

If anything, you should LEVERAGE the fact that there are certain people who don’t like you, and use it to further draw in the people who DO like you.

You may know this as “attraction marketing.“

The flipside of it is what we call “rejection marketing.“

You want to, actively and forcefully reject the people who are wrong for you, your message, and your world. And you want the people who are IN to know that there are also people who are OUT.

The value of a room is that not everyone can come in.?

The value of a table is that not everyone gets a seat.

It’s the foundation of the Us vs. Them dynamic. People need to be part of something that not everyone can be part of.

Who’s IN with you? Who’s OUT?

You should know. And you should make it known. Often.?

Attraction and Rejection marketing are but two pieces of what I help entrepreneurs with as a coach with my Marketing Master System.?

With this, you will learn how to identify, attract, and keep your ideal people in your world, which means you are only serving people who you want to be serving, giving them exactly what they need, and they are happy to work with and get value from you on an ongoing basis.

Get started here: https://www.WorkOnYourGameUniversity.com/apply ?