Being highly influential on social media is overrated.
Yet every young adult wants to be a Youtuber or a Tim-Ferriss-podcaster. It sounds great on the outside. It gets our egos h0rny. But it’s disappointing once you get it.
How do I know? I accidentally became a somebody. Not Tom Cruise, obviously. But a guy on the internet with several million followers.
Here’s what no one tells you: being a somebody sucks.
The hell of being placed on a pedestal
Strangers on the internet place me on a pedestal all the time.
They assume I’m some god-like creature that can do no wrong. Then when I stuff up, like I do all the time, they go into outrage mode.
“How could he? What’s wrong with Tim?”
They don’t understand the dilemma or the irony. I am not really any different from them. I f*ck up all the time. Some days I’m tired. Other days I’ve been chased around the house for hours on end by a psychopathic toddler.
The thing is, I was never perfect in the first place (neither are you). I tell people I will 100% disappoint them. It’s to be expected.
Yet strangers are surprised.
Nowadays all it takes is one wrong mouse click and you can blow up your whole life. A bad social media post. Clicking a link in an email. Accidentally exposing your digital wallet to hackers and losing $1.2M (happened to me).
The more you want to be a somebody, the more you’ll likely disappoint everyone around you. It’s like living in hell. You’re never good enough. People make assumptions about you who have no freaking idea who you really are.
It gets weirder.
Not only do strangers have no idea who you are, but they bizarrely hold onto past versions of yourself who no longer exist.
For example, I used to be a romantic writer. I worshipped the art of writing and my fellow writers.
Over time I grew tired of writers.
Their romanticism and delusion that their $15 book on Amazon would make millions of people cream their pants and shoot them into superstardom… exhausted me.
When I got below the surface, I realized most writers want to think they’re smarter than the average person. They secretly idolize the memorization of information because their schooling told them to.
Turns out I was right on time. AI killed these romantic notions of writing. The information age is over. We’re now drowning in information.
So I stopped worshipping writers.
I started focusing on being around writers who transcended writing to get what they want out of life (the true test of intelligence). I became intrigued by writers who treated writing like the business it is.
Yet much of the internet doesn’t allow me to change my mind. Changing your mind is seen as an act of war. It means you’re inauthentic.
Or worse… a dirty rotten liar.
Why does this happen? Because people hate changing their ideology. They don’t want to challenge their own beliefs or risk being left behind. If you’re not careful, your ideology and beliefs can secretly ruin your life and slowly rot your brain.
When you’re a nobody you can freely change your mind.
Here are the best reasons to become a nobody.
1. “Main character syndrome” can no longer rob you of your potential
I’ve loved the idea of being a nobody ever since Zat Rana wrote about it using the same headline of this essay years ago.
Since then Zat’s idea has morphed into what’s known as “main character syndrome.” It’s where people overestimate their own importance.
They think the world is watching their every move. They start Youtube channels as if they’re Jim Carrey in the movie “The Truman Show.” When you fall for the lie you’re a somebody, it forces you to be less than your potential.
You’re worried what people think.
You’re terrified to make mistakes.
You take criticism as an attack.
You can’t stand rejection.
You may even have dark fantasies of one public mistake making you unemployable or leading to bankruptcy. The mind is great at elevating your importance to help your survival brain save you from an upcoming bear attack.
But this reality is likely holding you back.
2. Nobody controls you anymore
Most people don’t realize it, but they’re a puppet with strings attached who’s being controlled by some institution or ideology. It’s tragic.
When you become a nobody, well, nobody can control you. You don’t seek out people’s approval or suck off gatekeepers to get ahead in life. Nope. You just do enough to succeed without overcompensating.
A university’s accreditation of you or a corporation’s handing out of an executive title no longer feels relevant anymore. As long as you accept who you are, that’s all that matters. Everyone else can go jump in the lake.
3. You stop trying to create some big mission which is nothing but a w*nkfest
I came across a guy recently.
Sounded fine on the first interaction. Then he started dropping “we’re going to affect billions of lives with our business.”
I said, “How do you know?”
“Because this is groundbreaking. It has to. Trust me.”
The more I spoke with him about his mission the more it turned me off. Thinking your idea will impact billions of people is ridiculous.
Help 50 people first then re-evaluate. Even if you saved 20 people from cancer that’s more impactful than 99% of not-for-profits.
Overshooting for top 0.1% results in any field is often just ego in disguise.
I have a family member like this. Turns out they were neglected as a child. Their parents left them home alone from a young age. They were ignored. Their older sibling got all the praise while they got a bag of coal for Christmas.
So they fell into this over-the-top mission existence.
They only felt satisfied if their mission helped millions. Anything less felt like failure. When I got to the heart of their way of thinking, I realized they just desperately craved significance.
The mission’s impact had to be so gigantic or else they risked not being enough of a genius to be worthy of their parents’ love. Kind of sad, really.
The antidote is to be a nobody.
When you embrace it like a psycho, you stop falling for the lie that you need to help millions of people, which is statistically unlikely. Instead, you do something more impactful by helping a smaller number of people with a deeper problem.
Small missions are achievable, deeply fulfilling, and add purpose to your life.
Big missions are fantasies that’ll likely never happen.
4. You appear more humble
This essay probably should be titled after Ryan Holiday’s book: Ego is the Enemy.
When you embrace being a nobody you avoid letting your ego run your life. It leads to more humility.
Here’s the crazy thing:
Humble people have a secret aura about them that humans can’t resist.
When you lead with humility more opportunities find their way to you. When people say “be #authentic” what they’re trying to articulate is “just be more humble, dude.”
I get this compliment all the time. I realized I’m not more humble or magically authentic like a rainbow unicorn.
No.
I just think I’m a nobody. I’ve always believed that and still do. That makes me more humble, so more people want to work with me or interact in some way.
This leads to outsized returns and, ultimately, enormous wealth. Until recently, I never knew that hidden superpower. Be a nobody & tap into it yourself.
5. Being a nobody removes this limitation on your life
What is it?
Entitlement.
Most people are entitled and don’t even realize it. Why? They accidentally think they’re a somebody. This leads them to think the world owes them something. So they walk around with a chip on their shoulders just waiting to blow up.
That’s why the current mainstream culture is one of pure outrage. When you see yourself as a nobody there’s no reason to get your panties in a knot when things don’t go your way.
You see every opportunity as a path for self-improvement, where you’re personally responsible for whether you get it or not. It’s a beautiful way to live.
6. Being a nobody helps you embrace doing hard things
Once the ego is gone, you see doing hard things as normal. Even exciting.
Being a somebody means you quietly chase the easy way of life because you think you’re entitled to it and/or are delusional enough to think that shortcuts exist.
Being a nobody is the total rejection of this philosophy.
You realize no one is special and your heroes will disappoint you. You realize every successful person in history just did incredibly hard things and did an enormous amount of work most of humanity will never see.
What’s more interesting is that doing hard things defines you.
The struggles shape your mindset.
They make you high agency.
They turn every goal, including running a business, into a camouflaged form of self-improvement.
It gets even cooler. Living this way turns life into a game of You versus You. There’s zero competition. You don’t give a fudge if the niche is saturated. The spectators who throw peanuts from the peanut gallery mean nothing.
Ironically, all of this makes doing hard things easy.
7. Buying luxury stuff to impress others no longer makes sense
High class society scares the cr*p out of me.
The other day my neighbor said “we’re sending our kids to private school.” She made it sound like doing the opposite is the equivalent of silently murdering your kids. Well, my two daughters ain’t going to private school. Why?
Because I saw what luxury, privilege, high society life & private school does to teenagers.
I went to private school and dropped out by choice in primary school. Many of my friends stayed in private school.
They became little monsters.
I’d go to their parties. They’d sniff cocaine off the hoods of their parents' Mercedes Benzes. One of my privileged friends even got so high, he drowned in a river. Sad.
Now, as adults, many of my private school friends are outcasts. They can’t hang around normal people. They must eat only in fine dining restaurants paid for by their trust funds.
Honestly, my private school friends are lazy.
They’ve never had to work hard for anything. They have no f*cking idea what it’s like to go bankrupt or have their car repossessed. Or get made redundant and not have daddy’s connections find them a new 6-figure job. Their upbringings deluded them into thinking their parents’ wealth made them a somebody.
They accidentally see being a nobody as a form of loser religion.
This leads them to buy luxury garbage like cars, mansions, and high-end fashion to show people they’re NOT a nobody. No, they’re a somebody.
Thank god I avoided this way of life. I recommend you do, too. When you don’t need to impress anyone and are happy wearing $5 unbranded t-shirts, life is easier.
To prove this point, yesterday I got a message from the risk guy who used to approve my clients’ credit applications when I was a banker.
“I think I saw you walking down the main street in a pajama top at 2 PM and talking to yourself.”
He was right. It was me. That’s what being a nobody looks like. It’s liberating.
Final Thought
The unlikely ending to this essay may surprise you.
The conclusion isn’t to avoid building influence or exiting from social media. The answer is to find a balance.
Get enough influence so you can do what you want online and earn a healthy living. But not so much influence that you end up with millions of followers and holding green smoothies in Instagram posts as a hidden form of infomercial.
A small tribe of fellow humans who all care about the same stuff you do is probably all you need to live a chill life and reach your version of wealth. When you do that, you avoid becoming a somebody and can stay a nobody.
The purpose of life isn’t to be a somebody. It’s to stay a nobody — free from ego, free to change, free to live. That’s the only way to unlock your full potential.
If nobody was watching, what would you still choose to do with your life? I’m curious. Share it below, I’ll be reading.
