Be Useful
Level 6: Grand Master Player
A quick note at the beginning here …
I’m publishing this week’s article a day early because this weekend is Gray Wolf Summit (Nov 22-24) - our biggest event of the year. Many of us will be in attendance and I felt it prudent to get this out there before it all begins.
If you’re there, find me and say hi :)
Otherwise, maybe I’ll see you at the next one …
Always check out https://guardiandates.com/ for upcoming event information.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming ..
Dear Future Guardian,
I'd like to rewind the clock.
Let's head alllll the way back,
To 2021.
Err...
Maybe we don't want to exactly revisit that time.
But I do want to go back to the early days of this project ...
In the days of yore, when The Guardian Academy was young, and we had a program focused around giving to earn which involved creating a Capstone project for TGA (this was part of becoming a Guardian - a path no longer available).
When it came time for me to write my Capstone, I thought deeply about what had impacted me most in my time with The Guardian Academy.
Then,
I came up with two answers.
Two deep fundamental ideas which had foundationally impacted me so greatly as to change the course of my life.
I wrote about one of them.
The other,
I decided needed more time. I knew it was powerful. I knew it was important.
But I also knew it needed more time.
That idea has sat as a few notes, in my web of ideas, for the past 2 years.
Now it's time,
For what might perhaps be a second capstone ... but whatever you call it, I just hope that you find it useful.
From the very beginning there has been one underlying perspective which has completely altered how I create, how I work, how I interact with people, and how I treat my relationships. It has directly contributed to the very reason I'm here before you right now ... as the CMO and primary author of The Guardian Academy and Man Bites Dog.
This concept has murmured in the background of everything we do in TGA, but in the early days of our wild-west style times with cryptocurrency, was oft spoken of.
This Idea which I've integrated into my everyday life and my approach to all of my work ...
"Being valid vs Being useful"
OR
As I'll just think about it now:
"Be Useful."
It sounds simple ... and it kind of is, which may be why it's so powerful.
Let me start with the relevant context:
Everyone is mostly interested in themselves
This may sound negative. But understand this is not a judgment or a critique but rather a practical analysis of our humanity.
Other people don't care about you.
They care about what you mean to them, how you make them feel, what you can do for them.
Of course this means, we don't care about other people. Not by default anyway. We care about what they mean to us, how they make us feel, what they can do for us.
This dynamic is built into the foundation of every single human interaction you will have in life.
Let's go deeper.
Everything about our humanity means we are internally centralized and our relationships with other people are based in ourselves, not in them.
Again, this might come off as selfish and you might object and fight against this, but if you really want to care about and for other people, start by understanding where that's all coming from in yourself.
If you look at this objectively it makes sense. Our reality is based on how we internally experience that external reality. Our experience of other people is therefore based in how they relate and interact relative to our own internal basis in reality.
We can go deeper with this and look at energy. Without writing an entire dissertation, I'll ask you to accept that you are ultimately a collection of energetic vibrations. You are energy. Come together in the form of a being existing in relation to everything else in our reality.
If you think about the nature of time and space ... consider that the light and warmth we experience from the sun no longer exists in the sun. It originated in the sun over 8 minutes ago, but now the sun is different than the sun we are experiencing, yet what matters to us is the sun we are presently experiencing ...
You can take this perspective into human relationships too, because everything you see about someone, everything they say and do, exists in your experience some very tiny fractions of fractions of seconds after it originates in the other person. The energy they put out is no longer in them when it reaches you. We can't consciously perceive this because our entire biology has evolved to exist within this paradigm, and so we experience interaction and relationship with other people as immediate and now, but if you stand back to the structure of reality around us, you can see that your experience of someone else is based in your own internal reality - it has to be.
If you, reading this, have a lot more experience, knowledge, and understanding of physics and biology feel free to comment below and disabuse me of these ideas. I'm just running off what makes sense to me.
Back to practicality.
The above is important to me in all this because it grounds the perspective that we are all experiencing reality from within ourselves. Everything is by default about us, how we experiencing, what it means to us, etc.
Aka - we are by default interested in ourselves because our existence is defined through that paradigm.
Not only does it make it easier to accept the seemingly selfish nature of where our interest in others comes from, but it also illuminates the undeniable power in being able to evolve beyond this paradigm by putting yourself in the present energy space of other people.
(Which is what we are going to do by being useful)
K?
K.
I find it easy as a marketer to accept this perspective, because when you are marketing your business, its very easy to see that no one gives a shit about who you are or what you are doing, they care about how you can solve their problems or fulfill their desires. This is just how we are built by default.
This dynamic naturally changes when we do build a relationship and caring for other people, and when we have and use empathy in our lives. But ultimately, the less you relate to someone else the less you naturally project your own experience with them (empathy).
Regular communication and relationships are the same. That's just how we approach reality and those around us. It takes intentionally stepping beyond the default paradigm to change your relationship with it - empathy, sympathy, understanding other people's perspectives and then joining the relationship from their experience (inasmuch as you are able to do so ... physics not withstanding).
Going back to the marketing and the business (well, and really any relationship), understanding this dynamic ... rather than try to convince people to like me and work with me - bringing them to me - I endeavor to bring myself to them.
And one of those ways, is by Being Useful.
Let me illustrate just how impactful embracing "Being Useful" has been to my life:
Let's back up to 2022.
The Wolf Den and The Guardian Academy were merely sprouts coming from the soil of crypto and an exploration/experiment which exploded into reality.
During the height of that initial growth of The Guardian Academy, when we were all focused on the crypto itself, the prices, the massive wealth being generated, the amazing benefit we were all going to have ... I slowed down and took that long term view - this was a 10 year+ path at least.
And I started to think, how could I benefit this, how could I be more a part of this? I couldn't afford to go to the events, I couldn't afford to join Guardian (not outright - I ended up farming my way there over the course of a year, a path no longer available).
But I saw what was happening,
I knew that it was much bigger than the money. There was an underlying thread of personal improvement, learning, and growth which was pushing the thing. And as The Guardian Academy started to emerge from the chaos,
I really wanted to be a part of it.
During that period I was spending all of my time as an email copywriter, taking on clients, figuring out my way, having some outstanding successes, and some catastrophic failures, discovering what I really wanted to do with the work and more importantly who I really wanted to work with.
And I dreamed.
As I watched the TGA team start putting together assets and information, and start testing marketing, I thought "wow it would be so amazing if I could handle their email."
I dreamed. Dreamed of the day I could spend my days writing, benefitting the people and ecosystem of TGA through my work, helping to build the project and being a part of something that was more emphatically living than anything I'd done in a long time.
But, I also couldn't really see it how what I wanted would be useful then.
If you were around back then, you might recall, but the project grew in such a way that typical marketing approaches were not necessarily appropriate. It didn't make sense to just slap an email list on top of TGA.
(The reasons for this are complex, but principally are rooted in Diffusion of Innovation)
I didn't see a way in or a way to make it happen. I took the practical choice of letting that dream go. I needed to focus on the here and now, not get caught up in what I wish could be.
I instead asked myself how I could be useful given the situation at hand.
That's when I wrote The Real Cost of Dopamine1.
At the time all that was written for TGA was coming from Nic, so there was little in the way of other perspectives. I didn't know what was going to come of writing that article, but I knew a few things:
It was going to be good work for me to do.
I felt like members of TGA would find it useful.
Even if that was the only thing I ever wrote, I was pretty sure I would benefit just by giving to the TGA community in the way I could best contribute. (Give to earn)
I got excellent feedback for the writing. It seemed like there was a place for it. That flared up my dream again, but again I didn't see a way to make it work, so I let that go and went back to my task of building a stronger freelancing base - this time focusing on raising the floor, getting more consistent and secure.
A few months later, I had finally staked for Golden Guard, starting the final path toward becoming a Guardian. This meant it was time for my Capstone.
Again, I turned to writing.
Again, I asked myself ... how can I be useful?
I did my best to give as much as I could to TGA in that Capstone2. My best perspective and insight from my experience applying TGA principles to my life in a way that would hopefully be useful to others.
And again, it was well received. Again ... I dreamed. I dreamed of being a rockstar writer, being the one that everyone tuned into, of being the one that TGA turned to in order to grow and make it all happen.
(My most indulgent dreams are often like a Marvel movie unsurprisingly, Captain America over here)
And yet again ...
I didn't see a way to make it happen. The time wasn't right. The opportunity wasn't there.
I actually felt like it would NOT be useful for them to have a ton of focus on email marketing at the time (from me or anyone really).
At the same time, I kept consciously applying the framework of Being Useful in other areas - not just my current clients but people I wished to work with as well.
An opportunity appeared and I wrote Lukas Resheske's new subscriber intro series (he was having a "cobbler's son has no shoes" challenge).
He found that quite useful.
A few months later in that year (2023), having shown my usefulness to Lukas, he asked me to join him in a test project relaunching New Email Masters and running a live cohort for his students.
That went very well. Lukas found my support and work very useful. Towards the end of the year he invited me launch "AI Email Masters" in partnership with him, giving me a springboard for productizing work I had already been doing.
And in the interim I had continued to provide useful insight and writing about his work and his ideas (both for him and TGA).
Lukas recently told me that one of the things he appreciates about working with me is he doesn't have to worry about his business or his ideas in my hands - he knows I have a deep understanding, ability to communicate that understanding, along with the knowledge and experience to handle his situation and business the way he wants it handled without him needing to babysit.
Very Useful. Uniquely valuable.
In the midst of all this,
Nic had been quietly observing and reached out (August 2023).
He said simply that he enjoyed my writing and they needed writing for the new TGA Substack. Would I be interested in doing something for that?
I took the opportunity.
I believed that no matter what happened, it would benefit everyone for me to walk that path.
Now it is 15 months later.
I am CMO of The Guardian Academy. The very position I dreamed of having. The very position where, 3 years ago, I'd distract myself from mundane work to daydream like I was Captain America coming in to save the day (or ... maybe more like Rocket, much more scraggly and messily coming in to kind of save the day but really just blowing shit up).
It's difficult to look at this and NOT say "well, duh, hindsight makes the path clear."
But I think the most clear thing about this path I followed (to me anyway) is that it was anything but clear.
I don’t think I could replicate it.
The only unifying truth is that at every step of the way I asked myself ...
"How can I be useful?"
Being Useful is why I'm before you right now
The entire reason I'm here doing what I do now working with the people I work with, seemingly getting all the greatest opportunities and doing exactly what I want to be doing ...
Is because I focused on making myself useful.
When you can prove yourself to be useful in the context of your unique gifts, how you show up in the world, other people start to find you invaluable and irreplaceable.
I don't try to convince people of anything (that's actually one of my Bumpers).
I just ask myself "how can I be useful?"
Sometimes the answer is "I can't."
In the face of this dynamic, when not considering one's usefulness, I think most people lean into the gap and try to convince themselves or other people of what they want, or, how they are valid.
This shows up in regular conversation frequently.
I find more often than not when it comes to contributing to a conversation, if I ask myself "can I be useful," the answer is either no, or not clear. I think that may be true for most people in most situations.
If you stand back and observe how people interact in conversations it's often a ping-pong match of "here's something valid." People bouncing observations and details off each other without the process of really listening and trying to understand what's happening for the other person.
Which is what you are forced into doing if you ask yourself "is this useful?" (Is it useful to them)
This all really requires a level of Empathy and thinking deeply about where other people are on their journey and what it is they may be looking for right now and how you might support them in their path right now.
Beyond just "showing" them how you think you might be useful, but by actually BEING useful.
That can mean giving up what you want - because what you want has no relevance to them. They don't care. And if they do actually care, then approaching the relationship from a “be useful” perspective will cause a resonant feedback loop of positivity - and that's how really cool shit happens. It's just rare because most people don't ask themselves how they can be useful to others in any given relationship interaction.
Let's do some practical ideation here ...
Give you something,
Useful ...
Before I do though,
I want to reiterate one EXTREMELY IMPORTANT DYNAMIC OF BEING USEFUL:::
Its important that it's useful for the other person
Whether you're writing an article, pitching a client, talking to someone in conversation, going on a date, selling a bag of coffee, selling a house, trying to make the deal of a lifetime etc ...
You must anchor your perspective in their understanding of what's useful to them.
Remember that entire bit towards the beginning of this article where I talked about how people are only interested in themselves?
Or, to put it more gently, people's reality is anchored in self interest. That is the human mindset3.
Understanding this,
Not only is it ... useful ... to make yourself and your work useful to others (because that's the natural state of people, where they are coming from, and what they are looking for)
You MUST anchor the idea of what useful is in the other person's perspective, needs, interests, and desires.
If all else fails you CAN start with "I think this is useful," but understand that if your goal is to connect with, build relationships with, and impact other people, what you think is useful ultimately only matters to you (it just happens to be a decent place to start because similar people may find the same things useful to them), and what really matters is what they actually find useful themselves.
(So if you start with I think this is useful, do so with full present awareness and intent to adjust based on data and feedback so you can change to what they find useful)
This is not easy.
Especially if you are steeped in very strong beliefs about what you do and the way things ought to be, it can be difficult to look at other people and understand that they don't care. The only way to positively impact them is to be useful to them, from the point of view of THEIR needs, interests, and beliefs.
It's about them, not you.
Understanding THAT...
Here's
How to make this all useful for yourself
Being useful as a way to make yourself and your work valuable.
I have a few ways of looking at this.
Let's zoom in on the practical action.
I'll use writing an article as an example. Every time I write an article (for TGA, MBD, myself, etc), I ask myself the question "how is this useful?" I want anyone reading the article to not only find reading the article itself a useful practice (which is often making sure, or at least hoping, that they encounter a useful perspective shift), but also to get something they can then usefully also apply to their life (some understanding you can reflect on and then engage the field with - something actionable).
I don't start my articles that way, overtly. The ideas that come to mind usually are anchored in usefulness, but that's only because I've been thinking this way actively, intently, for a couple years now. Typically ideas come to me in a flash and a sense that whatever it ends up being could be useful and valuable to others ...
Yet I start them off anchored in my own reality. Because, after all, I am also human (as far as you know).
How do I perceive this?
What's important to me?
What am I trying to explain?
And then finally ... how is this useful to anyone else?
I apply this in every bit of work I do. As a marketer there are obvious places where this matters. An ad (or an email, or a letter) must be found useful by the person viewing it (even if that "usefulness" is having a good laugh) in order for the person to give their attention and time to it.
But I've also found it to be a valuable component of my cold outreach strategies as a freelancer. When I started off as a freelance copywriter, I used cold outreach to get clients and it didn't take me long to max out my time. I've gone through the process 3 times, and each time I applied this "be useful" lens and always have quickly found valuable and useful conversations to myself (that were also useful to those people).
I care more about being useful in the process than I do in getting the gig, because I know that if I am found useful to the right person, them wanting to hire me becomes almost inevitable.
So, I make my work useful.
We can look at this from many different angles.
Since we're talking work, if your end goal is to make a certain amount of money, then it behooves you to consider all the possible people along the path that might lead you there and figure out how to be useful to them ... because as you walk on that path your usefulness will make them far more likely to reach out and ultimately make your path easier.
Really want to work with a specific person?
Just be useful to them (and ideally in a way that demonstrates if they pay you money that usefulness will compound).
Be useful in your communication and relationships
Let's back out from work.
All the way back to useful vs correct.
Ever know anyone who seems to habitually, or reactively, butt into a conversation with "well, actually ..."
Or "well, technically ..."
Or even just jumping into something you're saying to correct a statement or factual point which they think or hear as wrong.
Ever do that yourself?
Ever respond in a conversation with a point you think is important to make because it's correct?
Ever think that your correct point is itself useful?
"But, correctness is important, how can we have a conversation if we aren't correct? It's useful for me to point out the wrong information and provide the right information!"
If you're in that frame of mind, what I have to say to you is that a conversation is not about the technical correctness of the information, it's about the outcome the communication is there to achieve.
Most of the time, being completely technically correct is not necessary in order to achieve the outcome of the communication. Sometimes, having the wrong information alters the outcome, but you know who doesn't care about that if you are just pointing out technically correct details?
The other person.
Because they don't see it as useful.
You must pull back and anchor yourself in the perception of usefulness to the other person. Would it be more useful for them to be corrected, or for them to have someone present and listening to them? Context is important, and any given conversation between two people is completely unique, so there's no way for me to blanket statement this - but stand back. Put yourself in their shoes of usefulness, really listen to what they are saying.
As a sort of side note ...
If you are struggling with a need to technically correct people in conversation, try to replace that behavior with a little "Tactical Empathy" from Chris Voss4 - instead of correcting them, mirror back to them what they are saying.
"The other day, I was walking down the street and the 6 legged elephant nearly ran right into a car!"
Instead of responding with "Elephants don't have 6 legs" try "The elephant had 6 legs."
Sound Ridiculous? Obvious? Weird? Useless? Try it out.
Take the above example, if you respond with "Elephants don't have 6 legs" the other person is probably going to respond back "I know elephants don't have 6 legs dumbass, thats not the point."
If you respond with "the elephant had 6 legs" you might get "yea crazy right? Turns out what I was actually seeing was 3 dudes in an elephant suit. Wild morning."
(Because in this scenario the other person was trying to share an experience and a story, and you got caught up in technically correct details - what was useful to them was someone just listening to what they had to say)
And correct is NOT useful.
If your goal in a conversation is connection and understanding. You do not need to be "correct" in order to communicate your ideas well. You just need to meet the other person where they need you to be - you need to be useful to them in the moment.
There are too many layers to this to expand on all the possible details. But I will say that to consider usefulness in a relationship and a conversation like this you've really got to think deeply about what the other person is trying to get out of the relationship and conversation as well.
I'll give a loose example of a situation I see far to often online, where someone asks for advice of what to do given a certain situation, and I see response after response after response of people telling this person what they should do - everyone having a different answer, everyone inserting their own correct opinion ... no one asking why.
You might argue back that the person is looking to be told what to do, but I'd counter argue that most of the time in my experience and observation people aren't so much looking to be told what to do as they are looking to have their assumptions, beliefs, and ideas confirmed as correct .... but this whole dynamic is much more difficult in an online space where you don't have the in person interaction to guide how you behave and show up and really understand what's most useful to them.
But in any case,
The answer is the same.
Respond, don't react, and before you respond, ask yourself, is what I'm about to say useful? Or, how can I most usefully contribute to this conversation? Is it even useful for me to contribute given the context and everything else that's going on?
And when all else fails, just listen.
Everyone out there is really just hoping to be heard by other people.
It's ALWAYS useful to someone for you to demonstrate that they are heard.
Being useful as a frame for figuring out what to do
Here's a short one.
Pull out all the way. Away from the conversations, away from the projects and the work, all the way up to your philosophies and principles ...
If you are struggling with what to do with your life and related questions,
Maybe start by asking yourself, "how can I be most useful?"
And maybe also ask yourself "to whom can I be most useful?"
Follow those threads, because I reckon you'll chase down lines related to your gifts, those areas where you can tap into your known potential and give yourself the opportunities to reveal your unknown potential by being useful to the right people.
My personal example:
How can I be useful?
Well, I can write. A lot. I can go deep on subjects. I can bring principled and strategic perspectives related to marketing and copywriting to the table to solve problems.
To whom can I be most useful?
(This one is obvious) The TGA team and community. People who are looking to deeply communicate their philosophies and principles to others in a way which creates gravity and understanding, who may also be looking to build out long term marketing systems through email. (There's much more detail, and very specific people I could list, but that's not the point here)
Going back in my story to the early days of The Guardian Academy, this is what I did. I asked how I could be useful and to whom. Writing was the answer. The TGA community was the answer.
That was the start of a path.
What happens when you "Be Useful"
I can't easily prove it with data.
I can't point you to charts and graphs. I can't point you to percentages and measured results.
But I firmly believe based in my own experience that "being useful" has been, by far and away, the most profitable single perspective and behavior that I have adopted in life (and possibly has contributed the most foundationally to my consistent contentment and happiness indirectly due to positive impacts on my relationships).
When it's obvious to people that you are useful in attaining the outcomes they desire in life, then it becomes so much easier to find and put together opportunities where you can financially benefit with those people.
When you're frame coming into any relationship is usefulness, then how you show up for others just aligns naturally with their self interest and removes any natural barrier they may put up which might prevent them from reaching back out to you in a similar way.
(That last part is a whole thing in itself I haven't even touched on ... how the "correctness" frame creates a dynamic of opposition which prevents positive connection and relationship)
If you really want to figure out the value to others aspect on a deep level ...
Consider "the pie" analogy.
Most highly successful people out there are walking around with a pretty full pie. They've figured a lot of things out. They've gone likely further than they had ever imagined.
But it's most likely not complete.
You might argue many reasons why, but I'd say the most relevant one is that nobody wins alone5.
No one is completely capable of completing the entire pie on their own.
And so every successful person out there doing really cool stuff also needs other people to help them do it.
If you can, knowing yourself really well, understand how your full potential can complete the pie, you can become an invaluably useful person to those people. Someone they can't ignore. Someone they can't walk away from. Someone they can't continue on without at least seriously considering how you might work together.
(And if you don't know your full potential, start with your known potential, because the people for whom your known potential is useful may just be the people to reveal your unknown potential)
If you do this, you will represent something uniquely useful compared to anyone else out there.
Personally,
I think the best way to approach this is from within.
Know yourself. Focus on your known/unknown/full potential. And always ask yourself ...
"How can I be useful?"
Those situations and those people will emerge if you just start being useful to others. If you start making your work and your path useful. Let go of the need to be correct and become the person others want and need because your usefulness is abundant and clear.
THAT I think is probably the most reliable and powerful way to an abundant life, where you can forever walk the path forward with full meaning and intent.
Be Useful.
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
Joseph Robertson, CMO The Guardian Academy
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Present + Useful = Helpful
Valid + Right = Unhelpful (and Useless)