Creative Productivity & TikTok Tips with Jon Jon Wesolowski

Speaker 1: 0:00

Contact switching is the number one killer of like productivity, and the inertia it takes to restart focus after you've been distracted is way greater than most of us think.

Speaker 2: 0:14

Welcome to Tried and True with the Dash of Woo, where we're all about mixing tried and true strategies that actually work with the magic of manifestation and the science of programming your unconscious mind so that you walk away feeling integrated, inspired and aligned. I'm Renee Bowen, certified life and business coach, professional photographer, middle-aged wife and mom to now three grown kids. I've built two multiple six figure businesses with zero business training by digging in and learning the methods, and now I'm here to pass them all on to you, from photography and business strategies to energy healing, human design and the basics of manifestation we cover it all here. I'm here to help you embrace your multi-passionate brains and lean in to the fastest and most efficient ways to reach your goals, whatever they may be. Whether you're a season pro or just starting out, or maybe you're just here for the woo-woo, let's dive in and explore all the exciting ways to take your life, business and self-improvement to the next level. Thanks for joining me and get ready to be inspired. Hey, friends, welcome back to Try it In True with the Dash of Woo. This is Renee Bowen, your host. Thanks for joining me again today.

Speaker 2: 1:35

I have a really amazing guest for you. I found John John Weselowski on TikTok a while ago and when I tell you he drops like the most amazing and useful tips for creatives and anyone with a creative brain or an ADHD brain. He helps people so much with his content so I knew I had to get him on the show, okay? So here's his little spiel and then I'm going to go right into the interview, because he drops some serious, amazing tips for you guys today on the show as well. So John John is a content producer at superhumancom. He specializes in TikTok and Instagram, and in 2023, he grew the company's TikTok channel from 53 to 48,000 followers. So, despite having ADHD himself, his focus is on helping individuals boost productivity for personal growth rather than just corporate success. He lives in Chattanooga, tennessee, with his wife, megan and their two kids, finn and Ellie, and spent eight months traveling Europe last year. He's a super interesting guy.

Speaker 2: 2:45

I love this conversation. I know you're going to get a lot out of it, so we're going to dive right in. Hey, john. John, thanks again for coming to talk to us about all these things. I'm super excited to just dive right in. You kind of use this term, a little bit called soft productivity, right, and I think that it might be a new term for some of the things that we're doing. I think it might be a new term for some of my listeners. I have a lot of creatives, a lot of ADHD, you know, or is like we're just all the creative brains. Can you kind of like walk me through or how you explain like soft productivity and why it's like so important for us creatives to understand and incorporate into our lives and our businesses.

Speaker 1: 3:27

Yeah, so I've seen terms similar to the soft productivity, gentle productivity and the idea is not productivity for the sake of like hustle culture, but like creating a period more important or finding your significance or your identity in your job. Soft productivity is all about creating like mental margins or like extra space in your life to do more of the things you love. So the idea is wow, if I can feel accomplished and satisfied with my eight hour workday, I can leave it behind and be more present at home. That's the goal of soft productivity. If I can get more done in an eight hour workday, then I can start a side hustle, or then maybe I can spend two extra hours working on career advancement or something like that. So I think the shift with gentle productivity is like maybe if I'm more productive when I'm at work, I can fit in a nap, things like that.

Speaker 2: 4:25

Yeah, no, I love that and it fits right in line Like I'm so on that bandwagon right now.

Speaker 2: 4:30

Like you know, I mean I definitely fell into like the hustle culture. I know a lot of my audience does and a lot of my coaching clients do and it was kind of the thing for a while right and now we're like really seeing this shift of like hang on. That is really really bad for our mental health and like we really should probably prioritize, especially as creatives, if we have like these overactive, overthinking brains. Like you got to get it to slow down and stop a little bit. So I love, I love how you run your, especially on your TikTok. For those of you guys who don't know, like I'm going to link his TikTok below in the show notes. You've got to follow him. He gives the best tips for productivity for people with creative brains so that we can be more productive without feeling like we're like kind of always on that hamster wheel which a lot of us do, and what I love about it is that you always give like time stamp as well.

Speaker 2: 5:21

You're like, okay, this is a. You know, this is how long the video is, and I'm going to drop this tip at like one minute 30 seconds, like it is so spot on, you can tell that you have that kind of brain, and is that how you sort of like decided like, hey, this is how I'm going to start, you know, educating people. Like because you had that experience with all of this, is that how you kind of fell into it?

Speaker 1: 5:43

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:44

So a big part of like getting this, getting started with this TikTok account, of helping people, was realizing that, like the tickets, the TikTok algorithm was very magical at helping you find a very specific group of people, and so I was like, if my videos are helpful, even to the point of I'm telling people to skip half my video if they want to jump to the helpful part, then those are the type of people that are going to be my community and stick around.

Speaker 1: 6:10

So an example of this was the 2X feature was sort of announced or wasn't announced, sort of dropped anonymously or like secretly, if you, if you put your thumb down on a certain part of the video, it'll play at 2X the speed. That's how I listened to audio books, that's how I listened to podcasts, and so I was like, oh, I love that I can do this. And then I realized anytime I post a video over two minutes long, I'm just going to remind people they can 2X it. It doesn't offend me. And the first time I did that, the video which I was so proud of all the comments were people thanking me for the 2X introduction. So sometimes, like your popularity can be just being helpful for people, meeting them where they are, and that's what I tried to do is like okay, maybe if they skip to the helpful part of how to empty out their Gmail inbox, they'll miss my waxing poetic about productivity, but that's okay, because at the end of the day, I want to see them helped.

Speaker 2: 7:06

I love it.

Speaker 2: 7:07

No, it makes so much sense to you because it really I find myself doing the same thing and so many people that I know do the same thing.

Speaker 2: 7:13

Like we just got to listen at a faster rate, like, and it's not because we're, it's just the way our brains work.

Speaker 2: 7:19

You know what I mean and it's okay and I'm really big on you know, learning how your brain works. Helping you know, helping people figure that out and helping them with these little hacks. They're going to help them and not feel like they're behind, because a lot of people with ADHD in my experience have found, you know, they always felt either not smart enough or behind, or like not, because they were trying to fit into like this, this stream of like neurotypical learning styles, and that just doesn't really work for us. So it's I love that you sort of like you know, meet people where they are and, with that said, growing a TikTok account from you know 53 to 48,000 followers in a year is like really impressive. So can you walk us through just a little bit of the key strategies and tactics that you kind of did to you know grow that for superhuman and you know, just kind of walk us through that, especially given your experience with ADHD.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Yeah. So if you're looking to grow a community on TikTok, there are three things which, almost like a good church sermon. I'll start with the same letter. There are three points that you're going to want to hit. Your TikToks need to, on a regular basis, evoke emotion, educate or entertain, and so the people that you follow are probably doing those three things on a regular basis.

Speaker 1: 8:42

Now, entertaining is hard to do, like it looks like I can just copy trends and it'll work, but the problem is the people that are funny and can be funny consistently on a theme. That's a lot of work. In my opinion. It's hard to replicate that AvocAmotion. Those are the people you see, you know, that are telling those sad stories or interesting things, but a lot of times I see that sort of devolve into like I don't know, showing off or something. They end up being the type of people that film themselves doing charitable work, and so I found the easiest for any business to be consistent on is the education bit. Like people leave that video learning something and TikTok builds so much of its algorithm around that to the point where I'm just like watching stuff that I never thought it would be interesting to be, but I'm like, wow, this guy is showing me how to repair a light pole, and like I never thought of all the logistics that go into it, like those sort of things like get me to stop in my tracks. So the first thing I tell people is focus on those three E's Are you evoking emotion, are you entertaining or are you educating? And then what I tell a lot of people that I like what I'm doing consultation, like I tell them like education is probably the best bit. So that's the first part of it. The second bit is I tell people reduce the friction to posting, that is to say, lower your standards, because if you have too high a standards you won't post enough to actually do something about it.

Speaker 1: 10:12

So when superhuman asked me to take over the business account, they one of the questions the like CMO asked was like okay, what is your budget? Like, let's say I gave you tens of thousands of dollars for the next six months. How would you allocate that money? And I said I don't need money, I need trust. The trust is some of my videos will have typos at home, sometimes it'll be grainy, the audio won't be ideal. I was like but you just need to trust, it's gonna work. And superhuman is sort of a premium brand, like people do case studies on how nice superhuman looks in every aspect of the brand. But I was saying, trust me, let me be a little bit messy. And that was because if the standard was too high to make videos, I wouldn't make enough videos. The third thing and this is where most people that I gave advice to this is where they stop. Are you familiar with Ira Glass from this American Life? Are you familiar with this concept of the gap?

Speaker 2: 11:08

Yes.

Speaker 1: 11:09

Okay.

Speaker 1: 11:10

But explain it a little bit for people, because I don't know if everybody else says so the idea is, when you decide to do something or you're passionate about something, it's usually because you have good taste in that area. So imagine you're a food critic who decides to become a chef. You know what good food tastes like, but there's gonna be an amount of time before you cook food good enough for your taste. So if you're a creative and you wanna start a podcast, you know what a good podcast tastes sounds like, but it's gonna be a while before you're making podcasts that are up to your taste. And the area in between that Ira Glass calls the gap, and you need to fill that gap with experience.

Speaker 1: 11:47

So when I tell people to wanna get started on TikTok, as I say, write down 40 video ideas not 40 scripts, not 40, write down 40 video ideas and then each day you're gonna record a video on one of those things, using them as prompts. So if you go to a photographer and you ask them you know a question about lighting? They don't have to write a script. They'll just start talking about lighting or ISO or something like that, and that's what these 40 ideas are supposed to be. Take 40 prompts and do a video a day for 30 days.

Speaker 1: 12:22

I say 40 prompts, because usually there'll be prompts that you just like don't wanna record or whatever. So a video a day for 30 days, one of those videos is going to take off and teach you so much about who your future audience is gonna be. So that third tip is probably the most daunting but the most important, that every branch I work with and consult with you gotta do this. And I even have clients I've worked with who have grown a big audience and they feel like they plateaued and I'm like, okay, let's redo the 40 prompts, let's come up with new, 30 new video ideas. That's how they sort of break out of a slump as well.

Speaker 2: 12:59

That's really good. Yeah, I kind of find myself a little bit there, you know. I mean I've grown it and I've been. It's just so interesting. Tiktok is so, because just when you feel like you've kind of gotten the groove to, they change things. Like the algorithm will shift a little bit and it's like oh, now we're prioritizing this and like now this new, one of their new supposedly prioritizations is horizontal videos.

Speaker 2: 13:27

Yeah, and that's brand new. And now I'm like cool, cause I got a lot of those. But let me you know what I mean Like, let me figure out how I can. And that's a really good tip, though, because I find that a lot of my photography coaching clients and just people in my audience in general, you know, especially with ADHD, we kind of have this tendency to be like if I can't do it, perfect, I'm not gonna do it at all, and like that's what you were talking about before, about lower that, get rid of those roadblocks a little bit, right, like, so you know, lower those expectations a little bit. So that's really good too.

Speaker 2: 13:58

But also, you know, just kind of just get out there and make some content, like you said, daily to see you need the feedback, you need the like, the data to let you know, like what is actually working, what's not, and when something is working, how can I fine tune that? Can I do it again or maybe replicate it in a different way and kind of test. It's like a constant testing. Do you find that as?

Speaker 1: 14:23

well. Well, so there's a great anecdote for this. I think it's in the book Atomic Habits or Essentialism, one of those I can't remember which, but we can look it up after the show. Yeah, essentially, they give this case study of this professor at the University of Florida and it's a photography class, so it fits in and he basically says this okay, at the end of the semester we're going to have a gallery open to the public with photography. We're going to also be displaying students pictures that you will vote on who are the best. They will also be allowed in that gallery.

Speaker 1: 14:57

Now, half of the students have to take and submit a photo a day for the entire semester and then the other half only have to submit one a week. But it needs to be of a higher standard, like focus on getting everything right. What they find is that the photographs that make it in the gallery most often come from the group that has to take a photo a day. By producing a lot of quantity, they end up creating quality, because every single day taking a photo, you start realizing these different settings and things like that. And so, yeah, it's not quantity versus quality, it's quantity to help get you to quality. Now that's obviously an over-simplistic thing, but just letting people know like your experience matters and what I tell people about TikTok is it's a win-win. If nobody watches your videos and you feel like your videos are super cringe, well hey, guess what? Nobody watched them. But if the videos grow up and gain you followers, well then the cringe was worth it. So you can't lose. You either gain experience or gain followers. Let's start posting. That's what I tell people like at the end of an actual consultation.

Speaker 1: 16:08

The other thing I like to point out to business owners that just isn't as obvious to other people is you want to be posting a lot of times, brand-adjacent content. That is to say, if you're a photographer and your bread and butter is brides and weddings, you should be posting content that brides want to see, not necessarily just posting about you and what you do. Okay, so if I were a bridal photography brand, I would not be saying like here's what I do day of or here's why my clients like me or check out these photos of me. Those should be in there, for sure, but 90% of my content should be like here's the best checklist I've ever seen a bride have to make their big day the easiest possible. Here's some traditional things that are kind of out the door and here's some new things that I'm really seeing like people choose to do on their wedding day. Like that would be the stuff. And then when a bride is thinking about a photographer like you come to mind and I'll give a quick example of this.

Speaker 1: 17:14

There is a TikToker named Joe Himaly. He's one of my friends on TikTok. He's a realtor but he never talked about real estate. He never talks about. He talks about historic homes and architecture in the Dallas area and he's grown an audience talking about all these things. But if you were to say, or not, dallas, dc, if you were to say, hey, I'm moving to Washington DC, do you know a realtor? I'd be like, yeah, Joe Himaly. And so he could have talked about market reports or housing updates, but I don't care about that and I would never follow him because I don't live there. But now that he's talked about something to grow a bigger audience, there's thousands of people who will think of Joe Himaly as a first realtor when they think about DC or the DC area.

Speaker 2: 17:57

I love that example. Yeah, no, it's such a great piece of advice. A lot of my audience and coaching students are high school senior photographers, and so we talk about that a lot too, about attracting Gen Zers right as someone in their 40s or even 50s.

Speaker 2: 18:16

A lot of people are like oh, how am I going to do that? Well, that's one of the ways you can do that is you create this brand adjacent content and show up on their feeds, because their algorithm is going to look a lot different than your algorithm, as someone of a different generation like that as well. So how can you weave yourself into their content, into their For you page, basically, yeah and that's something with Superhuman.

Speaker 1: 18:41

So Superhuman is a professional brand that does email management, and I told them, in the first 45 days, we're going to get 10,000 followers. However, we're going to do it by teaching people how to use our competitors better. So we're going to be talking about how to clear out your inbox and outlook, how to clear out your inbox and Gmail. Now you need Gmail or Outlook to use Superhuman, but I'm teaching them how to get by on Gmail and Outlook without Superhuman. And this is scary because it's like, ok, well then, why did they need this?

Speaker 1: 19:14

And my logic was this People who are interested in clearing out their inbox. They're the ideal customer for Superhuman, and rather than convincing them to come here, let's show them how bulky it is to do it in their current system. And when we gain their trust, that's when they're going to start signing up. And I had a video showing people how to clear out Gmail that has 2.7 million views, and I'd rather have 1% of that video convert than 100% of a video that gets 200 views. And that's sort of the philosophy is like be helpful even if it doesn't drive people to your product right away, because that trust is what you're going to lean into when it's time to convert.

Speaker 2: 19:57

You're building it. Yeah, it's really kind of leaning into you and building that trust over time and that's how I found you. That's how you popped up on my feed is the email tips. I definitely want to kind of dive into that for a second. First of all, talk to me a little bit about what superhuman is and what you guys do, because, you're right, a lot of your content is talking about Gmail and that's kind of what attracted me and I was like, well, wait a minute, what is superhuman? And so it made me go, huh, what is that?

Speaker 1: 20:26

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 20:28

Yeah, so tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 1: 20:30

So I was a philosophy major. I have ADHD and dyslexia. I do not belong in a tech company. But I found my job at a tech company back in 2018, and I had a lot of stress and anxiety around work because there were so many communications that were tech space, like Slack emails, things like that, mimos and I heard on Seth Godin's podcast this new email software that did one-on-one onboarding for every customer. That is to say, even if you wanted to buy the software, you weren't allowed to pay for it until you've been trained how to use it.

Speaker 1: 21:02

The claims that they made about stress reduction were productivity around email. It just seemed unfathomable to me and I thought about 30% of my stress is around communication. Maybe this will help. So I got on boarded with Superhuman. I got on the wait list. I jumped the wait list because I found a referral and when I tell you that my company would not pay for it out of pocket, so I paid for it and it was expensive at the time? When I tell you, the difference it made in my work was so strong that I immediately applied for a job there and they offered me one, but I had to move to San Francisco and I wasn't ready to do that. So I bugged them for two years, basically every six months, saying hire me remotely. And then in 2020, they did so every six months. I was like, hire me remotely. That's how much I believed in this product.

Speaker 1: 21:53

But what Superhuman is is the fastest email experience out there, built for VCs and tech companies, c-level executives but what they found is that email isn't just a burden of a leader at a big company. We all have a lot of stress around email, and so what I tell people is think of email as waves coming in and you're sitting way steep in water and it's pounding you and there's always another wave. A lot of email stuff tries to set up walls to protect you from the waves. Superhuman teaches you how to surf, how to feel good about the waves you catch, how to leave those waves behind and think there's gonna be waves tomorrow and I'll be here to ride them when they come, and that sort of mental bandwidth like what I call soft productivity. Being able to leave my work behind when I'm done with work was perfect. So Superhuman does this by trying to get you into flow states and to sort of gamify your email, and that's really what it's all about.

Speaker 2: 22:55

Yeah, and a lot of your tips are about that gamification, which is really kind of cool. So give us a little bit. I know that just kind of like it would be impossible to. You've got so many videos on these and you guys can definitely go you should go check those out. But, like, what are some of your top ones that you tell people with ADHD or creative brains, Like just in general, to help them with that flow state, to get them out of that fight or flight or freeze Cause? A lot of people just like I just don't even wanna look. I've got so many things going on.

Speaker 1: 23:27

So what I feel people is all email handling. Every time you go to handle email or a task in general, we think about. It's a question we're trying to answer that we create our processes off of what is this? When do I need to deal with it, why is this important? And a lot of our systems are built off of the why and what. But what I tell people is build a system off of when you need to deal with it. So with email, if you try to figure out what this is and create labels and categories and sub labels and sub categories, you're gonna spend a lot of time organizing tasks and so much mental energy will be spent there that you won't feel like replying to them. So I actually tell people stop using labels, stop using folders, which for some people that's liberating, but for some people it scares the heck out of them. And instead I say this if you are just trying to answer the question when when do I need to deal with this you now only have to think of emails in three categories.

Speaker 1: 24:29

Emails you're done with archive them. Don't look at stuff you're done with. The archive is saved, searchable, never deleted, so archive it. Emails you need to work on today. Keep those in front of you. You don't wanna miss them. And emails you need to work on some other day, snooze them for that day. And what people realize is that when their inbox is empty except for the things they need to work on today, all of a sudden it's so much easier to respond to those emails. So the number one tip, I think, is build a process based off of when you need to deal with that task, not what the task is or why it's important, that doesn't matter. Those three things will help you go a long way, and you don't need a fancy email system to do that. You can do it in Gmail, you can do it in Outlook. Superhuman just makes it a lot easier.

Speaker 2: 25:14

Okay, yeah, so how, like, what are some of the ways that Superhuman does make that easier? Because I feel like so many people get especially with Gmail right. So a lot of us I know, like for myself included, I use Gmail through Workspace, hooked up to my domain, through my client management system, that kind of thing, so a lot of us have that. But, like, is this, is Superhuman like a replacement for a CRM, or is it in addition to it? Like you know what I mean? How does it work with it?

Speaker 1: 25:43

basically, yeah, so Superhuman still work with your workplace Gmail, but it's not necessarily replacement for a CRM. It does have some great features, but what I like to think of it, first and foremost, superhuman visually cuts out a lot of the noise so that you're paying attention to what's most important. Contact switching is the number one killer of like productivity, and the inertia it takes to restart focus after you've been distracted is way greater than most of us think, and the idea of getting into work without distraction is what this Hungarian researcher named Mihai Chexen-Dihai called flow. And so this idea of flow is when you lose track of time, so when you're a kid and you're playing video games and you can't believe it's midnight. When you go on to TikTok and you're scrolling and you look up in an hour as past, like that's the idea of flow, and Superhuman bases everything on that. So here's a few ways that it works. One, contact switching is an evolutionary survival response, like when we walk past bushes. It kept our ancestors alive to worry about not what they were holding, but what's in those bushes, and so, as a result, this is why, when you walk through a doorway, you often forget what you were coming in that room to do is because the contact switch set all of your mental energy to we're in a new space.

Speaker 1: 27:10

Am I at risk Now? This happens online, virtually when windows pop up, when you're looking at different things, when notifications happen. So Superhuman, by reducing visual noise, increases flow by reducing the chance of contact switching. The next thing is, when you take an action in Superhuman, it's designed to bring you to the next action. And so in your Gmail, if you archive an email, it pops you back out to the inbox, which now you need to restart and think okay, what do I do next?

Speaker 1: 27:40

In Superhuman, when you archive an email, it brings it out to the next email. It's little things like that. And then, lastly, the speed of the software helps as well. So Gmail found that the speed threshold for distractibility is 100 milliseconds. If you click on something and it takes 101 milliseconds for something to happen, there's an opportunity for you to get distracted. So every function in Superhuman, including search results, comes back in under 100 milliseconds. So that's what Superhuman is going for to keep you focused, to make it feel like a game. I can go on and on. There's lots of other things I can highlight features that help, but that's the idea that is built to reduce visual noise, to get you into a flow state.

Speaker 2: 28:25

That's fascinating. I love that because my husband would I mean I need to kind of get him on board with this because he has ADHD really bad and that's one of his main things.

Speaker 2: 28:35

He's like I can't even like my Gmail just, and I've tried to help him. Like you said before, like for me, all I sort of like knew how to do was label and create those things, but my brain is okay with that. Like I like you know what I mean. Like that's just kind of how my brain sort of works. He's like, oh my God, like he looked at all of my labels and all that stuff, he's like I immediately shut down, and a lot of my clients are like that. So I love the simplification that you said. Like you reduce the noise, right, that's a huge, huge thing, because sometimes you just can't really do that within the platform as much as you need to, and I find that that's really helpful. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 29:20

And so a couple of things. So one with ADHD mindset of it. What I like to tell people is like, adhd isn't a lack of attention, it's a misallocation of attention and it's your brain giving you, directing your attention to things that don't align with societal norms. But people with ADHD get hyper-focused and hyper-fixated toward when the thing aligns with what their brain tells them to focus on. And what I found with superhuman is the triaging aspect of it, which is when you start your day going through your emails before you start responding to them. Go through everyone. Archive ones are done with set reminders for future ones.

Speaker 1: 30:03

The triaging aspect getting gamified was a game changer for me.

Speaker 1: 30:08

It's where I went from like ignoring my email to the last possible minute at work Every review I got at work was around communication to going to where okay, now I'm an expert on it, speaking about it on TikTok, like that is the difference it made for me and realizing like okay, it's just a misallocation of my attention. The other thing is this a lot of little tasks have friction at the beginning that keep us from taking action, and that the hardest part is getting started, and that's really where a lot of the features of superhuman come in. So with AI, if you have a big thread of emails and you need to get caught up on them in superhuman, you can just say summarize, and it could tell you what everybody said in a short bulleted list. And then you can even put that into the email and send it off to someone else and say like hey, here's to catch you up to date on the conversation. It has things like snippets and templates. Where in Gmail, if you go to get a template, you click, a dropdown, you click another dropdown.

Speaker 1: 31:03

You select the template, you start editing it. In superhuman, you just hit a shortcut and type in calendar and it drops in your calendar template. And so with superhuman, it's like reducing friction on the front end of tasks so that you're less likely to procrastinate on them. That has also been something that's huge for me, so I'm not afraid to make TikTok videos that say here's how to use templates in Gmail. But if you're using Gmail and you're not finding yourself using templates, here's how superhuman makes them incredibly accessible.

Speaker 2: 31:34

I loved. Just recently you did one about I think it was that summary thing where you and it was, I think, the AI feature that you were talking about like how you can like and voice text, like you could talk into it and you could say make it shorter, or something like that, and I was like what the actual hell is this Like? That's amazing. So run me through, like tell us about that, because I think that that's kind of like life changing.

Speaker 1: 31:58

So one of the things that I've totally so earlier you talked about ADHD and like embracing things like audiobooks at two X speed, which, for me, was a game changer Like I love reading, but I would read in a good year, 12 books a year and a normal year less than five, and I love reading. I love reading, but when I decided that reading with my ears was the same as reading with my eyes, like I just stopped saying I listened to that book and I just said I read that book. I went, I listened this was in 2020, I listened to 106 books that year and I still ended up reading 12.

Speaker 1: 32:40

So I think that mindset shift has been really helpful for getting people ahead and AI has been an absolute game changer for me.

Speaker 1: 32:49

So you can do this in most AIs, but you can also do this in superhuman. And I would avoid emails that I read on my phone because I don't want to type out an email like this. So I'll stamp the AI on my phone and say I want to write an email to Renee thanking her for letting me be on the podcasts. I want it to sound like it's from me and my voice, not overly formal, and I want to ask her how I can return the favor and be helpful and if she would like to book a like TikTok coaching session. And I just say that and it pops up the email and I can accept it as is. Or I can say shorter, make it longer, make it more on my voice, and it'll update it like that. So that's the idea of like. If you struggle with written communication, even if you, it's like typing out a prompt for an AI, just being able to turn on the microphone and talk to it makes all the difference.

Speaker 2: 33:40

Game changer honestly, Like I do that all the time on my computer even and I am a pretty fast type, or even you know what I mean.

Speaker 2: 33:47

So for people who that's a really like my husband, same thing, he's like he just like we just talk to texts, right. And so when I saw that, I was like that's really fascinating because it'll do it for you so fast and most of us are on our phones, right, Like we're so much easier. But then you're right, Like that's a barrier for me, Like I don't love to respond to emails on my phone, so I love how that makes it easier for people to do that.

Speaker 1: 34:12

Emails on a phone that are viewed on a phone have a much higher open rate than emails on a computer. That is to say, if someone sees your email initially on the phone, there are a lot more likely to actually open it and read it, cause usually if you're looking at your phone, you have time, you're not that busy, you're waiting in line at a coffee shop, things like that. However, emails that get responded to on a phone are way lower because they mark them as red and they forget about it. So imagine if, in that instance, you're waiting for something. You have nothing better to do. You're on a park bench, you see it and you think I'll get back to this one about my computer. What if, instead, you just said write an email saying that's great and ask these two following questions when does it need to be done by, and can I have access to the document? And?

Speaker 1: 34:57

then just hitting submit and having to do that is 20 seconds, 10 seconds, rather than typing out a full email with your thumbs, so yeah.

Speaker 2: 35:06

No, that's huge. I love it. Okay, we're gonna wrap up. I don't wanna keep you here all day, but if there's one more thing that you could impart, like something that you see come up a lot with your, it could be about social media or email, or productivity or soft productivity, whatever. Like what's one of the main things that you had seen people struggle with, and like a really good quick fix for maybe even distractions or whatever. Something that's kind of top of mind for your audience. That would be also useful to this audience.

Speaker 1: 35:36

Yeah, great question. Let me think about how to put this. Yeah, you are an expert to a large audience that doesn't know you. Yet when you see somebody making content that you wish you could make, instead of thinking that's what I have to look like, instead of trying to be the next celebrity, try to be the first you. I think you can take that literally and say okay, I'm going to be inspired by this person who's doing the type of work I want to do, knowing that the pool is big enough, that the overlap is strong enough, that I'm going to find an audience that's just ever so slightly different. This is why I'm such a proponent of TikTok Make the content that helps people, and you'll find your audience there. Don't be afraid of helping people, even if it means they think they don't need your product or your service anymore, because, at the end of the day, if what you do is that good, they'll start seeing okay, I'd rather just have Renee help me with this than try to do it myself.

Speaker 2: 36:59

That's really really good advice. Yes, I hope you guys all really take that to heart. That was awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Tell everybody where they can connect with you. Obviously, tiktok, probably. But where do you like to connect with people and how can they find you if they do want to work with you and all that kind of stuff?

Speaker 1: 37:15

Yeah, great question. One at Superhuman Co is the TikTok that I manage around soft productivity and email direct message me. I fully run that account. I see the direct messages. I'm happy to talk. They can email me, johnjohnjon. I'm Johnjohnjon at superhumancom if they want to get direct there. If they're interested in superhuman, superhumancom forward slash TikTok, they can try it out for free. And let me know if you do it, because I'd love to give you some tips and tricks on getting started there Fabulous.

Speaker 2: 37:44

Thank you again so much. This has been amazing. I know that this is going to get a lot of people thinking about a lot of different things. I'm sure that you will get some of them reaching out to you. Thanks so much Awesome.

Speaker 1: 38:00

It's been a blast.

Speaker 2: 38:02

I told you guys he was such a dynamic guest and you guys have to go follow him on TikTok at least, or Instagram or both. I mean, every day I learned something new from him. I swear I thought I had this productivity thing nailed down until I started coming across his tips. He just has really great insights. I really hope you got a ton out of this episode. I would love to hear your feedback. As always, go ahead and hit me up at Renee Bowen over on Instagram. Shoot me a DM and tell me what you loved most about this episode. Go ahead and screenshot it, tag me and tag John John as well on Instagram so we can repost it.

Speaker 2: 38:46

As always, I'm going to ask you to leave a review for this show, because the reviews really help so much. You can make that really easy on yourself and just go to ratethispodcastcom slash Renee Bowen. It's going to pop up all of these different platforms. It doesn't really matter where you're listening to the show. You can just click on the little icon and leave a really quick review and a rating. It is so appreciated. Yep, I am going to start my little giveaways soon again. I love to just choose a random person who leaves me a review and I will send you an audible book of your choice. Actually, I'm a big audible listener and, like John John and I were just talking about on this show, it counts as reading a book. You guys, let me know what book you want and I'll send it to you if you leave me a review. I really do want to know, though, what you're taking away from this episode. If you found something particularly helpful, please let me know, because, also, that's super important for me so that I can continue finding really amazing guests for us. Like John John, I have some really awesome ones coming up, and I cannot wait to share those episodes with you guys as well, so check back next week. I've got a new show for you every week, every Wednesday, because I am always looking for new and insightful topics and discussions for us to have here. So I hope you have an amazing week. I'm definitely decompressing right now.

Speaker 2: 40:18

I got back from the workshop that I held last week. It was absolutely amazing. I mean, I can't even express to you like the deeper connections we were able to make. Plus, we had a whole day of shooting some incredible models in downtown Los Angeles, both outside and at this really fun studio. So if you haven't seen my Instagram or any of the content there, go check it out. At Renee Bowen I'm gonna be posting more as well, because I gotta get through like a couple thousand images to get them to the models and the boutique that we collaborated with and my hair and makeup artists.

Speaker 2: 40:58

If you're a high school senior photographer, I don't always do these in-person workshops, but if you're interested in anything like that, go ahead and DM me and I'll put you on a wait list. And if I do announce anything like that again, I try and keep these for my elevate members. I'll usually go out with my first chance basically at these to my elevate and my level up one-on-one members, like my actual coaching students. So if you're coaching with me in either group or one-on-one, you're gonna get access normally to those types of workshops and retreats first, but I'll go ahead and put you on a wait list if you're interested in working with me in that way, and I do have two spots open for one-on-one coaching right now. So I offer packages that are a minimum of three months because I really believe that you really need to commit and dive in and I very rarely do one-off coaching calls. However, I might be announcing those pretty soon, so stay tuned for that. So if you're looking for just like a one-off coaching call with me to discuss one topic, I might have some capacity in February.

Speaker 2: 42:12

I'm looking at my calendar right now trying to get that all worked out for you guys. I definitely wanna help, if I can. Normally, like I said, it's a three month minimum commitment to work with me, but definitely check in, let me know If that is something that you are interested in. You can always DM me on Instagram as well. We can chat and I'll let you know what that looks like.

Speaker 2: 42:33

Otherwise, you can join us inside of Elevate, which is a really accessible group program for photographers. It's only $49 a month and I'm gonna be adding some really killer stuff to that program this month. Every month I add new stuff and I give you guys tips and tricks, marketing and mindset, because, as we know, working with your peers inside of a group and staying accountable and getting actual coaching from me, it really makes a big difference and I really feel like this is super accessible for most of you and it's not a huge time commitment, but it's just enough to keep you on track. So I hope to see you inside Elevate as well. If you have any questions about any of that, hit me up over on Instagram or shoot me an email. Renee at reneeboencom, and I will see you guys here next week.