Be Your First Fan

I love reading books. 

But is it possible to get paid for reading books? I’ve kind of figured out a way to do so.

Every month inside Membership Freedom, we do a live call based around a book that directly relates to a specific point in our Membership Freedom Roadmap. I get to spend time reading, dissecting, highlighting and coordinating the impactful points of the book and then lead an interactive, engaging call with our group to help them get massive value in a short period of time. 

The book that we dove into for the September call was Fans First by Jesse Cole, the yellow tuxedo-wearing owner of the Savannah Bananas. If you have been under a rock, the Bananas have taken hold of the baseball world with their wild, wacky and rule-breaking ways of playing baseball. 

Cole has infused a brand of baseball- and a staff around him- that has one focus. Fans first. 

My only disappointment with the book- and it’s a slight one- is that the stories were heavily driven by the energetic antics that they do and engage with before, during and after the Bananas games. Although he implores all business owners to add higher levels of fun to their business, I’m not showing up on stilts or jumping around singing in front of my customers. Many of his examples were fun to read but felt unrelatable for myself or those who I’m guiding. 

That said, there were so many gold nuggets from the book that I couldn’t get through more than half of them during the call. 

I wanted to highlight one of them for you today. 

The first fan is you. Not your team. Not your customers. You.

Failure to recognize and embrace this one point could be the difference between uncapped opportunity and depressing obscurity. I brought it up intentionally during the call because I looked at a few faces that have more ability than they have belief. Meaning, their skill sets, their experience and their knowledge stretch out much further than the belief that they can be the one to help others with their niche. 

Self-doubt kills more dreams than a lack of knowledge ever will. But too many people allow self-doubt to get in the way instead of changing their perspective and believing in themselves. 

Cole takes it a few steps further with this thought. You should do more than just believe in yourself. You should be your number one fan. 

If you aren’t your number one fan, who is? Or better yet- if you don’t believe fully in what you do, who else will? 

That is a disconnect that holds too many business owners back. They haven’t become their biggest fan. If you aren’t your biggest fan, you won’t feel confident enough to promote it. If you aren’t your biggest fan, you won’t truly, deep down, feel like you are the solution to someone’s problem.

If you aren’t your biggest fan, you are not going to become so passionate about your product that you get clients to believe in you simply because you care so much. 

The Savannah Bananas now have lots of fans. So many, in fact, that they are close to having a 50,000 person waitlist for tickets. But no matter how big of fans they become, Cole is still their first fan. 

That self-declared status is what gets him to write down ten new ideas for the Bananas every morning. It’s what energized him to create a staff of people who have more passion and energy for a position that most business owners don’t feel themselves. 

And why don’t those business owners feel that themselves? Because they haven’t become their first- and biggest- fan. Cole’s point is that it all starts with belief in yourself and what you do. If you don’t, nobody else will. 

Become your biggest fan. Do that first. Allowing yourself to be your first fan will make you excited about marketing what you do. It will inspire those around you. It will create more fans- who will then bring their friends. 

But it will never happen if you don’t declare yourself as your biggest fan!

Have an AMAZING week!

Vincent