Focus on your own fire.

// The Campfire

This week has been a week where two ideas and two theories have come together to create a narrative in my head which I just can't let go of. Around 5 years ago, when it first came out - I was going through a phase of binging on Gary Vee videos (we've all done it .. nothing to be ashamed of) - I watched Gary Vee’s video on the “biggest building in town” and the premise is around the fact that you have two choices when it comes to building the biggest building - you can either just build the biggest building or you can go around knocking down everyone elses building and as a result, yours will appear as the biggest building - this stuck with me. It's a wonderful metaphor for building businesses in a local community and it's so easy to see examples of both when you watch and observe on social media.

The idea stuck with me - not because I wanted to repeat it, but because it said something true about the way we all approach growth and promotion.

It’s a sharp metaphor. But the more I sat with it, the more I kept seeing another picture in my head. Not a skyline, but a forest at night.

And this is where the other idea came in - I've been reading Dain Walkers book called the '90 Day Brand Plan' and in that book, he describes social media pages as campfires. The campfires are the places where you tell your stories, you bring people closer by telling more stories and the better the stories, the more the campfire grows.

But the ideas of both merged in my head this week and I'm seeing things in a different way - when you start in the world of social media, you're in a dark place - no light, no way to guide you and you certainly don't have the audience in the way that Dain describes - you're looking for the spark to ignite the fire and that's where the first followers come from.

Once you've started your fire - you just need to keep it burning and quite often, you just keep enough wood on it to keep it burning, enough to keep your audience warm and enough to keep them warm and guide them to your story.

You can post more (throw more wood on the fire) and the fire burns brighter, giving people a greater sense of who you are, making the fire brighter brings more and more people to the warmth - the bigger the fire, the more people you bring because your fire is the brightest around.

But then there are certain people on social media who want to be the brightest fire - so they go around stomping on everyone elses fire, even if it's burning brightly with a large audience - because the perception is... if their fire is out, it will bring more people to their own fire because (as in Gary Vees example) - its burning brighter than everyone elses.

// Smoke or Glow

So I think there are two ways forwards - you’ve got a pile of wood at your feet, a box of matches in your hand, and the air is cold enough to make you hurry. You're eager to tell your stories and you want to build that audience of people around your campfire to tell that story to.

There are two ways forward.

You can crouch down, strike a spark, and patiently build your own fire - small at first, then bigger, until the glow reaches out into the dark, it will guide those people to you, slowly and surely they will see your fire and they'll understand what you've got to talk about - this is all about patience and the slow burn of guiding people to your space will mean you're building your fire just for them.

Or you can wander through the trees looking for other people’s flames, kicking dirt over their embers, stomping out their sparks - because if theirs go out, yours looks brighter by comparison and it will be the only fire around.

Both choices change the night. But only one actually makes it warmer.

// The Harder Way

The harder route is obvious.

It takes patience to sit with damp wood and coax it to catch, it takes resilience to try again when the flame dies out. And it takes faith - real faith - to believe that if you keep showing up with your own fire, it will eventually be enough to be seen.

All of these things are where the rewards happen - I know I'm speaking a lot in metaphors but I hope you can see what I'm trying to say. Gary Vee's story of building the biggest building in town is great but I always imagined those buildings (no matter how small) as being filled with people already and it never really sat well with me.

The whole campfire analogy is better - because social media is a dark place when you don't have your audience, it's a place where we don't know what to post most of the time because we're focusing so much on ourselves and making sure we're warm enough. The fire is a great analogy for me because of two things - firstly, the imagery of creating that fire to tell stories - we want people to join in and listen but secondly, we want our fires to help guide people and help them find their way.

There are a ton of charlatans out there who all have special powders or 'petrol' to pour on their fires, but they burn brightly for a few moments, get the large following and then, over time, that fire dwindles and the audience disappears.

We all need to focus on building that fire sustainably, with equal measures of story, warmth and with the right wood so we keep a large fire burning for longer.

If you go down the route of cheating - stomping on others, pouring fuel into the fire or trying to steal others firewood - it's just a shortcut.

But shortcuts rarely last. A fire built on sabotage is a fire with no foundation.

// The Circle

For me, I want to burn my fire properly - take this newsletter for example, I want people to see it as a campfire which is slowly growing, the fire is starting to burn brighter and whilst some people may leave the fold (yeah, I'm looking at you 'unsubscribers') - slowly over time and with a consistent output, they gather.

A campfire becomes a circle: people leaning in, sharing food, telling stories. It becomes a point of connection, not just a pile of burning wood.

That’s what real promotion feels like. Not shouting, not posturing, not proving, just showing up with enough light that people want to be part of it.

And the wonderful part of my 'joined up metaphor' (I should trademark that or something) is that when another fire sparks nearby, the circle gets bigger, not smaller - There’s more light to see by, more warmth to share and our glow doesn’t diminish because someone else’s flame is burning too. It elevates everyone around you and everyone becomes a part of that circle.

That's got to be the right way to promote yourself right?

// The Ember

When you're starting your newsletter, Instagram page, Youtube channel or blog - every fire starts the same way - one spark, one ember. It’s fragile. It needs care and you protect it with your hands, feed it with small kindling, and trust it will grow.

You don't look at what's happening around you because you're building that fire so that you feel it will grow - slowly over time, you feed it more and more wood and slowly - you'll have to worry less about it going out.

That’s the work.

Not trampling on someone else’s embers, but guarding your own. Not worrying about who’s burning brighter, but staying with the process long enough that yours catches and stays lit.

And when it does, you realise something simple: the forest was never short of firewood.

There’s room for all of us to burn. Just keep those people away from your fire who want to stamp it out.

They're not worth the time.