On Going Non-Viral and Being a Zero

An interview came up on my YT feed; I watched the first three minutes. An influenzer wanted to be a swimsuit Insta-ham model and took B12 shots laced with a fat dissolving (the claim) toxic mess that ended up giving her an antibiotic resistant flesh-eating virus. Let me recap that for you:

She wanted to go viral by showing off her skin and…her skin went viral.

Be careful what you wish for!

Is that #karma or what? She was approached by the “wellness” company to push that dangerous junk to her followers and took the bait.

I’m not sharing her story to express schadenfreude. I vaguely recall opening a Greg Isenberg post (another influenzer) where he was writing about how to market without promoting or some such “advice.” I didn’t read his post fully because I clicked on his example: a young woman posting endless photos of herself in a bikini. She had a swimsuit line but was not posting about the goods directly just posting the half-naked photos thus implicitly selling the swag. I was like, well, duh. And if that’s your prime example there’s nothing clever here so the post is not worth my reading time.

I’m not writing this to drag modeling or selling swimsuits. However, there are a bunch of us out here I call “shining opt-outs.” We did not want to use ourselves, our talents, or our images to sell crap or mislead people. And we ended up at the bottom of the totem-pole a lot of the time. And we sort of cared but not that much as we just couldn’t stomach the trade-in (of our spirit or integrity or values or even just our mood or intuition) and so we ate our humble pie, quietly. And now we are sitting back watching the fall-out happening left and right and being grateful we opted-out of the game. All these folks who were looking down on us gloating in their towers are now collapsing round and round. Us being at zero with all the plus 100s flipping to minus 100s is actually not such a bad place to be.

So, if you are one of us, please take a minute today to congratulate yourself for going non-viral. And being a zero. Because all of the zeros you’ve collected over the years are about to back up that one little 1 you have saved up and push you and your purpose to overflow. It is time for the opt-outs to opt-in as the field is being cleared of the fake debris. The rules of the game are changing. And it’s happening fast.