Find your purpose today as we speak to Evan Carmichael about his new book, Built to Serve. Learn about the importance of purpose and how to better serve others.
Evan is an entrepreneurial expert who built and then sold a biotech software company at the age of 19. He now runs a YouTube channel for entrepreneurs with over 2 million subscribers and 300 million views. He also wrote 4 books, speaks globally, and wants to solve the world’s biggest problem.
Today we dive deeper into how to truly serve others and find your purpose (and what that even means), how to have more impact in your life, and how this relates to building a personal brand.
Evan is one of my new favorite channels on Youtube and I’d recommend you immediately search him out and subscribe! And there are some links at the end here to where you can connect and find his book.
(BTW… if you like this episode, you’ll probably also love our interview with Chris Ducker on the topic of personal branding. Click here to listen.)
WHY PURPOSE IS SO IMPORTANT
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:07:42] First off, thank you for being on the show today, Evan. I know your time is valuable, but you still volunteer to give everyone time and show up to shows, and I think that is huge. What makes you do that? Why do you give your time to people like that and volunteer to have ideas shared like that?
Evan Carmichael: [00:08:04] So I think humans are built to serve, and I think your purpose comes from your pain. I think whatever you struggled with the most in life is what you then want to contribute to the world. Sustained happiness will come from waking up every day knowing that the work that you are doing is having a meaningful impact on other people’s lives.
That is why you do your show. That is why I do my show. It is why I come on other people’s shows. If I could spend 20 minutes with Brandon, and then say something that hopefully sparks something for your listeners, that makes me feel like what I am doing is important. It is an honor and a pleasure to be here.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:08:43] I do appreciate it. I usually talk about marketing and branding, and you have done a lot of that. What has been important to me lately has been this idea of personal branding, telling your story, finding your voice. You come at it in a different way.
You have written a couple of books on this idea of finding your purpose and thinking of that as a key ingredient. You have to have a mission, you have to have something that is your guiding light for your personal brand, what you stand for, your goal. Let’s start there. Why is this idea of finding your purpose so important for someone who is trying to develop their reputation?
Evan Carmichael: [00:09:37] I think it’s important in general, not just to establish your reputation. I think your reputation becomes a byproduct of you living a life that you love. I think most people wake up and feel like they know they are capable of more. They know they want to contribute. Serving and helping others hit the same part in your brain as having food and having sex, which is important. It is hard-wired into you.
You like helping other people, but there are different levels. Holding the door for somebody is great. It will make you feel a little bit happy. Or you can buy the coffee for the person behind you in line.
But when you can see somebody who is a younger version of you in terms of going through something that you went through, and you know that you can be a source of hope, inspiration, and belief for them and help them get out of their hole, that will fill you up in a way that holding a door for somebody won’t.
It is important as a human to realize that you are capable of great things. You are capable of having a giant impact on people, whether you want to serve the planet, or you want to serve the 25 closest people to you. But if you are not happy, it is because you are not serving.
The byproduct of serving others and knowing how you are meant to serve becomes your reputation. I believe in people. I think everybody has Michael Jordan level talent at something. That is what I want people to find in themselves.
I want to be a bit of a catalyst to help with that on every show I do, every video I make, every Instagram post I put up. I am trying to find different ways and different angles to help people believe more in themselves. I think the world’s biggest problem is people do not believe in themselves enough. As a result of finding that, it now has become my reputation or my brand.
YOUR PURPOSE AFFECTS YOUR WHOLE LIFE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:11:26] You have written this book, “Built to Serve: Find Your Purpose and Become the Leader You Were Born to Be.” One of the things you say is most people wake up and drive to a job they hate. We are not happy. We are lost. We settle. We find a routine that feels safe. Maybe we think we are finding happiness in other parts of our life.
My question becomes, does your purpose have to show up in all aspects of your life? Do you have to find purpose in your job as well as your personal life, and everywhere else? Does it all have to come together like that?
Evan Carmichael: [00:12:38] So everybody is going to have a different version of balance. Where do you want to spend your time? What makes a good father? Brandon has his version. Michael Jordan has his version. And I have my version. We tend to compare ourselves against other people, which can be really detrimental because we usually kick ourselves down instead of forward.
The key is then thinking, “What does my version of balance look like for me?” How much time do you want to spend with your kids? How much do you want to spend with your wife? How much time do you want to spend in your business? How much time do you want to spend volunteering? What is important to you? There is no right answer, but there is a right answer for you. The purpose should be baked into everything.
The purpose is not just what I am going to do in my business and shut it off when I go home. My purpose is believing in people. I believe in my son, I believe in my wife, I believe in my friends. It’s not something that I have to put on. It is who I am. It is figuring out who you are, so you can show up as the best version of yourself in every situation.
I try to “Believe” in myself as well, and I need to be better at that. It’s not just for other people. It is an internal thing too.
There is what we do, and then there is the reason behind it.
For you Brandon, if you are helping people with their branding, you are helping people create their companies and launch their businesses. The thing behind it is that you do not want people to live 18 years working at some corporation where they have settled in their life. You want to show them how to break free and build successful brands.
Building the brand is the tool. But the thing behind it is that you don’t want people to feel like they have settled in life. You have the skill set to help them get out, which is branding. Awesome. But you are not actually teaching branding. You are teaching people how not to settle in life anymore.
Even just that mindset you can take to being a better father. You do not want your kids to settle in life, even though branding probably will not be the tool you use to help them get out of that. Just rewire yourself to think, “I don’t actually teach branding. I am in the potential business and branding is the tool belt that I use.”
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:15:28] I wanted to tap into that. You teach “purpose”, but your skillset has been YouTube. People ask, “How did you grow your YouTube to 2 million people and put out all these videos?” They want to learn that. But that is not what your thought-leadership content is about and the thing that you are trying to help people with. So how did you use these two things together?
Evan Carmichael: [00:15:55] I think for people who have a big mission, you are either built to serve the world or you’re built to serve the 25 closest people to you.
I am wired to serve the world, my wife is the 25 closest people to her. If you want to serve the world, I wake up and I think, what is the best way for me to serve the world? What’s the biggest microphone I can use to spread the message?
Right now, 2020, YouTube is the number one platform where if you are a thought leader, you have to be on because it is the only place where your content lives forever. Podcasts we will put as a number two, but a distant two, and then everything else afterward.
You post on Instagram, you post on Facebook, you post on Twitter, it goes away. It doesn’t actually disappear, but stories do. Nobody is going back in your Instagram a week ago, let alone a year ago, two years ago. My videos from ten years ago are still getting me views.
If you have a big mission, if you said, “Hey, I want to build this and sell it in in five months”, great. Don’t go to YouTube. It just takes too long. But if this is a lifetime mission for you, then YouTube has to be the number one place where you are creating content long-form and then cut for other platforms.
And so, I’m on YouTube, but I’m not attached to YouTube. I got the gold play button and all that stuff, but I just use it as a tool for other thought leaders and experts, to be able to then share their message and hit a wide amount of people. But in five years, ten years, it might be something else. It’s going to be VR. I am going to be beaming into your living room. I’m going to be a hologram version of Brandon and Evan having a conversation.
WHAT IS A SUSTAINABLE STARTING POINT?
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:17:31] If you’re someone who says, “I have a message to share. I want to help people with this. Maybe I have to do my job while doing this or whatever it is, but I have a window here to jump into this and start doing something full time.” Are there steps that you took or maybe things you have taught other people so there is a way we can help make this more sustainable for people?
Evan Carmichael: [00:17:55] The starting part should be coaching. Before you worry about writing a book or speaking on stage or anything else, it should be coaching. You think you have an answer, but until you actually start working with people, you don’t have an answer. Not just a one-off conversation where they leave and they’re pumped up and they feel amazing, but then they fall back to their life.
What do you need to do to get them to actually shift is the skillset. Even if you never want to be a coach long term, it is the skillset that you need to develop. My book “Built to Serve” is a result of me coaching tons of people through the process. All the objections, all the roadblocks, all the, “but yeah, what if” are all addressed because I have guided people through it enough. I have the pattern recognition. You have coached and mentored enough people that now you have the pattern recognition to know, here’s where people are going to fall down. Here are the common questions they’re going to ask.
When you are making a YouTube video, you’re just talking to a camera most of the time. You have to know who the people are behind you watching the video. If you are going to speak on stage, you’re not speaking to a thousand people, two thousand people. You are speaking to individuals.
If you have never coached and you have never helped people, you don’t know what the message is. You can give an inspirational message, but your goal is to actually have the impact.
I’d be looking for how can I, as quickly as possible, get to coaching people, even for free, just to build the muscle, just to build the experience, to get the pattern recognition. Then you’re looking for people on Instagram who are complaining about their life or a certain area of their life that you have a skillset in.
If it’s branding, look for people saying, “Oh, I can’t figure out my brand name. I suck at branding.” Then you reach out and say, “Hey, I’ve got a couple of big ideas for you. Happy to hop on a 25-minute free call to discuss them.”
If you have a skill set and expertise, you should be doing daily outreach to people and getting on calls. Your goal with the call would then be to 1) gain experience and then 2) be so good that they message you back and say, “Hey, can I hire you? Do you do any consulting work or do you coach?”
If you are doing free calls and nobody says, “Hey, can I bring you back?”, then you’re not good enough yet. And that’s okay. I had to get good. More practice, more repetition, more learning. The number one skill to hone should be coaching at the beginning.
It’s also service-based, it’s just your time. You don’t have to spend a whole bunch of money on any fancy gear or equipment or offices. That can be a sustainable life that then gets you out of working your nine to five, then scaling up to think about speaking and books and videos and everything else.
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:20:34] In terms of the craft of coaching, obviously you might already have the knowledge in you, but I also think that the craft of coaching, teaching something, takes practice. It takes a certain knowledge base or skill. How would you say we should go about honing the craft of coaching? Do you take a class, learn from someone else, or just keep doing it? How do you get good at coaching itself?
Evan Carmichael: [00:20:55] It’s both right? First, I would look at doing it more. Chances are, you are not putting in enough reps. You could watch somebody do a bench press as much as you want, but if you’re not actually doing the bench press, you’re not going to get the muscles. You are not going to get the results.
I love learning. It’s super important, but without applying it, if you guys listened to Brandon’s show and you’re inspired, great. Nothing happens until you go and do something. Go build your brand. You have to actually take some action on what you’ve learned in each of the episodes.
Michael Jordan is a good example. Michael Jordan hit the gym every day. If you are coaching somebody once a month, you’re just never going to get good at it. Twelve times a year is just not enough to get great at something. You need to be doing it consistently, ideally every day, or at least multiple times per week.
Of course, you can model success. I love modeling success. I have learned from all the people in the pictures on my wall behind me. All the people that I profile on my videos, I learned from them. I apply something.
If you want to be a coach, I’d look at whose coaching style do you like the most. Do you like how Oprah does it, do you like how Dr. Phil does it, do you like how Jocko Willink does it? Eric Thomas? Do you want to be the yelling in your face type, screaming at the person, or are you going to hug them through it? Oprah and Eric Thomas have a very similar message. They just come at it in totally different ways. Watching them, you can pick up tricks and ideas, but you still have to be off applying it.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE
Brandon Birkmeyer: [00:22:21] I think the strongest words in the human language right now are, “You are not alone.” I think so many of us are chasing something and feel like that. I appreciate that you built something like this, “Built to Serve”, and you put yourself out there in a million different ways, coaching and whatever else. That is what sticks out to me. I think you embodied this idea of “you are not alone, I’m here for you.”
Evan Carmichael: [00:22:44] Well, I appreciate that. It means a lot. You know, I’m an introvert. That does not come out when I’m making videos like this, but I’m afraid every time I get on stage. I’m afraid every time I get in front of the camera.
I have had a lot of practice, six thousand videos later. I’m decent at it, but still, I am worried that I’m going to disappoint people. Even this, we started a little late because we couldn’t find the link and I’m panicking, oh my God, where’s the link? What is happening? Brandon is showing up, I’m not there! Disappointing people is the number one fear in my life.
The biggest fight I got into with my agent was saying, “Hey, the problem with you, Evan, is you don’t want to be famous. ” I have no need to be famous, but if you get more known, you can spread the message more. It has been this constant battle to slowly inch more towards the light because the more I’m in front, the more people can learn.
It’s not about me. It’s about the mission.
CONNECT WITH EVAN
Website: EvanCarmichael.com
Book: Built to Serve
Instagram: EvanCarmichael
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