SECTION ONE CREATING YOUR MASS MOVEMENT

Before we get started, I need to share something that might seem a little backward at first, but it is one of the keys to sharing and monetizing your message. As you know, the world is filled with experts who are broke, people with advice and opinions and no one listening to them.

When I first started on this journey, I realized that if I was going to have success, I needed to focus first on building an audience of people I could share my message with. I wasn’t sure where to go or how to do that. So I started studying historical figures who had built huge audiences and caused big changes. The more examples I found, the more patterns I noticed.

It didn’t matter if I was studying Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party or Jesus Christ and Christianity; all the examples I found had three things in common that helped them build a mass movement.

1. They each had a charismatic leader or an attractive character.

2. Each of them focused on a future-based cause that was bigger than themselves.

3. They each offered their audience a new opportunity.

After noticing this pattern, I dug deeper into each of those three things to reverse engineer what was happening, and figure out why it worked. What I discovered was fascinating, and once I felt like I understood what worked, my team and I applied those principles to my audience. And I watched as people quickly transformed from mere followers into true fans.

In 2008, Kevin Kelly wrote an article called “1,000 True Fans”. In that article, he said:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author in other words, anyone producing works of art needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-ofprint editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.

This section is all about HOW to create those true fans, how to build your following. We have a joke inside my highest-level mastermind group (called the Inner Circle) that each of them must focus on building their own CULT-ures. While we’re not actually building a cult, we are consciously creating a culture of true fans. And this section will show you how to do the same so you can create a vehicle for change in your fans’lives.