Patrick Rife (00:02)
I didn't disappear because I was lost. I disappeared because I could feel myself losing the signal. That's the monster that's been spinning in my head for months now. And I'm thrilled to be moving out of that era of contemplation. My name is Patrick Rife Welcome to the Ground Control Podcast. I am very excited to finally be putting

this boat in the water. It's something that I've been thinking about for a very long time, planning, scheming, and now we're here. So before we get into the first episode of the Ground Control podcast, I thought that it would make a little bit of sense to kind of talk about who I am and how I got here. So I have been building businesses here in Baltimore, Maryland for about 15 years now.

And while I have had experiences podcasting in the past and creating video content, oftentimes it's been in service of my other businesses. Whether it's pixelated, my photo booth company, ⁓ those podcasts were very events, industry centric and events, technology focused. And I also had a long stint of time creating podcasts for startups, which was our community that

we, ⁓ that we made here in Baltimore that focused on, ⁓ interviews and uplifting, ⁓ entrepreneurs, small business owners, startups in the Baltimore ecosystem. and while all of those previous experiences were really fun and they really, ⁓ showed me how much I enjoyed making this kind of content and talking and storytelling, all those things. They never really placed the most core aspects of.

my point of view and how I wanted to show up and do things at the forefront. So ⁓ a few years ago when I started building Ground Control, I knew that at some point I would launch something like this. And it's a little nerve wracking because this is the first time that I am doing a content vehicle, a show that is in an interview format. So it's just me and you ⁓ chatting, talking through these ideas.

And that's a little bit scary because when you have ⁓ a co-host or you have someone there that you're interviewing, all you need to do is ⁓ ask them a few good questions, be a good listener, and then build from there. And with this format, it's just me and my ideas and figuring out how to pick through them in WayFind. And ⁓ that can be intimidating to say the very least.

⁓ I thought that it made a lot of sense to just say that first and foremost. ⁓ But that being said, that's not the theme of this podcast. The theme of this podcast is it's wayfinding, it's ground control, it's figuring out where your center of gravity is and how the decisions that you make for yourself help you to continue along that journey in a way that feels good to you. And a lot of that is cloaked in...

conversation of self-awareness, also building businesses, building things, building your future that you want to really live through and stand up in. So that's the intro. That is the pre-ground. Welcome to the first episode of the Ground Control Podcast. So this specific edition, and if anyone has been following along this week ⁓ on some of my social media content that I've been putting out,

I'm trying to have a standardized format where this will go along and have a theme that travels through the week. And I thought that what really made sense was to really predicate that theme on what I'm doing, but also it's fair to acknowledge that I was very productive for a long time over the last, I don't know, we'll say not year or so so much, but

the proceeding, if we go back nine months and then we look 14 months before that, I was very consistent in writing. I was writing a newsletter called Ground Control, ⁓ the first edition, the first re-edition publishes tomorrow of that, but I was writing a newsletter and I was publishing a ton every single day on LinkedIn. I was doing all the things that I thought I needed to be doing to grow an audience.

⁓ And what I realized is as I got further into it, ⁓ the things that I was doing, the ways I was doing them, was compromising the big vision for the short term and the results that I was looking forward to. ⁓ So the theme of this week's content has been ⁓ why I disappeared and what I built while I was gone. ⁓ And I think that to like set the stage to that.

is to say that I didn't disappear because I was lost. I disappeared because I could feel myself losing the signal that I had been broadcasting about who I was and what I wanted. Nothing was wrong in terms of what I knew that I wanted to do. know, like the work was moving, I was publishing, you know, like there were plenty of likes.

some of them earned, some of them paid for. We talk about earned and bought media. ⁓ The numbers were good. Honestly, the numbers were amazing. ⁓ But internally, something was slowly, glacially drifting away. ⁓

That's what this week has been about. And that's what today's podcast is about. without further ado, welcome to Ground Control. ⁓ So the idea behind Ground Control, again, I said it before, but it's really about holding yourself accountable to...

setting the stage for what you want to do and then executing to do that thing and really bringing that level of self-awareness to the forefront and accountability is a very hard thing. I say that and 99 % of the statements that I make, they're always, I think that they can often feel prescriptive like I'm speaking to you, but almost always I'm speaking to me in the mirror.

Right? I'm talking to my own self about my own observations that I have found. ⁓ and I think that what the reality is, ⁓ particularly in this life that we live in is that that, ⁓ those universal truths, they resonate more with other people than we realize that they resonate with. So, ⁓ if it feels prescriptive, just know that I'm talking to me. I'm not talking to you.

And hopefully ⁓ it will resonate in a similar capacity. So when I had initially started Ground Control, I knew that it was a writing vehicle. It was a newsletter for me to take all of the experiences that I had building Pixelated and building Startups Rory and building other projects in between. And it was a vehicle for me to talk about those and then also to parlay all my generalists skill sets.

to a place where I could make sense of it. Like I wanted to make sure that I was building a business that was representative of me and the best things that I had to offer up. So that's where I started and it was a weekly newsletter and quite frankly it started incredibly. I really felt like I was ⁓ feeling my way through it.

that I was finding my center of gravity and what I was really trying to do. ⁓ I often talk about, particularly in my consulting business, ⁓ being a person that's able to ⁓ listen to someone's challenges, the things that they're grappling with, and then to recite it back to them. And it happening in such a way that I shift the prism just enough that it really sheds light for them, that it's positive and it's productive. And I felt like

those early months of writing the ground control newsletter were doing just that. ⁓ That was the heart side of it. The practical side of it was ⁓ how do you build an audience? Like what are those things that you do to build an audience? So in addition to writing this soul seeking newsletter on a weekly basis, I was also, you like I was publishing on social media, right? Like I was writing for LinkedIn. I was writing for Twitter. ⁓

And using that as a way, as a path to acquisition for subscribers, right? For people that wanted to read my writing. And what was happening was, ⁓ there were kind of like dual, dual pillars, if you will. And I was publishing the weekly newsletter and I was getting DMs in my LinkedIn and I was getting text messages from subscribers that are friends.

And I was getting phone calls and emails, replies to the newsletter saying like this was exactly what I needed. This was amazing. This was so great. And not because they wanted to be like, good job for trying this thing. It was that the ideas that I was sharing and the things that I was communicating, they were resonating in a real way. And, you know, just to be candid and, and a little crass, was fucking amazing. It was fucking amazing to have these.

ideas that I'd had for so long and had wanted to put out there for so long resonate. And you know, like, I hope that the smile on my face is evident of exactly how that made me feel. It was incredible. So there was nothing wrong with it. It was perfect. Except from a promotional perspective, I wasn't.

really growing my readership, right? And the whole side of this is, you know, like you want more people to read these ideas, you want more people to come into it. ⁓ And what that meant for me was that I had to figure out how to do that. And generally speaking, if you're reading the words of wisdom from gurus and other people that create content like this,

⁓ You know, like your newsletter is your distribution channel for like the big ideas, ⁓ but your acquisition happens through social in a lot of ways, right? You find readers and you build your list by publishing content on LinkedIn or on X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it. And then from there you convert. So slowly as I figured out the newsletter side of it, I really ⁓ started to shift my attention over to

figuring out how could better architect a system for subscription acquisition, right? How do I add more readers to my newsletter? And I primarily did that through LinkedIn because it was my most effective platform. So I started to really evolve my writing. And instead of having my writing be reflective of the ideas that I was trying to communicate, I started to implement the technical strategies that

we're working in that moment. And anyone who ⁓ focuses and has any kind of modicum of success in any social media platform knows that ⁓ it's 90 % the technical strategy you're deploying. And it changes every day almost, right? So you need to be very much in step with ⁓ what is the algorithm doing, right? ⁓ What is the...

What is the format, right? Are carousels working? Is it short form video? it polls this week? ⁓ You know, like, how is your hook? How is the second line that follows after your hook? How do you get people to expand your posts and read through it? So I went in and I started becoming much more of a technician of that world. And slowly but surely, the content that I was putting out there...

lent itself more to the execution of those optimized strategies than it did the message. And with every one of those ⁓

pieces of bait that pulled me off of the center of the path, I lost a little bit of the purity of what I was writing. And that was just the beginning of the journey. What the journey ultimately ended up ⁓ taking me on was going from writing up the pure ground control vision to moving all the way over to doing anything and everything.

to grow my exposure on LinkedIn. And, you know, like that journey was something that was...

started with good intention, right? But by the time I had crossed the chasm, what that meant was belonging to growth pod groups. And for anyone that doesn't know what that means, know, like a growth pod is a group of, you know, 25 or 50 people that have like a back channel and they agree to engage with everyone else's content when it gets published, right? In exchange for you engaging back with them. And it's a way to game the algorithm.

⁓ it's, if you know about SEO at all, it's, would, it's what we considered a black hat technique instead of a white hat technique, right? You're using things to juke the algorithm of the social platform. So that way it sees people engaging with your content as a signal that your content is good. And then it exposes it to a greater amount of people from an organic capacity. ⁓ so the, the.

The net downfall of that was all of that engagement ⁓ while it's ⁓ completely reasonable why you got into it. It's an agreement that you went into and that everyone else is in as well, but their engagement on your content, it's not sincere, it's manufactured. rather than, you know, like the goal of a great LinkedIn post is

you pour your heart out or you share an idea or something that you've learned or a frank piece of, of, of, you know, maybe, ⁓ unconventional advice. And then a group of people see it that it resonates with. And then in the comments below, they say, this is awesome. I'd never thought about it like that. I tried this too. This is how it worked out for me. It ends up being a mind share, a meld, right? Where there's a back and a fourth and you're

drawing your community together, right? We're all circling around the bonfire of this singular idea and we're having a share about what that means. And in engagement pods, it's not about that. So what ends up happening is the comment that's being left is meant to be and is broadly relevant to what you've written, but it's generic and it's not actually saying anything. It's not actually participating in the comment because

All anyone is trying to do is run through the room and put their post-it note on every space that they're required to for that day. And what that ends up doing is then that whole narrative underneath of your post, your idea that is supposed to be important to you, right? Your ground control ends up being awash in the most generic vanilla

conversation. It's not conversation at all. It's just a bunch of post-it notes that don't actually have anything of value on it. You know, like they just say, do you think? Question mark, question mark, right? Like, I agree. Like all of these just kind of generic platitudes. So and further away from the center of my gravity I get, right? I'm churning further and further away and

This doesn't need to be over explained. What's important and understand here is that I got to a place where what had started so purely with the idea of taking my ideas and my thoughts and putting them out there to see where they resonated and to hopefully draw people with common ideas closer to me instead turned into a place where

That vision for what I wanted to communicate became secondary. And then even when I was sharing it, the community that I was gathering around me was only there to get a high five back.

And the conversation was completely empty. I was willing to forego the genuineness of what I was writing to try and get to a place where I could build a real audience, where I could return to my genuineness. But in the process of doing all that,

everything shifted. And the internal question that I kept having to myself was, you know, if you are finding me for the right reason, and you show up and this is what you see beneath my question, like, how does that look like how does it look to others? You know, like, how does it hold up? And how is that at all meaningful to me? Why is it meaningful or acceptable that 50 comments that are not real?

are more valuable than two text messages back from somebody that said, I woke up this morning and I felt awful. And then I read this thing and it's exactly what I needed. And thank you. ⁓ those comments, I didn't realize it at the time. ⁓ that's not true. I realized it every moment. Every single one of those comments lit me up.

set my world on fire. was the greatest, greatest compliment that I think I've ever received to finally be out there sharing these, know, ⁓ non-traditional ideas to be sharing ⁓ vulnerability in a very big way, to be putting it out there and to have it resonate was fucking incredible. And I

appreciated every bit, you know, like to name names. I published an edition once and Juliana, you called me in, I don't know, like six minutes and ⁓ you called because you read that thing and that was epic. ⁓ John, ⁓ you DM'd me back ⁓ like almost immediately and we're like

I'm in such a similar place to you right now. And this was extremely helpful. ⁓ All of those notes, those DMS, those messages are insane. Kevin, Kavina, right? You and I have been having an email dialogue about these big existential conversations in life. And it all happens in a reply to an edition of Ground Control that got sent out.

All of that meant so much to me. And what I didn't realize is that those one twos and threes are enough. ⁓

That's why I disappeared nine months ago. I woke up one day and I was like, just can't, I can't do it today. can't, I can't go through the motions of posting post-it notes on everyone else's wall just to get some post-it notes posted online. And I took the day off and I thought it's fine. Like I'll just take the day off because right in social media land, it's consistency above all things.

And if you miss a day, you know, like the algorithm is going to spank you for it. It's so fucked up. ⁓ So like we're terrified to do that. And I was terrified and they had all the guilt and all the, all the feelings about it. But I took that day off. ⁓ And I took the day off after that and the day off after that and feeling terrible about it. And then I thought, well, it's been a day. So I'm going to take a week. ⁓ And then I took a second week.

And then as a month. And then before I knew it, I looked up and it was nine months later. And in those nine months, what I did was I just got down to work. It's no coincidence that in those nine months, I signed six clients that I started to work with. It's no mistake that in those nine months, I came to terms with.

what it is to call yourself a coach or a consultant and not have that be skeezy ⁓ and valueless because up until that point, I struggled a lot with that. A lot of those early editions of Ground Control, they're about that struggle and that journey. ⁓ know, like, era one of Ground Control newsletters are 100 % about a man coming to grips with who he is and what he wants to do.

and acknowledging all of the blockers that stood between me and where I wanted to go and piece by piece figuring out where those bricks laid on the wall that I was going to build. you know, like that journey ⁓ didn't not come with its own pitfalls. Obviously it did. ⁓ But man, the last nine months have been amazing because they did a few fundamental things that are incredibly important.

One, they allowed me to understand that the work in and of itself is fucking beautiful and to be able to do it is enough. ⁓ That to have people that read the things that you write and appreciate them is ⁓ perhaps one of the greatest gifts ⁓ of the universe. ⁓

that we are the highest evolved species on this planet and we have these ideas and we get to share them and put them out there ⁓ and hopefully be helpful and hopefully find other people that they resonate with is truly amazing. ⁓ And more than that, I think the big existential thing that I had been struggling with was how do I take these ideas? How do I take these thoughts and these hunches and these notions about the universe and about how things should be and how

So many times things that I built in the past didn't end up serving me. ⁓ And all of these, you know, having committed to being a generalist forever in my businesses and really being terrified of like, okay, now that those are coming to their sunset, how do I take who I am and make it make sense in the future? ⁓ All of those things.

came together over the last nine months. And now I understand how this.

this soul searching, my writing, how I can be completely uncompromising in it and that it can still be tied back to building a business, right? To building a livelihood in a company that serves me along my own ideals with my own goals at the forefront and have them both. To be able to have my cake and eat it too and that's it.

That is the.

That is the thesis of Ground Control 2.0. ⁓ Listen, thank you so much for ⁓ tapping in for this first edition. I am gonna be coming here every Friday and sharing this rambling wonderfulness. If you hate it, I realize it's not for you, it's all good. If you appreciated this, I just want you to know that I appreciate you.

Please, if we're on a text message basis, shoot me a text. ⁓ If we're connected somewhere on social, feel free to shoot me a DM ⁓ and tell me the things that you liked. If any of this resonated, ⁓ if you're seeing this on YouTube, just know I read and respond to every single comment that's there. ⁓ And I would love to get a chance to do that. ⁓ If you like this podcast and this video show, you want to hear more.

I'd encourage you to go ahead and hit the subscribe button so that way you get notified each time they go live. But to wrap it up, I'm Patrick Rife This is Ground Control.