Radical Authenticity

So you know the secret now: you’re gonna brand yourself as a fighter early, so that you can start to profit from getting CTE long before you’re chucking dollies at busses. You know the strategy: quantity over quality.

Hopefully, implementing this sounds stupidly easy to you. After all, if you’re willing to get punched in the face 3 times a week, making a video about it after the fact each time should be easy.

But it isn’t, and you’re not really sure why. Or worse, you can think of really good and unavoidable reasons why you can’t do this, or shouldn’t do this “right now”. We’ll get to that.

BRAND AUTHENTICITY

“Authenticity” is a bit of a loaded term in the business world. For you and me, “Authentic” is just a fancy way of saying “Real”. For business people, “Brand Authenticity” actually means “How authentic the customers think the brand is.” In other words, how good that particular company is at lying to their customers about what they’re really about.

Now not every company is the same. Small businesses are often exceptions to this way of thinking. Their brands can actually be authentic. Massive companies, such as Monsanto, tend to take this definition of brand authenticity way farther than anyone really expects, and it’s those companies that you likely deal with daily.

I’m gonna hazard a guess that you don’t read business brand authenticity articles in an attempt to boost your fighting career, but it’s still very important to understand this mindset, because this is the mindset of your high end competitors (and the UFC), and most large corporations. It’s something that you’ve been exposed to all your life, and you’ve passively absorbed into your mind, whether you planned on it or not.

Now the thing with lying is that it takes a ton of effort, especially if you’re doing it long term. “Brand Authenticity” works very well for megacorporations with millions of dollars to spend hiring PR executives, drafting press releases, and paying me to make bomb banger videos for them (jk I don’t take those jobs). Enormous lies can be told, if you have the money to tell them.

You probably still think you need to be something that you’re not in order to get traction on social media.

You know Connor McGregor? I’ve got news for you: he’s not real. He doesn’t exist. The Connor McGregor you see on your TV screen is not the real Connor. He’s a character, played by Connor and crafted in painstaking detail by Dana White, many UFC and ESPN broadcast executives, Connor’s own personal team of brand managers, which he’s hired using the money he has, Connor’s coaches and cornermen gassing him up, and so on. Without those things, if you were to meet Connor in real life, you’d see a completely different guy. A real person, and not a hypergrandiose character. But he can pull that look off on TV, party because he does have a ton of raw talent, but mostly because he has an exorbitant amount of money and man hours constantly dedicated to creating that image for and of him.

You don’t have those things. But, you probably still think you need to be something that you’re not in order to get traction on social media. Because that corporate “Brand Authenticity” mindset has still found its way into your unconscious, and/or you are still vulnerable to peer pressure despite the fact that you pay money to have people beat you up.

So, for whatever reason and likely without even realizing you’re doing it, you’re actually trying to compete with megacorporations and top tier UFC fighters, at their own game, without any of the extensive finances and resources that they have. This is not going to go well for you.

How Bad Will it Go?

Well, the first thing you’ve probably noticed with whatever branding attempts you’ve made so far is that it takes a ton of mental effort to post anything on social media at all. You need to build your confidence. You need to hype yourself up. You need to think of something to say. You’ve got lines and things you’d like to say, but when the camera is pointed at you it just never feels right.

Because of that, you focus heavily on quality. Every post has to be perfect, or at least your best effort. Many takes. It’s a chore for you, and more often than not you find yourself deciding that you’d “rather just not deal with it right now.”

Your social media is relatively quiet, with multiple days, sometimes weeks, between posts. Because social media is a hypersaturated game of quantity and algorithms, you completely fail to gain any traction with your fighter accounts.

And that’s it, really. You’re just stuck there, forever. You stay in this cycle of not having time to train, because you don’t have money, because your brand isn’t big enough to sell or move people, because you never post, until eventually you get a nasty TBI and that’s that.

Total failure.

So what’s the alternative?

RADICAL AUTHENTICITY

Thankfully, you’re not alone. Eminem has also been in this position, and he gives us the perfect model for handling it here.

You see, while Brand Authenticity is a corporate term that means “spending a ton of money and time to effectively misrepresent this company/person/glyphosate to the general public”, and requires those aforementioned massive financial and human resources to implement, actual authenticity is ridiculously easy to do. Instead of putting in mental effort to act cool, you just stop caring and put in no effort at all, and you tell everything as it is.

Yeah cage fighting is tough, but have you ever tried being honest about your life on social media?

At the beginning of 8 Mile, Eminem gets stagefright and chokes, cause he’s still trying to be a normal high-end rapper, he’s trying to act like hot stuff when he knows he isn’t. At the climax (that scene), he’s been beaten down and screwed over so many times throughout the course of the movie that he doesn’t give a damn about trying to be anything anymore, and so now he’s freed up to be completely brutal on the mic. He’s become radically authentic, and so even the terrible failures that he’s had throughout the film become weapons he can use against Papa Doc.

Going radically authentic is always terrifying at first. It may feel like you’re giving up on your goals and your future. That couldn’t be further from the truth. It is a bit risky, but when it comes to your mission of UFC domination, being radically authentic is actually the only way you can hope to achieve that.

Like yeah, cage fighting is tough, but have you ever tried being honest about your life on social media? You’re gonna get judged, you’re gonna get hate. People you meet on the street are going to know things about you. But if you can take punches, you can learn to take that weirdness no problem. And if you can take punches, then your life and perspective is interesting enough that the internet is going to want to hear it.

Your apprehension at the idea of being yourself on social media comes from the subconscious assumption that you’re not worth it: you’re not interesting enough, smart enough, a good enough fighter yet, whatever. Let me assure you: none of that is true, and even if it were you should still go for broke and be authentic because you don’t really have anything to lose. The risk is social judgment. You’re a cage fighter. If someone doesn’t like your content, let them come at you in the cage. They’re not gonna, you’ll be fine.

Once you get your first couple reps in, posting simple talking head videos about what’s going on in the day-to-day of your fight training, you’ll start to realize that it doesn’t really matter whether people like you or not. You put out content simply as a way of making your mark on the world. The people who like it will like it, and the people who don’t, won’t. It’s graffiti. Very profitable graffiti. Ideally also informative graffiti, graffiti that adds value to other people’s lives, helps them with their fighting journey or makes them feel good.

To be clear, one thing you don’t want to do is genuinely own yourself. See this clip from tropic thunder to understand what that looks like. In the earlier clip Eminem’s complete openness with how badly he’s been doing is countered by the fact that he’s saying that stuff while completely massacring Papa Doc. He has obvious skill, and he’s retained it in spite of everything that’s gone wrong for him. His resilience is what makes him admirable here.

To really sum things up, the proper mindset is this:

• instead of trying to pretend that you’re the best and nobody can touch you

accept that

• even though people are going to touch you, even though you’ve had to deal with a whole bunch of crap to get here, YOU ARE STILL HERE, and YOU ARE STILL GOING TO CRUSH IT

It doesn’t matter what happens, what you post, or what Ls come flying your way, because you already know that you can handle it. You’re not the best thing since sliced bread, you’re better. You are robust.

Now for some finer details.

What Do You Actually Post?

You’re in a kickboxing class. Find someone who’s sitting out for a round, give them your phone, have them record you. After class, when you’re all sweaty and tired, record a video selfie of you talking about what you’ve learned, how you’re feeling, any fights you’ve got coming up, what you had for lunch, whatever. Don’t stress about it. Don’t act.

Cut those two videos together into a TikTok, post. Every class. Build a degree of consistency, that’ll start to get you a community. Build lasting relationships with your followers. Let your audience see the process of you working towards your goals. The idea is that 15 years from now, when you’re big, people can still look back at your old content and see where you came from. You’ll care about having that stuff 15 years from now too.

You have literally nothing to lose by doing this. It’s the baseline minimum for any fighter trying to make a career out of a combat sport in the modern day. I believe in you, and once you start doing this, you’ll find that your audience does too. Good luck.

This is definitely going to become a series. There are many more benifits to authenticity that I haven’t covered, some of which are worth talking about just because of their artistic value. Stay tuned.