Screw what people say about emotion. Emotion is everything. Emotion is what has allowed me to keep gaining a massive online audience.

Here’s an example: Last Friday, I posted a photo on LinkedIn of two surgeons who had just finished a 32-hour surgery. The photo had a lot of emotion and I backed it up with an emotional question for people to ponder.

Humans can’t resist this type of content. What’s even funnier is that business humans especially can’t resist this content. It’s these business humans that need and crave emotion more than anyone on the planet.

Spending hours at your job or startup can suck the life out of you. Emotion brings all of that life back again. For the next three hours, this post went crazy. Emotion was pouring out of people and I too was feeling the same emotion. I responded to every single comment in real-time.

It had been a tough week for me full of disappointment. This opportunity to deliver emotion and have it come right back at me was impossible to pass up. Lately, I have become an emotion junkie chasing the next piece of content that is going to inspire me and help me stay focused.

Here’s why emotion is so incredible:

1. Emotion unites us

Linkedin proved this to me last Friday. People united around these two surgeons I posted because they are heroes. They gave everything they had to save another humans life. They did it without thinking about anything else.

Emotion united everyone that read my post because deep down we all want to be heroes. Heroes bring out the emotion in all of us and we all want that feeling. We don’t need to be ashamed of this wish; we need to go out there and make it come true.

Emotion is what creates a human life and it’s what can destroy a human life as well. Emotion is what made you start your business or take a job and it’s what can end it as well. As humans, we are united by emotion because it’s part of our DNA.

Even the grumpiest son of a gun can become an entirely new person when they come into contact with raw emotion – that’s part of my dream. I hope that one day one of these grumpy, worn out souls can read one of my posts and change the way they think.

If that happened just once, then I’d die a happy man. Emotion drives me to do what I do and emotion is what unites all of you reading. Let emotion bring us together rather than allowing hatred to win.

Don’t let war fuel your thoughts, let love take control and drive you towards emotion.

That one thought right there has the power to change every problem this world is facing. It’s one simple, dumb, sentence and yet it’s game changing. I used to think changing the world was so incredibly hard.

Now I know that I can achieve that goal by sitting behind my laptop and making people feel emotion. I want that dream for you too.

2. Hiding from emotion is never going to work

To display raw emotion is tough. I’ve done it for long enough and it’s hard work. As much as you try and avoid it, sometimes you think to yourself, “What are people going to think? Are they going to feel I’m a total screw up?”

The answer to this question is that it’s far worse to hide from emotion than it is to embrace it, and unleash for all to see.

“Those lifeless souls you see whipping their employees and saying the word “revenue” every five minutes are the ones hiding from emotion”

On the outside, they look like hardasses, but inside they are destroying their souls. One day all of that hidden emotion is going to bring them down like the twin towers. You can’t hide from emotion. You can’t hide your real feelings about the world or the people you share it with.

So if you can’t hide from it, why don’t you embrace emotion? That’s the whole point of this article. I’ve done it and it’s the best decision I’ve ever made. I feel like I bought a Toyota Corolla (emotion) which turned out to be a Ferrari when I took delivery of it.

3. Emotion will always dominate social media

I’ve studied every top post on Facebook and LinkedIn for the last four years. There’s a pattern and it’s emotion. The top posts are always loaded with emotion. They pull at your heartstrings and they’re real. These stories are popular because emotion brings us in.

The fact is that emotion is the real story. We don’t want to hear about a story; we want to feel emotion. In a world where we’ve become numb, emotion acts as a mindfulness trigger. Emotion brings us out of our messed up past and back to reality.

Think about the social media posts you’ve loved the most over the last 12 months. I guarantee it’s the ones that are full of emotion. Don’t deny it, embrace the emotion. Forget what your friends think.

4. Emotion takes you to the next level

The way to up your game is to add emotion. Whatever you’re doing right now, you need to add more emotion. I was blogging for a long time about dry subjects like business. I repeated the same advice you can read on any startup blog.

I added boring stock photos of men in suits and wrote what people wanted to hear from a so-called business guru such as myself. Then I started swearing and showing the world who I was.

“I added emotion into the meat pie I called blogging. Then, that pie started to taste bloody delicious. Everyone wanted to take a bite”

The only thing I did to get to the next level was add ten times more emotion. I layered every blog post with a whole raft of emotions. Some blog posts I dumbed right down and focused on one emotion.

Emotion is not about me, though, and my stupid looking spiky haircut. Emotion is about getting to the heart of what you do. It’s sharing the emotion of what you do rather than the raw strategies and advice. When you connect with people using emotion, they start to listen.

This one magic trick allows you to go to the next level and create more of the following: money, influence, followers, outcomes * insert success metric. *

This list of things won’t help you win at life though. If they’re the reason you’re playing the game, then you’ll lose big time. These things will help fuel the burning desire you have inside of you. The challenge is they will only become real when you throw emotion to that same fire inside of you.

5. Emotion shows who you really are

For years we all hide behind a mask. We do what society, our parents or Instagram tells us we should do. We go and get that university degree, buy that house, marry that person or get that dumb luxury car we don’t need.

When you’ve done all that, you end up right where you started. You don’t get to pass go and you don’t collect $200 like society tells you that you will. It’s only when you throw that goddamn mask over the bridge like Jim Carey does in his iconic movie that shit get’s real.

The mask comes off when you start showing raw emotion. People always thought they knew me and then when I started showing emotion, people realized they didn’t know me at all. It even scared some people to the point where they stopped talking to me or thought I joined a hippie cult.

Well, the good news is I didn’t join a hippie cult folks: I just learned how to show people who I really am. Emotion is what allowed me to do that. I showed emotions such as love, happiness, disappointment, frustration, sadness and excitement. Sometimes I even showed all of these emotions at once.

That picture of those two surgeons is who I really am. I like to celebrate people that are changing the world and making a difference. I want people to feel something so that I can feel something too.

Think about you for a minute. Who are you really? How do you want to inspire people and what’s your vehicle? Once you work this out and start showing emotion, everything will change for you. This change will occur because emotion will make you more human.

Being truly human is relatable, sexy as hell and infectious. That’s who I believe you really are.

6. You need to be vulnerable to show emotion

It takes guts to be emotional. What I’ve talked about today ladies and gentlemen sounds like a bunch of advice for pussies if you are some hard hitting, success junkie that does one hundred push ups before sunrise.

Obviously, this advice can look like that if you’re not someone that understands the rules of the universe yet. But the real point is that yes emotion looks weak from the outside in some ways. It’s not though. What’s hard to grasp is that you can’t display raw emotion until you embrace vulnerability.

You have to put yourself out there and wear your heart on the front of your blazer. Emotion looks strange to people because to display it 100% of the time is very uncommon. It’s more common to hide what you’re thinking and say what you think society wants to hear.

I encourage you to rebel and fight against that idea. Be vulnerable and show people who you are using emotion. Use emotion as a tool to improve the lives of others, thus having the same effect on your own beautiful life. Become a patriot. Show emotion whenever you can.

***My advice to you***

Go out there and create some emotion. Stir people up. Change their thought patterns.

Wear your heart somewhere that everyone can see it. Chase your dream. Be bold, vulnerable and courageous all at the same time. Don’t let anybody tell you that you’re not phenomenal.

Tell stories with emotion. Tell stories about your deepest darkest fears. Wear a big fat smile on your face. Be cool, loving, outrageous and fantastic all at the same time.

Life’s short too short to live any other way.

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