Happy Monday, Creators 👋
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Welcome to Remarkable Monday. This is our corner of the internet where we get the inspiration and insights to crush our content goals for the week ahead. Make yourself at home and feel free to hit reply if you want to get in contact with me, your host. I’m Mark Patterson, and my hope for you this week is that you make it remarkable!
Ish The Black Superman
At 3:30 every morning, before most of Richmond, Virginia, has thought about breakfast, Ishmael Sandiford is already in the gym. He is an engineer by trade, a fitness creator by calling, and a case study in what it looks like to build a creator business without a roadmap.
Ish — known online as "the Black Superman" — didn't join Instagram with a strategy. He joined because his friends told him he wasn't on it. His first posts were just his workouts. No brand. No pitch. No plan.
"I just enjoyed posting what I love. If I got one like, I felt good."
That low ego, high consistency posture set everything else in motion. Within a couple of years, a single reel would earn him 20,000 followers in two days. Fox Sports featured him as an athlete. Celebrity clients started calling. But what made those moments possible wasn't luck. It was the thousands of hours he spent going live in empty gyms at two o’clock in the morning, showing the bad days alongside the great ones.
The Playbook
Ish wasn’t afraid to take risks either. He enlisted other fitness trainer friends to elevate his in-person fitness event. He promised trainers he'd pay them after three events — without knowing where the money would come from. That bet, among others, paid off in a big way, and it’s just a few of the lessons we covered:
Start before you're polished: Ish went live for two and a half hours, showing full workouts because unfiltered authenticity separated him from every other creator. It still is. Don't wait for the right equipment, the right aesthetic, or the right moment. Start now, with what you have.
Know your why before you need it: Ish watched his brother — given five years to live — defy every prediction through movement and discipline. That story is what gets him up at 3:30 AM on hard days. Your content will eventually test you. Have a reason that outlasts the resistance.
Serve before you sell: He built an audience before he sold. His first product was a $25 guide. Off one reel, it made $3,000. The sequence matters: trust first, transaction second.
Teach, don't just train: Training scales by the hour. Teaching scales by the idea. When Ish stopped selling individual sessions and started packaging his knowledge, his revenue grew exponentially. What do you know that other people would pay to understand?
If you’re reading this far…
I hope this message finds you well. I’m sharing from my heart in hopes that you will be inspired to unearth and live out your God-given purpose. Hopefully, something I said resonated. I would love to hear from you if so. Please feel free to reach out to me on social media.
FYI: I’m mostly active on LinkedIn these days. If you were forwarded this message, you can subscribe here to receive thoughts like this directly in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out the latest episode of my podcast, ConvoRoom with Mark Allen Patterson.