Author: Henry Murphy

It’s about 87° in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I expected it to be hot and muggy today, but there’s this amazing cool breeze.

I’m sitting on a bench, watching the wind blow by, and my heart is filled with gratefulness.

I don’t talk about it much, but on the days when my eyes are super blurry, it can be discouraging. I have to encourage myself in the Lord immediately when I wake up.

This morning, I woke up and shot Arie a text message to tell her I love her. She responded, “I love you too,” and then FaceTimed me.

It made my day because it was the first time I’d seen her face in about three weeks. She told me that her dad was working on her passport, and that made me smile.

Later, I went downstairs to register for facial recognition in the building, but it wouldn’t work because it couldn’t read my eyes.

Needless to say, the discouragement came back. I had to take a breath and let gratefulness take over me again.

I think about the Apostle Paul a lot because we don’t know exactly what ailment he had to deal with, but we know he had to deal with something.

This is my ailment right now, but I’m grateful that I still have some sight.

This is why stewardship is so important to me. I never feel like I can afford to waste a day.

When I think about gratefulness, I think about all the things I’m still able to do. I can go out by myself, ride my bike, record content, edit videos, write blogs, post to my website and social media, and coach other entrepreneurs.

I can cook, too. Well, I don’t plan to do too much of that anymore because the food here is delicious. 😂

Okay, I’m drifting.

But seriously, when I don’t encourage myself in the Lord, anxiety tries to take over. It wants to ruin my life. It wants me to doubt everything God has said about who I am.

You might be reading this and have your own ailment. Or maybe there are things you’re dealing with in your mind that nobody else knows about.

Today, I want to encourage you to DOUBT YOUR DOUBTS.

Don’t let your doubts convince you that God has forgotten you or that you can no longer do the things He’s called you to do.

Instead, I want to encourage you to steward every gift God has given you.

Focus on what you still have. Focus on what you can still do. And don’t waste the days you’ve been given.

I can’t get Seth Godin out of my head. It doesn’t count if you don’t ship it.

Every time I edit a video and ask myself, “Is this good enough?” I realize that I don’t get the final say. The market does.

I think it’s easy for us to get so caught up in our heads that we never do as much as we could because we become the judge and jury before we ever put anything out into the marketplace.

Once we ship it, we’ll find out soon enough whether it’s good enough.

Once we get the analytics, we can use that information to make our next set of content better. Maybe we need better hooks. Maybe we need better captions. Maybe we need to learn to communicate better.

None of those things happen if the ideas stay in our heads, the videos stay on our phones, and we never put them on social media.

We’re living in an exciting time when we can bypass all the gatekeepers.

The phone is one of the most powerful tools in the world. These days, we can hit that little red button, record, upload, and publish.

When we do that, we’re connected to the world.

You can encourage people. You can sell something that solves a problem. You can share a moment.

There has never been a time in human history when it was easier to build a personal brand.

However, it doesn’t count unless you ship it.

God gave you the vision. You wrote the vision down. Now what?

Have you ever thought about what happens behind the scenes when a director says, “Action!” and someone claps that little board in front of the camera? 

When the director says action, the scene starts.

But what if the person who wrote the movie got the deal signed, found the actors, and hired the director, but they never did anything else?

That would be a waste.

The movie would never become a blockbuster. It would never be talked about. All that potential would go to waste because nobody took action.

I wrote this for people who are building a business or plan to build one.

If you want to be completely unmissable, then you’ve got to take action. You’ve got to show up everywhere, and I mean everywhere.

Look at Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, and Facebook. I look at them as networks. They don’t charge me anything to show up and talk about my personal brand and what I offer the world.

If I want to be completely unmissable, then I have to be findable.

That means the idea can’t stay in my head. I have to take action.

If I don’t take action, then what was the point of God giving me the vision? What was the point of writing down the vision if I was just going to let it lie dormant?

Let’s call it what it is. This is stewardship.

If I type your name into Google, you should be findable. You should have a footprint.

I should be able to hear your voice, see your face, read what you’ve written, and know your convictions.

God gave you the vision. Now give the world something to see.

I remember the first time I heard that the subconscious mind is more powerful than the conscious mind. I’ll admit, it didn’t make much sense to me.

To keep it simple, think of your conscious mind as the part of your brain that you use to think about things on purpose. Your subconscious mind helps store what you learn and influences habits and automatic behaviors. Think about tying your shoes. You don’t have to think through every single step anymore. You just do it.

I said to myself, “I’m gonna try this.”

So I started going to sleep listening to a Bible plan. And I strictly stayed in the Gospels for a while. When I say a while, I mean almost two years straight.

Every now and then, I would mix in books. Eventually, I started adding more books.

Let me tell you something. It has changed my life.

I could be sitting quietly, and things from the Bible would play back in my mind as if I were listening to them through the app. I would retain so much information from books that it was unbelievable.

I was like, “Where has this been? This could’ve changed my life 20 years ago!”

But as I always say, we don’t know what we don’t know. And when we know better, we do better.

Honestly, there are some days when I wake up with so many ideas that I don’t even know what to do with them.

Over the past three years, I’ve experimented with what I feed my mind before going to sleep, and it’s changed the way I think, what I remember, and how I approach my day.

It will change your perspective when you really start to understand the conscious and subconscious mind and recognize that what you feed your mind matters.

So, what are you feeding yours?

If I could go back in time, there’s one thing I would’ve done earlier, and that’s master online sales.

I was blessed to do so many vendor events that I honestly can’t even count them all. And that’s outside of the 19 tours.

If I hadn’t met Nehemiah Weaver from Kingdom Promotions, I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to travel with Trip Lee, KB, and Jackie Hill Perry. I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to sponsor the NF tour. I wouldn’t have gotten the chance to do five tours with Jonathan McReynolds, and I would’ve never met Kirk Franklin and designed apparel for his tour.

All of those experiences were amazing.

But one thing hit me when I was out on the road.

I love what I’m doing, but this is also exhausting my body. How can I make money from home?

Now, there are a lot of people who understand this, and they take advantage of online sales early. But there are so many people I see missing this.

And don’t get me wrong. Vendor events are important. They ground you. They give you a chance to prove your concept and meet your audience face-to-face. There are so many perks.

I also hesitated to write this because I was the person who had a 5,000-square-foot building with six employees. But even then, a lot of that was made possible because of the online sales we were doing. So I understand how important it is.

I had to ask myself:

Do you want to be local, or do you want to be global?

If you’re going to be global, everything starts with proof of concept. Does the marketplace want what you’re selling?

Once you establish that, you can take that same concept and rinse and repeat.

This is important because it gives you a formula. It helps you build a system and establish infrastructure from the beginning.

This is what I call the foundation. The groundwork.

I don’t know why people wait to get their email strategy set up, but they do. And it’s probably because they just don’t know what they don’t know.

If they understood how important it was, they would build that framework from the beginning so that as new people enter their funnel, they can build relationships authentically.

I don’t care if you have a jewelry design company, a streetwear brand, or a fashion brand. It all starts with proof of concept, having an email strategy, and understanding pricing.

That’s a different blog for a different day.

But if you want to be global, you better learn how to master online sales.

It’s 5:30 AM, and I’m looking over my balcony as the sun peeks through the tall buildings. There’s a cool breeze and an energy I can’t explain.

It’s about 6:30 PM back home in Atlanta, Georgia, and I’m texting a few family members and friends. I’ve found myself in conversations using this phrase:

“Have a good night. I’m about to get my day started.”

The first week, I found myself thinking, What time is it on the East Coast?

But each day, as I become more present here in Vietnam, I find myself letting go of that connection to the clock back home.

Not because I’m trying to get rid of it in any way, but because I’m now fully embracing the culture and what’s around me.

A typical day might start with a coffee run, primarily for me because my wife is trying to stay away from coffee. But then we end up somewhere drinking milk tea and eating croissants, and I find myself loving those, too. 😂

I’m all in.

Then we might go get some pho.

I sat in a tea cafe the other day and wrote three blogs. I could’ve kept going, but we had a few things to do that day.

If we don’t feel like going out, which is rare because we love the area around us, then we might order through Grab, the equivalent of Uber Eats back home.

We take night walks. Sometimes, we find ourselves on the swinging bench right by some palm trees.

I always talk about the freedom of entrepreneurship, but I don’t think I’ve experienced it quite like I am these days.

My mind is free, and my body is free.

I finally realized that I can create from anywhere in the world. It feels amazing to be an entrepreneur and founder living abroad.

My mentor said something one day that took me by surprise.

He said he planned to drop one video per week on YouTube for the next 10 years and see what happens.

I had to sit with that for about 8 to 12 months because I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

I think it was hard for me to digest because I wasn’t thinking about the practice.

What is the practice?

The practice is basically what you do every single day.

Usually, we have a goal in mind. People are great at setting certain goals, but they’re not usually great at the everyday grind.

Everything is about the practice. You can call it the journey, or you can call it the process. No matter what you call it, this is where character is built.

The idea here is that the outcome will be the outcome, but everything is in the practice.

Because when you fall in love with the practice, that’s when you start to see patterns. Your mindset starts to change. You hit walls, and then you want to give up, but something in you says, “No, it’s time to level up.”

So yes, I set goals, and I set very big goals. But that’s just the target.

It’s what I do every day that makes the great difference.

So no, I don’t give two red cents about the outcome.

My heart is dedicated to the practice.

Because if you can commit to the practice long enough, the outcome will take care of itself. And even if it doesn’t turn out the way you planned, you’ll never be the same person you were when you started.

I’m not a rebel for the sake of being a rebel.

When you’re building a business, there are certain things that make sense. And then there are certain things where there are no rules, and you can make it your own.

Let me give you two examples.

I will die on the hill of this one: Do not build a brand until you’ve done a proof of concept. Anything else is foolish. And I’ll even be so blunt as to say it’s stupid. I said what I said.

Every brand should be focused on email retention because that’s where the money sits. It’s easier to take care of customers you already have and build their lifetime value than to constantly chase new customers.

I use those two examples to show you that these aren’t things you should go against the grain on just for the sake of being different. These are things you should look for ways to do better.

Now, when it comes to building a personal brand on social media, this is where you have the freedom to be you.

When I got back on social media in 2024, everything had shifted. And nowadays, things are moving even faster.

You have to look at the market and ask yourself, Does this make sense for me? Does this fit my personality and who I am?

One thing I didn’t want to do was get trapped creating content I didn’t love. I didn’t want to follow guidelines just for the sake of following guidelines. I wanted to be me.

So, in 2024, I created some content formats and used them for a while. I liked some, and I didn’t like others. So I got rid of the ones that didn’t work for me.

I continued experimenting in 2025, and now I’ve landed on four pillars that I absolutely love. They give me the freedom to be myself while still having structure and direction in my content.

My content pillars look something like this:

Henry C. Murphy’s Content Pillars

1. What I Know

Entrepreneurship, branding, and e-commerce.

2. What I Believe

My convictions, opinions, and the things I stand for.

3. What I’ve Lived

My experiences, lessons, and storytelling.

4. How I Live

The freedom of entrepreneurship, life through my Meta Glasses in Vietnam, and everything in between.

These pillars give me direction without putting me in a box.

I’m not trying to do what everybody else is doing, and I suggest you don’t either.

If something about my pillars works for you, take it and use it. That’s what it’s there for.

But whatever you do, don’t get so caught up building your personal brand that you become somebody you don’t want to be, creating content you don’t even enjoy making.

Build a brand that gives you the freedom to be yourself, not one that forces you to become somebody else.