Meet Reid Quiggins

We were lucky to catch up with Reid Quiggins recently and have shared our conversation below.

Reid, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?

I think my work ethic comes from my years of long-distance running. In the process of training for a race, there will be hundreds of days where you don’t feel like getting out of bed and getting the work done for any number of reasons: it’s cold, your training partner can’t make the workout, your body isn’t feeling great, you name it. But any great runner will tell you these are the days it’s most important to show up. Doing the thing when its least appealing, when it’s the last thing your mind wants to do builds the consistency required to produce extraordinary results in the long-term. The process of showing up every day to run and not trying to do anything amazing, but simply putting in the repetitions required to get better has trained my work ethic. More importantly, it’s trained my mindset to not give up when one thing goes wrong. So often, the winners in any realm are just the last ones standing, not those that were most talented to begin with. Therefore, I’ve learned how crucial it is to show up day after day and learn from your mistakes.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I’m Reid and I help young people live more and scroll less. I communicate this message through my viral Instagram series “Dutch Baby Detox” where I provide my audience mindful messaging around attention span, focus, and screen time while showing them how to make a different flavor of Dutch Baby Pancake – a giant, baked, eggy pancake that I first learned how to make back in high school. I just passed the 1-year mark for the account and have grown my community to over 330,000 followers, and now my focus is turning to building a sustainable, monetized platform on top of my content. In the coming weeks I’ll be launching my first limited wave of Dutch Baby Detox apparel which will allow my audience to rep the brand and have a constant reminder to live mindfully and spend less time on screens.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

1) iterative improvement 2) growth mindset 3) passion

The three qualities that have served as the backbone of my success to this point are a growth mindset, a process of iterative improvement, and passion for what I’m doing. When you’re first starting out, it’s easy to view a video that hardly gets any views as a complete failure and feel like you have to start from ground zero on your next one. However, I’ve found that viewing each video as a stepping stone in the process to producing content that you’re proud of and can attract viewership is the way to go. There are always positives to take away from a final product, even if it’s just a tiny new technique you tried with video editing or a different shot you got while filming that looked cool. On the flip side, tying in with my second point is that results lag behind output, and so I’ve found it critical to maintain a growth mindset and focus on inputs rather than outputs. What I mean is that momentum on social media is real, and at the beginning, you just won’t have any. Still, your content will be getting better and better each time, and maintaining a hunger for learning and improving will shorten the time period it takes to get to a place where you have carry-over momentum from video to video. At the same time, maintaining almost a stoic, head-down improvement process and growth mindset aren’t possible if you’re not truly passionate about the content you’re producing. When things get hard you WILL give up if it’s not important to you. And things will get hard. It’s inevitable. Therefore, it’s essential that instead of chasing views, followers, and money, you’re seeking positive impact on the world. That is ultimately what will keep you afloat long enough to find success.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

Atomic Habits has easily been the most influential book in my development, and for good reason. James Clear demystifies how to build good habits that support your goals and break bad ones that detract from them using the four laws of behavior change: make it attractive, easy, rewarding, and obvious. These laws have all been extremely helpful as I’ve sought to build systems that make it as simple as possible to produce as great of content as I can. Something as easy as patting myself on the back (make it rewarding) after finishing filming allows for positive checkpoints in the process and makes it less demotivating when the results aren’t always there.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reidsactivekitchen/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reid-quiggins-414704204/