Guy Reams (00:01.71)
Today is Day 172, the return of Ghosty.
So I have this personal project of taking on more self -disclosure. Basically the idea of being more revealing in my writing about me personally. And the reason I'm doing that is just to see how embarrassing it can be and how many people will pay attention to that. Just kind of being fun about it. So I've been diving into personal.
topics that are a little bit embarrassing, but very real. And I've noticed that an interesting trend has occurred. I'm not alone. Surprisingly, how many people have the same thing going on, even though I feel it's a personal issue. I realize that humanity is not all that different. Kind of interesting.
So on the subject of embarrassing topics, I wanted to broach the topic of imaginary friends from childhood. Yes, I had imaginary friends in childhood. In fact, I had quite a few of them. I had an army of them. Now before you start judging me, I want to relate the top five conclusions in modern day research. So behavioral science has come to five, I think,
major tenants about imaginary friends through children, because this is a phenomenon that occurs quite frequently, actually.
Guy Reams (01:36.142)
First, it's a regular aspect of development. Imaginary friends are considered normal. It's not weird. It's normal. It's not an indication of schizophrenia. It's not an indication of psychological problems. They can be wholly invented characters. They can be personifications of objects like stuffed animals or other things. And they can just be entirely invisible friends. Second,
Children with imaginary friends tend to display higher creativity and advanced social skills than other children. They are better storytellers. They have greater empathy for others because they practice social interactions with their imaginary friends. Third, they can provide emotional support. Sometimes kids don't have, now I had plenty of emotional support, but some children don't have emotional support.
and they may not be comfortable sharing thoughts or ideas with others. So, imaginary friends can provide that emotional support for them. Fourth, it helps them develop their language and cognitive development. Children with imaginary friends create complex narratives and the usage of a complex vocabulary. So, as a consequence, they tend to have greater reading comprehension and other cognitive abilities than other children.
Finally, they can help pave the way to real friendships. Now, the first four of those are something I can definitely see in my life. That definitely helped me. The last one, I always struggled with building friendships in school in my younger ages because I just was weird, let's be honest. I was just a weirdo and as a consequence, I always struggled. I was always thinking differently than other people. Now, that brings me to,
Ghosty. Now, Ghosty was my first imaginary friend that I must have developed really early on, like probably pre -K. And Ghosty was with me for quite some time. I don't know how many people I actually told about Ghosty, if at all. This might be the first time I've ever revealed Ghosty's identity, other than to maybe my sister.
Guy Reams (03:49.517)
But he was a very prominent imaginary friend with me. Now, of course, Ghosty was joined by various others and they all helped me do things. Like if I was playing games by myself, I would bring in my imaginary friends to play with me. If was practicing basketball or some sport, I would bring my imaginary friends with me. When I was doing something scary or unnerving, my imaginary friends would help me through it. When I was alone on the playground or whatever, I would, my imaginary friends would be with me. And Ghosty was always there.
Now, I wasn't very imaginative in my preschool days, so I could have come up with a better name. But I didn't have chat GPT around, so I couldn't go research really cool imaginary friend names. So Ghosty was what it was.
Now, what's interesting is, you know, so much to my surprise, while I was walking the other day, I walked by a playground. And in my mind's eye, I imagined the ghostie was there looking at me. Some 40 years later, a ghostie is there looking at me, smiling at me. What had actually happened is I was walking around. I was.
practicing a presentation that I had to give. And don't worry, I had my earbuds in, so if anybody saw me, they would just think I was talking on the phone, so don't worry. But I was listening, I was talking through my pitch, my presentation, or what I was gonna say to this group of people. And you know, I wanted to rehearse not only what I was gonna say, but how I felt people would react, what questions they might ask me.
how they might, you know, what they might conclude from what I was saying. So I was imagining that presentation in my mind. Well, that's when I started thinking about, well, this is a lot like when I was a child, because when I was a child, I would have these imaginary friends that I would run scenarios by, just to test and gauge reactions from people. And I'd have various different types of personalities. Ghosty was always that cool kid that I couldn't be.
Guy Reams (06:04.877)
So I would run things past Ghosty to see how he would react in my mind. And so I thought, well, this idea of me giving this artificial presentation to an artificial group of people that I concocted in my mind is no different than that. So I thinking, why is it that imaginary friends are just a childhood thing? And I thought, well, actually they're not. I was on a conference call a couple days ago with an entrepreneur.
And the entrepreneur was talking a lot about what he called his ICP. This refers to ideal customer profile. So he was envisioning what his ideal customer was like. And he could describe his ideal customer down to the very car that that person drove. How much money was in their bank account? What they looked like? What cities they lived in? He was very descriptive about the customer that he was going after. And so I thought, an ICP doesn't sound that much different than
an imaginary friend. In fact, the reason we create an ICP in business is because we want to do all the things that a kid does when they're developing their personality as a child. We want to know our ICP so that we can develop our business more in a more mature fashion because we want to develop our business around that customer profile. We want to improve our social message marketing by making sure our messaging appeals to a particular audience. We want.
to build in a support structure so that when our ideal customer comes into our company, we are providing them with all the things that that customer would want. We're building better language and messaging and communications around the ICP. And then finally, we're hoping eventually that ICP will become real. We'll have real customers buying from us that match very closely to that ICP. So this is no different than a kid's imaginary friend. So it led me to the conclusion that,
You know what? There's not that much of a difference between having imaginary friends and having imaginary customer profiles or imaginary people you're going to present to or imaginary people you have to talk to or interview with or people that you have to interview. So yeah, this idea of imaginary friends is not such a bad idea at all. In fact, I think maybe as we got older, people are beating this down. Now I remember when I lost Ghosty when he disappeared and it was right around middle school.
Guy Reams (08:32.909)
And I remember, you know, there was some kids that I wanted to be cool like them. So they were all wearing penny loafers. So I convinced my mom to let me buy penny loafers. So we went to Payless Shoe Source and we bought penny loafers. And then all the kids were listening to Bruce Springsteen. But I didn't hear it right. I thought they said Bruce Springsteen.
I thought they said Rick Springfield. I didn't know they said Bruce Springsteen. And I didn't know the difference. So I went and bought a Rick Springfield album, not understanding the difference. I don't know, I got mixed up between Springfield and Springsteen. Well, that was really embarrassing because Springfield was not cool. Springsteen was cool. So I messed that up. But anyway, Ghosty was ashamed of me. He was like, how dare you.
comply with these, how dare you give in to the peer pressure and become like one of those preppy kids. So Ghosty bailed on me, because he was no longer interested. Because, you know, Ghosty was the cool kid. He was the cool kid wearing the Clash t -shirt or whatnot, right? So I've missed out on that. So anyway, so Ghosty has finally come back into my life. It's been 50 years. And Ghosty's now back. And...
I noticed something a little bit different about Ghosty. He's no longer that punk kid that he was in middle school. Ghosty is now more like what I want to be. Ghosty is that ideal guy, that person I want to be in 10, 15 years from now. So I'm very excited that I have welcomed to Ghosty back in my life. And I would encourage you to utilize your imagination to create your ideal customer.
your ideal investor, your ideal friend, your ideal, whatever it happens to be. With that, I'll say thank you.