The world of social media influencers is glittering and filled with all the stardom you can aspire for. These influencers shape public opinions and help brands engage deeper with their customer communities. It’s also quite lonely for them, their crowded social media fan universe notwithstanding.
Gaurav Taneja, aka Flying Beast, is an outlier in the social media world for many reasons. First, he’s a professional airline pilot who worked with Air Asia until last week, before he turned a whistleblower revealing the airline’s security malpractices. You can view his video titled “Reason Behind Suspension from my Pilot Job.”
Secondly, unlike most of the social media influencers who mostly focus on their own personas, Gaurav, his wife Ritu who is also an airline pilot, and their daughter, Rasbhari, are all part of the Flying Beast videos, together.
“I realised that I am better with the rawness, talking naturally without any scripts. For some others, scripts work better. You show what you want to show. I believe in transparency and that helps build deeper relationships with my audience,” Gaurav tells me in this episode of the Outliers podcast.
Over the years, Gaurav has shared his own mental health problems, relationships and many other issues openly with his followers.
“Mere basic instincts abhi bhi ander se shy waale hain (I’m still shy from inside),” he tells me in this podcast.
More importantly, there are life lessons from Gaurav’s career as an aviator, and as a social media influencer.
“If you have made some mistakes, don’t carry that baggage forward. Once you do a hard landing, you get stuck thinking how bad the landing was, what will the captain or co-pilots think, and so on. But it’s not over yet. You have to cool the engines, brake the aircraft, vacate the taxiway, take instructions from ATC, taxi to your parking bay, check left and right, and so on.”
“There will be times when the winds are gutsy and I will end up landing bad, but I should leave that then and there and focus on what lies ahead,” says Gaurav.
Tune in to this podcast to learn life lessons from flying and being a social media influencer.