Look For The Truth

In the next couple of months I’m going to be relaunching a podcast.  This will be the 4th time I’ve started from scratch with any sort of presence online other than writing.  After the last time I did this I got so burned out I swore off anything that wasn’t writing.  But I can’t deny the power of podcasts and social media for spreading a message.  The problem has been anxiety and burnout everytime I use social media.  I’ve figured out 2 critical points that I’m taking into this iteration:

1. Nobody knows precisely how any of these platforms work – I don’t use social media for any personal reason.  I watch YouTube videos and listen to podcasts partially for entertainment but more so for the education factor.  I have no desire to be on Facebook or Instagram or any of the other social platforms.  I try to be very mindful of how much time I’m spending on YouTube and Spotify.
   
   That said, I have often made the mistake of believing I don’t know anything about social media.  Therefore, I have often felt the need to take advice from other people about how to spread content on social media.  But here’s the problem, most of the people whose advice I’ve listened to are only consumers of content, not creators.  Furthermore, these platforms are changing all the time.  Even if you are a creator, the platforms could adjust their algorithm tomorrow and that could be more or less favorable to whatever you create. 
   
   So often I’ve been told to create content every day and put it on every platform possible.  Though I didn’t like the sound of it, I would try to do it thinking that I don’t know anything.  Everytime, I burnout.  I end up hating even the sight of my phone and deleting everything I made because I’m so damn disgusted with all of it. 
   
   Nobody knows precisely how these things work.  What we know is that it appears that people have been able to build some sort of income by spreading their content online via platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and Instagram etc. I say ‘appears’ because I’ve only personally talked to one person that’s ever claimed to have made a living from making content online.  I never saw this person’s financials so I can’t even verify that.  I know I discover new people on Spotify and I know that I have purchased products made by some of the individuals I’ve discovered.  Particularly, books they’ve written. 
   
   I’m going to start with a podcast.  It’s easy enough to crank out an audio recording based on an article I’ve already written to my blog.   We’ll see how long I’m able to stick with this.  No promises.  Which leads to my next point…
   
2. Make what you want to make, the way you want to make it, at the pace you want to make it –
   
   ‘Reply to all the comments’
   
   ‘You need Instagram, facebook, TikTok, SnapChat, Linkedin, YouTube, Whatsapp, Discord, Spotify… You need to be Everywhere and you need to update your website’
   
   ‘You need to do a motivational minute every day with giveaways’
   
   I’ve heard multiple versions of all of this over the last 10 years.  Annoying as hell!  Again, all this advice was almost never from someone who was creating content themselves, on some regular basis.  95% of the time this was coming from people who were consumers of content like I mentioned earlier.  They follow someone online who has particular habits for posting their content.  Therefore, they extrapolate that I should follow those same habits to achieve the same kind of exposure.  But, correlation is not causation.  Just because someone else makes 10 pieces of content a day does not mean that specific strategy is the only way to build awareness online. 
   
   I believe as a creator you have to make things that you want to make.  I think it’s a safe bet to say that if you start making things you don’t want to make or you start making things at a pace that’s not comfortable to you, you’ll probably stop making things at some point.  It seems true that the more you create, then there are more pieces of content online that have the potential to spread.  However, what I have found for myself is that if I begin creating in mediums I don’t enjoy (particularly video on various social media apps) at a pace that exceeds my ability to do it well, then I end up burning out and I hate the content I created because I did it in a way that wasn’t authentic to me.  I’m guessing that’s true for most people.  If it’s natural to you to make 20 pieces of online content every day for every conceivable platform, do it.  If it’s natural for you to write one blog post a month for your personal website, do that.  Create the things you want to create at a pace that allows you to stay in the game for a long time (like years to come).    

At the end of the day I don’t think it’s helpful to try to spend my time reverse engineering virality.  I have to write and speak from the heart in a way that I can look at myself in the mirror and be proud of what I’ve done.  No amount of money or attention will supersede that for me.    

This relates to the stories we tell ourselves in the modern world about what it takes to succeed.  I think people have always given their advice from a good place but what is often overlooked is the fact that some things just take a lot of time and work to see to fruition.  This post is late this morning because I’ve been writing a speech based on my book.  If you remember from a few posts ago, this was one of the reasons I burned out on motivational speaking.  I didn’t have a core philosophy (the book) and core speech.  This meant that every time I gave a presentation I was starting from scratch.  That wore me out.

As I’m preparing to begin marketing myself as a speaker again, I’m looking at the facts from the last time I did it.  I’m trying to be careful to separate those facts from the assumptions I made last time.  I assumed I didn’t know anything about social media.  I assumed that certain people close to me would be more receptive to my message.  I assumed that there was some business expertise out there that I didn’t have.  All of these assumptions were wrong.  The facts are I’ve been told numerous times by people who have read my writing that I’m a good writer.  I’ve been told many times by people who have heard me speak that I have a powerful story and I’m a fantastic speaker.  I know that I enjoy both.  So I’m going to keep going.

We have to keep looking for what we know to be true and try to make the best assumptions we can from that starting point.  From there, as with any significant goal, we have to show up consistently to do the work and allow time to do the rest.

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