Scott Perry (who I met via Seth Godin’s Akimbo workshops years ago) and I love talking about escaping social media, something he’s achieved after my incessant nagging over the last few years during his Creative On Purpose membership calls! Hah!

Escaping social media requries leaveing behind the idea of trying to reach everyone. It’s not about volume, it’s about the right people coming into your orbit.

Before we worry about marketing or growth, Scott says we need to ask, “who are you, what are you good at, where do you belong?”

Do we belong on crowded apps, mashing our creative round pegs into algorithmic controlled square holes for the likes?

Or do we belong in places more suitable for the work we’re trying to make?

Kate Ellen talked to us about using a Light Phone. It can’t stream music, and adding your own is clunky. Sometimes friction can lead to real life possibilities:

“I just have been listening to the radio in my car. And the interesting outcome to that is that I’ve gotten to know the local radio stations in my town who are super supportive of local musicians. And through that… now I’m at the point where I’m getting booked for a show, and I’m like, okay, now I have the confidence to actually call this radio station so that I can go on the radio station and promote my music. Which, if I was just listening to Spotify… I just wouldn’t even have had the context of understanding my community.”

An artist can thrive locally; I know several who’ve stepped off the social media hamster wheel and are doing just fine.

When we stop making the phone the central part of our day we begin to realize that the real life possibilities never went away, we just stopped looking for them.

During a recent Substack Live someone ask about spending more time on Substack Notes to grow their subscribers, and I suggested they make better use of that time by sending an extra newsletter to their subscribers.

My job is to make great work, and maybe that’s your job, too. The byproduct is someone enjoying that work.

My work is better today because I’m introduced to great people on Substack Notes. That lead to new ideas which I can share with my subscribers.

People like Maria Popova and Jason Kottke made a career from this. They curate, inform, and share, and they’ve built an audience that supports this work. They’ve become trusted curators of inspiration by being curious, and then sharing the results of that curiosity with their readers.

You can be that trusted source, too.

I spend time on Substack Notes because of the amazing artists, writers, photographers, all doing their thing. Some of those things inform my writing. Recently Caroline’s newsletter was the basis of my last newsletter, which came from this post.

But I also find inspiration from the wide open web; I’ve got almost 100 blogs I follow in my RSS reader, and I subscribe to hundreds of newsletters.

Curate the best items you find (which most of your readers will never find on their own), and share it with your newsletter subscribers.

Simon Lahaie posted this recently, reflecting on one of my Substack Live streams:

“You can’t create being drained” a sentence from a recent Live Seth Werkheiser. What a relief it was for me to acknowledge this.

I’M DRAINED. And I’m still blaming myself for not feeling the energy to create. Ha!

How do you manage to keep enough liquid inside your tank?

Putting my reply here because I don’t want it to just live on Substack, but rather it can live here, too, for everyone to find:

SETH: “For me – OTHER PEOPLE. I can’t help but be stoked from doing calls with people. Setting up time for a weekly Zoom. Texting some folks. I feed off their creative energy and zest, and maybe it’s not ALLL DAY, but it’s enough to get some jolts of good stuff out there (or at least planning good stuff for sometime down the line).”

SIMON: “I’m curious, do you have a specific strategy to manage Drainage generated by the day job (or any recurring situation where we have limited control over)?”

SETH: “Just gotta do SOMETHING that lights you up that’s related to the thing you wanna do.

Scrolling YouTube shorts for 20 minutes while eating cake is nice and all, but then I have to go back to the thing I don’t like.

Whereas 20 minutes replying to emails related to the work I love doing… or writing a quick bit to a newsletter… making a video… updating something on my website… ANYTHING related to the thing I WANT to be doing. Just do that.

Because doing the THING I LOVE all the time would be awesome.. but the next best thing is doing it for 10 minute… 20…. or just 1 minute.”

If we want until we can do “the thing we love” full time, we’ll be waiting a long time. Just like, you can just start. Just take one step, set a timer for five minutes, and just what you can. Give yourself a glimpse of what it could look like, so you can recognize how you want to feel.

Caroline in the Garden, a musician in Atlanta, recently wrote, “I’m disgusted with myself over my phone use,” saying “my phone usage during this ‘publicity cycle’ was getting to be upwards of 6-7 hours a day.”

They’ve since deleted the social media apps and wrote a new song.

That can happen when we don’t spend all our time on social media.

How grand could we be if we spent 6-7 hours a day on your craft? Or just three? One?

That’s not possible, right?

(more…)

I opened Josh Spector’s email recently, and saw this:

“As the artist, as the creative person… I’m the lead magnet.”
​
This line from Seth Werkheiser’s Social Media Escape Club newsletter resonated deeply with me.
​
He went on to say:
​
​“People signed up for me, so they’re getting me. And if people get huffy about it and unsubscribe?
​
Bye.
​
I don’t want to hold back. I’m not a magazine. I don’t have editors. I want to write what I want to write.”​
​
Exactly.

That quote game from this newsletter, which actually came from one of the weekly Zoom calls I host every week.

This is why it’s so important to talk about your work. Like, out loud. With friends. Over dinner. In the mirror. On a podcast. Speak the things you do, refine it.

This isn’t about an elevator pitch (who buys things in elevators?), but about the depth and distance that the words you speak might travel.

If words can make us cry (from a break up), or jump for joy (“we’d like to offer you this position”), then surely our words can do the same.

I love this “extremely non-comprehensive list of ways to increase your surface area for luck and magic and synchronicities and signs,” from Holisticism.

Make something with your hands without multitasking. I like to call these “quiet thought hobbies.” Cook dinner slowly. Write a letter to your international bestie. Arrange flowers. You can’t do magic while you’re multitasking — presence is the prerequisite.

And…

“Lying to yourself about your wants is a great way to sever the inner connection to your intuitive self. Get the pizza. Go with your instinct. Trust yourself, see what happens. Maybe on your walk to the pizza shop you’ll notice a picture in the main window of a gallery; you take a picture to reverse image search and find that the artist is living, and actually resides on the street next to yours, and has an email on their website, and you reach out to do a studio visit and BOOM, they become your creative mentor. You never know which one door will open the next. Maybe your intuition knows something your practical mind doesn’t.”

There is a time and place for email lists and DNS settings and websites, but before all of that is the very human element of existence, and you’d be wise to prioritize that before everything else.

Without the energy of life there’s no art, and therefore no need for landing pages and press kits.

Denna Seymour asked me a question I get a lot: “how do you get new people when you’re not on social?”

By doing cool stuff with cool people, just like this.

I did that Lex Roman mixer thing, met interesting people, you and I connected, and now we’re talking. A few people listening to this are gonna be like, “Who’s this guy?” They’re gonna click over, and a couple of them are gonna be like, “This is cool,” and they’re gonna subscribe.

And I just keep doing that over and over again. I reach out and try to get people to do Substack Lives with me — come on, we’ll do a live stream together. They tell people, “Next Tuesday I’m talking live with so-and-so.” I put that on my website, they tell their friends, and so on.

I literally try to do that week after week after week, like 50 weeks a year. Get on a podcast, do a live, do a live stream — over and over again. That’s how I do it.

Everyone is different, and has varying bandwidth for their marketing and outreach efforts.

Have you tried billboards? Sky writing? I’m half-kidding, of course, but there’s a million different things you can do between social media and doing nothing. It’s up to you to find what works for you.

Listen to “Building a Business Without Social Media with Seth Werkheiser” here.