If you’re going to leave social media, you need somewhere to go. Somewhere to put your attention.

Like leaving the house – where are you going? Leaving a bad relationship or workplace – you need to physically and mentally go somewhere else.

So leaving social media isn’t just about newsletters and websites and screen time, because honestly we’re taking multiple hours per day and putting them somewhere else. Where do we move that attention?

For me, that’s been walking. I’ve started a movement practice, as Cody Cook-Parrot speaks of in their book The Practice of Attention (affiliate link).

Take a moment now to consider what forms of movement feel accessible, enjoyable, and grounding for you. Maybe it’s dancing alone in your kitchen, stretching when you rise in the morning, biking along a trail or to work, tending your garden.

I can just slip out the door for 20 minutes, see a neighbor, pet a dog, see a cat, listen to the crows – things that much more enjoyable than the firehose of “content” I get from scrolling.

Just as we don’t stare at social media for three straight hours, I also don’t walk for three straight hours a day. But a mile here, an hour walk there, and by the end of the day I’ve covered 10 miles. This is something (at the time of writing this) I’ve done for 63 days in row (and covered 720 miles).

So maybe try spending 10 minutes writing lyrics, or painting, or writing, or humming a melody into your voice notes – what could add up to hours per day that would “feel accessible, enjoyable, and grounding for you?”

Where could you put your attention? What could your “720 miles” look like for your creative journey?

The shows and movies we loved used to come on VCR tapes, or discs. We’d watch hours at a time, one program, show, or movie at a time.

Now we watch a flurry of brief story lines, bloopers, sports high lights, movie scenes, dancing, crashes, breaking news, podcast interviews – hours of “content” ingested a few seconds at a time.

It’s no wonder we’re exhausted after just 20 minutes of “relaxing.”

Then we spend hours per day trying to cram our work into that whirlwind, and we’d be lucky if a few people will even see it.

That’s why I think it makes more sense to find those “few people” in other places – local and online communities, reaching out, collaborating, interacting with the people doing the same level of work in our creative orbit.

Sure, maybe we “only” reach a few people from all that, but this effort is foundational, building the skills and sense of how to navigate the human to human world of making all this work.

The thing that comes easy might just be your big thing, which came up in a recent conversation about selling. It’s easy to get stuck in the mindset of “this is easy for me, so it must not be valuable.”

Sometimes I feel like these blog posts aren’t my finest work. But then I’ll include one in a newsletter and get five email replies like, “this was so good!”

But the filters of perfection and safety hold us back, or the idea that our work has to be hard. Maybe trust in the “easy thing” and see where it lands.

You made a product, a service, an offering, an album, and now you want to sell it, and damn – selling is hard.

None of it is simple! None of this is plug and play!

Trust, people, communities, communication, being associated with other people, and the lending of credibility, building our own credibility, reputation, alignment – WHEW! These are things that help the sale, but it’s a million different factors that get you to the finish line.

And like Stephen Dorr said on a recent call: experiments.

No one woke up one day and had it all figured out, or watched the right YouTube video and arrived at the answer – they tried things, tested things, over and over again to discover what worked for them.

Cody Cook-Parrott is having a summer sale, six classes for $99. Lo-Fi Ghosts sells their monthly mail club like this, and the Catdrool Club is sold like this. Darla Jackson is “offering up 100 tiny rabbits at a Summer Sale rate.”

And those are just some sales-page examples – everyone has their own way of marketing and promoting and reminding people of their offerings!

A great comment from Laura Van Buskirk, “knowing your angle that actually gets results and that part of the process takes elbow grease and experience to figure out.”

Do you want to cut three hours of screen time from your day? Walk / run 10+ miles per day! This evening I will have done this for 60 days, coming in at just over 675 miles (1086 km), about 11.25 miles per day.

No, I don’t do it all at one time, I chip away at it with multiple walks per day, like Tara Dower who set the Appalachian Trail southbound FKT (Fastest Known Time) in 40 days and 18 hours, or Alex McCormack, riding 3,826.47 km (2377.65 mi) over seven days.

Okay, I’m not just like them, of course! But my walking practice (something I picked up from Cody Cook-Parrott’s “The Practice of Attention” (affiliate link) is something I can do everyday, as a nice little challenge to myself.

What’s something you could do for three hours everyday?

Substack rolled out an AI detection system using Pangram, and it’s kicked up more questions than answers.

​This is well beyond “did AI write this?”

​Did we opt-in to have all our writing scanned? Is our work used to train AI models? Where does that data go?

​When (not if) the detector gets it wrong, what are the consequences for the writer? Can we appeal?

​And underneath all of this, what kind of culture are we building? Are we putting our trust into the hands of Pangram? Are we building a paranoid creative surveillance state on an AI service? And who’s paying for it?!

​So many questions.

​We won’t settle all of this in an hour. This is a room to bring your reactions and feelings and talk about it with other people figuring it all out. There’s no right answer here, or perfect outcome, but we can get together with others as we look ahead.

Thursday, July 30 at 2:00 PM EDT → https://luma.com/fro6y0r8
Monday, Aug 3 at 9:00 AM EDT → https://luma.com/xo7xogcm

It was only recently that we were expected to always be available. This from Nicholas Bate (via Patrick Rhone):

“Life was shaped, from edge to edge, by scarcity and by natural limits. The shop shut. The night fell. The letter took three days. You were, for long stretches, simply out of reach.”

We drove across town to pick up groceries without a phone. We drove across state lines. We drove in snow storms and heavy rain.

Without a phone.

Yes, of course the phone comes in handy in emergency situations, but now everything is seemingly an emergency sitatuion, from breaking news, shipping alerts, album announcements, Slack notifications.

When are we ever out of reach?

I got to join someone else’s community call and talk about topic everyone wants an answer to: “how do I pull back from social media and still find work / clients / opportunities?”

In other words, “all the work / clients /opportunities are on social media, and if I leave, I’m ruined.”

I usually ask folks if they’ve tried renting billboards when they ask me this. They look at me like I have three heads, and then I tell them I’m joking. How about sky writing? Print ads? Hand bills? Direct mail?

There are 1,000 different ways to “reach” people, and 10,000 different people explaining those 1,000 different ways.

That leaves us a million variables, and then we look up and realize that we’re just talking about the marketing, when so often we forget to talk about the offer or the product or the market or the demand.