Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Shradical, makers of high-performance helmets with built-in front and rear LED lights. Look good, be seen, and stay safe – check ‘em out here.

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I believe that finding work and interesting opportunities can come from your existing contact list and network. The creative people in your orbit.

Since I started playing music in the late 90s, and made a music blog back in 2001, I’ve met a lot of people so, sure, it’s easy for me to offer this advice.

Q: What if you don’t have decades of contacts to pull from?

A: Start being around the people you need to be around. Today. Right now.

Social media has led us to believe we can find success as “lonely content machines, but the adventure becomes easier with other people by your side.

THE MUSIC BLOG

In 2005 I was four years into the “I’m a music blogger” thing, and that’s when I met someone that I didn’t know would change my life (and it would take half my life to realize it).

Sean Cannon started helping with my music blog, and we worked together up until 2008, when I handed him the site because I started another music blog for AOL Music called Noisecreep.

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Saw this question on Substack Notes from Aishwarya Vardhana, and figured I’d make a full post about it because I see it a lot.

Go to the profile of the people you already subscribe to and find out what they’re reading! You’re probably subscribed to some quality folks, and I bet they subscribe to good folks, too.

Relying on the Substack Notes algorithm (or any algorithm, like Spotify) to show you exactly what you’re looking for is a waste of time. As you can see, I Subscribe to a lot of people – maybe you’ll find something from my list!

Do your own homework, and seek out the sort of materials you want to consume via your own network.

And don’t be afraid to ask your friends (and even your subscribers) what they’re reading, too. You just never know who you’ll discover along the way.

Spend time setting up a new social media account, and in five years you’ll be right back where you started.

I’ve seen this song and dance before. We’ve learned nothing from the days of Xanga, MySpace, and Facebook. What was the name of the app that’d replace Instagram?

“I’m wondering if another social media network is really the answer we need.”

It’s time to build something that lasts – your own website, a homebase on the internet that becomes the primary source of all the work you put out into the world.

A place where casual fans can turn into bigger fans of your work.

Now, most “build your own website” services make websites that are good enough, but your work deserves so much more.

“We are the creative professionals who base our entire careers on making things look interesting.

Why would we stop with our branding, our collateral material, and – for the love of God – our website?

We are in the world of visual excellence. We should make visual excellence the priority feature of our brand.” Photographer Don Giannatti 

• Roman Muradov made a micro-site for his comic, and Diana Pappas & Tom Bland made a site for their photo & video shoot location titled Meadow, both using Cargo.
• Cody Cook-Parrott uses Notion to explain their upcoming classes.
• My interplanetary commuter music project (Hunterthen) needed a website, so I built one using Carrd. MMM is another website builder, but weirder.
• You could upload HTML files to YAY.BOO, made by A Good Enough Newsletter (they make Pika, too, which is a neat little blogging platform).
• I have a WordPress guy, and they set up my blog sethw.xyz in 2018, and I’ve been manually importing photos and posts dating back to 2004. I can introduce you.

You can do whatever you want!

Relying on a platform to get it right is hard because platforms are made up of people, and it’s hard for people to get it right for everyone all the time.

I was on the phone with my buddy Dino Corvino the other day, bumming about the recent election, and he said, “Someone in your town is hungry; make them a sandwich.”

I searched “Thanksgiving volunteer (your town)” in Google and found a local non-profit organizing meals for the upcoming holidays. I told a friend, and we went out and bought three meals for people needing a Thanksgiving dinner.

Today, for me, that’s my answer to all this.

From Embedded:

“It’s time to stop ceding our humanity to these platforms. It’s time to invest back into IRL community. It’s time to stop 24/7 scrolling social media—you will not find the answers there.”

I’ll find more of the answer when I drop off these three boxes of meals later this week because the answer is people, not platforms.

We need more people working on bringing joy into the world instead of uploading vertical videos for no one to see.

As Alice Katter says,

“The systems we live and work in today are human-made; they were created by people. So, why not create something different? That’s the beauty of creativity — it has the power to overcome established rules and even the language we use daily.”

Get to know the people who work at your local record shop, music store, gas station, library, or grocery store.

Say hi to your neighbors. Tell other creative people you like their work. Start Zoom hangs or phone calls with your friends.

Start a blog, an email list, a neighborhood group, a community meeting of artists, or gardeners, or joggers.

Conversely, don’t hang out with people who drain your energy. Set boundaries. Cut people from your life if you need to. Yes, even family. Life is short.

Spare me the “echo chamber” talk. We can have different opinions about economic policies and football teams, but if you think people I love don’t deserve basic human rights, well, go fuck yourself.

Yes, we should continue throwing stones at Spotify and Apple and Facebook and Amazon, but we can also do the work of engaging our communities for the benefit of humanity at the same time.

We can create new systems, new ways of working, new ways to show our work. I know it’d be super cool if I just laid out all the answers for your super-niche category, but I promise that you already have the ideas inside of you.

Do the thing you want to do. Most people won’t see what you’re doing anyway, so you might as well do it how you want.

Email someone way up the food chain. Go to the event. Ask for an introduction. Make your own luck. Your next big break could be one email, one interaction, one person away.

Hitting the viral jackpot on social media won’t save you, but building genuine connections with people around you just might.

We’re not meant to stare at our phones for several hours every day. As Tuğba Avci says:

“It isn’t easy, but we need to start treating our mental and emotional health with the same importance as our physical health. You wouldn’t run a marathon every day, would you? So why do we subject ourselves to this communication madness for 12 hours straight?”

We make ourselves more available to anyone at any time, as we might be on several different social media platforms and their DM inboxes and replies, Slack channels and Discords, and managing multiple email inboxes.

As Seth Godin recently wrote:

“You might not have thought you’d be spending seven hours a day reading the internet, or most of your free time posting and responding, but that’s what the social media companies have pushed us to do.

We’re so scared of leaving social media because we’ve been led to believe we’ll be alone without it.

So, how can we possibly live without social media?

We read books. Magazines. Visit our library and local bookstores. Join a knitting club or take a photography course. Learn a new skill or a language (or two).

We can play shows in weird venues. We do book clubs in diners (or Zoom). We make comic books and zines, podcasts on cassettes, and screen print our own posters.

We build websites, and we update them. We send newsletters that aren’t just digital product catalogs. We buy photo prints and postcards and vinyl from our friends, and if we’re broke we at least tell our friends about the cool things our friends are making.

We stop talking about the 900 things we read yesterday and instead tell stories of shit we’ve done, places we’ve been. Trust me, you’ve got stories.

We host dinners without cell phones. We make breakfast for friends. We talk up our friends who do good work with people who can hire them.

We start radio shows at the local college, make ambient music, make short films with our iPhones, and bring together friends to premiere our work over pizza and seltzers.

None of this is a guarantee. None of this goes viral, or brings in 100 new subscribers, or pays your rent.

None of this is easy.

People working at social media platforms made sure that posting a video is as easy as possible. That makes everything else feel like hard work.

But we need to do hard work because when done often enough, with good people, we create a scene and build culture. That’s how we find our people and start feeling less alone in all of this, because we can’t hang out at the food court at the mall on Friday nights forever.

Let’s start hosting our own Zoom calls, and meeting in basements, studios, and backrooms to create the creative world we want to inhabit.