Category: Social MediaCategory: Social Media

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.

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.

Everything you post, big or small, can inform the next thing you post. This from Debbie Weil, emphasis mine:

“I had decided not to publish this week; my editor Erin Shetron was taking a week off to drive across country, as she moves from Oregon to Philly. So I figured I’d take a week off too. But I missed writing and publishing; I pulled out my laptop yesterday afternoon and wrote this in about three hours. It’s not deep or difficult (it’s partially based on some Notes I wrote earlier).”

Your ardent supporters are on your email list, but most will never see your Note on Substack, or a random post on Threads, so repurpose that work for your subscribers!

I’ve said this for years – if you’ve been posting on social media for years, writing your next newsletter is easy, because it’s already written.

Most of your followers didn’t see your latest social media post, so re-use the photos and text and ideas and craft them into your next newsletter, where more people will see it. Give those “random posts” oxygen, new life – you never know where they might lead with the right attention!

NOTES TO NEWS LETTERS ZOOM CALL
Thursday, May 14 at 2:00 PM EDT
Replay available if you sign up.
Pay what you want, starting at $3.00
Register for the Zoom call here: https://luma.com/fku24gz8

Meg Lewis recently posted “The Grown-Up’s Guide to Growing Down,” a permission slip to skip acting our age:

“The way out is to tap into humanity, love, joy, curiosity, and play. Just like we were all born to do. The adults want us to think doing this is nonsensical and ‘childish’. But ‘childish’ is a term created to keep us alienated from what we were all supposed to be this whole time.”

Grown ups say we need to be on every social media platform, save 10% using the code BORING for our lame Square Space site, sand off all the corners of our personality, and definitely listen to what everyone says on YouTube.

Instead, we can just never log into LinkedIn again.
We can stop playing venues that serve alcohol.
Stop chasing book publishers or record labels.

We can make the things we want, the way we wanna make ’em.

So hey, sign up to hang out with Meg and I on Thursday’s Escape Pod Zoom call, and hear how Meg is navigating her own Candy Land world and soak up the inspiration from her and others living how they wanna live!

ESCAPE POD #118 W/ SPECIAL GUEST MEG LEWIS
Thursday, May 7th at 2:00pm EST
Replay available if you sign up.
Register for the Zoom call here: https://luma.com/jzdkvpp2

I get to talk to a lot of creative people, and whenever I mention the whole “having a website,” folks tune out. I think this happens because for the last decade we’ve been hammering our creative round pegs into the templated square hole website builder platforms, and they feel gross.

Not to mention we’ve been throwing our best work onto social media platforms, where at least we get some LIKES and replies on occasion, right (even when hardly anyone sees them).

For me, posting to my site (like right now) is lower stakes writing. I don’t need to think about if an algorithm will pick it, or if someone might misinterpret me and leave a nasty comment.

This site exists between something like Morning Pages, which no one will see, or a full-blown email newsletter, which goes to thousands of people.

Here is where ideas germinate, in public, with just enough tension. Something I write is likely to be referenced a week from now, or even a year (or more) later.

“My blog posts inform the posts I haven’t written yet, they become the solutions to problems I didn’t know I had. They get referenced in member calls and workshops. They become subconscious scripts for future conversations I’ll have months from now.”

Good ideas have to start somewhere.