Category: WorkCategory: Work

I’ve written about all the attention we’ve paid to social media platforms over the years.

I ran 1,105 miles in 2020, which took me around 200 hours. Scrolling 33 minutes daily on your phone adds up to about 200 hours a year, too.

Since May 26th, a few days after my 50th birthday, I decided to walk 10 miles a day. After a few too many months of inactiviy, I needed to get moving again. Walking this far takes me over three hours a day, so that’s three less hours of looking at my phone.

I talk about this a lot – the idea of taking the time we spend on social media and spending it on our craft. If we practiced our guitar more, wrote more poems, made more paintings, went for more walks, had more conversations, read more books – where could that lead?

Now, when I walked 10 miles that first day, nothing changed. But the hours add up, the miles add up, the movement adds up, and sometimes not in the most obvious ways. There’s no immediate prize, I just get to do it again the next day.

Walking 10 miles a day for 100 days didn’t lead to a finish line, but it reminds me of the concept of “increasing the surface area of luck.”

From James Clear (author of Atomic Habits):

“The forager who explores widely will find lots of useless terrain, but is also more likely to stumble across a bountiful berry patch than the person who stays home.

Similarly, the person who works hard, pursues opportunity, and tries more things is more likely to stumble across a lucky break than the person who waits.”

Spending three hours a day walking instead of scrolling has now led me to sign up for a “12 Hour Endurance Trail Run.” There’s a five mile trail loop, and I get to do it as many times as I can in 12 hours, with 200+ other people

It’s a new thing to go to, meet some people, have some conversations, and a whole lot of “getting out of my comfort zone” (literally and figuratively, of course). This is “surface area for luck.”

Practicing your guitar for three hours a day doesn’t guarantee you’ll play the Super Bowl Halftime show, or making pottery every day doesn’t promise a full time income, but these things can become conversation starters, or give you something interesting to talk about, maybe lead to a new friend – these things come along as a by-product of just doing a thing.

Walking 10 miles a day is not exactly aligned with the work I do in email marketing, or gathering people to talk about quitting social media, but maybe in a weird way it’s completely aligned.

Because if you want to leave social media, you need to put your time somewhere else, give your attention to something that needs your attention.

I was asked recently on a podcast “what am I running from” by seeking to escape from social media, and at the time I didn’t have a great answer, but I think I’ve come to the idea that to escape requires a destination.

We’re not seeking just how to delete an app or marketing without social media, but asking “where are we going?”

One hot summer I ran a 5K race. Afterwards, leaning against a railing and sweating buckets, a man approached.

“Good race?”

“Hah,” I panted, “yeah, a little hot.”

“Have you heard the good new of Jesus Christ?”

Now, this conversation goes differently with someone I’ve known for 20 years on a back porch after a nice dinner and beverage. That’s because of trust, something the person who approached me after that race didn’t earn.

We’ve spent so much time building trust on social media platforms, with stories, photos of our pets, our travels, our bookshelves, our weekend adventures, and then when it comes to our website, it’s just “are you ready to convert?”

The trust can’t stop on our websites, it has to get bigger. More stories, pet, travels, whatever… if we’re doing all that on social media platforms to impress strangers, what does it say when our website is just a static business card?

Comedian Anthony Jeselnik on the fragile nature of digital media.

What do you think about our Netflix specials? Things we’ve done — there’s no physical media anymore. That can all go away, and you’re left with nothing. And that’s wild to me: a corporation… who knows what you get canceled for, can just be like, “All your work is gone.” It’s gone, as if it never existed. There’s nothing. Nothing.

This is why I’m so big on having a website, and maintaining some sort of digital archive of your work. I wish I had learned this a decade ago, as most all of my early blog work and Skull Toaster metal trivia are wiped out by unpaid hosting bills, or hasitly deleting social media profiles.

Download and back up your work. Request your files and images and videos from the social media platforms. Tuck them away on an external HD and make sure that’s back up, too (I use Backblaze).

Having something for sale online is the easy part. The hard part is making the sale.

I talked about this a bit on a recent Substack Live with an author who had their work on Gumroad and Amazon but had no sales.

I got talking about this in my conversation with Deanna Seymour, about sales pages. Well, long sales pages. You’ve seen them; two miles longs, 9000 words, and they don’t say anything.

Like Deanna says during this conversation, by the time she’s on a sales page, she already knows she wants the thing, to which I replied:

“I think it’s a trust thing. The trust that (is) built. Like, there are people that we both know, they could send a Google Doc with a PayPal button on it. Yes, I’m signing up because we built that trust. We trust them now. I don’t know that an 18-page sales page builds trust. I think the trust comes way before someone clicks on your sales page.”

We buy from people we trust, or we buy things that we trust will get us what we want. We trust that buying a coffee at our favorite shop will bring us a bit of calm, peace, productivity, whatever.

But buying something from a complete stranger on the internet? There is risk in that, a roll of the dice. A foundation of trust has to come first, before growth and reach and views. As Sari Azout of Sublime said:

“Attention is cheap and volatile. Trust is slow, expensive and durable, and I think if something reaches a lot of people but creates no relationship, that’s not distribution. That’s just noise.”

When I started hosting Zoom calls with my readers in 2023 I made sure to invite friends personally, one at a time, just in case no one else showed up. By doing so, I got to learn how to host a Zoom call, and make my mistakes in safety, with people who appreciated and loved me!

Seek out ways to build trust first. Build that foundation, become oh-so-very sure and confident in who you are and what you’re offering that people are drawn to what you’re doing. Seek out the one or two or five people who appreciate what you do and figure it out together.

On today’s Break Up 💔 With Social Media call (upcoming schedule here), we got on the topic of energy. A guest mentioned that they felt inspired from the call, and they were going to spend 30 minutes afterwards working on their creative project.

Getting on a good Zoom call can give you energy.
Then working on your thing can give you energy.
Now you’ve got two jolts of energy to get you into the afternoon.

It’d be a lot easier to scroll, click, consume, of course. But choosing to spend energy, to take a chance on a Zoom call, or to make the choice to work on a thing for “just” 30 minutes, it’s all a chance. A risk.

As Seth Godin says, “this might not work.” While true, I think we know what we’re gonna get if we spend that time on social media.