Just left a marketing event and I’m on the way home. What’s on my mind? There are a bunch of things that I could and should be doing to improve myself and to improve the quality of work I do. [1]
I realize that I haven’t updated my blog in a very long time. I’ve basically just been doing these vomits, which is a good thing. But my blog and my web assets in general are incoherent, messy and don’t adequately represent who I am or what I am capable of.
The first thing I want to do for myself is to go through my best Quora and Reddit answers and post them on the blog. That’s a no-brainer, it’s just introducing a bunch of relevant, useful links to the world.
The next thing would be to consolidate my own learnings as a content marketer. What have I learnt over the past couple of years?
And then I got to think about the rants that I want to rant. My first and biggest rant is probably that people trust statistics too much, generalize too much from a few data points– probably fewer than they think. I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to obsess about post length and tweet length… is it the length that influences the outcome, or is there something else that influences both the length and the outcome?
Next I guess I’m thinking about what it would take for me to become truly useful and relevant to the people who are at the forefront. I can comfortably give marketing advice to beginners, and even to some intermediate folk. But what are the advanced people doing, and how do I get on their radar? How do I make a difference to them? How do I become one of them? I know that it is within my power.
Earlier, I witnessed a bunch of people on a panel being asked their thoughts about a range of things. A couple of the questions they were asked were, who do you most like to follow or read on social media, and what is your favorite interview question to ask people you’re hiring. And this is kinda narcissistic and ego-centric, but I kinda would like to be asked those questions some day. And maybe years from now, maybe decades from now if I’m still around, I’d find it silly that I even bothered to care about those things, and that panels are ultimately just time-passes, none if it matters, it’s all just superficial validation, yadda yadda. But somehow for the time being, it feels like a legitimate goal to me.
I was skimming through a Medium post by Alanis Morissette (isn’t it ironic?) [2] and there were a couple of things that resonated with me. One was… she said that she was looking forward to the day somebody would ask her, perhaps not with words but with presence, “Who ARE you, Alanis?”
And in a way, I still think that’s something I want. It’s something I want to earn. [3] I know that reality doesn’t owe me anQything, and that I’m not entitled to anything. But I also feel like I have a lot of value to offer the world, and I’m probably sitting on quite a bit of it right here in this word vomit project– I haven’t yet gotten around to slicing and dicing the stuff to extract the value.
So… what now? What then? What have I learned? I guess it’s just another reminder to keep revisiting peak consciousness as often as I can afford to, which is more often than I think. Now that’s a pretty interesting way of framing it. What are the costs and benefits of attaining peak consciousness? There’s a virtuous cycle there– while it’s a little costly to reach, the benefit typically outweighs the cost. I’m talking in terms of energy– it takes some energy to reach, but it bestows far more energy in return.
So if I’m serious about living a good life, and I’d like to think that I am, then I’m going to have to be more systematic and methodical with regards to how I manage my consciousness. How I debug and upgrade my cognitive software. And coupled with that is hardware. That’s a nice way of framing it. To have a good life, you need to have a good software, and to do that you’ll find that it helps to optimize your hardware, too.
So what’s the plan? Hardware improvement is going to come primarily from lifting weights, eating healthier, drinking more water and sleeping better. Software improvement can only come with constant reflection and evaluation. Weekly reviews. I keep putting them off, perhaps because I haven’t yet felt that each individual review makes much of a difference. I need to track them the same way I track my word vomitsk. I need to analyze carefully to see what I did right, what I did wrong, what the contexts and circumstances were, and how I might do things better the next time around. I’m too old now to keep dicking around and repeating the same old patterns over and over again. I am so bored of that stuff, I am so amped and ready to be more than I am now.
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[1] I’m a little jealous of people who get to constantly be in the presence of other focused, inspiring, driven people… but hey, if the world’s not going to do it for us, then we gotta do it for ourselves.
[2] It’s a joke.
[3] I was going to say that I look forward to a day where I get to have spontaneous Twitter conversations about absolutely anything I like– I think that will be my favorite thing about celebrity if I ever become more popular. It often seems to me that popularity is wasted on the popular, because there are so many interesting things you could do with that sort of audience and that sort of feedback. The constant science experiments and so on.