Filter.
Your attention is a commodity, and you must filter the good stuff from the pointless garbage. You only have so much time in the day, you can only keep up with so many conversations. Honestly, do you really have 600 friends, can you really follow 900 people, do you really need to read 25 blogs? At this level, these conversations are just white noise.
Overload yourself…
and these three “tools” become black-holes where you can dive in and hide from actually doing work. Instead of writing that Ebook or working on that paper or starting that website or recording that video these black-holes serve as a distraction and steal away our valuable attention… UNLESS you consciously filter each of these resources with LIMITS.
Worse yet…
we don’t feel bad with ourselves for wasting huge amounts of time. Don’t you get it? When work needs to be done and you know it needs to be done, but instead choose to sit around and watch TV or procrastinate by making a sandwich or some other bullshit, you feel terrible about yourself. “God why am I such an idiot, I had all this time and I did nothing!”.
BUT however…
if you wasted time Facebook messaging with that cute girl or guy you like or you read a blog post on why Facebook is a waste of time, or you checked out 5 different links from Twitter and ended up going off on a tangent for 35 minutes you don’t feel bad. You feel like you gained something because you stayed in touch and learned of an interesting idea. NEWS FLASH: YOU JUST WASTED 2 HOURS DOING NOTHING.
Competing against the creative flow
How do I create anything on this site? Do you think it takes 5 minutes then I’m off to Facebook land? No, I and any artist, or any human being for that matter engages in the creative flow to make forward progress. To get any work done by any productivity standard you need at least 2 hours of uninterrupted time. Uninterrupted means no phone calls, no Facebook, no Twitter, no nothing. Just you and the project you are working on. Remember, half ass this and you will lose because you are competing against pros who will do what pros do:
- Engage in the creative flow
- Put the time in
- Do the work
- Network
- Over deliver
- Filter social media channels
Raise your standards and demand more from yourself. Stop getting your ass kicked on a daily basis.
Everyday, the Internet expands to grow larger and thicker…
with more and more voices publishing content. Most of it mediocre, a bit less is garbage, and very little of it is brilliant. All these new voices are after one thing. Your attention. Your attention is what powers any business. It’s how ideas spread, and when ideas spread products can be sold and social change can begin to take root.
A few years ago, it was a much simpler Internet.
Before YouTube, before Facebook, before WordPress, before Twitter what was the Internet really used for? 1) Email 2) Online shopping 3) Encyclopedia 4) Porn. This was it and most of it was uninspiring and boring (except maybe the porn). The amount of material simply was not as vast as it is now. It was not up to date per se, you used it to find what you needed then got off to go back to the physical world.
You will drown in a digital sea if you forgo filtering
The biggest problem is finding good content, really good remarkable content that deserves to be shared. Established types like to purport that great content gets naturally shared all on it’s own. There is some truth to this, but really, this might be more from a selection bias that top influencers tend to develop after years of being on the top and having their content shared naturally and easily, even it it’s not that remarkable. They have already reached a critical mass of followers. So how do you discover undiscovered and remarkable content?
First, acknowledge that you are in charge of your digital experience.
All these voices add and expand to the web. Most of it is noise, but all of it serves as an expression of the individual. Free from corporate influence, free from government manipulation. The power of what content you consume is no longer dictated to you online by big corporations as it is with other mediums. You decide what gets passed on, what gets ignored, and it’s a big responsibility as well to the people who follow you. You owe it to those who follow you be it your family and friends on Facebook or 1000 people on Twitter to provide the best content possible.
Always ask yourself:
- Where am I focusing my attention?
- What am I sharing with people who listen to me? Is it worthy?
- What type of contribution am I publishing?
Gaining popularity on the web
There is no easy answer to how you gain popularity online. There is no two step process. If it was easy, anyone could do it. Not being easy makes it worth doing and worth figuring out. Here are some lessons I have learned thus far:
- Be intelligent.
- Cultivate intelligence.
- Be a human.
- Have a sense of humor
- Make every single bit of content/information that flows through your digital presences of value. Without exception. If done so correctly, people will begin to listen to you.
- You’re value is directly tied to the value you provide people
- Provide no value means you are contributing nothing.
- Provide useless crap means you are useless crap.
- Provide value, you will become valuable.
- Don’t be boring
- It’s not about YOU
- Nobody care about you
- It’s about everyone else
Your online growth and authority is directly related with all of the above items. Master this list and you will master what it takes to garner a sincere following of fans. In fact, these rules transcend the online space and can apply to anything else in life for that matter. Just be intelligent, remarkable, usefull, and entertaining.
This seems obvious, but it’s not…
just look around the web at the same recycled posts, at the same recycled YouYube videos, at the same recycled Tweets. It’s from people who sling information around with no concern for its value. They approach the online medium with the idea that if by maintaining a useless but safe and prolific presence that this will somehow garner a following, it won’t. Attention can not be maintained by sheer volume, it just simply does not work that way. Volume should not be equated with quality. Really, it’s quite the opposite. You just end up saying nothing new.
So it is your job to filter. You must. You have no choice.
You will be constantly overwhelmed with information.You will never get important work done.You will never focus on things that ACTUALLY matter.
Twitter:
Follow less than 150 people. It’s dunbars number which is based on the cognitive limit a mind can handle in regards to maintaining social relationships. Don’t retweet mediocer stuff. Make every Tweet matter. View it as an indication of your intelligence and personality. Are you a humorus smart ass? An intellectual? A popular fun person? Be yourself, just don’t be boring and don’t be about you.
Facebook:
Friend less than 150 people for the same reason as above. Even more so in that there is no way you have 150 real friends. The most efficent use of Facebook I have found is to keep it strictly to family and close friends. Otherwise, it will evolve into a digital escape where you find yourself checking in multiple times a day for no reason out of habit. If you don’t want to maintain a 150 person limit, then don’t use Facebook. If you are over 150, delete, delete, delete.If you check in more than once per day, take a digital sabbatical from Facebook by deactivating your profile for a minimum of 30 days.
Blogs:
Follow 10-20 blogs max. Share content that blows you away via Facebook and Twitter. Unsubscribe from sites that no longer resonate with you. If you are not gaining value, don’t pass it on just to get the creators attention. Help out artists that are doing good work. You get back what you put out.
My attention is finite…
so is yours. Both of us can not spend all day reading nonsense and viewing pictures and watching stupid 30 second YouTube videos. A little fun is always nice, but wasting precious time and attention is not. Things need to get done or our dreams and goals stagnate.
Just create and provide value. That’s all you need to do. Create your own value and share it, and share the value of others. Filter out the garbage, and let the remarkable content and ideas spread naturally and rapidly.
One last word of caution from my friend Chase:
“We seem to have endless attention spans for the dumbest things, and the most minuscule ability to focus on things that really matter.”
Don’t be like that. I have shown you better.