Please Live Your Life Before Telling Me About How to Live Mine

Open letter to the trending “influencers” out there — Please experience a little bit of ‘your’ life before telling me about what I should do with mine.

Photo by Sander Sammy on Unsplash

My morning routine involves opening Medium to see what my favorite authors have created to probe my mind, challenge my biases and trigger my neurons to form new connections.

Then there are the listacles …

For anybody who is unfamiliar with the phrase, a ‘listicle’ is when you make a list-article that doesn’t really have a thesis or story element.

Examples:

• 5 ways to know he is the one
• 7 irresistible attributes that attract women
• 9 signs your marriage might be over
• 11 quotes that changed my life

The thing about these listicles that typically cause the most anxiety for me is that they are frequently written by young creators who do not yet have significant life experience.

What Happens When ‘Audience’ Is Everything

In the social media era, everybody is trying to optimize everything.

This means that instead of doing something meaningful, people are trying to get famous on social media by writing about getting famous on social media. (Note that this is a circular system … like a pyramid scheme)

When people are pushing for an audience, the inevitable cost is authenticity. Almost everybody starts from an authentic place, but when that authenticity doesn’t catch attention there is a choice to be made.

Do you stay authentic or change your style & content to get more followers?

Once you see this, you cannot un-see it.

With this filter in place, social media will become much, MUCH less interesting.

Writing for Algos Instead of Humans

If your goal is to build an audience without lots of paid ads, you are going to need help from the algorithm.

This means that building an audience will require that you exhibit extreme patience for the algorithm to slowly find people who identify with your point of view <or> you will need to latch onto a trending topic to get traffic.

Unfortunately, patience is in short supply with many creators

So we’re left with most creators (Especially the impatient 20-something’s) traffic hijacking based on trending topics.

This means that creators will cluster around the same topics with the hopes of siphoning some of that traffic over to their account.

The issue with this strategy is that a consistent stream of content is needed in order to traffic hijack your way to relevancy.

But where is that river of content going to come from?

No Real Insights — Only Regurgitated Ideas

The answer to the quest for consistent content is to regurgitate the ideas of other creators.

This means that as a topic trends, there will be more and more people making derivative content that basically says the same things in a slightly different tone of voice with slightly different words.

It also means that the ‘volume’ of content available online is a completely meaningless metric. The overwhelming majority of people who are creating content have no intention of doing so from the frame of creating unique content from a unique point of view … it simply takes too long to build an audience using this method.

This means that we will continue to see:

• Listicles — List Articles that don’t contain any real insights
• Trend Hijacking — Regurgitating other trending creators ideas
• Topic Spinning — Creating multiple pieces of content that say the same thing in a slightly different way

Speaking for myself, I don’t have any desire to spend the limited time I’m alive with content created by somebody who can’t/won’t create it from a unique point of view.

Unless You Have Done/Experienced This Yourself, Please Stop Talking About It

The ultimate filter for authenticity is to only talk about things that you have personally done or experienced.

The reason for this is because when you do things and experience them, it creates firsthand experiences that enable a unique point of view, which does not require the regurgitation of other people’s content to continue creating.

What does this mean for young creators who don’t have much experience?

If you haven’t lived enough of life yet to have a portfolio of experiences, my advice is to focus on gaining experiences first and creating content afterward.

It is most certainly a slower path to building an audience, but it is a guaranteed path to being authentic.

In my view, being authentic is more valuable than being famous.

This is the frame that I am using for the second half of my life, and it is the frame that I would recommend for deciding which creators you will use the limited minutes of your life to read, follow and contemplate their message.

Final Thoughts

I spent much of my youth wanting to be rich and famous. (Like most people)

What I have learned is that there is a destructive impact of attachment to money and security. Now I am shifting my focus to the things that truly matter for the limited time I have in my life.

If this article and perspective resonate, please drop a clap + follow me here on Medium and subscribe to my podcast — People First Leaders (Both are free)

https://open.spotify.com/show/4pIuQdrU2jdMDDaNjhEyl0