There’s more to life than Tweets, and other advice for 2018
If your job consists of Tweeting for someone else, you owe it to yourself to think of something else in 2018. Particularly if you’re under 35.
It’s early January, and so time to add to the inevitably endless slew of “What you should do in 2018” posts sloshing around the Net.
Under 30 and Tweeting for someone else for a living?
Last year I found myself returning, time and time again, to Jeffrey Hammerbacher’s 2011 complaint that “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads”.
The Brussels Bubble equivalent, perhaps, would be “The best young minds of Europe are thinking about how to make people Like something on social media”.
If this doesn’t apply to you, skip down to And now, get organised. Otherwise, don’t get me wrong: if you’re truly happy with endlessly pumping out and optimising social media fluff to achieve… well, whatever it is you tell yourself and your boss that you’re achieving … that’s great.
After all, a paycheck’s a paycheck, right? Or it will be until your boss realises a BPI (barely paid intern) could do it for 75% less; it can be outsourced to India for 90% less, and by your 30th birthday an AI will do it better for peanuts.
Unless, of course, before then your boss realises what was foreseen back in 2011. That nobody ever convinced anyone of anything on social media, and that all that social media output is just deepening divisions, reinforcing mutually uncomprehending echo chambers, and just making things worse.
your mind deserves better
But my problem is not that it’s an increasingly pointless, formulaic, boring dead-end career choice. My problem is that your mind deserves better.
If you’re under 35 in the Brussels Bubble you probably have at least one Masters degree. You’re probably bright, and unless you’re Belgian you also had enough ambition to get off your ass and come to Brussels.
Do you really think that optimising Facebook posts is the best use of that mind you spent 20+ years training?
Get a life: Get a Good Problem
You only have one lifetime, and Social Media on New Grub Street won’t fill it. For your own sake, seek and find a Good Problem that you can spend the best 30–40 years of your intellectual life exploring:
A problem that will never be solved — it will evolve, getting harder and more interesting the more you explore it, discovering new facets like a never-fully-polished diamond.
A problem that matters — so that when you have a grandkid on each knee, you can explain how you spent your talents and focus on something meaningful, improving more people’s lives than a few rich shareholders.
Something that forces you out of your comfort zone and gives you reasons to grow and learn every day for 40 years. Because that’s a long time to do the same thing, with only minor variations.
40 years is a long time to do the same thing with only minor variations
So sorry if that rules out half the jobs in Brussels, including the best-paid ones, but this is your life we’re talking about here, and I don’t want you to waste it networking with people you dislike and optimising the Twitter Reach of some faceless lobbying association determined to tweak legislation to their advantage for a couple more years.
So fucking what? Be more ambitious with your life. It’s all you’ve got.
And now, get organised
So, now you have something to do, you’ll probably also need to develop your personal content strategy to ensure that:
- you read the stuff you choose to, not what some algorithm decides for you
- you extract maximum benefit from reading it, now and in the future
To implement that you’ll also need a first-rate productivity process to better organise your ToDos, Calendar and mental energy. This might help:
Nurture your mind outside of work
But make sure you use the above processes for your life, not just your work.
This is where I need to develop in 2018. I’ve been a solo consultant, with no job security outside my CV, since mid-2015, during which I’ve developed the unhealthy habit of never stopping, never resting. Always Scanning, Queueing, Reading, Annotating, Sharing, Writing.
Andrew Sullivan’s I Used to Be a Human Being was a wake-up call, triggering this post, which summarises one aspect of the above productivity process in order to explain why I added Inbox Curation to my personal content strategy, and how the two systems work together.
But it’s not just about improving productivity — you can do that forever, and just use it to cram more ToDos into each day.
Instead, use these processes to give your mind the time it needs to ensure your happiness and creativity, as set out (most recently) by the BBC (The compelling case for working a lot less). There are many more resources in similar vein in one of my newsletters from late 2016, which concludes:
cultivating what you read, study, write and share is a good way of cultivating your mind… as long as you take control of the process, rather than leaving it to Zuckerberg’s algorithm
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