With the official start of Lent last week and with several major and detailed projects on my horizon, I’ve decided to take a break from Facebook and Twitter (as I did last year, here).
I’ve told myself a story that I need to be on these platforms for building an audience (although most of my audience comes through my writing for other outlets and organic searches, not Facebook and Twitter and I can still share my posts to Facebook and Twitter without actively putzing on the platform) and to grow my business. Meanwhile, 80% of my business is creative work that requires extended periods of focus and constant learning and relearning. If I don’t create quality product, it does not matter how many followers I have on Twitter.
An added benefit of this is that I am also more conscious of what I read. I do not just spend 20 minutes reading an article because it pops up in my newsfeed. I either have to go looking for an article or it has to come to me through a friend.
These are the articles I enjoyed over the weekend:
- He Deleted Twitter and Made $92,000 – Anybody who is either a freelancer or a small business owner feels, at one point or another, that you have to be on every single medium in order to sell your product. I occasionally run into this with my business clients: they want to grow their business so they figure they have to make a Facebook page, get on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. This article reminds us of an important fact: SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT A BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY. In fact, I’ve seen numerous early stage companies blow a ton of money on social media when they should have been focusing on building strong inbound and outbound funnels.
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule – h/t Marc Aarons – This isn’t the first time I’ve read this article. I first came across it in 2015. I was working for Praxis and, for the first time in my career, felt overwhelmed by meetings, calls, and application review, so I turned to it to figure out what to do. I felt busy but that I was getting nothing done. Graham’s main point is that meetings, no matter how “short,” destroy your ability to do valuable creative work. If you have a 10:30 AM meeting, for example, you’ll really spend 10-11:30 AM on the meeting. Once 10 AM rolls around, it’s too late to get focused on work that requires a significant investment of time.
- The 1517 Anti-Pitch Playbook – My friends Michael Gibson and Danielle Strachman run 1517 Fund, used to run the Thiel Fellowship, and put together this mega-piece on pitching venture capitalists for investment. I originally encouraged them to just put together a piece on pitch decks and it turned into an entertaining read about what really matters when pitching investors (hint: it’s traction and relationships, not glossy pitch decks).
- Why Technology Prophet George Gilder Predicts Big Tech’s Disruption – h/t Michael Gibson – George’s books Knowledge and Power and The Scandal of Money are two of the best I’ve read on how money, credit, and prices communicate knowledge and why disrupting those with interventions leads to problems. The Scandal of Money is the book that turned me from a hardcore cryptocurrency skeptic into having a generally positive view of the technology. This article is full of gems like:
[Elon Musk’s view that we’re all living in a simulation is] really nuts. It’s clinically crazy. But I hear lots of otherwise brilliant people talk in these terms. I think it’s a Silicon Valley dementia that’s going on, which probably results from a religious collapse. I think G.K. Chesterton put it very well: When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they start believing in anything. Such as, we’re part of a computer simulation, or that there are infinite numbers of multiple parallel universes, or that a planet, which has endured orders of magnitude greater amounts of carbon dioxide through eons of geological history (producing photosynthesis in the process), will suddenly founder on an increase of .003 to .004 of a percent. You know, those bizarre, speculative fantasies that you hear very solemn, professorial figures espouse. It’s an amazing phenomenon of our time.
Check Out My Bookshelf
While I try to share interesting links and articles to my email list regularly, I keep an updated list of the books I’ve recently purchased on Amazon that you can find here. 80% of my self-education comes through these books.