Cut the Crap
You are more interesting than whatever is trending.
Nobody cares about what you’re posting.
Not because the algorithm is broken or because your timing is off. And no, it’s not because you didn’t use the right hashtags.
Nobody cares because you don’t care.
You care about how it’s received. You care about whether people agree with it, share it, respond to it, validate it. You care about all of that so much that you forgot about the simple fact of caring about the damn thing itself.
Instead of asking yourself if what you’re writing was true, you instead focused on if it would work.
I’ve experienced this since the birth of social media. At times it felt like growth and professionalism. I often felt like I was getting better at the game.
But the only thing I was actually getting better at was anticipating other people’s reactions before I even had my own.
You start thinking about the audience too early. You start editing before you’ve said the thing you want to say. You soften the line. You take out the part that made you hesitate for a second.
You call it refining, but what you’re really doing is removing the only part anyone would have responded to. Y’know, you.
What I’ve learned is the work that lands is rarely the most polished version. It’s the version that has a pulse. The one that hasn’t been filtered through ten layers of “Will this go viral?” before it’s even written.
Confidence has nothing to do with frequency or volume.
Confidence is whether you’re willing to leave the edgy part in.
The line you almost cut. The version that sounded the most like you before you started adjusting it.
That’s the part people feel and remember.
You don’t need a better strategy. You need to stop abandoning your voice in exchange for what may or may not attract an audience.
Every post that mattered had something in it I almost cut.
Leave the scary part in. Let it be uneven. Let it be too much.
Let it be yours.
I’m here if you need me.
Pump Up the Volume: On Confidence, Self-Doubt, and the Voice in Your Head That Can Go Straight to Hell is coming soon. Foreword by Becky Lynch. Blurbs from Jimmy Kimmel and Chris Regan (Family Guy, The Daily Show).
aaronblitzstein.com