Are conversations across blogs dead or is there a chance they can be revived?
I’ve been thinking about some version of that question for the last two years. While I’m not one of the true blog elders, I’ve been around long enough to experience what blogging was like before the rise of social media. I remember what it like was like before Twitter.
In many ways, I liked it a lot more. Maybe it was just where I was at the time, but I felt like I was writing to someone, rather than for someone or at someone. For what it’s worth, the quality of my posts descend from better to worse as they move along the to, for, and at spectrum; if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll see the same pattern in your writing, too.
Aside from the direct conversation aspect of things, the pace of writing was slower. Obviously, as someone who prefers to explore and savor ideas rather than serve ’em up like fries, it was more gratifying to really work through things and share something thoughtful. And because we weren’t bombarded by information at the same time that we’ve self-conditioned ourselves not to be able to read anything longer than 800 words without serious effort, more people actually read – and perhaps favored – those posts. It’s no coincidence that some of my best writing happened before the rise of social media.
It’s not just about creating, either: I actually read and commented on my conversants’ blogs. They didn’t have to pretend that I was reading – they knew I was and that, I believe, helped them write their posts. There was grip precisely because someone was holding the rope at the other end.
Now our communal practice is to click a social share button and move on. Conversations that once pushed us all along have been replaced by scattered votes of approval that, at best, generate more scattered votes of approval. Conversations that used to funnel and distill cognitive noise have been replaced by cacophonous shouting by increasingly more people with increasingly more numerous and powerful megaphones.
To be completely honest, I don’t know if I would’ve started if the conditions were what they are now. And I probably think too much about how my actions are making it worse rather than better.
But that brings me to the question I started with. It’s quite hard to tell whether the conditions are such that the stream will go the way it will and fighting it is futile or whether it’s reversible. Obviously, it’s a social behavior, so it has malleability at its very foundation, but social behaviors with sufficient inertia can be much harder to change precisely because, as a collective, we are averse to uncertainty and change presents uncertainty.
I learned long ago not to fight battles that are impossible to win. At the same time, the power of determined individuals is the only thing that actually creates positive change. The resolution for this tension usually boils down to whether the issue at hand is worth pushing forward, balanced with everything else I might put that energy towards.
You can probably tell why this has been on my mind for the last few years. It’s something I care deeply about because the cacophony is one of the worst wastes of potential of the social and technological context of which we’re in. All of us having access to a printing press is powerful, indeed, but not nearly as powerful as us all having access to each other.
That’s the idealist in me speaking.
The empiricist in me observes what we’re actually doing and the strategist in me sees where it’s going.
When all of these aspects of myself converge, I only see a few options:
1) Play the game as it’s being played
2) Change the way the game is being played
3) Play a different game altogether
I tire of 1 and don’t like the present outcomes or the future it leads to. I care too much about it just to move to 3 without at least trying. So that leaves me with 2 as the only option that my heart is into.
When Doing It Wrong is Doing It Right
It feels weird to be taking what’s otherwise a traditionalist stance. “Let’s go back to how it was 6 years ago!” is not a particularly popular stance in such a tech-driven community. And, besides, we can’t go back completely – the world is different.
Once upon a time, Productive Flourishing was a blog where we did a lot of things “wrong” but it was exactly right for who were and what we were trying to do. Whether it was courage, naivety, or a mixture of both, I feel like I did a better job of staying rooted to what we were here to do. We still do plenty wrong – not to be provocatively wrong, but because it sticks to our core – and we have our share of wrong things being done wrong. We’ve been working a lot this year to address the wrong things we’ve been doing wrong, but that’s largely low-hanging fruit.
It’s doing the right things right that’s always the hardest to do (click to tweet – thanks!), and it’s even moreso when doing them right for you means going against best practices (for whom?), trends founded on short-attention spans conjoined with do-it-for-me demands, and the 101 easy zen secrets to be successful just like everyone else.
[Here’s where blogging conventions would suggest that I wrap this up with some question that encourages comments and feedback. But, true to the spirit of this post, I’m pushing forward and deeper rather than tying it off here.]
Why is this a big deal all of a sudden?
Something shifted when Stephen Covey died unexpectedly a few weeks ago. I admire his work and he’s been a mentor from afar since my teenage years, and he’s someone who I was looking forward to meet as a colleague some day. I wanted to put a book in his hand and let him know that his work was one of the inspirations to my own. I had no expectations that he’d actually read it, and, anyway, let’s get real: those expectations are usually self-centered, anyway.
I’ll never get that chance now. It serves as another reminder of how preciously short life is and how little time we have to do what we’re here to do.
When I assess my great work, it goes far beyond the content that I’ve produced. It goes to how I’ve both built and lived in the communities I’m a part of and the space I’ve made for others to flourish. A chief question that I pose to myself is “have I truly shown up and done the best with what I’ve had?”
This is a question that guides my days, my months, and my years. And, upon meeting Stephen, I’d want to be able to ask and answer that question honestly.
My current answer to that question when I consider the end in mind: no, I haven’t. I’ve done well. But doing well and having done well are two different things.
Excellence and Fear: Strange Bedfellows
Do one thing that scares you every day. – Eleanor Roosevelt
A clear sign of that is that I haven’t been scared about my work since 2010 or so. I’ve been scared about cashflow at times, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about doing something that truly scares you on a continual basis. I’m talking about dancing with uncertainty and having the creative courage to not know where things are going and to keep going anyway.
As I left Boulder a few weeks ago – read Jonathan’s post to see what I was doing there – I almost emailed a handful of the people who co-inspire me to ask for help and accountability. I recognized that I’d gotten really good at being really good, but I can do better. I communicate with each of them frequently enough, but the truth of it is that I’m one of those coaches who’s a pain in the ass to coach (ask Pam) and I can get squirrely with each of them singly, but I can’t outsmart, outhide, or redirect all of them at once.
I still haven’t done it because of two reasons: 1) it’s a big ask to ask world-class coaches and thought-leaders to help you and 2) it scares the hell out of me. I can’t tell which one of them is providing more inertial weight most days. (I can also get squirrelly with myself, too, hence the need of the dream team.)
A Safe Place to Suck
Last year, I was taking music lessons for the first time in my life. I enjoyed it for many reasons, but chief among them was that it was a safe place for me to not be good at something. Twice a month, I got to spend an hour or so doing something I enjoyed without my professional or personal credibility on the line.
It was a stark contrast to where I was in my professional career. Somewhere along the line, I became a socially-recognized expert about a few things, and one of the traps of expertise is that you stop giving yourself permission to not be an expert. Everything you do has to be excellent – after all, people are watching you. Your social and financial capital depends on your public displays of excellence.
This is true for everyone, of course, but it’s especially challenging in small, public, and personality-based business. When everything you do can end up in Social Media, you have to be careful about what you do and say in public. For what it’s worth, it’s not just in public – private communications that you intended to remain private can end up in magazines, blogs, or other public media.
But here’s the paradox: to truly do your great work, you have to embrace the fact that you might fail. And if your great work is in the public domain, you have to embrace the fact that you’ll fail publicly. As Jonathan has so rightly pointed out in Uncertainty, it’s failing in public that causes the fear and anxiety that keep most people from achieving greatness.
The reason for me being in the dream team’s spotlight is that, under the way I’m thinking about doing it, I’d be failing publicly in front of my expert peers and colleagues. Despite what the rest of the world thinks or believes, they would know the difference between excellence and good-enough coasting, both because they know me and they’re amazing at what they do generally.
(Have I mentioned how uncomfortable I get in these types of spotlights?)
If it’s not obvious thus far, I’m incredibly demanding of myself. I wouldn’t be asking them to help me be somebody else’s version of excellent, but rather my own. To echo Lao Tzu, “he who masters others, I count as strong; he who masters himself, I count as truly powerful.” The Sage wasn’t quite as clear about the fact that some of us need others to master ourselves.
Ironically, I need a professional space to suck so that I can be truly excellent.
And here’s the big reveal: doing this will require going back to where I started.
Coming home
Get prepared for a big sigh of relief at the same time that you laugh with me.
I’ve pretty much completely scrapped the book idea I’ve been struggling with over the last few years. When I started the journey, the ideas in it were fresh, new, and imminently marketable.
But it was me getting away from my boomerang, which is the unique way that I pull productivity, planning, strategy, team-building, leadership, creativity, and personal development into a special type of harmony that helps people get their meaningful projects done in a coherent, organized, sustainable, and enriching way. Despite years of trying to get it into some type of soundbite, buzzword, or percieved-value altering phrase, I still haven’t been able to do any better than that description. For that matter, neither have my clients, colleagues, or other branding or marketing experts.
Despite the description problem, you can probably feel it. It’s what people want me to talk about. It’s what people bring me to their events to share. It’s what I wake up in the morning and want to talk about. It’s the special sauce that our clients and customers get when they work with us.
It’s why this site is intentionally called Productive Flourishing.
Harangued by Hacking
So how’d I get away from it? ‘Productivity’, as a domain of expertise, went somewhere in 2008 and 2009 that I didn’t want to go. I wanted to distance myself from where it was going because I didn’t want people showing up on our door wanting tips for how to cross-purpose shoe boxes, color code files, or the endless tips on how to hack technology. I also didn’t want the discussion to be around the “more, more, more” mentality that people often think productivity conversations are about or engender.
Which is why I cringed inside when people asked me to speak about productivity or labeled me a productivity expert. None of that was a dish I wanted to serve because I didn’t think that it was something that added the value people wanted it to. It was very similar to the way I cringe when people call me a power blogger or, worse, an internet marketer. (I know, this is all my baggage, not theirs.)
But I’m deeply curious, excited, and passionate about exploring the ways we work and live and how we can do it in such a way that we thrive – physically, emotionally, mentally, socially, and spiritually. I’m fascinated by how our actions embody us and how we embody our actions. I break down events and experiences into phases, stages, processes, and models so I can put them back together in different ways for myself and others. And my desire is not to cultivate within us a bias towards action, but, rather, habits of principled action on the stuff that matters.
And I can’t not do it.
For instance, we went to the Oregon Coast during our summer team retreat in June. As Lisa and I were walking down the sand, I verbally pondered how long it would take for the rain-damped patches of sand to dry and what factors would effect that process. After 20 seconds or so of me listing off the different factors that might be at play, she laughed with me. Where most people would have just been enjoying the beach, I was enjoying the beach while thinking about this. When I see a foodcart, I wonder about costs, customer volume, hours of operation, and profit. (It annoys me, too, as I wish I could do better about turning it off.)
In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that people weren’t asking me to do productivity the way other people were wanting to do it; they were asking me to do what I was already doing and “productivity” was the doorway to that world for them and their audiences. I was projecting my baggage onto them.
(Go ahead and laugh. Seriously. It’ll help you laugh at the ways you’ve done it with your great work, too. And, in case you need a soundtrack to go with this, check out Jack Johnson’s “At Or With Me.“)
Part of my frustration this year is how few products we have around this stuff. I’m tired of not having the worksheets and coaching aids for clients and workshop participants. I’m tired of having to explain an idea that I’ve worked out in my head to people rather than being able to give them the information ahead of time so we can work on just the application. I’m tired of not modeling the message of not recreating the wheel, which is essentially what I do every time I verbally share an idea that I’ve been sharing for the last few years simply because there’s not an external anchor out there in the world yet.
My experience in Boulder a few weeks ago catalyzed my irritation into action. I decided that it was time to put some of this material together and ship it as a self-published book, which then set off a chain of thoughts about why I woudn’t push it to the publishers rather than the other book I’ve been laboring around.
I didn’t have a good answer besides not wanting to revise the proposal. And I had plenty of good answers for why I should push it out in favor of the other one. And the most important reasons I should is because I want to, it’s natural, and because it scares me.
It scares me because I’ll have to put up or shut up, even though it’s something natural and motivating for me. I also can’t hide in needing to read and learn more. Asking what people want isn’t a great way for me to go about doing this, either – if people don’t know what they don’t know or how they want to learn what they don’t know, how can they help you teach them what they don’t know? (It’s the whole market demand vs. market projection distinction I’ve discussed before.)
What Does All of This Have to Do with Blog Comments?
Great question.
I highlighted earlier that the logical and motivating response to the state of blog commenting was to “change the way the game is being played.”
A better way to address the challenge is to be concerned less about changing “the game” than I am about how my team and I are playing our game.
Which means we have to define the game we’re playing.
Which means we have to live up to our own potential and thus get to live up to our own potential.
Which means we need to embrace that our future will unfold in ways we can’t predict because we don’t know what we can do when we really show up. (The strategist in me really doesn’t like this one.)
Which means we’ll need to embrace public failures, missteps, and be willing to change directions quickly as the ice cracks around us.
Which means eliminating a lot of unnecessary distractions, ideas, and bright, shiny objects so we can focus on our core work.
That’s a tense, uncertain, and unresolved position to be that parallels the tense, uncertain, and unresolved nature of this post. These are the hardest for me to publicly share, which is why I normally don’t. Not today.
To echo Forest Gump, that’s all I have to say about that. There’s nothing left to say (today, at least 🙂 )but a lot to do.
It’s good to be back and as terrifying as it ever was. Thanks for sticking with me over the last few years.
Cool! I really like this new-old Charlie!
I’m also eliminating distractions and a lot of stuff I found along the way that seemed like “I need to add this into the mix, too.” It’s hard to do after convincing myself I needed them, but day by day I’m making progress.
My goal, too, is to be faithful to my core work and live up to my true potential. I look forward to being part of those conversations 🙂
Funny how much the “I need to add this into the mix” gets away from us, no? Glad to see you pop up in the comments, Megan – thanks for staying on the ride. 🙂
Wow, that question you asked the other day turned into this?
You’re in a lot of places, some of which I’m not sure how to respond to. So we’ll go with the initial premise, that being blog commenting and the like.
To your initial question on Twitter, I responded “no”. I still respond “no”, and I’ll stick with that. What has happened is that more people have decided that blog commenting is a way to make money more than add to a conversation and thus they’re not just sending out spam messages anymore, they’re paying people to go to blogs and comment, which I’d have no real problem with if those comments were one line stupid statements that compliment me on how my blog looks and asks if I created my own theme; ugh.
I think it depends on if you care what you’re reading. For instance, you go to a blog like what Marcus Sheridan writes and you not only see very good blog posts, but insightful comments that stimulate great thought and conversation from other people. I go often, disagree often, and write some fairly long comments. He responds, sometimes with a long response, sometimes with something relatively short. Conversations go both ways; if he says nothing in his response that I can go back to comment on, conversation over.
It’s almost like a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago addressing something I’ve seen a lot lately where these writers, who really have nothing to do with blogging, are saying that blogging is dying because major corporations aren’t blogging as much. It’s pure idiocy because those aren’t the people who started blogging and thus those won’t be the people who end blogging. I had a lot more to say, but you know where I’m going with it.
As for the rest of what you wrote? Well, it’s kind of a catharsis it seems you were meant to write and express, triggered by the passing of someone you admired. I’ve been there, though not to this extreme. I’ll say this, which is easy and might seem like a passing thought; it is what you decide it is and what you decide to make it. The same goes for everyone else. I have 5 blogs; obviously I don’t feel blogging is going anywhere. Where will you decide to take it as things progress in your life?
Ugh, indeed.
What I wasn’t so clear about in the post – catharsis got in the way 🙂 – was that it was also referencing other people’s blog post as part of our own.
This is were I personally fell down by not making commenting enough of a priority. That said, much of my coverage wasn’t about commenting here as much as globally.
Isn’t that always the question.
I really appreciate your feedback, Mitch.
Nice blog. Did you create your own theme. :p
This is the first post of yours I’ve ever read (I came here via a link from Jonathan Fields), but as a fairly new “public” blogger who used to keep a very personal livejournal blog some years ago where I felt like I knew and was close to all my readers, even though I’d never met most of them) and even though I’m on social media all the time for my ‘real’ job and do enjoy parts of it, I feel a lot of the same things you do. This really resonated, even if I don’t have a whole lot to add to the discussion.
Also: LOVE Jack Johnson 🙂 … “Better Together” was my wedding song.
Welcome, Nora! I’m glad to hear it resonated.
And, I could go on and on about Jack Johnson’s impact on my life. Maybe another day.
It’s interesting Charlie- as Mitch wrote there’s a LOT to respond to here. Since I have Ramadan brain now that it’s mid-afternoon, I’ll limit myself to saying that when something is new, and the space is mostly early adopters who are enthusiastic, then it’s easy to find the good shtuff. When it gets crowded later, there’s more good shtuff than when we started, but a LOT more noise as well, making it harder to find.
I’m leery of opinions that say things are all new, or all different, or the “new economy” or whatever… I think the game is what the game has always been- people are doing their best at getting along with whatever they are doing, some more consciously than others.
I’ll say this too: it’s no sin to plateau. It’s called “integration.” We can’t be at our edge all the time, and who the heck who want to? So you’ve taken a couple of years integrating. In internet time it seems like three lifetimes, but in real life two years or so of integration is probably, yup, about right. If you’re ready to climb off the plateau… let’s go! Because I think I’m in a similar cycle to you. 🙂
peace
Mark
How is it that you show up with Ramadan brain and drop some wisdom like this, brother? I miss lunch and can’t think straight.
It’s the cycles and permutations that make it so interesting. And recognizing that you’ve been on one, in one, or around one.
It turns out that a move across country causes a lot of disruption and integration. Let’s see, when did we move here to Portland – oh, about two years ago. :p
And let’s go! 🙂
*stands and applauds wildly* As stated above, there’s so much here to respond to… it’s hard to know just WHAT to respond to!
One thing that truly stuck out at me was this;
“I recognized that I’d gotten really good at being really good, but I can do better.”
As you mentioned in response to Mark, it’s been about two years since you moved to Portland. In the meantime, some crazy intense things have happened in your life, which is bound to affect your business. The fact that you managed “really good” at ALL is amazing, and something to be acknowledged and celebrated.
Moving forward, I’m thrilled to hear that you’re returning to your roots, as it were, and embracing your natural talent and passion. I can definitely understand a hesitancy to be ‘pigeon-holed’, especially in a field that seems to be developing in a direction that doesn’t call to you. But as you said, that style of ‘productivity’ is based on other peoples’ baggage… and one of your great strengths is that you approach it from such a different angle! So as someone who appreciates the approach you take, I’d like to thank you and encourage you on this path.
Also, I LOVE how long this post is… but only because you took the time to dig in deep and write from your heart! I’ve definitely suffered from the ‘depleted attention span’ of spending too much time online, but I’m finding that part of my short attention span is based on feeling like so many people just aren’t taking the time to write something meaningful; maybe they’ve just committed so strongly to the schedule that they’d rather post ANYTHING than miss their (self-imposed) deadline. In the meantime, I can only read so much chaff before my eyes start to glaze over… this on the other hand? Definitely not chaff 😉
Alas that one’s own medicine can be the hardest to take.
Thanks for this. I’d rather have 1,000 words that dive deep, that go to the heart of that matter, that illuminate a fundamental paradox or irony, than 100 words that sound good but amount to nothing.
Just as I’d rather have the 1 doer out of the 100 wishers as readers, friends, clients, and colleagues.
So often we conflate quality and quantity.
Also, it was great seeing you, Heidi!
I wish you ease and spaciousness, friend, as you find your clarity in this next round. I appreciate your questing nature so much and I know it will all come together in a way that helps many.
You rock, Jen. You’ve been such a wonderful compatriot all these years. I know I saw you briefly at WDS, but it wasn’t nearly enough of a Jen fix for me.
I know! That was so yuck, I got into another conversation and the whole time was thinking “But there’s Charlie and Angela! Shoot!” I’d say next year but I don’t know if I’ll be there, it’s Bob’s 50th b-day. As the man is marrying me the least I can do is spend his big birthday with him! 🙂
I just interesting more in you mean let face with our fears. I mean final we don’t have any feals in our process.
And I have my oppinion on, how we can become fantastic people. I mean let courage practice self improvement and learn more. Live with all of our heart with other people. Final we will become fantastic.
And in more parts of post that you written, I can feel about your feel in that case.
Thank you
Thanks for sharing, Charlie.
Like somone mentioned earlier, I’m also still fairly new to the blogging space, and I constantly battle with my approach to writing. I’m wrestling with the main ideas I want to convey and how I want to communicate them.
It’s refreshing to hear more established bloggers still wrestling through those decisions and altering course as needed to stick with what matters most. I love that idea for productivity. Instead of just trying to get evertything done all of the the time, it’s about choosing what tasks are actually important and in line with your mission.
Thanks!
True story: in my conversations with established bloggers, the recurring them is that many of us are working through this. I’m not sure if they’re talking about it publicly or not, but, again, I wanted to make sure I was.
There’s an older post here on that if you’re interested. Check out Becoming Yourself and Growing Your Blog.
Thanks for the feedback here, and for the comment in general.
Great post and some good stuff in the discussion. I agree about Mark’s comments. Mark with Ramadan brain is better than most folks well-fed.
Seems to me you need to stop worrying so much about what other people are saying you are supposed to be doing with these tools. Also, if “productivity” is the word people are using, then finding your approach in amongst the other stuff might be just the breath of fresh air someone needs.
I have other thoughts on the question of asking people what they want when they don’t know what is possible. Henry Ford did give people a faster horse.
Hey, haven’t we had this conversation before, with the roles turned. Oh wait …
Thanks for the nudge, Jo. 🙂
I came to your site this morning because I just needed some ‘time with Charlie’ (one thing that is still great about blogs….something I could never have done in the past). I am excited to watch you push your edges and get uncomfortable. Not because of the potential humiliation, but because of getting to be part of the audience that cheers you on. You.ve built an audience and reputation for creating great things. I have a feeling there will be nothing but cheering and encouragement from the sidelines…and perhaps even some exciting new opportunities in the ring.
Anyway, one of the beautiful things about this GLP project that TK and I talk about is how Most of the businesses we’ve built we built all alone, by ourselves, no one saw the planning stages, the trial and eror, the behind the scenes, etc. until the ‘doors opened’. GLP has put a flashlight on the entire process. It has been uncomfortable because creating something is messy…and you hate for anyone to see the messy stages.
It has also been at times cumbersome because of too much input or a tendency to seek ‘approval’ or to want someone to tell you how to do it instead of giving voice to that gut level inspiration that started it all in the first place.
Learning how to create in the open, with the input of others, and still bringing your gut level true self to the process…it’s been fascinating to observe in myself the last few months. To see and observe your own self doubt, to stare it in the eye. Scary, yeah, but It’s pretty cool, too.
You have a much bigger fishbowl to build in, but I think you’ll observe the same thing. Whatever stumbling around you do in the process, you have nothing but cheers and support all around you.
You’re a leader and as such, you are showing the way from one stage of business to the next. take good notes for us, would you?
It was great to have some time with you, too, Karen. Thanks for letting me know you’re here.
Loved this thought and seeing you in it. And I also wanted to applaud you on stage for it, too.
Always. I can’t not do it. 🙂
So many thoughts during reading, and the re-read, and the re-re-read… and the comments….
… “I wanted to distance myself from where it was going because I didn’t want people showing up on our door wanting tips for how to cross-purpose shoe boxes, color code files, or the endless tips on how to hack technology.”
I heard a clear call out here of Covey’s distinction between efficiency (How fast can you climb that ladder? Color coded files will get you there even quicker!) and effectiveness (is your ladder even leaning against the right wall? No? So stop climbing and we’ll find your right wall, and we’ll figure out the ladder/system needed to get you climbing at your best speed.).
As long as I’ve been reading you, and from our conversations, I’d say you have always been about effectiveness, and your personal genius is the way you pull all those pieces (…”productivity, planning, strategy, team-building, leadership, creativity, and personal development into a special type of harmony that helps people get their meaningful projects done in a coherent, organized, sustainable, and enriching way” [I LOVE this!]) together into one fabulous system that works for that person.
I agree with Mark about the integration, too. The systems architect in me says it seems like you needed to go down each of those paths of productivity and planning and leadership, etc., so you could bring back your findings and build them into your own system over these few years. Now the system has been built with all these awesome things in it, and it’s time to try it out. AND (alert! gross generalization ahead), it also seems that someone who is only interested in clicking a social media share button might not be your ideal client because you are complex. What you are building is complex. Yet, as David Allen would say, only as complex as it needs to be, and as simple as it can be. Our world is demanding that we be distracted by shiny, faster, sexier… and it will take us so far away from our core and what we need to be up to (Great Work) that we have to just say no. And, in a rather Matrix-y fashion, only the ones that are ready will be the ones that comment, and not just tweet/share.
I’m going to stop typing now. And, er, um, no… I actually do not have a Ramadan excuse for my muddled ramblings…
Thanks for an AWESOME post. And nice theme. 🙂
Ok, I lied, ‘cuz I’m not going to stop typing yet.
As an introvert, I really like juicy blog posts like this, where I can mull it over and comment, EVEN IF you don’t comment back. It feels like Twitter runs too fast for me, and while as a Scanner with Adult Deficit Oh Shiny! Disorder, there’s so much fun and interesting stuff happening that I get lost and any comment I might make already feels stale to me by the time I think of what it means to me.
Additionally, the ego/relationship builder in me doesn’t like that someone with a billion Twitter followers will never notice me but with that same person’s five blog commenters, I can actually build a relationship with that person I admire/trust/learn from (ok, so the metrics of Twitter/blogging comparison might be a *little* off, but still).
The main commodity I have is how I choose to spend my time and energy. We are longing for community, and perhaps this social media piece is just reflective of the types of communities people want or are drawn to as a function of who they are. Gross generalization again, maybe extroverts/mavens/connector types are going to prefer the community created through faster social media sharing, while introverts/systems thinkers/scanners will love the richness of blogs.
As for me, I’m going to keep choosing to spend part of my time and energy on Productive Flourishing because you consistently provide food for thought. And I’m excited to see what your scary, tense and unresolved future holds because I guarantee that I’ll be learning from your journey.
*Goes off to Google *become a Sufi master and quiet your monkey brain…
Me, personally? I like knowing the people who comment and talk to me. Social Media lost some of the joy for me when I felt like I couldn’t keep up. The fun part about spending more time on the blog and what we do is that our right people will show up and talk.
Great seeing you again, Sherrill. Nice to know you’re here.
To give you back more of your own advice … I started a private Twitter list that I call something like “My right people”. I add people to it who engage with me and take them off if that turns out to have been a one-off. (If you can’t see your advice it was to make a list for prospects or some such.)
If I only have a short amount of time to hang out in the Twitter bar, I make sure I look at recent posts from that list and maybe chat to them.
I follow about 1600 people so no, not everyone is engaging in the way we all are here. But some are. And I give them more of my social media energy. Of course I also need to scan the others and engage with them to see if they are the type to engage. And not all of the 1600 people are in any way related to my business.
But Twitter is a tool, just like blogs are a tool. And we can have conversations there, though of a very different type. Also, I get a lot of ideas for blog posts from Twitter convos.
Yep. In my mind, PF has always sought the syntheses of personal development and productivity. I’m between Allen and Covey that way.
See you below, too. 🙂
Charlie, the earlier question you posed on Twitter and your elaboration in this post strikes a chord as I too share your sentiment. I applaud you for sharing your thought process and prompting this discussion. You sound a lot like me. Like all things, we have to fight to keep some semblance of tradition (for the sake of what works / not for the sake of resisting change) in our crafts, even while technology and other factors evolve. Creating courageously is one such tradition that I hope you continue to promote in your endeavors. It’s why we were here before Twitter (and the like), and why we’ll continue to be here long after the cacophonous shouting. Welcome back!
A question that I love to work through is “how does this new technology, technique, or factor help me create my best work, the stuff that matters?”
It turns out that it’s a great filter question, in that it helps you see that, 90% of the time, it’s not needed.
Bonus points for applying it to new books. :p
Me, too.
Funny, sometimes “creating courageously” doesn’t mean doing something new, but doing something you.
Thanks for being here, Mario.
Congrats on the success of the failure! I too remember fondly the slower, pre-twitter pace of the blogosphere. Never fear, though, it can still be found!
This is my first visit to your blog but I am glad I found it (even though it is over a month late). I am becoming a bit of a comment junkie because I find that comments and the conversations that develop offer some of the strongest social gestures on the web.
Here is a very recent and excellent comment by Arnold Waldstein that I should described the evolving nature of behaviours online
“Building a product or platform that ties to behavior is like throwing a stone at a moving train. Expression and behaviors change a lot faster than core human dynamics.
The core need to express and respond will remain even as types of conversations and gestures evolve.”
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how-to-filter-the-social-web-from-your-inbox.php#comment-646619134)]
Welcome, Abdallah! Thanks for sharing such an awesome comment.
thanks for writing great content. I look forward to more 🙂