Author: Seth Werkheiser

IT’S NOT JUST ONE THING

There’s a quote in here that’s actually a quote from another podcast, but it’s something like, “it’s not just one thing.”

And he’s talking about the young kids coming up and thinking that making it to the NBA is the “one thing” that will make them happy, but then it’s depressing when you make it and wow, it doesn’t just make you happy.

It’s never just one thing.

I remember not just getting a three month contract gig at AOL Music in 2006, but I was asked to START a metal blog for them in 2008. There’s more to the story, of course, but there’s always a way for that thing you’re dreaming of you disappoint you, to let you down, to fail you, because it’s never just one thing.

RETHINK YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

This is just one person’s account, of course, but I think we’re going to see more of this.

In March 2024, I ran an experiment in my Portuguese-written blog: I stopped distributing its content on social media (Mastodon, mostly) and messaging apps (Telegram and WhatsApp channels). It has a small following in a few places — ~2,9k on Telegram, ~450 on WhatsApp and three Mastodon profiles (two with autopost) that sums ~5k followers.

The result was that… little has changed.

From Almost no one cares if your site is not on social media

Yes, if you do the bare minimum and “just” post when you have new stuff, new things, new projects – sure – some people may find your stuff. The alorithimic gods may show your post to 5% of your followers, and you’ll get two clicks, and that’s nice.

If you want more, though, you gotta give more. Show up, engage, maybe “create content” just for the platform by way of vertical videos and other multimedia assets.

Then you’ll get seen by 8% of your followers, and maybe get four clicks. Great.

Or – what if we made the best fucking work we possibly can, and instead of spending 100% of our “marketing budget” on posting to social media, what if we spent 80% of our time reaching out to our contacts? Emailing galleries, venues, agents, etc.? Spending time in places where we want to spend more time in, surrounded by people we want to be around?

What if that was our marketing budget? Time and care in the creative world that’s already around us.

The “creator economy” existed long before tech-bros came along and tried to squeeze it for every last 3.5% surcharge.

We’ll be here long after they move onto the next market to destroy.

STORMY NIGHT

We had a glimpse of spring a few weeks back, but then it dove right back into winter. Three days of rain, then today was just cold and drizzly. Got in a walk tonight and managed to avoid getting too wet.

THIS IS HOW WE DO IT

There’s a certain way to do TikTok, sure.

You can half-ass Instagram, and get 12 likes. I get it.

Or you can just do what YOU wanna do, and not worry about being a 12 person marketing and social media team.

Not everything is social media.

BENCH MAKES TAX TIME A BREEZE

Look, we’ve all got out strenghts and weaknesses.

Since I’ve been self-employed since 2006 (18 freaking years), I’ve never really been great with the whole taxes thing. All the expense tracking. The forms. Writing off all those tiny bank fees – those all add up!

I used to do everything in Freshbooks, and it was a MESS. Always. So much manual input. Or some months I’d just not clean up my books. I was a wreck.

Three years ago or so I bit the bullet and signed up for Bench. They connect to your bank accounts and do your bookkeeping. They used to shuffle your books over to another company for taxes, but now they process and file your taxes, too.

They also have this messaging feature through their website, too. So you can ask all sorts of questions about books, expenses, and taxes, and it’s CHILL because it’s just CHAT. With REAL PEOPLE.

If needed, you can book a call with them to talk about your books and taxes. It’s all included, and I LOVE IT.

Now… halfway through last year, I “streamlined” my operations and cut a bunch of expenses, so I thought, eh, I can manage my books myself!

Then it was the xmas holiday, and I still needed to process my books from November, and then December was lurking, too! I dreaded even getting started.

So I came crawling back (had great phone conversations with their team), and got re-started.

Here’s the thing – they have a “CATCH UP SERVICE.”

So they got connected back to my bank account, I uploaded some bank statements, and then they got my books settled from June-December.

It wasn’t free, of course, but it was WORTH IT.

Everything was updated, all books current. It was great.

Now, I just reviewed my taxes today, April 2nd, and we’re like, good to go. All done. In years past I’d get to filing my taxes in like, AUGUST or something, cuz I just kept pushing it off. Hell, I didn’t even file my 2019 taxes because of the whole COVID thing. Yeah… tax stuff is my weakness!

If that sounds similar to how you treat tax time, I highly recommend them. Check out Bench (affiliate link) and see if they might be a fit for you.

IMPACT

Had a wonderful conversation with a dear friend today, about life and work. And the big thing that came up was about impact.

That while money and the bank account are usually the biggest factors in our work, sometimes it’s impact that counts for most. And to somehow be in a position to seek opportunities for impact, that’s the dream. The bills are paid, there’s food in the fridge, and that opens up space for impact, and I gotta say, it sure feels nice.

GETTING IPHONE PHOTOS ONTO MY COMPUTER

Since I no longer keep my photos in Apple Photos, I needed a way to transfer my photos from my iPhone to my new file system.

I knew I could plug in my iPhone via USB cable and then use Image Capture to get the photos, but transferring the photos wirelessly would be really nice.

I was looking at USB thumb drives that I could plug into the Lightning port (on the iPhone 14 Plus), export the photos, and then plug into my Mac via the USB C plug.

This seemed fine, except I’d be using SansDisk software. I watched a few YouTube videos, and it looked atrocious.

Not to mention, sure, that’s another $50 purchase.

I then remembered that Dropbox has cloud photo storage. I’ve got the space in my account, and it seems that a month’s worth of photos on my phone is around 5GB of space.

So now, at the end of every month, I can export the images from Dropbox on my Mac and drag them into my new file system.

There is no clunky SansDisk software, no extra purchase, and it all works seamlessly in the background. I did it today for the images, too, and it’s absolutely fine.

GOODBYE, APPLE PHOTOS

The photo you see on the right is from 2002, which is 22 years ago. Apple’s iPhoto launched the same year, but I didn’t get my first Mac until 2003, which is when I must’ve started pouring photos into my computer.

Here we are 20+ years later, and my Photos library is over 350GB in space, but too large to sit on my my new 512GB MacBook Pro.

So the file sits on a 2TB external HD. Everytime I click on a photo, or an album, or anything, I get a beachball.

And since I’m getting more into taking photos with an actual digital camera, that means I need to put more photos into iPhoto (or whatever the fuck it’s called now), which just means more of the same – beachballs, slow, partially downloaded images.

So I finally exported all my photos by year into their own folder.

Yep, everything is out of sort, nothing is tagged, I lose the whole AI functionality of finding the word “burger” in a sign from a decade ago, but that’s ok with me. I also can’t bring up any photo on my phone at any time, but oh well.

I have over 3,000 screen shots.

What the fuck do I need all those for?

And did you know if you have LIVE PHOTOS turned on, like every image has a corresponding video file of a 2-5 seconds?

So 1000 photos is really 2000 files. Of shit I’ll never need again in my life.

Somehow I have duplicate files – sometimes 3x, 4x, 5x copies. Zero idea why.

Not sure the designers of Apple Photos planned on people like me with 22 years of photos, but here we are.