Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
Love this bit from Derek Sivers:
Making money depends on other people, so it’s harder. It’s not entirely under your control. It’s an outer game.
Reducing what you “need” to be happy is easier. It’s entirely under your control. It’s an inner game.
Would I like to replace my car from 2015 with over 100,000 miles? Sure. But that means a car payment and higher insurance premiums.
I don’t need that new car, which helps me be a little more rich.
I spoke with Thought Enthusiast about Social Media Escape Club, mantras, and Noah Kalina!
“hey… you don’t need to be loud and jump around and do stunts to connect and share your work. Like, you can just be who you are, and that’s enough, and even though the algorithm might not “reward” that, oh well. Being yourself makes it easy to sustain your work because you’re not wasting energy being someone else.”
Read more here.
This is from Cassidy Frost’s latest, How to Dedicate Your Life to Music When You’re Fucking Scared:
“You don’t need to believe in yourself, you just need to act in service of whatever thing you do believe in, no matter how small.”
Stack up Small Acts daily and weekly. They don’t need to be heavy, cost a lot of money, or take up a lot of time.
As time passes, these Small Acts will create a mountain built on all the cool things you’re doing.
Then I saw this is Lauren’s latest newsletter a day later:
“If you keep swimming, shooting your shot, putting in the reps, things are bound to look different or at least pleasantly more weird a year later.”
Heck yes, “pleasantly more weird.”
The work doesn’t guarantee you’ll achieve some new level of success. But the cliche “it’s the journey, not the destination” rings true for a reason.
Act in service of yourself. It has to start there. Yes, help may come, but you must work towards something for someone to believe that helping out is worth the effort.
If your website is just a billboard, remember that no one gets on the highways to look at billboards.
If your website’s contents are just embedded content from other platforms and links to social media, it is a billboard.
I come to your website, and the only option is to… leave your website.
Imagine if I drove to your restaurant and it was just a billboard, with links to Google Maps, DoorDash, and your Instagram account.
It’s not just about the food when I go to a restaurant. Sometimes you strike up a rapport with the wait staff. You find something on the menu that becomes your favorite. Maybe the seating is extra nice, or the crowd on a Tuesday night is your vibe.
You don’t get any of that from a billboard. A billboard is for shouting HEY HEY HEY. DETAILS! WEBSITE ADDRESS!
Stop putting up billboards and expecting people to get excited.
To be alive is fraught with tension – a delicate balance of having your shit together and being moments away from everything falling over the rails.
People talk about the “hot new thing” because of tension. Taylor Swift has a big tour. Great! I’d love to go. Tickets are $1000, and the nearest tour stop is five hours away. That’s tension.
There’s no tension in posting a song on Spotify or uploading a video to YouTube. That’s the easy part. Telling someone, “I posted a new single on Spotify,” is easy. An AI bot could write that. No tension.
Time to up the ante. Send the link to only ten people, and then see what happens. Show your next film or gallery with only a cryptic map to a secret underground venue under the local college water tower. Limit the number of people that can attend your next Zoom meeting.
When everything is available for everyone, there’s little incentive to pay attention; it’ll be here tomorrow, digitally or available to purchase on Amazon.
Great bit from Looking Sideways:
Let’s face it, being an independent creative person amid this onslaught of algorithms and homogenous content is bloody hard and endlessly soul-destroying. Sharing your friends’ work is good for the soul, hugely encouraging for them, and a vote for the type of creative world we actually want to live in.
Photo by Seth Werkheiser
Recently I did a Klaviyo “check-up” for a record label and found they had two abandoned cart flows going at the same time (which meant every user got TWO emails to remind them of items in their cart – ooops).
I’ve been using Klaviyo since 2020 for music labels (including Death Row Records).
The holidays are coming up – if you need a second set of eyes on your email marketing setup (Klaviyo mainly, but I work in Mailchimp a bit, too), let’s connect: hey@sethw.xyz
As Seth Godin says in his book Linchpin:
“The reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map.”
If you want a guarantee, buy a hammer.
Stop looking for tricks. There is no shortcut. There’s no “one size fits all.”
Make a painting, a photograph, a sad song, teach a course, call an old friend, dance like no one’s watching, cuz no one cares more than you do, so you might as well get to it.
We always need more here in America:
“For some reason, the American mindset is endless growth. Everything must get bigger, everything must get better, and more, more, more, how do you like it, how do you like it. But the truth of the matter is, nothing natural undergoes infinite growth, other than some cancers.”
Like I started thinking about in 2008 and 2009, when running a music blog for AOL Music, “it’s like driving full speed up a mountain that doesn’t end, with two bosses in the back seat telling you to go faster.”
Growth or else. Cut writers, cut budget, but keep growing at 10% month after month. Be it traffic, or subscribers, or units sold, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
Photo by Seth Werkheiser
There are so many distractions, so many shiny objects to chase. A splash of inspiration came way this morning, but had a good grounding call this afternoon to set me straight, a reminder to stay true to my own mission and style.
