Me: “I think I’m going to write on LinkedIn every weekday for the month of January.”
Most People I Tell: “Cool! What are you going to write about?”
For awhile, I wasn’t so sure. But there was a time that I wrote routinely for a combination of different outlets, including for the Rice University newspaper, Google’s student blog, my own Medium blog, and of course, Seventeen Magazine (woot!) where I had a gig as a contributor during my freshman year of college. Back in high school, I founded an “underground” newspaper called The Kumquat (lol) and was supremely proud of the writing team I put together as “editor-in-chief”. Whenever my friends are applying to grad school these days, I beg them to allow me to edit their essays.
I don’t share this with you to brag – the truth is that regardless of the outlet, the opportunity, or the content, writing has always made me extraordinarily happy. Even when I was a management consultant, I most enjoyed the projects that involved massive amounts of corresponding and connecting with others in written or spoken communication. It has always made me happy to write and to crystallize the meaning of phenomena, regardless of topic.
I’ve known for a long time that writing makes me happy, I talk a big game about posting online more, and I yet I don’t do it.
Until now.
I’ve decided that now in 2018, I’m going to face the blank page each day instead of making writing a “once in awhile when I get inspired” kind of thing. And upon reflection, I realized that part of the barriers to writing more was that I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to write about.
Whenever a person builds decides that they want to be a content creator of any sort, there is this pressure to figure out every single thing in advance about what their “brand” will be. Before even getting started with creating or writing, the gurus say you’ve got to have a detailed plan. Ironically, that pressure usually prevents a person from even getting started. As with determining one’s career path, I’m pretty sure that the idea of “figuring it all out” in advance and having a detailed map to one’s perfect niche is a false ideal. The truth is that there is an iterative process of finding one’s voice through just diving in and doing. This process continues throughout a person’s evolution as a content creator and as a human being.
So in the spirit of diving in and doing as I find a voice that resonates with you, here’s what you can expect from these posts this month:
Exploring Career Advice – Let’s get something out of the way: I don’t pretend to know all the answers when it comes to anyone’s career. That being said, it’s certainly an area of my life where I have a lot of questions, and in the exploration of the answers to those questions, I’ve gotten some great advice. When I’ve had the opportunity to share those thoughts, I feel like I’m being of service because people seem to like it and find the sharing to be useful. You can expect to see that advice featured here.
Alternative and/or Extreme Productivity Ideas – I used to love productivity articles, but at this point in the journey toward content singularity, the internet does not need another heavy-handed article on the 7 Things All Leaders Do Before Breakfast. (And besides, don’t those articles make you feel like crap? Because they make me feel like crap.) Instead, I hope to bring you career-related productivity ideas that may not have been explored in glorious listicles, and we’ll start with my own experiences. You’ll hear about my journey into hypnotherapy, from using it to skyrocket my analytical abilities to working on my certification to become a hypnotherapist. You’ll also meet my friend who has meditated for twenty minutes twice a day every day for over a year and a half all while working at a top management consulting firm (granted, I haven’t asked him if he would be OK with me profiling him, but now that I’ve said it here he kind of has to say yes). And of course, I’ll walk you through the breakfast hacks that I’ve implemented. Whether you’ve already heard about or tried out the hacks, I will at the very least do my best to make it entertaining for you to read!
My Opinions – Hopefully, sharing these won’t totally kill my career prospects, because I do have a lot of opinions on management, people, relationships, life, and leadership. Some of it is stuff that inspires me, while other stuff irritates me. My plan is to establish a foundation for an entertaining dialog with you.
Don’t worry though; I won’t be one of these silly LinkedIn Steve Jobs-Wannabes who doublespace all their posts and purport to write bestselling books in some universe, somewhere.
It’s kind of smart to have that double spacing, though, because it forces people to scroll down.
And it makes you sound like you’ve written a lot and really know what you’re talking about.
Also, who even are these people and why are they crowding up my LinkedIn feed!?
Business and/or Tech Things That Excite Me – There are a lot of people writing on LinkedIn who are true experts in their crafts and fields. I have not become an expert in anything, yet, but I’m very good at getting excited about cool stuff. As with anyone, the things that thrill me do change – for now, blockchain technology and cryptocurrency seem to be exciting to everyone and their mom (literally, my mom is freaking stoked about bitcoin and Coinbase; I’ll tell you more about that later). For better or worse, I count myself to be a part of the blockchain bandwagon. Right now, the implication of blockchain I’m most excited is its potential to change media, including through decentralizing monetary rewards. You’ll hear more about this in future posts, but to begin with, every post I’m including on LinkedIn will also be cross-posted on Steemit, a blockchain-based social network that uses cryptocurrency to generate payments for contributors.
I’m really excited about sharing all of the above with you. Any encouragement and/or advice that you have throughout this journey is greatly, fantastically appreciated – it’s not easy for me to finally get it together and commit to posting at a level I’m fundamentally uncomfortable with, but I’m looking forward to enjoying the process. So, thank you all in advance – let the new year begin!
What are your resolutions and – more importantly – how are you putting them into practice? Let me know in the comments below because I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Feel free to share and like/upvote this post because as a budding writer, it means the world to me.
This post also appears on LinkedIn in an effort to convert more users to Steemit!