Boneyard
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View this email in your browser (|ARCHIVE|) “Ask yourself at every moment: Is this necessary?” —Marcus Aurelius Being a creative pro is a choice, but it’s one that most people aren’t prepared to make.
Why? Because daily distractions around them provide what feel like instant rewards for sacrificing their attention.
You never run out of distractions in a culture that rewards you for being an obedient consumer.
In that sense, social media is the boneyard of your unrealized potential.
Left unchecked, it’s a confirmation bias machine designed to keep you entertained by outrage and preoccupied by the opinions of others rather than thinking deeply for yourself and doing your best work.
Recognize that the default setting for most media—Facebook, Twitter and TV news especially—is unhappiness. But also recognize that it doesn’t have to be this way.
How your social media feed makes you feel is a reflection of choices you’ve made. So make better ones.
Make a deliberate choice in how and why you use media. Stop behaving like a consumer of it. Treat it as a raw material resource, not as a daily diet of fast food that gets force fed to you (it’s not a coincidence that it’s called a daily “feed.”)
Be highly selective of the people you follow and don’t just do so reciprocally. Don’t waste even a minute of your time arguing online with people whose opinions you disagree with. Tune out the conflict prone. Find insightful people. Pay attention to what they do and less to what they say. Look for examples of work that can inspire you. It’s all there.
As I’ve said before, there are three forces that keep us in unhappy situations (https://us4.campaign-archive.com/?u=89226eb68936fc712577977b8&id=87ef0ac6d9) : choice, contract or force. No one is making you fill your feed with garbage. No one is paying you for your attention.
You are what you eat in terms of your social media choices. It either leads you to a garden or a boneyard.
Very best, Patrick
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