100 days of blogging

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With this post, I’ve gone 100 days in a row with a blog post. My last run at this (starting back in December of 2016) lasted around 50 days.

As I mentioned early on, I tried to shift my mindset from talking about stuff to talking about ideas, in the hopes that it wouldn’t run out. While I still cover some random stuff (like the reMarkable tablet or the running app Zwift), I think I’ve done a good job of staying focused.

It’s amazing how much the world of digital publishing has changed in these quick 100 days. I started before the election, and since then we’ve had huge shifts in perception regarding publishing rights (with things like Donald Trump being kicked off Twitter, and Parler being kicked off most everything). As time goes on, I’m increasingly convinced that most everyone should be publishing on their own blog, for reasons I laid out here.

Will I make it through February?

This month will prove to be quite a test for me. While I have a handful of posts already written for the next few days, as I tend to do, in three days I’ll be starting the altMBA, billed as an “intensive, 4-week online workshop”. The schedule for it is insane, and I’m super excited about it.

While I have permission and help from my wife and my business partner, it’s still going to be a challenge to balance everything.

My hope is that I come out of the altMBA ready to tackle this even more, but it’s entirely possible that it causes my focus to shift and I start pointing my resources elsewhere. We’ll see what happens, but it’s been a great 100 days to start!

Who is “the media”?

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We hear quite a lot about “the media” leaning to one side, or the “the media” not promoting a particular event, but who exactly is “the media”? Increasingly, it’s us.

This is media. This post can be found in Google, or perhaps you found it via a social media channel. It’s media as much as anything else is media, though with a smaller audience than most big names.

Muzzled?

A story written by Josh Hawley a few days ago pointed in this direction. His article was titled “The muzzling of America”, about how he’s losing his voice — and it was the cover of the New York Post! That hardly seems like being muzzled. Techdirt did a great job of breaking it down if you want to check out their thoughts on it.

Another example is a post from a friend of mine on Facebook, sharing a story from the Washington Post about people who cleaned trash off the streets after the events at the Capitol building.

A comment on her post simply said “Where is the media?” (to cover the clean-up), which was confusing to me.

This was an article from the Washington Post, shared by countless people on Facebook. The “media” covered it, but just maybe not the particular outlet she was hoping for. It’s not where is the media, but perhaps who is the media?

We’re the media

We’re not fully there yet, but content power is quickly moving into the our hands, and slowly away from the bigger companies.

CNN averages around 1.7M viewers, a pretty solid number. However, “MrBeast” has over 51M subscribers on YouTube, and Charli D’Amelio has over 105M followers on TikTok. They have potentially far more influence than CNN does, and it’s likely you’ve never heard of either of them.

There is only so much attention that a single person can give, so we’ll never hit a point where everyone has a million fans, but content distribution seems to be getting wider and wider.

Own your content. Share your views. You are the media.

Don’t start tomorrow

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If you’re thinking of starting a blog, or writing a book, or exercising, or anything else, a good time to start would be tomorrow. A better time to start would be today.

In his book The War of Art, author Steven Pressfield says:

We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead we say, “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”

Starting “tomorrow” can be a way to push things off forever, as tomorrow will never come.

You don’t have to finish today — just start. Even if you don’t have time, you can still get started right now.

Buy the domain name for your blog.

Start a Google Doc with some notes on the first chapter of your book.

Go walk for 10 minutes on the treadmill.

Getting the first step out of the way makes the second step much, much easier to take.

Needless artificial constraints

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Constraints on your work can be a good thing. In The Practice, Seth Godin devotes an entire section to them. Among other examples, he cites Susan Kare’s work on the original Macintosh and the amazing icons she created while under a 32×32 pixel constraint.

However, there are times when constraints seem arbitrary and unnecessary, a legacy of “that’s how it’s always been”.

YouTube TV

A great example is with YouTube TV. It’s a wonderful service, but has a weird constraint when it comes to rewinding the channel you’re watching.

In the days of physical DVR devices, like TiVo, when you switched to a new channel you couldn’t immediately rewind. You’d need to be on that channel for a while so it could record what it saw, and then you could rewind back to the point you started with (but never any further). This was a constraint brought on by the technology of the time and the fact that it was using your local storage for the video, so it made sense.

YouTube TV has neither of those technical restraints, but the same issue still exists. If you change channels, you can’t rewind to a time prior to when you changed over. This makes no sense. YouTube TV isn’t recording the channel locally for you; they’re really not recording your own copy at all; when you “record” something on there, they just note that your account needs future access to that past show, as likely thousands of others have requested as well.

When you change to view a different channel, Google has long been recording it already and allowing you to view past content should be easy. Instead, they’ve unnecessarily carried on constraints from the past, even though they shouldn’t exist in the present.

Constraints can be a good thing, but creating artificial constraints is generally not something to include.

Update: Oddly enough, Seth Godin’s post today is on the same topic, though with a slightly different spin.

What record label is Taylor Swift on?

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What label is Taylor Swift on? It doesn’t matter.

It matters to the record label, and it might matter to Taylor, but it doesn’t matter to you or I. We just care whether we can access her on Spotify or YouTube Music or wherever we try to stream.

What network produced “The Office”? All most people know is that it’s no longer on Netflix and they have to go to Peacock to watch it now. Some people know that it was NBC, but that’s mostly irrelevant anymore.

Who published Harry Potter? This one is even tougher, as I would guess that very few people know (or care) that it was Scholastic Press.

At the end of the day, none of those matter except to the people that created them, and they need to learn to be ok with that.

This site is built on WordPress and hosted by Flywheel. I think both are excellent choices for people to use, but they don’t matter to you. You want to see great content (which I hope you sometimes get), and it’s irrelevant what CMS and hosting I’m using.

Produce great work, and let that work speak for itself.

Why Seth Godin doesn’t tweet

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Seth Godin doesn’t use Twitter. He has a Twitter account for his blog, but it’s just for his team to share his latest posts.

He’s made it clear before that he doesn’t have a problem with Twitter, and thinks some people make great use of it. In terms of his time and his focus, it’s just not where he wants to. As I’ve said before, it’s not that he’s necessarily “too busy”, but just that it likely is not a priority for him.

I’ve long been kinda bummed about that, simply because I think he’d have some great things to share on Twitter. It hit me today that he indeed does have great things to share on Twitter, but instead of quickly tweeting them he takes the time to develop those thoughts into more robust ideas and publish them on his blog.

Three kinds of Twitter users

In taking this further, I think Twitter users can be loosely grouped into three categories.

First, you have the Twitter-heavy folks. These are people that tweet fairly often, and tend to have great things to say. They’re good to follow on Twitter for their insights, as that’s their primary place to go.

Next, you have the Twitter-assisted people. These are folks that share ideas on Twitter for the use of crowd-sourcing responses and fully fleshing out their idea. Once they’ve gotten feedback and shaped their view a bit more, it becomes a full blog post.

Lastly, you have the Twitter-lite users, and I’d put myself in this group. I share my blog-produced thoughts on Twitter, follow and interact with other folks from time to time, but don’t produce a ton of unique content on there.

I’ve felt that I “should” be publishing more frequently on sites like Twitter, and maybe that’s accurate, but I’m finding the the work to publish full blog posts every day consumes much of the time that I would otherwise spend on there.

The Mona Lisa

Cal Newport wrote a post about why the Mona Lisa is famous despite not tweeting, and I think summarizes my thoughts pretty well with this quote:

…you’re almost certainly better off taking the 135 minutes per day the average social media user spends on these services and instead dedicate them to deliberately improving your ability to do valuable things.

Tweet if you want. I’ll likely follow you, enjoy your insights, and think more highly of you. However, also consider easing off on traditional social media a bit and put your time into content that will last.

An hour without a mouse

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I’ve seen people try to use the web with just a keyboard for a full day, or even a week, but I thought a good place to start would just be a single hour. It doesn’t sound too tough at first, but you quickly realize — how do I switch tabs with my keyboard? Or change to a different application entirely?

It gets worse from there. But first, why?

Why try this at all?

You may have seen some of my recent posts related to accessibility, and this test is along that same vein. I want to better understand how impaired users (whether in mobility, vision, or otherwise) use the web, and going keyboard-only is a great place to start.

It’s hard to find exact numbers, but it seems that roughly 7% of users have “severe dexterity difficulties” that would preclude the use of a mouse, and it’s estimated that 1-2% of users have to rely on a screen reader. Screen reading software uses the same type of interface as a keyboard user would, so we’re talking about nearly 10% of users that aren’t using a mouse when they browse. That’s a lot of people!

By working through this, even for just an hour, I made additional changes to this site and GreenMellen (and will be updating our client sites as well) to make them more keyboard-friendly.

How to get started

I did my test using my Chromebook (at my new standing desk), and whatever type of operating system you’re using I suspect that most of your day is in the browser. For that, I’d suggest printing out two things:

  1. A list of Chrome keyboard shortcuts (or a similar list for a browser of your choice).
  2. A list of keyboard shortcuts for any of your main programs, like this info for Gmail.

From there, see what happens and where you get stuck.

Try it yourself

You don’t have to do it for a week, a day, or even an hour. Maybe just set aside 10 minutes, put the mouse in a drawer, and see what you can do. It should help you gain some empathy for users, and depending on your role it may encourage you to put in some work to make it easier for them (and everyone, really) to access the content that you’re working to share.

Reading for the altMBA

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I’m taking part in Seth Godin’s latest class of the altMBA next month, and the books for the session just arrived at my house. These aren’t textbooks or anything — just normal books you can get on Amazon. Some have been on my “to read” list, and some weren’t, but they’ll all be getting read in the next few weeks.

If you’re curious what they are, here’s the list:

Thanks for the Feedback, by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen. While none of the books are strict requirements before we start, they strongly encourage people to read this one first, as a main piece of the altMBA is giving and receiving feedback with your cohort.

Inclusive Conversations by Mary-Frances Winters.

Overcoming Bias by Tiffany Jana and Matthew Freeman.

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The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.

The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.

I’m excited to dig into them, and I suspect some of what I learn from them will show up on this blog in the coming months. If you’re looking for something new to read, those are five good places you could start!

Am I an expert on that?

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I mentioned David Perell’s “Write of Passage” course a few days ago, and even if the course doesn’t interest you he’s a great guy to follow.

A few days ago, David tweeted this:

If you’re unable to read the embedded tweet, it says:

Writing is humbling because you realize that you don’t understand things you thought you were an expert on

I’ve found this to be true as well. Some of the topics I’ve written about on this blog are things that I thought I knew quite well, but as I started writing I realized I had more work to do.

It’s like I mentioned a few months ago, where I said that “I often intentionally present topics that I myself am unfamiliar with but curious about — which forces me to think through them, learn more, and put together a presentation“. I know that the act of writing will force me to think through things more deeply, and that’s a good thing.

And sometimes, like David said, it’ll make me realize that I’m not as sharp on some subjects as I thought I was.