Every time I sit down to write a blog post, I try to imagine a specific person that I’m writing to. Sometimes it’s my best friend, sometimes it’s my kid sister, sometimes it’s the grocer from Trader Joe’s (her name is Bettie and she’s a pro).
It’s tempting to create content for an unknown audience. Many companies launch new products to try to feed the appetite of unknown new customers and vastly unconnected markets (to date Coca Cola’s product portfolio is over 3,500 drinks). As a result, we wind up with more and more content, watered down for a broader audience. It loses its luster and worse, becomes generic. Even the art that people post becomes bland.
Most importantly, this unknown audience wouldn’t miss a single Instagram post, Tweet or YouTube video if we stopped tomorrow. These people won’t miss us when we’re gone.
This doesn’t just apply to content, it applies to most effort spent. To every person that spends their life stuck in a cubicle, spending endless hours on email in their cyber-factories, would their company miss them if they were gone? If the signature suddenly changed in the email, would anyone even notice?
And how about Instagram friends, how many would miss us when we’re gone? How much of our effort and time is spent pleasing a faceless crowd. We’re competing on an overflowing stage with no audience.
So where do we go?
Create content for the specific tastes of that one friend and his penchant for juggling.
Write for that one person, the one that would miss you if you didn’t exist tomorrow. I treat this blog as a digital inheritance, laying out my thoughts and self experiments so that one day my kids can get to know dad when he was their age, to learn more about his successes, struggles and whacky theories.
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