Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter

A top writer left. His loss, or ours?

Let me tell you a secret. If you ever need to revive a dead list, ask them for an opinion. Everyone tells you if your list has grown stagnant, you have to delete it and start over or the spam complaints will kill you.

Not true.

If you send them a pitch, probably. I don’t think you can revive a dead list with a sales pitch. But, I had a list I hadn’t emailed for over a year.

I asked them for an opinion in the subject line. Best open rate, ever.

We sure love being asked for our opinion, don’t we? We all have something to say. We all have opinions. Lots of them. On everything.

Being heard is another thing, of course. No one is guaranteed an audience.

One of the top writers at Medium left last week.

110K followers and he threw in the towel. Said he puts a lot of time and thinking and research into his writing and he just can’t keep up with the people who are churning out one or more stories every day.

Food for thought there, I think.

Which is not to say people can’t produce strong writing daily. Journalists do it all the time. I’m just not sure frequency and quality marry well for everyone.

It reminded me of a scene in a movie.

There’s a crowded building where some lunatic is silently picking off people one at a time and no one knows who’s next until the body falls. The hero is trying to get everyone out alive, but no one can hear him over the din of the crowd.

An analogy of life, in some strange way. All voices are equal, but not all opinions have the same weight, if you know what I mean.

On the internet, we readers get to choose which voices to elevate, of course and we choose by clicking. I’d love to believe the cream rises to the top, but I’m not sure that’s always the case.

Hot buttons and shock value get in the way.

Who cares about some guy doing research and citing sources on a deep and philosophical thought-piece when someone else is telling you about the lurid details of their sex life, or how to make a cool grand on your next article and I can’t even fault them because they need to eat, too.

Realities of the world we live in.

Quality isn’t the only reason we pay attention.

There’s 2 reasons we “pay” attention, of course.

Pay. Attention.

Interesting phrase, no? As though attention is a currency.

It is, of course. We live in a world where money usually follows attention. Sometimes, that’s a scary thought. Ten years ago, could anyone have imagined there being Instagram influencers?

Why we pay attention is worth thinking about and best I can figure, seems to me there’s 2 reasons we pay attention…

The first reason is that someone has earned our respect. The second is that they’ve pushed buttons.

One of the best favors we can do ourselves is to learn the difference.

The latter is what Internet Marketers often do. They push buttons.

Often, respect and button-pushing are at odds with each other because when you make a habit of pushing buttons for personal gain, the end result is often loss of respect. Not right away, but sooner or later. It’s almost inevitable.

How often can that guy tell you how to radically increase your income before you figure out that the only one making bank is him? And then the respect is gone, like the little boy who cried wolf, until eventually the villagers stopped paying him mind.

On some level, we know when we’re being duped.

We know that real help — real instructions — can be replicated. Instructions, entertainment and opinions are not the same and we do ourselves a disservice if we think they are. Or pretend they are, or confuse them, because that happens, too.

That recipe for chocolate cake? You can follow the steps and make the same cake. Imagine that. One, two, three. Just follow the instructions.

That post about earning money on Medium, or succeeding on Amazon or eBay or wherever? Figuring out which words are instruction and which are entertainment or opinion — well, that’s on you.

Caveat emptor. Buyer beware.

We don’t just buy things with money, of course.

Attention is a currency.

Here’s how I made a gajillion dollars on one article…

I saw a post with a title “how I made $____ on one Medium post.”

Very first sentence, the writer said really, it’s dumb luck.

A series of circumstances that lined up, he said. He, himself, hasn’t been able to replicate it. He talked about all the things he did, but when he did those same things again, it didn’t get the same result. I was stunned at how many reads and claps it had. Not surprised. But kind of stunned.

It’s like applauding the lottery for existing.

But we read them anyway, don’t we? Because who knows? Maybe it will work. Maybe there will be some gem there… maybe we’ll learn the secret, maybe.

Or maybe we’re just applauding someone who won the lottery. I don’t know. Humans can be confusing whether I look inside or out.

And so we cast another vote for what we want to see more of, and the world and its algorithms are happy to comply while the thinkers sigh and wander away because they can’t keep up with the daily content churn.

His loss? Or ours?

I don’t know, but I think it’s worth talking about.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

The never ending adventure

When my daughter was young, she had a collection of write-your-own-adventure books. She’d read a section and have to pick what happens next.

— If you think he ran into the forest, turn to page 49. — If you think he climbed the tree, turn to page 72.

She could build dozens of different stories by choosing a different option for what happens next.

Oddly, that’s kind of how life works. Especially on the internet. Click by click, we’re building the world we all have to live in. Every time you click, you’re not just shaping your world. You’re shaping the world we all live in.

Some days, I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Thanks to Rasheed for thinking of me when I was buried on a project…

And thanks to Dr. Y for the hard work on this publication