Feeling pressure to produce Find relief in the remarkable
Transcriber: Hà Vi Phan
Reviewer: Arvind Patil
A few months back, a business
owner asked me how I felt
about social media schedulers.
Now, if you’re not familiar,
a social media scheduler is a piece of
software that you can use to come up with
a whole bunch of posts all at once
and schedule them to drip out
on various platforms
day by day in the future.
If you’re just a casual
user of social media.
You have absolutely no use
for one of these things
you just post
when you have something to say
or otherwise, you’re just scrolling along,
laughing at memes,
looking at baby pictures and trying
to ignore that Uncles latest rant.
But for business owners and creatives,
social media schedulers promise
the possibility of being everywhere online
everyday in order to promote your business
without the soul crushing,
time consuming task of actually being
everywhere online every day to promote
your business.
Social media schedulers give us
a way to pay down our content debt every
day that you believe you should be
posting to Facebook or LinkedIn,
Instagram or Tiktok.
It all adds up on your content
debt balance sheet.
And many small business owners today are
deeply in the red
and content debt is
a lot like financial debt
in that it
weighs on the decisions that we make
and the strategies we choose.
Imagine if your paycheck depended on
what you posted to Instagram daily,
the funny reals of Tiktok that you make.
The videos that you upload to YouTube,
perfectly suited to what other
people are searching for,
not to mention your weekly newsletter,
your new connections on LinkedIn
and the Facebook lives you do
for your free Facebook group,
all to satisfy an algorithm.
Pretty bleak, right,
but that’s reality
for so many small business owners today.
So how do I feel about social
media schedulers? Not a fan.
I told this business owner and that
might be surprising
because I’m a business owner twice over.
I’m a marketer.
I am here because I use social
media and content marketing.
And so it could seem like I would want to
use any tool that would allow me to
make that all happen
in less time and less hassle.
But the way I see it, social media
schedulers incentivize us to create more
and more forgettable content, all
to pay down our mounting debt.
And I’m ready to declare bankruptcy
and start fresh.
So why do so many business owners,
influencers and creators feel this
pressure to be constantly posting?
Two big reasons.
First, tech companies have built
business models around our free labor
and marketers have built
business or business models
training us how to do that free labor
so that we can find the freedom
in building an audience and
selling that audience’s attention.
We end up believing that we have
to be constantly working the system
to feel like
we’re not working at all.
And that leads to the other reason.
Why is it that we end up agreeing to
all this free labor
and taking on all of this debt?
Traditional ways of working
have failed us
over and over again.
Our current economic
and social systems
have created a state of utter precarity.
Creators and business owners
don’t feel the pressure to constantly
create loads of forgettable content
because they see
an oppotunity.
They feel it because
they’re trying to escape the uncertainty
that swirls around their bills,
their careers and their families.
Crappy jobs just keep getting crappier.
Wages are stagnant, benefits
are nonexistent.
Student loans threaten to topple
even the highest achievers,
and our workdays get longer and longer
as work bleeds into every
corner of our lives.
And so a whole generation and then some
is willing to try to pull themselves up
by their bootstraps, by selling
themselves online
through the social media marketplace.
It can feel like the choice is
to keep cranking out content
or end up living in the proverbial van
down by the river,
which is not,
it should be said,
the same thing
as hashtag found life.
Now, I know it is the height of privilege
for me to stand up here
and talk to you about the demands of
building an audience or a business online.
And many of us do come from white, middle,
upper middle class families.
We’ve got degrees and plenty of experience
in corporate America,
and many of us, far more
than you might expect,
feel forced into making a living this way
because it seems like there
are no other good options.
Some of us belong to groups whose labor
has been exploited
generation after generation,
and some of us are the moms
who have been forced out of the jobs
that we’ve trained for.
The recent grads who pick up the
side hustle just to pay the student loans.
Or even the folks just a couple of years
from retirement
who have been unfairly
aged out of their careers.
All of us, for one reason or many,
feel unstable enough
to go all in on laboring
to satisfy an algorithm every day.
And it’s not working.
The pressure to create
and create and create
isn’t meeting individual needs
in the way it’s been sold.
It’s certainly
not creating stability
when these platforms are constantly
changing the rules on us.
When one person can come along
and disagree with us
or doesn’t like our race,
gender or sexuality
and upend everything we’ve built
with a single nasty comment
or reported post
know the endless
hustle is just replicating
the same system that’s causing
us all to burn out.
We’re constantly working,
constantly producing,
constantly trying to do something valuable
just so that we don’t fall behind.
We haven’t created some sort of liberated,
democratized approach to earning a living.
We’ve just reproduced the same conditions
we sought to escape.
Now, my solution isn’t to give up on
social media or building businesses.
I love the Internet and I love
doing business there.
So instead I propose content
debt forgiveness.
As business owners and creators,
we can forget the quotas and
the optimization and the mediocrity
that comes from pandering for likes
and shares
and instead focus on the remarkable.
Now, if you’re not
a business owner or a creator,
you might be starting to wonder.
All right. But what in the world does
this have to do with me?
Why should you care about the pressure to
churn out the digital equivalent of
a live, laugh, love side
on a daily basis?
Here’s why.
This whole system is impacting
the ways that you interact online to.
It’s the same quantity over quality
attitude that has business owners
scrambling to be everywhere
online every day.
That’s also making your online experiences
at best decidedly mediocre.
And of course, it doesn’t stop
with the online world,
even if you don’t feel the pressure to
create something likeable every day.
As Jia Tolentino writes,
[you still live in the world
that this Internet has created.
A world in which selfhood has become
capitalism’s last natural resource.]
What could it look like if
our small business owners and creators
could spend more time plugging into
our communities both online and offline,
and less time putting
themselves out there
with market tested messages
and metric optimized posts?
Now, I’ve had a front row seat watching
small business owners go head to head
with algorithms, noise and misinformation.
It’s hard to get noticed, let alone
to find a new customer.
So I get why creating more,
posting more and showing up on more
platforms seems like the answer.
I understand the motivation
to produce more
and more mediocre content to
keep up with the market.
But here’s what I know
that many small
business owners don’t know.
Some of the most successful small
business owners in my community
don’t care at all about social media
or building an audience
or really anything that looks
like online marketing.
What they really care about
is doing remarkable work
and creating remarkable work helps to
create the stability that we all crave.
Remarkable work creates tangible results.
It inspires word of mouth marketing.
It builds fruitful relationships.
So the question I’ve been asking
in various forms
to the small business owners
that I work with
is it creating remarkable experiences,
results, products or content
can actually create the stability
that you’re really looking for.
What’s preventing
you from doing that?
And often I hear that the main thing
standing between them and
the time to create remarkable things is
the endless pressure to churn
out mediocre things.
And that’s when the light
bulb starts to blink on.
That’s when they realize that they don’t
have to do it that way after all.
Now, at this point, some of these business
owners do log off of social media
for good so that they can focus
on building remarkable businesses.
But plenty of us, like me, stick around
and approach things very very differently.
I no longer allow FAMO to dictate
what I create or communicate online.
I don’t crank out content just to satisfy
the demands of platforms and algorithms
trying to get my malevolent social
overlords to bestow a few more followers
on me so I can feel secure another day.
Over the last five years, I’ve
been investigating
how I want to show up
in public spaces online,
how I want to market my businesses
and share my ideas without contributing
to the noise.
I’ve tried a bunch of different approaches
but where I’ve landed is to focus
on creating remarkable content.
For me, that’s podcast episodes, articles,
visual essays for Instagram
curated newsletters.
I’m focused on ideas and conversation
instead of tactics, algorithms & platforms
I want to put ideas out into
the world that get people talking.
I want to share stories that encourage
others to share their own.
I want to become a part of
the conversation without,
as my friend Sara Avanir put it,
becoming ensnared by it,
trapped by algorithms, gimmicks and fads.
I’m focused on
remarkability instead of Ubiquiti.
For me, prioritizing posting
less but better
has created an incredible confluence of
creative satisfaction
and business results.
And it would be easy to quantify
these results by telling you that
my audience has grown,
that I see more likes
and shares every day,
the more people are becoming customers.
And all of that is true.
But those are just the vanity
metrics of this same system.
Here’s the real benefit: relief.
When I started to share this approach
with my clients and followers,
they told me how relieved they were
to let go of everything
they thought they knew
about online marketing.
They’ve told me they’ve changed
the way they create and consume.
They’re giving themselves permission to
linger on ideas and make them stronger.
They’re taking the time and space
to create remarkable things
and learning what remarkable
actually means to them.
They’re enjoying the process
and feeling much less stressed about
what they’re putting out online.
They’re feeling less precarious
in their day to day work.
And just like me, they’re proud of what
they’re putting out into the world
and the impact that it’s having
on people they care about.
And if that means creating and posting
a little less
in order to create and share better,
so be it.
And when creators and business
owners are creating
and sharing more remarkable things,
it means you get to engage with
more remarkable things.
It means we can have a more remarkable
public dialogue.
We can have less mindless scrolling
and more mindful exploration.
Your timeline does not have to just be
the place you go when you’re bored.
It can be a place you go
that inspires you,
that challenges you that opens the doors
to new ideas and new possibilities.
And that’s the Internet that I want to
help build one remarkable brick
at a time.