Create for Love not Likes
Spend a day on social media, and you will observe the similarities among all content across the vast sea of the digital ecosystem. Spend an hour on Twitter, and you will be dumbfounded by the lack of originality. Almost every other post from creators is about being original if you want to stand out while paradoxically being a carbon copy of the next person. It is extremely challenging to compete or have original ideas when more than half of the global population is occupying the same space.
Guess what? Most ideas are not original. Even writing this essay feels like something I have encountered elsewhere, perhaps...
The truth is that very few ideas are genuinely original. Most of them are morphed or compounded versions of something similar, somewhere else in space and time, much like how virus - ideas and content mutate.
I have a strong love/hate relationship with social media. I know I have to be present on it to grow, and I know I have to be consistent with it too. The problem is that my authentic self despises doing any of the above. So how do I stay true to myself? How do I write and create something that is unique, authentic, and made with love?
It took me over a decade to find an answer to this, or at least, what currently feels like an acceptable truth. I have experimented with different approaches, and I noticed that I get the most responses when I speak about my experiences, my truths, and my versions of things. I embraced the awareness that no thought is purely original, but your version of yourself, your variant, is what makes it unique.
While ideas are not unique, the creators are. How you encounter space, content, and thought, alters your interpretation of it, thus creating a new mutation of it. So, I focused on that. The mutant that I have created, I speak about that.
We all have hardships, doubts, fears, love, excitement, and anger, but how we experience it, deal with it, express it, forgive, remember, etc., that is uniquely yours.
So, I started writing and creating from that perspective.
Another thing that truly helps is to write with love. Don't try to make a post in hopes that it goes viral. Instead, write something that you genuinely love. Imagine your audience not as a sea of likes but as a group of people comprised of your future best friend, lover, partner, friend, business partner, and your biggest fan. Write for them.
Write so well that someone reading on the other side of the screen falls deeply in love with you. Someone who will eagerly share your thoughts with their friends. Someone who will read and screenshot your work as a glimpse of hope or aspiration right before they go to bed.
Can you imagine that? Now, go create THAT!
