We live in a world controlled by algorithms. Our behavior is influenced and affected in ways we don’t understand. Places like social media use people (like you) as the product, to create content, for them to then serve ads on, to the real customers – the advertisers.
Certain types of content generate more views, shares, and engagement than others. This lets the companies that own them sell more ads, which means they prioritize their algorithms to reward that type of content, which then gets the actual humans that produce it trained to produce more of the type of content the algorithm rewards. That usually includes outrage, “zinger” type responses, or even toxic positivity.
Regular web pages are no different; Google rewards rankings for sites that are Search Engine Optimized. This affects every piece of material posted on the web.
It’s a painful, exhausting cycle. I refuse to have anything to do with it.
I made a decision six years ago when I started writing to write for myself. For the first year of this blog, I didn’t even have email subscriptions. My articles were just posted on my website for people to see and read, if they came at all. It didn’t stop me. I wrote one article a week, trying to figure out what it was I wanted to say. Proving to myself I did actually have value to provide to the world.
I don’t track visits to my website. I don’t do SEO. I don’t post on social media. I even turned off the “Thumbs Up” feature for each article. I didn’t want to pander to what I thought my audience wanted to hear. Instead, I aimed to keep it pure and write for what I wanted to share.
Honoring myself was the lesson I learned as a DJ. I didn’t choose records that I thought the audience wanted to hear, I choose records based on what I wanted to hear in that very moment. I trusted my instincts and took huge risks. And that is why I transcended as a DJ and people still talk about me decades later.
Almost all of my writing today comes from this prompt: What do I need to hear most right now?
Sometimes I’ll write it in the way that it makes it sound like I’ve written it for the audience, but in the end it came from me, for me.
By limiting my blog to 100 email readers, I’m not focused on “growth” as a metric. Since I’m not looking for “Likes”, views, or Followers, I keep my writing pure. I don’t attach a dopamine hit to whether people like my article or are sharing it, or if the algorithm is boosting it. I remain focused on what is most important to me, not the algorithm.
I’m building towards something. I can feel it. This is only part of the journey, and I’ve amassed a huge body of work, and evidence, of my journey so far. I discovered a new community recently and I was able to say that I have 6 years of blog articles, which gives me a huge credibility boost. I was able to show and not simply tell. I was able to take my honed and refined message into the community and make a large impact. I got to develop my message outside of algorithms, and speak my powerful truth.
I’ve already written one book that originated from my articles, and am completing my next through the same methods. These books were not known to me in advance, they only appeared in hindsight from the volume of content I had produced.
Without measuring Likes, views, hits, Followers, or shaping my content in pursuit of them.
There’s an old saying to “Dance like no one’s watching”, which is easily understood about letting your body move without feeling inhibited or foolish or worried about what others think.
What becomes possible if you were to allow yourself to “Write like no one’s watching?”
