Why I’ve started a newsletter (can we find a better word than newsletter?)
Short answer: I watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix and it scared me.
Slightly longer answer: I want a space to connect with interesting people, away from the noisy social media platforms. It feels like I need to share my content on them but doing that is starting to feel bad. I’m adding to the noise, the notifications, the adverts and the general craziness of people’s lives. 2020 has been crazy enough. Email can be a sanctuary away from all that. It can also be mad if you’ve lost control of your inbox. If that’s happened, just file all those 1,932 emails away. You won’t look at them. And if it’s really important, they’ll email again.
What I’m reading
I came across a man named Derek Sivers. I’d heard of him before but had never looked him up. He’s the guy who started CD Baby back in 1998 as a platform to sell his own music. Turns out he’s a super smart dude, made a fair amount of money from CD Baby and has some really interesting ideas.
Someone in a Slack group I’m in posted a link to his book Hell Yes or No. It’s a book about “what’s worth doing, fixing faulty thinking, and making things happen.” It turns out the entire book is actually available for free on his website, separated into pages of succinct ideas. It also turns out that I was the first person he’d heard of reading the whole book on his site! That felt pretty cool. He also accepts lovely, lovely money if you’d like to pay him 🙂
I took a quote from every page of the book and wrote my thoughts about them. It was a long process but really helped with dissecting all the new ideas. The first and I think most important quote I took was:
What would you do then, if you didn’t need the money and didn’t need the attention?
We do so many things for the attention. If we didn’t, Instagram wouldn’t exist. Attempting to answer this question really digs deep into who you are I think. My answer to the question was:
I’d want to learn to make my own video game and create the music for it. I’d like to travel around the UK and learn more about English history, folklore and music. I would stop posting on social media and instead create something like a newsletter where I would post my updates to only people who were interested.
And here we are! Our first newsletter. I hope we can create a space where we can share ideas, away from the hustle and bustle of social media.
So what would you do if you didn’t need the money and didn’t need the attention? Feel free to reply to this email with your answer. In future posts, I’ll be writing about virtual reality, guitar, plugins, sample libraries, coding, and other nerdy stuff. If you know someone who’d enjoy those topics, tell them about this newsletter. If there are any topics you’d like me to write about, let me know too.
Stay safe!
Head over to the contact page and get in touch if you have any comments or follow me on social media and say hi.