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💡 The Big Idea: The Right Way to Use Social Media

Cal Newport is one of my favorite authors. But I think he’s dead wrong about social media in the advice he gave a listener on a recent Deep Questions podcast episode (the question starts at about 55:08).

Cal’s response to someone who asked a question about wanting to write a nonfiction book (without having social media or a blog) was basically:

1. Stop writing the book (get an agent instead)
2. Avoid social media because the publishing world has worked for 150 years without it

And while I understand the dangers of social media (and agree wholeheartedly with what he shares earlier in the episode about it being a huge distraction most of the time), I think he is missing something important with his advice to this particular listener.

The Real Reason to Write

Let’s start with the first part: stop writing the book.

I get what Cal’s going for here. He’s right that you don’t want to just show up to an agent with a finished work and then try to get them to publish it. Especially in the traditional publishing industry, agents and editors will want to help shape your ideas.

But for someone who’s never written a book before, your best bet is to WRITE. Write a lot. Especially for non-fiction, where you won’t really know what you think about something until you start writing.

I’ve noticed this myself. Often I have a general idea of what to write about, but I discover the real work through the process of writing.

As Dawson Trotman once said, “Thoughts disentangle themselves through lips and pencil tips.”

And for me, also clicky keyboards.

The quickest way to gain clarity on something that I know of is to start writing. It’s a great way to distill the information that I’ve consumed and has worked it’s way through The Creativity Flywheel.

Real briefly, here are the five steps:

• Capture what resonates
• Curate the good stuff
• Cultivate your ideas by giving them ideal conditions to develop
• Connect notes & ideas to see how they fit together
• Create something new from the pieces you've collected

One of the biggest mistakes people make with PKM is failing to make something new out of the pieces they've collected. It doesn't need to be for public consumption, but you'll never really make sense of things without an output (the Create phase).

It also makes it easier to capture things that are useful (and keep the flywheel spinning) by opening up loops in my mind and piquing my curiosity.

So if I were to give advice to Brom (the listener in the episode), I would say to start writing in public. I would advise him to start testing, validating, and developing his ideas by writing on social media every day.

The platform doesn't really matter. I still like Twitter/X, but I also like Medium & LinkedIn. The important thing is to find where your people are hanging out and join the conversation.

I would warn him that he won’t get much of a reaction at first. At the beginning, the size of your "audience" doesn't matter. But if you keep writing and publishing every day for at least 30 days, you’ll start to see trends. You’ll begin to see which posts gain more traction than others, which is an indication to explore those ideas more.

Make noise, then listen for signal.

This is exactly what I did. Even though I still struggle to post to social media regularly, I’ve gone through spurts (usually aligned with Ship30 cohorts) where I’d publish every day. I also found that my posts about Obsidian received 10x the engagement of anything else I wrote.

So, I started writing more about applying values-based PKM principles using Obsidian. That approach bled over to my YouTube channel, which while still not huge, has grown significantly in the last year.

But I believe anyone can do this. All it takes is a willingness to test your ideas and iterate in public.

Which leads to the second point…

Cal’s right that you can publish without using social media.

But that doesn’t mean you should.

I have friends who have books on the NYT bestsellers list. I know how the process works.

And I know it’s not as easy as Cal made it sound to “just get an agent.”

The publishing world still very much relies on personal connections. You need to know someone who knows someone to make an introduction for you. If you can get your foot in the door, then you’ve got a chance to get your proposal read.

But if not, good luck.

Doesn’t mean it’s impossible. But very improbable. In my opinion, the safer approach is actually to publish your short-form ideas consistently.

Create, not consume. That’s the trick.

Don’t get pulled into the infinity pools. But if you can use social media as a sounding board, do it.

Just Make Good Stuff

The barrier to entry for someone who wants to become a creator has never been lower.

If you want to make videos, you don’t need an expensive studio. If you want to make podcasts, you don’t need a broadcast license.

And if you want to write, you certainly don’t need an agent.

What you DO need is a good idea. But why not validate that publicly? Sharing it with others is the quickest way to find out if an idea is any good.

In The Creativity Flywheel framework I teach, the goal is to consistently go from capture to create. Information comes in, but it needs to go out again before you really glean the benefit from it.

Why make that harder than it has to be?

Publishing to Twitter, X, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Medium, or wherever your people tend to hang out has never been easier. Find your tribe and go join the conversation.

Especially at the beginning of the creative process. That’s when you don’t know what you don’t know about what you think you know.

😎 Something Cool: Lazy Plugin Loader​

Someone in The Library pointed out the Lazy Plugin Loader to me this week, and I’m a bit ashamed I hadn’t come across this sooner. I’m not sure how this plugins flew under my radar, but it’s a great one if you have a lot of plugins like I do.

This plugin lets you choose for each plugin installed whether you want to the plugin to load 1) immediately, 2) after a short delay, 3) after a long delay, or 4) be disabled entirely. You can configure the short and long delay periods (by default, it’s 5 and 15 seconds, respectively), then choose one of the 4 options for each plugin in your vault.

What this does is allow your vault to open (potentially) much sooner by prioritizing the order of the plugins that load. For example, if you only use Dataview occasionally but it’s causing your vault to load slowly each time you open Obsidian, you could set that one to open after a delay so that you can access the contents of your vault quicker (without having to wait for slow plugins to load).

📚 Book Notes: Hidden Genius by Polina Marinova Pompliano

Since we talked about social media in this newsletter, I need to mention the book Hidden Genius by Polina Marinova Pompliano. We covered this one recently for Bookworm, but the section on optimizing your content diet was of particular interest to me. I really like the metaphor of our mind being our mental hardware and our beliefs being mental software, and Polina challenges us directly by asking, “who wrote the software that is running in your head?”

This is actually what Cal Newport nails about social media… if you’re not careful, you can very easily get sucked into a vortex of distraction. And few of us ever stop to question what impact the information we consume actually has on us.

If you want to download my mind map book notes for Hidden Genius, click here.

— Mike