If you close your eyes and hear the word "Train", what's the first visual that comes to your mind?
A coach training a team or an athlete for success, a trainer guiding someone at the Gym for optimal performance? Or Just someone running with a sense of direction and purpose.
Now pick some of the keywords from the above paragraph
"Success, Optimal performance, Direction & Purpose."
A coach or trainer helps build a system that enables those they train to achieve their goals by setting a system. This system also slowly helps create an environment that feeds or nourishes them physically & mentally to reach optimal performance. It also ensures that momentary lapses can be minimised by helping bring an individual back to the fold ( cheat days are required, and they're part of the system too).
Now imagine using this same system with how you use social media. Most of us have spent a significant amount of time blindly scrolling through social media, consuming whatever has momentarily caught our fancy. And over time, this has taught the algorithms that drive these platforms to feed us the kind of content we consume. But what if we wanted stuff that was more positive? More educative? More focus on the things we want to consume at present, rather than what we have been in the recent past.
The trick is to use the same training methodology with social media itself. It's a simple 4 step process.
Put down a list of all the stuff you want your social media feed to be full of as content ( put 5,10 or more topics)
Then put down all the stuff you see more frequently on your feeds. ( it might require you to scroll through your feeds a little bit blindly but take notes while you do)
Start looking for the kind of content you want more of and start liking, commenting or sharing more of it. And scroll past anything that you want less of in life.
As you do this, the same way it is in the Gym or as an athlete, you start seeing more and more of what you want to see and consume. It’s a gradual process.
The longer you stick with it, the better your feeds become. It's enabled me to make my feed a well trained, informative, productive and motivating stream of content. And like any athlete, I have my cheat days, and then I quickly come back to correct its flow.
A simple persistent system can make anything perform the way you want it to, so train your social media feed for your benefit and happiness.
Weekly recommendations
The Colin & Samir show is something I’ve discovered recently and there is so much to learn from the perspective they bring to creator culture that its a must subscribe. I actually got a ton of insights from this particular episode on video podcasts and ton of other stuff.
Note: This episode came out before the recent revelations of transgressions of abuse that happened under David Dobrik’s watch ( by him and his vlog squad) so watch this clip for the underlying insights and not Dobrik himself. Colin & Samir have put out a POV on the controversy as well which you should definitely watch.
And on the Hype around NFT’s , Kara swisher has a fabulous chat with the artist Mike Winklemann aka Beeple who sold an encrypted digital collage for $69 million.
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Quote of the week
”Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished”
- Lao Tzu
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Train your social media algorithm & make it valuable for you ( plus Weekly recommendations)