I’ve been thinking about social media, sharing content, etc. for work and for myself. Right now when there are a lot of potential Twitter replacements/new players entering the game, it’s easy to want to just jump on board with any or all of them.
There’s also the POSSE concept: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I’m generally a fan of this idea.
If the goal is to share things with the hopes of capturing other people’s attention with them, building your own space online is like maintaining an investment portfolio, while putting something up on social media is like buying a lottery ticket.
Sure, every once in a while someone gets the big prize, but it’s about luck as much as anything, (and it doesn’t always end well for winners).
The problem I have (and maybe some other people have this, too) boils down to the dopamine, and the flaws in the brain’s ability to play the long game.
When we think about what hasn’t yet happened, it tends to be abstract. Things right now, on the other hand, we think of in more tangible terms. Several behavioral studies have supported the idea that what we cannot clearly imagine, we value less. We tend to have more intense emotional feelings about things we can imagine vividly. Being depressed doesn’t look like anything in particular, but a vision of a diabetic patient on dialysis can be disturbing. In fact, having depression is generally much worse than having diabetes. Yet people tend to say they’d prefer to get depression. Since future things are similarly thought of more abstractly, we feel less emotional about them and underestimate their value.
Lee and his colleagues confirmed this by looking at people’s brain activity with an fMRI when they’re making decisions about the future. They used a brain decoder to detect a “neural signature of the vividness of prospective thought” and showed that “neural measures of vividness decline as rewards are delayed farther into the future.” Lee had people imagine things that varied in how concrete or abstract they were, and how pleasant and unpleasant they were. “We show that when they see options that are farther in the future, their neural vividness scores decrease,” he said.
On the face of it, this imagination bias, in which future rewards appear less vivid, works against us, because delaying gratification is so useful. A recent analysis suggests that one’s general ability to delay gratification, or to value future outcomes over more immediate ones, predicts greater success in life in a number of areas.
Why Your Brain Isn’t Into the Future, Jim Davies
It’s easy to imagine what a successful social media post looks like. It has a scorecard attached to it.
What does a successful blog look like? What does it look like to have spent years building an audience, a reputation, and consistently showing up to craft more work?
It’s harder to picture. But what can be that kind of middle ground is learning to enjoy the process. Seeing the opportunity to do the work, and the execution of that task, as the rewarding part.
This Builds Character 