Seth Godin had a post yesterday that resonated with me.
According to this post by Neil Patel, I blog incorrectly–missing on at least 7 of his twelve rules.
On purpose.
I’m not writing to maximize my SEO or conversion or even my readership. I’m writing to do justice to the things I notice, to the ideas in my head and to the people who choose to read my work.
The interesting lesson: One way to work the system is to work the system. The other way is to refuse to work it.
I couldn’t agree more. One way to approach something is to seek to optimize the experience. There are many ways to do that as a blogger – optimize your search engine optimization, comment on as many blogs as you can to spread your net wide etc etc.
I tend to shudder at optimization because it tends to bring with it a limited view of what the journey can bring us. Continuing on the blogging example – our purpose, all of a sudden, becomes to optimize page views. I just don’t find it inspiring. Maybe it’s because I find it hard to believe that we can genuinely care about being popular above all else.
There are a couple of problems with that. If we aren’t insanely good at what we do, the popularity isn’t likely to last. And, if our focus is popularity, the chances of becoming insanely good take a dive.
We only have 24 hours in a day and, while the days are long, the years are typically very short. If we don’t spend the time we have doing things we care about, what are we doing?
I guess it comes down to that wonderful question Clayton Christensen once asked, How will you measure your life?
My view – don’t do it only because it will look good. Do it because you care.. it shows.
A Learning a Day 