People & Blogs: Annie Mueller

I’m a fan of the People & Blogs newsletter. I was the first supporter of it and was featured in the 16th edition. This most recent edition with Annie Mueller is a fabulous read. I liked all of it but this part about who she is really writing for really resonated with me.

I guess that's the other thing I'd do differently: I wouldn't ever worry about who's reading or not reading my blog. All expression craves an audience: that's beautiful and natural and normal and good. We want connection, not a vacuum. But when we focus on the audience, it's so easy to lose our own voice and perspective. We start tuning ourselves unconsciously to please this audience. Then we're not creating, we're performing. And we lose something really essential, the joy of creating for its own sake. And we get resentful, because we've traded something essential, something that's in our control--the process of creating and sharing--for something non-essential and out of our control. Because other people's attention and approval is always out of our control. No one owes me their attention, and certainly no one owes me their approval. But I owe myself the time and space and energy to do what makes me feel most alive, and to contribute something positive, however tiny, to this reality.

There are themes in here similar to what I shared on audience capture but I really like her invocation of "performing". Even if you are not a blogger but you do use social media this all applies just as much, if not even more because of how those platforms weaponize analytics.