The Internet Is Full Of Junk. You Should Add Yours on Top Anyway
I made the mistake of being quiet for 4 years.
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Don’t get me wrong, I still hate internet junk as much as Gillette hates bodily hair.
Every time I have to publish something trashy I feel like I’m littering the ocean with it — those internet wires travel underseas after all — don’t mind the actual continent of trash drifting through the Pacific.
But here’s my mistake.
I thought the internet was a stage.
Like the stage I got on before quitting my musician job to write on the internet. A stage is a place you go once you got your act together. A place to perform flawless work and amaze an audience.
I was wrong. I thought everyone should keep their crappy work off my feed because, as the aphorism goes, “The internet is full of junk — so don’t add to it.”
Turns out, it’s the opposite of a stage. It’s a place where your junk can help you thrive, improve your creative work, and find your unique voice. It all begins by shaking off the fear of littering the internet with it.
Successful creators have a backlog of crappy content too.
“I don’t think we’re quite high enough for this,” said Joe Rogan in his first-ever podcast episode, more than a decade ago. I like to go and check the beginnings of mighty creators, back when they bled like every other mortal.
And every time I’ve done it, I’ve always found a backlog of crappy work.
Seth Godin’s first blog post in 2002 was a 3-paragraph rant about mall shopping. “I spent two hours at the mall, and it was boring,” he wrote. Not quite the kind of sharp ideas modern Seth comes up with. It sounds like a bored teenager eager to get back home to watch Smallville (well, it was 2002).
Checking their origins certainly humanizes them. But also note this: they didn’t succeed despite their junk, but because of it.
Instead of hiding their early content, they used it to develop a unique voice.
Big creators have an unmistakable, signature voice. You can tell the insightful wisdom of Seth Godin from the hustling rampage of Gary Vaynerchuk.
But they didn’t come up with those unique tones themselves. Their audiences did.
Joe admitted he had no idea what he was doing when he started the podcast. Gary Vee started out with a video wine blog, and he didn’t have the frenzied attitude he has now, preaching self-awareness like he’s the reincarnation of the Buddha.
They developed their voices by listening to their audiences. Mark Manson’s bestseller? I heard it started as a blog post that performed really well and got a book contract for it. Through feedback, his audience appointed him the herald of “no bullshit self-help.”
Successful creators slowly shaped their style, discourse and manners until their audiences were getting exactly what they wanted.
I made the mistake of being quiet for 4 years.
I can tell you what is like to hide your junk from others. I worked in silence, learning and practising in solitude. I went into creative confinement because I wanted to launch a pro.
What an idiot.
When I began sharing my ideas, I had the shock of horror you feel when you hear your voice coming out of a recording, and wonder, “Do I really sound that bad?”
My inner voice sounds clear and confident, but thinking is very different from communicating.
To communicate ideas clearly, I need an outer voice. A voice I spent years ignoring, thinking it was not important. And yet it is. Because communication is less about “how does this sound in my head” and more about “what does this sound like to other people.”
So let people judge your junk (trolls too).
This begs the question, wouldn’t people hate you for lobbing trashy content their way?
That might’ve been true in the younger years of the internet, when it was a wasteland of Nigerian princes and Russian models lurking behind every spam link.
But we’re way past that. The internet’s puberty is over.
Algorithms have gotten better. We can follow, engage, mute — we tweak networks until we get the kind of content we want to consume. We can lock ourselves in a bubble of self-deception if we want to.
So don’t fret about criticism. If people find your content and get mad at it, it’s because they were looking to get mad at something in the first place.
But what if you have no audience and zero feedback?
Just keep consistently lobbing junk at the void, mate.
Seriously.
It has all to do with trust. I imagine back in the 60s when there were only 3 TV channels, the feat of getting featured on one was enough to make people go, “Oh this guy means business.”
But imagine telling the people of the 60s, “You know, eventually we’ll have this thing called YouTube where everyone can have their own channel.” I believe they’d look in panic and wonder, “so how do you decide what to watch?”
And that’s the state of things. Everyone can mass broadcast now. So who do you trust? Who do you engage with?
The answer is usually “with those that mean business.” And a way to prove you mean business is by sticking around and being consistent.
The internet is not a stage for flawless work.
It’s more like the backstage rooms of the theatre where all the artists hang out, half-naked and high in glitter and anticipation.
That’s where actual, theatre artists like me spend most of our time, anyway. Not at the stage performing, but backstage, discussing ideas and fooling around.
I believe the internet is such a place for creators.
So share your crappy work with us. If you still want to obsess over a pile of junk, remember there’s an actual continent of trash drifting through the Pacific that you can take care of.
At least your online junk won’t be feeding fish with microplastics.
