Post

people really be flocking from the other place ☕️ not convinced on being overly present anywhere yet, or even if there's a desire to be honestly, social media was a covid experiment that got a little out of hand for me

prior to that, i jus' built things because i could and i like doing it that is still the case somewhat but at some point the scale flipped and it almost became like an obligation. "need to build, need to post, need to feed the algorithm"

think my end goal would still be: do that full-time build education material full-time on building UI it's a double-edge sword, being "social" only helps with those goals

don't get me wrong, i'm very grateful for the support and everything that's come with it over the last few years heck - even gained a family through it which was unexpected

my goal in 2020 was something like "grow an online presence" after hitting 1K X followers in Jan 2020 fast-forward and it's like 100,000+ which is an achievement for sure but ultimately for what gain? what cost? it's hard to get the head around had some great roles, traveled the world, met my wife

at some point, you have to draw a line and be like "what am I doing here? what's my purpose? goal?" at some point, the scales kinda flipped for me don't regret any of it and all the opportunities have been unreal 🙏 but it isn't sustainable 💯

completely lost my trail of thought because i had to go into a meeting 🤦‍♂️ but yeah, this drive to kinda go above and beyond and create all the things has taken its toll for real still endeavor to create a course, keep doing the newsletter, etc. though

but i'm quite goal-oriented which i'm sure a lot of people are i'm always like "what's next?" but with social media, there isn't an end

0 reposts1 like

this is in part, why i don't appear at many conferences anymore too my goal was "be one of those people who speaks at a conference" (@joshnesbitt.dev gave me that chance and happened to meet my wife too 😅) then I ended up speaking at 15 in as many months... but then only did one this year

that said, i haven't closed the book on events, i will still do them but i'm way more selective about it now i've been fortunate to speak at the ones i wanted to and without a CFP 🙏 will always help friends out and still do the odd one like Figma Config this year

well, think that's the end of my watercooler session guess I'm just in a place where I'm like "what's next?" but at least this place is a welcome break to just put it all out there without any fear of "can I write this?" 🤙

extra thought: at some point, everything became heavily vanity metric driven on social media people waffling about MRR, building a SAAS, gaining follows, etc. and honestly, got no time for it mentally building things for the internet pre 2020 was low on my daily priority list 💯