Get paid to do what you love

Say that again to yourself.

“Get paid to do what you love.”

That’s got to be the aim of our working lives. But first, you’ve got to find out what you love.

If you’re a surfer, snowboarder, mountain biker or skater, that’s easy. (The hard part is building the talent and skills.) But if you’re a modern-day city dweller, discovering what you love is itself a challenge.

How many of us have found it, how many are still looking, and how many have forgotten to look?

Twitter tirade

I thought I should provide an expansion on my earlier post about how Twitter was killing my mind.

The nature of Twitter, Facebook and other feed-based platforms makes them good for real-time updates, impulse-based activities (like shopping) impulse-driven broadcasts (like reactionary opinions) and calls to action.

However, the mechanics of these platforms make sustained conversation difficult because the feed quickly pushes content out of view (and consideration) over time.

The recipient is inundated with small pieces of information from disparate sources, and in scanning a feed, little time and attention is spent investigating the content deeply before moving on to the next item.

This rapid switch from one piece of content to the next (from a different source and pertaining to a different subject) breaks one’s train of thought and line of investigation developed in each piece.

That’s when we drop the mental investigation and just move on to the next piece of information. It’s this loss of the practice of mental investigation that I lament.

So what if we call a spade a spade and drop the romanticised social media notion that Twitter helps to encourage conversation? Is there sufficient value in treating Twitter as an information feed?

Without a doubt, it can be a good source of new information, but does it generate sufficient impact or action, and is the impact sustained enough, to be considered useful?