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Stop Acting Like You're Famous

Advice for myself around leisure activities.

You aren’t famous. Anything you do or create will probably receive little to no attention, so stop optimizing for a non-existent audience and instead focus on what makes you enjoy the activity.

Want to try a craft or artistic hobby? Focus on mastering the skill and enjoy the variety it can provide. You don’t need to build a personal style. No one will care. Want to do photography and think black and white photos are cool? Great! You don’t need to create an Instagram branded all around your moody black and white photos. Most likely you’ll get bored of it and want to try a different type of photography, and that’s great. You aren’t Ansel Adams, no one will care if your “style” is all over the place.

Do you want to build an app or website but don’t enjoy the process of designing? Then make it ugly. Who cares! Design is for an audience and you don’t have one. Functionality is more important right now. Maybe a designer will notice and want to improve it for you, but until then take pride in your crappy UI.

Blogging is fun and therapeutic. Grammar and editing aren’t. As long as your thoughts are coherent, don’t worry too much about writing mistakes or filtering yourself. Just use Grammarly to fix elementary-level errors and move on. It’s more about the writing process than the final product.

The most egregious thing you can do with any activity is daydream about how you can make money off of it. That’s the quickest way to optimize for the wrong things and suck the fun right out of it. Most likely you will stop doing the activity almost immediately, so save the money-making schemes for work.

In the end, find something you enjoy doing and just do it because you enjoy it. If you have to, make some goals for yourself, but never for your “audience”.