"We Don't Bring Our Cameras to our Desk."
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Good morning from 37,000 feet, somewhere over the Swiss Alps, on my way back from 72 hours in Rome. I took a Lime scooter all around the city - Never again will I take a taxi or an Uber if I don't have to. Limes are AMAZING. You grab one, go where you're going, and just leave it! NYC needs to get on this immediately! Anyhow, I posted a few photos from my trip, and I got an interesting response back from someone. "Are you independently wealthy? You're always traveling, you live in NYC, but I never see you posting photos of your work. Did you just inherit your money?" Now, anyone who knows me for more than five seconds knows that I'm constantly working. Writing, speaking, consulting, constantly. Some would say I work too much. And yeah, I post about my work quite frequently. But I think there's a bigger reason at play as to why this person asked this question: He got suckered into believing social media. "Why is your feed so amazing, why is everyone I follow always on vacation, or traveling the world, or meeting celebrities, why aren't any of you working?" And the answer is pretty simple: We rarely bring our social media cameras to our desk. Who wants to see me typing for six straight hours? Or see me screaming when I get writer's block, or hitting the gym for the second time in a day because CNN bumped me? Who really wants to see me banging my head against the wall after a client calls and says "yeah, so it turns out we don't have the budget to do the thing we wanted to hire you to do." That's not fun, guys. While I try and be honest about the stuff I post, and try to share a good balance in my life, trust me - If I posted about all the mundane stuff that I deal with on a daily basis, I'd have one follower: My dog. Not even my mother wants to see all the boring and annoying BS I deal with on a regular basis. I've said it before, and it's worth repeating: Don't judge your day to day life against someone else's highlight reel. Remember: We rarely bring our social media cameras to our desk. Have a great week, my friends. :) -Peter PS: I'm thinking about hosting a one or two-day Neurodiversity conference in NYC in September focusing on talks and panels from people who are nailing this whole "different brain" thing. I'm trying to get a feel for whether that would be something worth doing. If you'd want to attend something like that, shoot me a reply and let me know? Thanks! :) |
Peter Shankman
That Peter Shankman. Skydiver, Ironman, HARO Founder, Dad. NYC and an Airplane.
You might be wondering where I've been the past few months.... If you didn't know, I launched a new newsletter - getting "back into the game," as it were - It's called Source of Sources, and each day, I send out two emails with media queries from journalists across the world. Totally free, no charge ever. You can sign up here. So yeah, in sending those out, I've been a bit busy, and have neglected my once or twice a month emails to the rest of my audience. For that, I apologize! What better...
Happy Wednesday from NYC, where today, I come with an announcement. I had a journalism professor at Boston University who once told me to "be brilliant at the basics." He was right. He's still right. The basics are what matter. The fancy things are all fine and good, but if you don't get the basics right, or worse, if you replace the basics with things people never asked for, that's where you run into trouble. After I posted last week about the death of HARO at the hands of Cision, I received...
Happy Thursday, my friends. Headed to speak to an elementary school about having different brains this morning. Wanted to take a second and publicly say goodbye to something... This week, Cision killed off HARO for good, merging the concept into a new website that combines all of their products. No more emails, no more helpareporter.com, nothing. Everything will be on the web moving forward. Hey, they own it - I sold it to them close to 14 years ago, they can do whatever they want with it....