3 – 14 – 18 Would Jesus Be A Blogger? (Self Promotion) (4 minutes)


Self-promotion is icky. I think everyone who hasn’t heavily practiced it gets a greasy feeling in the pit of their stomach. Aside from the ease of automation, it’s one of the main reasons I use autoposters. Not having to write a Facebook post or tweet and click the post button really lowers the bar for me in terms of sharing.

Sharing, what if we see self-promotion not as trying to get ahead in the world, but as trying to share something we genuinely believe will benefit other people? Sometimes, when you’re marketing yourself to get hired, that thing you genuinely believe will help people is yourself, more specifically your skills and experience. Sharing a helpful thing, even if that thing happens to be part of you or made by you, feels a lot better than labeling it “self-promotion”, even if they end up looking exactly the same.

If I haven’t convinced you, I’ve got a couple “case studies.”

Who, in history, had the best content ever? I’m talking about products, services, messages, any category? My angle here is that Jesus Christ was the greatest content-creator ever.

Well that’s a weird thing to say (would Jesus have a blog?). But think about what Jesus was trying to do in his ministry. He was trying to spread a message, the best message ever (the Word of God), but still a message.

So if it’s the best message ever, then once one person heard about it they told all their friends and the world beat a path to Jesus’s door, right?

What’s the first thing Jesus does before anybody even listens to Him? He turns water into wine. Talk about unconventional PR. Throughout the Gospels Jesus performs miracles so that those seeing them may come to believe. Jesus did not come to Earth to perform miracles, surely the healing and casting out of demons is consistent with his character because He loves us and wants to help us, but His purpose was to draw people closer to Himself and the Father.

This feels weird. Jesus needs unconventional PR, aka publicity stunts? I think we feel that way because we know that the people we see doing it (Elon Musk, the guy from Virgin Mobile, etc.) are doing it partly because they like being famous. It’s clear that Jesus doesn’t crave fame or attention, but He still recognizes that He needs to grab people’s attention and they “ask for signs.”

This gives me encouragement in two ways. Jesus had the best content ever and the world still didn’t beat a path to his door. He still had to hoof it around Ancient Israel to get the word out. The second bit is that maybe I shouldn’t feel so icky about sharing, considering Jesus did it. Granted I’m not delivering nearly as good of content, but as long as I’m still improving people’s lives there’s no reason to be ashamed or bashful.

I’ll share a personal story relating to this. When I released my album I also released what were my journal entries thus far in a PDF, a 66 page PDF. In retrospect I couldn’t have made it less accessible or inviting, but I was so afraid to bother people, to break it up. So no one read it.

And one thing I’ve learned since then is that people don’t get annoyed as easily as I thought they would. When they see my posts and don’t want to see them, they just keep scrolling. I’ve wasted 0.25 seconds out of their day that they don’t even remember. Besides, they see much more annoying and irritating things on either side of my promotional posts like political firebrands, clickbait, and gaudy ads.

A second thing is that people generally aren’t going to go out and look for what you’re offering, even if it’s helped them in the past, if it’s a small thing or a small part of their day. I produce articles that are about a thousand words, so they’re about five-minute reads (if not less). How many people will make the effort to remember to do something that takes five minutes and doesn’t impact them very directly in any manifest, day-to-day way?

Just because people aren’t looking for it doesn’t mean they don’t want it. They probably would be happy to read/hear what you’re sharing, they just don’t have the time or mental bandwidth to seek it out. But if you put it right in front of them and make it very easy to consume, they’ll be grateful to you.

Which seems weird. You’d think if no one’s actively requesting it, searching for it, then nobody wants it. But I’ve found that even when no one’s looking for it, they’re very happy when you give them something they didn’t realize, or remember, they wanted.

Would Jesus be a blogger?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

8 - 11 - 17 Dogs are Better than People? (5 minutes)

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.” We are not asked to deny our cravings. Neither are we asked to deny our vices. We are not asked to gain further resolve in the pursuit of holiness in order to deny any of our own weaknesses. We are asked to deny the totality of our current selves in preference for the new self Christ will fashion within us. I’ve written before about how Christ’s call is not just a new moral standard. If it were it would be an impossible one. It seems to me that the Christian vision of discipleship is actually quite different than that of the Jewish, though this is only in my perception and I am quite ignorant of Judaism as it extends beyond the Old Testament. It is less about behaving a certain way than it is about having a certain state of being. All our righteous actions garner some of their value in that they have a tendency to move us closer to the type of being God desires us to be. I’m not saying t
Read more

6 - 23 - 17 Jesus is Smarter than Drake

6 – 23 – 17 Link to Daily Readings This passage contains Jesus proclaiming that He is the only path to the Father, that He is the only method of salvation for all human souls. There probably couldn’t be a more important thing in the universe. In this passage He also says, “I am meek and humble of heart.” Which seems like quite the contradiction when we consider these two ideas together, but we are thinking of our human experience. Jesus does not need to boast, firstly it would not be in his nature, secondly there is nothing he would desire to lay claim to being that He is not. In this passage He is simply telling his disciples about the nature of His ministry, expressing to them the importance of not only Himself, but his teachings. I think this distinction is what makes these statements feel contradictory to each other when they in fact are not. Most other times we have heard someone boast on that level, of being all-powerful or the very, very best at something it is eit
Read more

5 – 1 – 18 The Power of Just Showing Up (4 minutes)

Father Ben Hawley once said to me, “you engineers all are so Type A.” Father Wayne Dziekan once said to me, “where do you get the energy and time to do all these things?” My mother once said to me, “you need to chill out.” Generally, I prize action. I’m very into verifiable improvements, public accomplishments, and third-party validation. I generally think of my self-definition in terms of “to do” rather than “to be.” It’s less about where I am than where I’m headed, less about who I am than what I do, and less about any appreciation of the moment than a constant task of optimization and improvement. But that’s not Saint Peter. “Lord, it is good that we are here.” The thought popped into my head yesterday morning while sitting in the pew after the Eucharist at my first daily mass at Mary of the Assumption in Saginaw. The experience was not altogether underwhelming, but the feelings that made it memorable were not exceptionally religious. I mostly just felt uncomfortabl
Read more