I don’t know how many hours a day I spend browsing net on an average. I have a blurry idea (as the days are flying fast) but it must be 10-12 hours. The professional commitments hog the lion’s share of data usage. My apathy to get out of the house and have fun is other cause towards my sticking to the screen all the time.
When you spend lots of time with someone/something (even if it’s a vacuous string of inter-connected networks), your mind starts itching, once you end up finding its glitches. You want to fix them so badly.
World Wide Web is my favorite place and below is the list of internet party-poopers I wish to go away – like right now.
Online money making fads
Pic Credit- Pixabay
I was ghostwriting for a client the other day (the things we do to make a dent in the world). It was an article about- how to make money through Pineterest marketing.
I had some aerated pointers to include into the article. They went something like this-
“Follow these tips and you are guaranteed to make money within 30 days”
Or
“I have made millions by selling sites and you can do it too” etc.
There is another insane claim “follow my leads and be a millionaire in 1 year.” Hah, the naivety of our cash-strapped hearts and the impossibility of internet dream-merchants.
“Buy my book”, “listen to my podcast”, “download my free e-book”, “subscribe to my YouTube channel “- they speak all these unanimously and seem quite determined to make the lesser-mortals to roll in millions.
Productive writing/blogging
The desire to write grows with writing- Erasmus
Dutch humanist (and whole tones of other things) Erasmus said those lines somewhere between 15th-16th century.
But I am sure if he were alive in this time of “productive” writing, then he would have withdrawn his affirmation.
When I decided to maintain a semblance of regularity in my blogosphere, I was raking up my brain for some ideas and motivations here and there. Everywhere, pundits gave out the common verdicts-
- Find your niche
- Educate your readers
- Include infographics
- Do keyword research
- Get killer headline
- Take help of Google trends yada yada
When and how writing became so much instruction-based? Is ‘writing for pleasure’ dead already?
In a way, it seems the whole world and its aunties and uncles are alive and scribbling down only with the intention to- educate, teach, inform and changing lives of others.
Generic Self-Improvement tips
Pic Credit: Pixabay
“How to be productive and give 100% at every task”- wrote the beautiful HR Manager in LinkedIn, peeping out of her professionally-shot display picture- with poker straight hair, perfect smile and highly visible cheekbones.
“20 things I wish I had known in my 20”- Penned down the bespectacled, balding Tech CEO on Medium. His profile bio mentioned so many things- father, coder, entrepreneur, father to John and Jane and Jerry (my four legged kid) etc. Conspicuously leaving the name of his wife. Hmm.
“Get your dream job in 6 months”- chimed in the 20-something start-up founder on any other recently sprung-up entrepreneurship-platform.
My personal favorite though- “follow this xyz steps and your life will be changed.” Touché!
It could be incredibly boring if we remain creative, ambitious, fired-up 100% of the time. Right?
Just thinking about the amount of will power and tenacity it will take, to remain auto-productive mode 365*7, making my knees wobbly.
This gets worse when at the end of an long, long “personal growth” article, the author puts up the CTAs-
- Please, buy book from Amazon on X% discount
- To get more such productive ideas, follow me on XYZ platform or
- If you like what I wrote, click on the “heart” sign.
P.S.– If selling book/ acquiring followers is the main idea behind writing so many generic rules, the article must have come under “marketing/promotional/whatever” tag.
“May you live in interesting times”- this couldn’t be apter (?) than this, to conclude my rant.
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