9 tweets · January 2018 · 9 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
1/ Am currently unfollowing more people to curate the conversational feed that I want to have. One thing I'm shocked by is the number of people past-me followed in the idea that I'd interact with them and eventually ask a favor of them or something like that.
2/ On one level this makes sense: build relationships that can be leveraged for mutual benefit (eg being on someone's podcast). But on another level I realize now that I wasn't actually interested in that person or what they were saying or what we could talk about together!
3/ And this actually just ended up creating a kind of vague guilty feeling when I would see them in my timeline, because I kept feeling like "Oh I should talk with these people to build those relationships" but I didn't actually have much to say.
4/ I did something really similar awhile back with online communities: One not-very-prominent feature of my app @CompliceGoals is that it has virtual pomodoro coworking rooms. And I kept joining various online communities hoping that I could get the communities to make a room
5/ Over the span of 6 months I spent several hundred $$ on subscriptions to paid-only communities, and only actually engaged a small bit. Kept thinking "I should engage before trying to sell" but didn't actually want to engage much, so was stuck.
6/ Finally I conceded that I needed to cut my loses and unsubscribe from those communities until at least I had a better plan for how to pitch the virtual coworking rooms to them.
7/ Note that I think the virtual coworking rooms *are* really valuable and could be a huge value-add for each of the communities that I joined. So it's not that I was being selfish. But I was being kind of deceptive in my motives, and that wore on me a bit.
8/ The past half-year on Twitter has been very much the opposite. I'm getting a lot more focused on it being a place for conversation with people I respect, admire, am curious about, and have something to say to—something *I* am excited to say.
9/ So yeah. Going forward, I think I'm going to be a lot more clear about where I want to create a partnership, and not kind of having half-relationships with people who I'm not intrinsically stoked to connect with!