Talking. About Everything.

I like just about everything. I think everything is neat and that everything is fascinating to somebody. One of my favorite aspects to writing articles for the college newspaper was talking to the people who were putting on various events, or who were trying to start a club, or who were behind some sort of student policy initiative. I love this because those people I interviewed were passionate and excited about the work they were doing and I found it infectious. I remember I was doing a short article for the newspaper about a fashion show the Black Student Alliance was hosting. After interviewing the person coordinating the event about it, I really wanted to go! I'm not into fashion and I wasn't a member of the Black Student Alliance, but the event coordinator was so energized about doing the event, about it's theme and about the people she was working in it. It was hard not to be part of her passion.

I'm Interested in Just About Everything

This quality is a good one. I work for a news app that released its first vertical news app, Inside Drones, and we're going to have two more coming out this week on two completely different topics. The week after or so, we're going to have another two or three coming out on two or three more different topics. By the end of the summer, we should have 11 vertical apps out as well as our main Inside news app, all available in the App Store for people to download. That is A LOT of topics, and that won't be the end of the line. The point is that being interested in everything is a good thing because Inside is going to cover everything ultimately, whether we do it in a vertical app or we feature the topic in our main app. My job involves sharing all the cool things we cover and getting people who love these topics into the right app(s). If I'm not interested in drones, then I certainly share the neat stories we feature or get drone enthusiasts using the app. They'll be able to tell a mile away and they'll just use a different app or website instead.

Right now, my job is primarily Inside Drones and the main app. But, come August or September, I'm gonna be doing this 11 times over across 11 different topics. So, really, my job isn't for someone who has already decided they know what they like or who isn't willing to learn about things they may have previously thought was gross or boring. I'm not lying. We cover EVERYTHING, which is a lot of things.

I Just Need to Start Talking, Reading and Writing

I just need to do those things and not be afraid. I need to not be afraid of not being good at any particular thing or of making people angry because I don't talk about the things they want to read about all the time. I need to stop being afraid of being criticized or of crazy people threatening to dox me or send me rape threats or something. Talking, reading and writing, both here on this blog and at work. I think that's really it. I need to do a whole bunch of little things, but talking, reading and writing are the main things. The little things can follow and can amplify the main things once the main things are actually on this blog and on the work blog and are actually being done.

As Seth Godin said, "the heart of real growth is a simple idea: people decide to tell other people. Start with that."

I Want to Talk About All the Things

When most beginners start blogging, all them blogging and social media gurus tell you that you gotta pick something. Nobody likes jacks- and janes-of-all-trades, so you need to pick something and specialize in it and build a community around that one topic you picked. It's easier that way. It's easier to attract a community. It's easier to position and present yourself. Besides, you can't be everything to everybody and you can't possibly do everything anyway. All those gurus forget to mention HOW HARD it is to pick. People are complicated and often have a variety of interests and passions, sometimes competing interests and passions. Other people just don't know what their passions are, or aren't sure among several different choices so they don't want to commit to one topic. Although clarity comes from engagement, not thought, as the great Marie Forleo says, at times it can take quite a bit of "engagement" for folks to figure out which passions and interests to spend their time on.

Therefore, I'm Going to Do All the Things

I'm just going to do all the things cause I want to do all the things and I'm going to be my own blogging and social media guru and make it work. I'm going to make it work because I think it's awesome and I think just about everything is awesome (except cockroaches, as they are not awesome). There's probably going to be a lot of app marketing, inbound marketing and content marketing in here as well because I know a lot about that stuff and I do it for a living so it's kind of hard not to have it seep into the rest of my life. After all, I have plenty of categories in my sidebar, which illustrate that I certainly love all the things and have already made previous attempts at doing all the things, even though I wouldn't have called any of those posts or categories attempts when I first created them. Never mind some of the stuff that I wrote about previously. Some of it I will iterate and bring it back and others I will not.

I'm Also Probably Going to Promote Apps Here as Well

I know! It makes me such a shrill to promote products or whatever on the blog or on the sidebar. But, first of all, it's part of my job. I love my job and I do love the apps that we create. Our apps cover all sorts of topics, and some of those topics I'm probably never going to talk about in depth on this blog. For example, our latest app is Inside Drones, which is about hobby drones, quadcopters, and how they're used in various industries. It features drones news and only drones news. so it won't ever have celebrity news or sports news or even topics more closely related like gadgets or tech news. I'm probably never ever going to talk about drones in a blog post. But, people are doing some pretty awesome things with drones, like this Drones Racing Championship that's happening next month. That just sounds darn cool. How do you not promote that and talk about that?

On a side note, I need to create my reading list for this website. I like to all sorts of books and I have plenty of favorites and recommendations, spanning all sorts of topics. You know what, if I like it I'm gonna promote it. Plain and simple. Marie Forleo does that with some of the guests she has on her show, and I've certainly bought the books and other products from some of her guests. One of my particular favorites is Sally Hogshead. Her research and ideas on fascination is just amazing.