Would You Be Embarrassed If a Friend or Co-Worker Read Your Article?
We say we always learn something new every day. Whether it is a skill, a code, a design, a technique, an idea or a simply a new way of doing things – the learning never stops. For an internet marketer, every day brings with it new challenges and perspectives that either reinforce your knowledge or completely replace your previously-held beliefs towards an altogether different direction.
I’m an anabashed Neil Patel fan. There are people who do not like him and I have read in forums where people express their reasons for disliking him. One of the reasons being his lengthy writings. Which is strange actually because that is what impresses me. But more than the average length of his posts, it is the manner in which he manages to keep readers like me engaged or hooked to his writings that’s so awesome. In one his posts I read recently, he lists down a few questions that he says he asks himself every time he writes a post. One of them struck me deep, “Would you be embarrassed if a friend or a co-worker read your article?” He says we should not publish something that we wouldn’t want others to read. He asks us to “fix” it.
I have my own reasons for finding Neil’s question insightful. It’s not necessary that the question is as relevant to everybody as it does to me. To me, that’s one of the most profound questions I have ever confronted with in my short blogging journey. Bloggers are strange creatures. We can be really loud (in our writings) and at the same time, the most private persons in real life. This duality is the new normal for some of us. Some of us really hate the idea of our friends or co-workers reading our posts.
- Is it because of our fear of them finding us salesy?
- Is it because of our ego and our low tolerance for criticism?
- Or is it because of the sheer imperfection or shallowness of our writing that we would like to hide from them?
Whatever the reasons are, we need to first accept that when we do not like our friends read our stuff, there are things that could be fixed in our writing. Now, what these fix-able things are differ from person to person. But fix me must. Because when we do that, asking people to share our content on social media or link to it becomes easy. It is after all one of the many ways to growing our traffic.
Recent Comments
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Very inciteful post, Sukumarth. We have heard of Neil Patel but don't know much about him. We will remedy that shortly.
Colette and Philip
I can totally relate to that, Sukumar. After writing and publishing my first posts, this is exactly what came into my mind and then I asked myself why. I thought if I wouldn't want a friend to read my post, then it's not good enough for others to read either and I should fix whatever is wrong with it.
Asking yourself the question, 'Would you be embarrassed if a friend or a co-worker read your article', really is a good way to find out for yourself, if your post needs improving.
Same here. If we are embarrassed to offer our article for comments or share them in the social media, then there's something seriously wrong here. And we should try fixing that first.
If we are embarrassed by what we write then maybe we should get a writing coach to teach us the fundamentals of writing.
Jerry
Perhaps we should. But before that, it's important to understand why we're embarrassed by what we are writing.
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When `i commit to publishing, I have no qualms about the piece being read.
Thanks for the post.
Mojalefa.l