Highest RoI - Change in Mindset
I have frequently written about a prolific Tweeter, Visakan Veerasamy. He is popularly referred as Visa. We both share a common mother tongue, Tamil. His name itself is a typical Tamil name. I started following him purely because of that. But I have been impressed and many times awestruck by his body of work: Twitter Threads.
Visa uses threads as a medium of expressing his thoughts. He also uniquely repurposes his old tweets and quotes it with the new tweets. Retweets are quite a popular thing, but I suspect because of Visa, Twitter may think of releasing a feature called Quote Tweets. I am digressing, because my post is about a specific thread that connected with me.
Never downplay your work. Took me years to learn this, and you can actually decide to do it in an instant. In my experience, editing the language you use to talk about you is one of the highest ROI activities there is. If you straight up ban yourself from talking shit about yourself, you almost start becoming more interesting just so you have something to say. And you don’t even need to change to be more interesting! You’re already interesting! Once you ditch the self-diminishment, you can start finding out the details. And focusing on the details helps you develop your taste, which makes you more interesting still.
Never describe your work as “uncool”, “no big deal”, “kinda shitty”, etc.
This thought really left a lasting impression on me for the past two weeks.
In my young days, I think I used to feel guilty of fame or popular. If anyone appreciated me in public or private, my first reaction is always feeling shy or feeling not worthy. I used to always put qualifiers like “humble effort”, “way less cool”, “not so great”, to describe my work in blog. Even though I was not feeling depressed, I somehow had this low self esteem. I still have the remnants of feeling. I never used to publish myself in Twitter or Facebook without any inhibitions. There was always something pulling me back.
Yes, there are spurts of zeal and moments of enthusiasm that drives me to publish and be active in social media or blog. But I never was comfortable fully. There used to be lingering thought: may be an impostor syndrome, may a feeling that someone else has done a great job on that topic or may be I have never published a blockbuster article that went viral. But I know that all these things doesn’t matter to write online.
This thought from Visa is a great antidote to this mentality. Visa is a very young guy. But these set of thoughts are so profound and so liberating for me. In the past two weeks, after coming across this tweet, I feel quite happy and relieved in my head.