Hey! Once again, we're defying all odds and writing another blog post. The world said we couldn't do it, yet here we are. So I might've made a huge mistake. I'm off caffeine.
Before DECAF.
Let me explain, I have been addicted to Coke products for almost half my life, Coke Zero being my absolute favorite daily beverage, but the amount of caffeine I was ingesting was keeping me up night after night. My thoughts would race and I would either be on a crazy high where (for example) I could clean the whole house, watch endless amounts of videos or spend hours doing tedious work on the computer. But it would affect my decision making to the point where I would try to decide an overwhelming amount of decisions about projects (past and current) and never really be able to focus in on a single task, so I would burn out.
Then there were the crazy lows, where I... simply... would.... slow...down...and ....(you get the picture). So I decided to have no caffeine past 2pm.
After DECAF.
So life's been a bit strange lately. I sleep deeply and on command. I wake up and am more reflective about the dreams I'm having which some are fun (like being a salsa singer/songwriter) but some are not so fun, like being trapped in some past argument with family members. It all has gotten me feeling and thinking differently about life in general.
Doing it for the "Likes".
I joined Instagram some years ago to share my art and grow my audience. I though that I could persuade people who liked my art to go see my videos on YouTube, and help build the following that Channels need to survive. (That didn't work BTW) Along the way I noticed that I got really hung up on how many likes I got on any given post. At first I was getting quite a lot of likes for some rubbish drawings and I thought "hey, this might take off".
Let me back track a little. I was having a hard time being a perfectionist. I wouldn't make anything because I knew that it wouldn't be perfect, in fact I knew it would be so far from what I pictured in my mind that it pretty much resembled a completely different project. I was just stuck.
One day I decided to break free from that way of thinking, So I decided that I would draw trash. The most terrible drawings I could make (derpy doodles that a child could do infinitely better; I'm being harsh now) and I would post them everyday to show myself that even those piles of garbage would get some likes. That I had nothing to fear, and that I could make my imperfect projects and let the bloody world decide what to think of them (and nobody cares).
But then the likes were okay. They were good. Then I got obsessed with getting likes. But I noticed that the likes weren't from followers. Followers were completely silent. The "likes" came from random people who go to #doodle and "like" random this or that to get people to maybe look at their posts and like them back or even follow back. (my wife likes to point this out from time to time as if she was the one who noticed this LOL)
But even still I was obsessed. I even found that if I edited the description in each post and changed all the hashtags I would get a bunch of new likes. So I did this for a long time and my likes were growing. More reach = more likes. But in the back of my mind I always thought, why aren't any followers liking my posts. Some of these were my friends.
Then I calculated how many likes I would get if I continued down this path (of self deception) and found that if I post 1 new drawing a day and get about 10 likes per post, by the end of 1 year I would get about (drum roll please) 3,650 likes (with about 1k followers give or take). And if everyday I switch the hashtags on my posts 1-12 times daily I could exponentially increase my likes and followers to a substantially big amount.
But now I'm on DECAF.
See you next week.
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