Are There Any Social Media Etiquettes

Neera

Unlike most people, I have been avoiding social media. This year I realized I can’t keep ignoring the power of social media.

In the first week of January, I started a 100-day project — to write a social media post every day on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

As soon as I started posting regularly, I began getting messages from people who wanted to either sell me something or to read their stuff. Some sent me links to their article, others wanted me to review their website. But this one guy sent me a page-long email asking me to spread the word about his novel. He even wrote the synopsis and included the links where I could buy it.

That tipped the scale for me.

I am new to social media but even I could sense that he had gone too far.

You can’t expect someone who hardly knows you to start recommending your books to others.

He didn’t even try to ascertain whether I read historical fiction or not (His was a historical novel).

That got me thinking, there should be some social media etiquette.

When I started looking for them I couldn’t find any. So I built a list of mine.

  1. Don’t bombard people with your products. If someone knocks on your door and straightway starts selling you a product, would you buy it? How do you feel when someone cold calls you to sell something? I feel exactly that. Cold. No one warms up to a cold caller. The same is true on social media. Social media enable us to reach targeted readers and attract those who might enjoy what we write. But they need to get to know you first. Build the trust. Let your audience warm up to you. Give them some snippets from your life. Once they get to know you, they might get interested in reading your work and later on down the track might want to buy your book.
  2. Be Genuine. People can discern whether you are being honest or not. They can detect whether you are being authentic or putting on a persona. One would think social media is a place for conmen, but surprising people need to be more authentic and congruent with their values on social media than they are even in their real life. Why? Because you get caught out pretty soon. The best way to use any of the social media sites is to be authentic and real. You have a better chance of attracting people and build a long-term relationship that way. Don’t broadcast spammy sales messages. Just be yourself and interact.
  3. Be useful, interesting, or entertaining. Social means social. Social media means a place to interact with other like-minded people. Just as we were taught not to go to anyone’s home with bearing a gift, you shouldn’t appear on social media without bearing a gift. Remember the phrase ‘what’s in it for me.’ Everyone wants to know things that will help them, or interest them, or make them laugh. If you are not offering something that they want you won’t get their attention. You don’t need to do weird things, be nasty or abusive to get attention, you just need to bear a gift whenever you appear on social media.
  4. Develop the relationship first. Building relationships takes time. You will need to invest time and effort. If you are not willing to do that, and just want to flaunt your product at every new contact, people will be put off quickly. People can discern whether you are in it for the long term or are just after a promotional opportunity. People are not stupid. Social media is a long term strategy that you should only follow if you consider someone to be a contact worth pursuing.
  5. Pitch them, but only when it is appropriate. Once they have noticed you in some way, you can ask to share your work. You can make them your beta readers or you can send them announcements whenever you launch a product. Don’t do it all the time and certainly don’t do it before they get to know you.
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Photo by Marina Vitale on Unsplash

Toxicity on Social Media

So many people come off social media because of the toxicity that goes on there.

Recently Tim Denning wrote about the dark side of LinkedIn where he told the story of a woman who had experienced bullying (called womanizing) on LinkedIn. Predators would develop a community around their content, using a group chat like WhatsApp, and then use it to exploit unsuspecting women.

They would pretend to make women feel good and leave nice comments on their LinkedIn posts to get their attention. Then they would try and do anything to meet up with them in person so they could, hopefully, get them in bed.

Many other women reported witnessing the same kind of experience. I too have been contacted by men wanting to talk because they were feeling lonely and asking me personal questions.

Bullying is universal by womanizing is new to the cyberworld. As a woman, we need to be more vigilant on the internet.

Can we ignore social media altogether?

Social media is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it provides community and friends who might never have met in real life, people who ‘get you’ even if they live on the other side of the world.

On the other hand, it makes us the target for bullies, womanizers, and vendors who want to push their products to us.

You can ignore social media and many people do.

But if you need to build a platform it can be a very effective way to reach your audience.

As an author, it has several benefits.

  • You can build your community. Particularly if you are a self-published author who is selling directly to your readers. Authors need to stay in contact with their readers to sell their books
  • Talk to other authors. Writing is a lonely profession. But if you know other writers, the process of writing becomes more bearable plus you discover opportunities to collaborate and to learn from each other. Social Media is a great place to connect with other writers.
  • Advertise to potential readers. You need the means to announce your books. There is no better way than social media.

It is also a brilliant form of marking for introverts and most writers are introverts. You can choose when you interact and you can also be at home in silence and yet still be ‘out there’ connecting with people.

In many ways, social media is still about hand-selling to individuals but on a global scale.

But the real power of social media is about making connections and building relationships.

It is a brilliant way to market organically. This is how the marketing principle AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Actions) works for social media.

Attention

Attention is hard to get in this speedy online world. There are books, TV, podcasts, and streaming. Yet people spend a lot of time on social media and the best thing about it is that it is the only medium where there can be two-way interaction. Pieces of content are breadcrumbs leading to your door. You can share bits of your story, your hobbies, your successes, and even your failure as long as it is interesting, entertaining, or inspirational and you are bound to build a following.

Interest

Social networking is pointless on its own as a marketing mechanism. The aim is to get people to notice you and be interested enough to follow you or click through to your website.

Make sure you have all your social networking links on every page or the sidebar of your site so that you are easy to contact.

Also, make sure to capture people’s interest with a sign-up so that you can develop this fledging relationship further. Social network rise and fall. You don’t own that real estate, you only borrow it for a little while.

Desire

Sometimes people will buy your book, as soon as they hear about you but generally, it takes time for people to make a buying decision.

Once people have found you and are interested in what you’re doing, they might follow your blog, may listen to your interview, or simply continue to follow you on social networks. They may also receive your email newsletters, by producing other pieces of content you will expand the impact you can have over time.

Social Networking is about people knowing you, liking you, and trusting you enough to let you have a slice of their time and attention.

Authenticity over the long term is therefore important so that you can sustain this. Marketing like writing is a long term activity. You might share snippets, and pictures from your writing life while you’re writing your books on social media. And in this way, those who follow you will be ready to buy when you launch.

Action.

Once people know you like you and trust you, they are far more likely to try your books or recommend you to others.

There is no hard sell necessary.

This method is about attracting people who might be interested in what you have to say.

Once you have their attention you have built up a desire to see what you are doing. As you can now ask to take action and buy your book.

Socialising is about having fun.

Social networking doesn’t work if you don’t enjoy it, or if you are unrelentingly negative. Networks are collective energy expressed in one place. If you exude negativity or hype or spam, then that’s what you will experience in return.

Joining a conversation, learning from people, sharing something interesting, and making connections could be fun.

Just like socializing is fun.

So how can you be social on social media?

Social media is about being social. You got to follow all the rules you would follow when you are socializing with people in person. Keep these simple rules in mind.

  • Make friends rather than push products. Friendship will bring you much more rewards than the little financial gain you will have from selling a book or a course.
  • Build trust. Share bits about your life, your interests, and your work so that people get to know you before they decide to buy something from you.
  • Be honest and be yourself.
  • Think long term.

Photo by Elevate on Unsplash

Understanding Authorpreneurship

Neera 1 Comment

How can one study Botany?

There are millions of plants on our planet. How can one study them? It will take us several lifetimes to understand the differences between species.

Yet Botanists know most of these differences by heart. They have arranged the information so that it is easy to know where everything fits in the big picture. 

Botanists divided all plants into two major groups — non-vascular and vascular. The non-vascular group contains early plants with no vascular system, while the vascular plants have a well-developed vascular system. 

Then they further subdivided the groups. Non-vascular plants have two divisions— Bryophyta(Mosses), Marchantiophyta(Liverworts) and, vascular plants have four divisions — Pteridophyta (Ferns), Coniferophyta (Conifers), Ginkgophyta (Gingko), and Magnoliophyta (Flowering plants).

There you go—the entire plant kingdom can be explained in two paragraphs. Each division has further sub-divisions, classes, order, families, and genus, but all you need is a bird’s-eye view approach to understand Botany.

I am going to use the same approach to understand authorpreneurship. 

Throughout my journey as a writer, I approached everything with the vigor of a student. I wanted to write my memoir, but I didn’t know how to turn my boring anecdotes into stories. I learned it.

I wanted to write a novel but I didn’t know how to develop my idea into an outline. I learned it too.

I didn’t know how to start a blog, write articles, write for social media, sketch. But I learned them.

I learned it mostly from other people. People took the time and shared their knowledge and techniques through books, blogs, videos, and podcasts. 

Now, I am learning authorpreneurship. Although it is not science or skill, it is complex enough to demand full attention.

It is complex because it is new. 

There is no clear path, and there is no one path.

Yet, it is reproducible as several writers are successfully doing it. 

I am reading stories after stories of writers who are turning their writing into a thriving business. I intend to study them and learn from them.

The first person who intrigued me was Jesse Tevelow.

At the not-so-ripe age of 31, Jesse was fired from a start-up company. He had no plans for his future. Instead of looking for another job, Jesse followed his dream. He hunkered down in his one-bedroom apartment and started writing.

He had two #1 bestsellers on Amazon in less than eighteen months, and he was earning thousands of dollars per month in passive income.

Writing can be a viable side-gig, a powerful leveraging tool, and even a lucrative full-time pursuit. It can open doors you never knew existed. But perhaps more importantly, it can bring you more fulfillment than you’ve ever felt before. That’s exactly what it did for me. — Jesse Tevelow.

According to a New York Times article, four out of every five Americans feel the urge to write a book, yet very few of them actually write one. 

Why?

Because writing a book has historically been considered an arduous task. It is like climbing Everest. First, you have to write a greater story. Then you have to hire an agent. Then you have to score a publishing deal. And even if you somehow pull that off, it’ll take years before your book hits the shelves. Writing a book is not everyone’s game.

It was true about two decades ago. Everything has changed since. 

Jesse wrote his first book in six months, making countless mistakes along the way. He didn’t have a publisher or an editor, or a marketing team, yet he still published a #1 bestseller that generates a significant passive income. 

“The experience blew my mind, to put it lightly.” writes Jesse. “I couldn’t help but wonder, are other people seeing the same results?”

As he dug deeper, he found multiple examples of indie authors making five, six, and sometimes even seven figures from their self-published books and related companies. And then it hit him. 

We now live in a world that favors content creators over gatekeepers. — Jesse Tevelow.

Jesse now has a multi-million dollar business build around his books. He is the founder of LaunchTeam, a distributed network of go-to-market experts who help remarkable people launch remarkable things.

I bought all three of Jesse’s books — The Connection Algorithm, Authorpreneur: Build the Brand, Business, Lifestyle You Deserve It’s Time To Write Your Book, Hustle: The Life-Changing Magic of Constant Motion. It was the best $4.50 I ever spent. 

Here is what I learned from his books:

If you’re entrepreneurial and hard-working, you can use books to earn meaningful passive income, gain leverage as an expert in your field, build your legacy, grow a sustainable business, and enrich the world.

And you don’t need anyone’s permission.

You can do it. 

It might sound hyperbolic and crazy, but it’s true.

Now is the most favorable environment for writing books the world has ever seen.

There are two things to keep in mind:

  1. Technology and entrepreneurship have made books more powerful than ever before.

2. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are several successful models available to follow.

Applying the bird’s-eye view approach to classify the models, I have found there are two major categories.

  1. Book Brand: This is where authors rely on producing multiple books in a popular genre targeting the same audience, using paid ads to drive traffic directly to the book sales page. It is usually part of the high production business model. Several fiction writers such as James Patterson, Joanna Penn come in this category. 
  2. Author Brand: This is about branding the author, and attracting the target market over time through content marketing, speaking, social media, and paid advertising. Authors find a niche and build an empire in that niche. Examples include Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, The Universe Has Your Back by Gabrielle Berstein, or Rise of the Youpreneur by Chris Ducker. This design style also applies to biographies like Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

In my further articles, I will further explore these models.

Photo by Laura Chouette on Unsplash

Authorpreneur  - A New Publication For Writers

Neera

The dictionary defines ‘author’ as a person who has written something, especially a book, and ‘entrepreneur’ as a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.

Many years ago, I combined the two to develop the word ‘authorpreneur’ to describe someone who takes risks to turn their writing into a business. 

I didn’t give it much thought because I was new to writing and still finding my feet. But soon, I started spotting the word being used by other writers. I even noticed some books with the word ‘authorpreneur’ appearing in the title. That was it.

The time had come to make the term mainstream.

Let me define and elaborate on the term.

An authorpreneur is a person who creates written products, participates in creating her brand, and actively promotes that brand through a variety of outlets.

An Authorpreneur makes use of the twenty-first-century outlets such as websites, blogs, social media, content marketing, writing platforms, newsletters, promotional materials both in print and online, speaking engagements, online and in-person courses, and workshops to create a unique business model to build a community based thriving business.

I started reading about more and more writers who were using these new outlets and becoming considerably successful. Much more successful than it was possible in the traditional way of writing and publishing. 

In less than ten years, a new breed of writers has started dominating the writing industry, and the trend is going not only to continue but explode. 

Yet thousands of writers aspiring are not even aware of it.

Why I started this publication?

One of the myths around writing is that you can’t live off your writing. Indeed, the vast majority of authors do not make a living from their written words. 

The traditional publishing industry that once sustained many writers is now in a freefall accelerated by the pandemic. I have been watching in dismay as publisher after publisher closing their shop. 

Four in five traditionally published books never “earn back” the advances received by their authors, which means they don’t sell enough copies to make the writers any money past the initial amount paid by publishers for writing the books. Most e-books don’t sell more than 560 copies per year and most print books don’t sell more than 250 copies per year. In fact, the average books sell 3,000 copies in its lifetime. — Nina Amir

But that is changing. On the other hand, self-publishing is thriving.

Making a living as an author takes hard work, and the income from just one book or writing on one platform will not pay you enough to live on. If you want to earn a living as an author and not make a living but thrive as an author, you need to think like a business person. Like an authorpreneur.

This publication will help you achieve that.

Writing is the hardest profession to break into. 

Not only learning to write well is arduous but making a living from writing is grueling. But things are changing for good.

Today many more avenues are available to writers to publish and make money while honing their craft. New ones are fast appearing. But the learning curve is sharp.

I have created this publication to help new writers establish their writing business. It will have articles specifically for that purpose.

If you are a writer like me, if you want to do nothing else but write, you want to know the clear pathway to become an authorpreneur. 

I want to dedicate this publication exclusively to help writers become authorpreneurs.

What kind of articles I will be published here

Articles helping you develop an authorpreneur mindset. Articles with practical advice to set up your business. Stories of the writers who have been on the journey before you and have made it. Summaries of the books on the topic.

I want to create a community of writers who want to help each other establish their author business. 

If we all lift each other up in small ways, we can reach new, exciting heights together.

Initially, I will be the sole contributor to this publication. With time I will like other writers to join me to help build this publication. 

I will be looking for high-quality, practical articles that focus on mindset, creativity, writing, editing, publishing, marketing, and author business models. 

Here is my rough list of the kind of articles I am envisioning:

  • The mindset of an authorpreneur.
  • The business of writing.
  • The process and habits of writers.
  • Advice on developing writing products.
  • Articles exploring different writing career paths.
  • Unique or creative writing, editing, and publishing tips, tools, and methods. 
  • Book summaries of books on the top of authorpreneurship.
  • First-person accounts of getting a book published.
  • Interviews with experienced writers.
  • Other creative pieces in which fellow writers can learn something new.

Who can contribute?

Any one of you who wants to write on the topic.

If you want to contribute, reach to me via  LinkedIn.

How can you help?

By subscribing to the publication. 

By leaving comments and asking questions about what you would like me to write about.

I am not starting this publication to turn it into a mega publication but as a small portal to share my learning as I progress on the authorpreneur journey.

“True authors don’t write for fame or make a name or money, they write to make impact.” — Bernard Kelvin Clive.

They say a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. For me, that step is this publication and my newsletter A Whimsical Writer.

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Want to take your writing to another level? Subscribe to my newsletter, A Whimsical Writer.

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Photo by Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash

My Author Business Plan 2021

Neera 1 Comment

Every year, I spend the last week of December contemplating the year that has passed and planning the next one. I set goals and write them in my daily diary where they are in front of my eyes all the time.

This year I decided to go one step further and created the Author Business Plan to stay on track and don’t get distracted by other exciting things. 

I started in the last week of December, as usual, but didn’t finish till the first week of January, and there was a reason for that.

Something happens when the clock strikes twelve on New Year Eve. 

All that was current becomes past in a moment. 

Your perspective changes. 

The New Year’s energy brings several possibilities, and wisdom gained in the past year helps you avoid repeating the same mistakes. 

A typical Author Business Plan has five components — Business Summary, Financial Goals, Products, Publishing, and Marketing Strategy.

My Author Business Plan has different components. They are not standard, rather than based on what matters to me at this stage of life. They may not apply to you. Feel free to choose your own components. I wholeheartedly recommend Joanne Penn’s book Author Business Plan, which I used as a model to draft mine.

Let’s not forget I am turning sixty this year. Some of the things that matter to me may not be a priority for you. But then some things are universal.

Let’s get into it.

Theme

From last year, instead of setting annual goals, I started setting a theme. I wrote an article about it – Don’t set goals, set a theme instead. I urge you to read it. I promise it is worth your time.

Where goals are rigid, limiting, and unforgiving, themes are fluid, merciful, and open up new opportunities. 

With a goal, the question is, have you achieved it or not? Whereas with a theme, every action you do, you need to ask: Is this aligned with my theme?

Goal setting leaves you miserable. If you don’t achieve them, you beat yourself up, and if you do achieve them, you set another one as soon as possible.

On the other hand, themes give you achievable, meaningful daily standards you can live up to. They reduce the pressure goals create. 

A goal shuts out opportunities for current fulfillment in favor of a distant payday. A theme looks for opportunities in the present.

Last year my theme was FOCUS. 

I focused on learning various skills and on whatever things I was doing. The theme kept my wandering nature in check.

This year my theme is CREATE. 

I will enjoy the process of creation by using the skills I learned last year.

Guiding Principle

A guiding principle is an overarching principle that helps you decide what to do and what not to do?

Pick a phrase or a theme and say like, ‘At the end of my life, what do I want my actions from today to have contributed to?’

For me, that statement is, “Make sure my creativity injects hope in this world.”

The Bare Minimum

I have always been an overachiever. I will set up so many goals, so many projects, and so many endeavors that it would become physically impossible for me to accomplish them all. Then I will beat myself up for not achieving those. 

On top of that, I love spontaneity in my day. I get easily inspired and want to act on new ideas as soon as they appear. New ideas have certain energy associated with them, and if you don’t act on them immediately, they go flat like a bubble. At this stage in my life (I will be turning sixty soon), I want to follow whim rather than discipline.

This year, I will identify the bare minimum things I want to achieve and leave the rest of the time for spontaneity.

These bare minimum things are:

  1. Finish my novel.
  2. Publish six ebooks (already in draft)
  3. Write 3–5 articles a week
  4. Continue once a week newsletter A Whimsical Writer.
  5. Draw 4–5 sketches a week

Three of these goals are weekly, one bi-monthly, and one annual. I will be able to achieve these easily. The rest of my time is for me to do whatever I please. 

I might run a webinar course, start a podcast and post on social media every day for 90 days, or start doing urban sketching. These things can come and go. I will be happy if I could achieve the five bare minimum things I have identified.

Health

In 2020 I ignored my health. I stopped going to the gym when lockdown started and didn’t start properly even when gyms opened mid-year (we have been lucky here in Canberra). I ate mindlessly and put on weight. To tell the truth, I ignored health for writing. I was so consumed with following my writing goals that I didn’t make time for exercise.

This year, heath is going to come first. I am back to walking 3–4 times a week, doing weights 2–3 times a week, core training 1–2 times a week, and yoga class once a week.

I have joined WW to be accountable for my weight and investigate intermittent fasting to control my eating.

Time Off

Not being able to travel led to non-stop working in 2020. I took no breaks other than a month off in February. This impacted my sanity and perspective. This year I have blocked two weeks each quarter. Even if we couldn’t travel, I will take time off to do nothing. And if travel became possible, I intend to take longer breaks in the second half of the year.

This is how the overall plan looks like:

I am sharing it here for two reason, one to keep myself accountable to my readers and two to give you a template to write your plan if you haven’t got one.

Happy planning!

May you have a productive and safe 2021!

Photo by William Iven on Unsplash

2020 In Sketches

Neera 1 Comment

I am a bit late in posting this, but I thought it would be a good idea to put all my sketches in one place and show you the progress one can make by learning in tiny increments.

When I started the Da Vinci course in July 2019, we were required to do two things: 1) Draw for fifteen minutes everyday 2) Post your drawing on social media every day.

Drawing every day builds muscles, and posting every day gives you deadlines.

Noting gets done without the deadlines. So, at the end of the day, I had to make sure I had something to post on Instagram. It had a side-benefit. My classmates started leaving comments on it. That encouraged me to do my homework and make sure I don’t miss a day.

I was building a habit to draw every day.

I started with drawing circles, and for one week, I drew a page full of circles every day. Big circles, small circles, clockwise circles, anticlockwise circles, fast circles, slow circles.

This was intentional. Drawing different kind of circles uses different muscles which help avoid fatigue and leads to better control.

Besides, if you learn to draw circles, not the perfect circles, but circly-circle (ones with concentric rings that you keep on drawing until it is right), you can draw anything.

From circles, we moved on to draw animals – pig, hippopotamus, cat, dog, teddy bear – all from circles.

Our next move was to learn how to draw Peanuts characters. Snoopy, Charlie Brwon, Lucy, Sally and Linus.

Then came Kung Fu Panda. He gave me a lot of trouble. It took me a lot of time to get his expressions right.

By the end of the year, we were creating a character of our own. That is when Ms. Jolly appears, almost fully formed. It took me a little while to learn to draw her curly hair but apart from that, she was there with her unique personality.

Altogether I drew and posted 250 sketches of Ms. Jolly in 2020, without counting the practice one. This is a great feat for someone who couldn’t draw a circle twelve months ago. I have put aside 20 sketches for the cartoon book I intend to publish in 2021.

But I am most proud of my Da Vinci diaries where I hand wrote all the notes during the course.

My only regret is that I started the diary halfway through the course. I intend to finish the earlier lessons this year. It will be a great way to revise the lessons.

Towards the end of 2020, I started drawing flowers. See the improvement in just 12 days.

One of the analogies our drawing teacher gave us earlier in the course was – there are two ways to eat a cake. You can eat it in tiny pieces or gobble the whole thing down. Most of us would like to gobble, whether it is cake or learning. But like cake, learning needs to be tackled in small portions.

Fifteen to thirty minutes of drawing everyday proves that.

Insights of 2020 - Wisdom For 2021

Neera 1 Comment

Many people are happy to see the back of 2020. One thing is for sure; none of us will miss it. And the bar is set very low for 2021. but 2020 was perhaps the most enlightening year in recent history. In less than ten months, it has changed the way we live and perhaps for good.

Much has been written about the havoc 2020 has caused, but I decided to concentrate on the lessons it taught us.

Here are nine insights, mostly from my journal entries.

1. This, too, shall pass.

Who would have thought that the whole world can come to a halt? As Burkeman puts it in his newsletter, “the treadmill, you’ve been on for decades just stopped.” If it’s possible for the world to go into lockdown, what else might be possible? A lot, in fact. We might have to continue to work from home. We may not be able to travel for another year. We continue to get tested repeatedly. Vaccines might prove useless.

But that is a grim picture. The biggest truth of all time is, “This too shall pass.” Soon we will get back to the routines of life and start complaining about the weather again. Already, nobody cares about the stats. Even thousands of deaths a day are not making the front page news. This is how resilient the human race is.

What happened is inexplicably incredible. It’s the greatest gift ever unwrapped. Not the deaths, not the virus, but the Great Pause. It is, in a word, profound. Please don’t recoil from the bright light beaming through the window. I know it hurts your eyes. It hurts mine, too. But the curtain is wide open. What the crisis has given us is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views. At no other time, ever in our lives, have we gotten the opportunity to see what would happen if the world simply stopped.

Here it is… [So] think deeply about what you want to put back into your life. This is our chance to define a new version of normal, a rare and truly sacred (yes, sacred) opportunity to get rid of the bullshit and to only bring back what works for us, what makes our lives richer, what makes our kids happier, what makes us truly proud. We get to Marie Kondo the shit out of it all.” — Julio Vincent Gambuto, Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting

2. Children don’t need to be told what to learn.

After years of debate whether kids can or can’t be homeschooled, 2020 presented the opportunity to test the theory on a mass scale. Kids stayed at home for most of the year and learned with the help of technology. Teachers and parents were there to guide but whether they put any effort to learn was children’s call. In other words, if they wanted to slack, they easily could. But schools are showing better results than ever.

What if schools are not the best place for your kids to learn? What if we don’t try to replicate school at home? What if we try something else? What if we use this as a radical opportunity to let our kids learn and explore their interests unfettered by the classroom demands?

John Holt started a newsletter Growing Without Schooling in 1977 where he advocated “ways in which people, young or old, can learn and do things, acquire skills, and find interesting and useful work, without having to go through the process of schooling.”

The term newsletter is misleading. It is, in fact, a reference book, published an article at a time on topics ranging from legal advice (homeschooling was illegal in many states) to technology, talent, skills, learning, and curriculum.

Children do not need to be made to learn, told what to learn, or shown how. If we give them access to enough of the world, including our own lives and work in that world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to us and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world than we could make for them. — John Holt in How Children Learn

John Holt’s books How Children Learn, Teach Your Own, and Learning All The Time are worth checking.

2. Love is the opposite of being invisible.

One of the common complaints of working people is that they see their coworkers more than their loved ones. 2020 allowed us to work from home where both partners sat side-by-side or in adjoining rooms and spent most of their waking hours together. Although it was initially challenging, eventually, it brought couples together. My husband worked from home two days a week, and it was good to little chats during the day, something we get to do on weekends only.

In September 2018, singer and songwriter Nick Cave started his blog The Red Hand Files to answer questions from fans:

When I started the Files I had a small idea that people were in need of more thoughtful discourse. I felt a similar need. I felt that social media was by its nature undermining both nuance and connectivity. I thought that, for my fans at least, The Red Hand Files could go some way to remedy that.

Nick Cave has received over 30,000 questions from his fans within two years, and he’s written more than 200 answers. Some questions are more typical fan questions, such as his favorite books, songs, musicians, or poems.

But other questions are deeply philosophical, like when Pablo asks, What is love for you? This is a part of Cave’s answer:

Love is acknowledging the other person’s presence as Nick Cave’s responded to the question “What is love for you?” by a fan.

Love has something to do with the notion of being seen — the opposite of invisibility. The invisible, the unwitnessed, the unacknowledged, the isolated, the lonely — these are the unloved. Loving attention illuminates the unseen, escorting them from the frontiers of lovelessness into the observed world. To truly see someone — anyone — is an act that acknowledges and forgives our common and imperfect humanity. Love enacts a kind of vigilant perception — whether it is to a partner, a child, a co-worker, a neighbour, a fellow citizen, or any other person one may encounter in this life. Love says softly — I see you. I recognise you. You are human, as am I. — Nick Cave

3. When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness.

Oliver Burkeman wrote in The Guardian, “I’m indebted to the Jungian therapist James Hollis for the insight that major personal decisions should be made not by asking “Will this make me happy?” but “Will this choice enlarge me or diminish me?”

We are terrible at predicting what will make us happy: the question swiftly gets bogged down in our narrow preferences for security and control. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. But the enlargement question elicits a deeper, intuitive response. You tend to just know whether, say, leaving or remaining in a relationship or a job, though it might bring short-term comfort, would mean cheating yourself of growth. — Oliver Burkeman

“Relatedly,” he infers, “don’t worry about burning bridges: irreversible decisions tend to be more satisfying because now there’s only one direction to travel — forward into whatever choice you made.”

4. Rituals are ballast against the chaos of the everyday

For years I resented the neverending household chores. When I was going to the office, they were out of sight. Since I started working from home, they are on my face all the time.

Then I developed rituals. Rituals to do dishes, rituals to tidy bedrooms, rituals to water the plans, and suddenly things that used to stress me became stress-releasing activities.

Mike Powell wrote an article in the New York Times, A Letter of Recommendation: Washing Dishes, which expresses the same sentiments.

I’ve often said that the best job I ever had was washing dishes at a small Italian restaurant just after college.

(…)

As much as I liked the machine, I often took the time to do the job by hand. It became a welcome ritual, a ballast against the chaos of the everyday.

And like any worthwhile practice — marriage, creativity, compassion — it engendered the kind of patience that lets you see how life is something to be managed, not conquered. You might finish a load, but you’ll almost always have another one coming.

(…)

But lately, I’ve been wondering what that time and space is for. Implied in the quest for convenience is a distinction between the life we deem worth living and the life we have to endure in order to get there. One is a possibility, the other an obligation; one is a means, the other an end.

(…)

Life hacks, multitasking, the ruthless compression of our daily routine: We still frame the ordinary as something that exists only for the thing beyond it, as a hazard to be optimized away instead of an organism to be nurtured and interacted with.

5. Solitude is freedom from input from other’s minds.

Cal Newport is talking about a definition of solitude in his book Digital Minimalism. He borrowed the definition from Lead Yourself First. According to the authors, Kethledge and Erwin, solitude is a “state of mind.” a spiritual condition, not necessarily a physical one.

Here is how Newport explains it in Digital Minimalism:

“Many people mistakenly associate [solitue] with physical separation-requireing, perhaps that you hike to a remote cabin miles from another human being. This flawed definition indroduces a standard of isolation that can be impractical for mos to satisfy on any sort of regular basis. As Kethledge and Erwin explain, however, solitude is about what’s happening in your brain, not the environment around you. Accordingly, they define it to be a subjective state in which your mind if free from input from other mind.”

Under this definition, you can find solitude in a busy train while commuting to work or sitting in a coffee shop or a hospital waiting room. You can also be alone with your thoughts. But you have to be free from the input.

In 2020, we had been physically separated but bombarded with external input. The stats are showing that in 2020, consumption of social media and digital information increased exponentially.

Much of anxiety can disappear if we can distance ourselves from social media. In the twenty-first century, the person who will be more successful and mentally stable is not the one who is well-informed and well-connected but one who has “learned to be alone.”

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” — Blaise Pascal

6. Pay attention to what you care about, and care about what you pay attention to.

Rob Walker writes a newsletter, The Art of Noticing, where he talks about “noticing things,” “paying attention,” and “care for something.”

He writes:

[O]ne of my favorite responses to a willfully open-ended prompt I give my students — I order them to “practice paying attention” — came from a student who thought he did it wrong. He had made a planter, he explained, for a cactus. He’d done this, he said, on the theory that “by nurturing or caring for something, you pay more attention to it.” And of course he was right! (See also this recent Times Magazine essay making a similar point: “How Taking Care of Houseplants Taught Me to Take Care of Myself.”)

Amy Meissner, who advocates mending, writes:

“Once you’ve mended something, if you didn’t have sentimental value attached to it before, then you certainly do once you’ve taken time to care for it.”

Austin Kleon connects the two ideas with a quote from his book Keep Going:

“Attention is the most basic form of love,” wrote John Tarrant. When you pay attention to your life, it not only provides you with the material for your art, it also helps you fall in love with your life.”

2020 provided us the opportunity to care for our loved ones, our homes, our environment by spending more time with them and by giving them more attention. A lesson we can carry forward to the next year and beyond.

7. Plans are useless, but planning is priceless

In the twentieth and twenty-first century, we are fed on planning from primary school. Plan for life, plan for a career, plan for holidays, plan for shopping, plan for socializing. Then came 2020, and people’s well-laid plans were wiped out with the single stroke of God’s pen.

There is another aspect of planning:

Planning is a common form of mental restlessness which can manifest as anxiety — we’re so uncertain about the future that we try to gain control by planning it. In Buddhist teaching, planning is part of papañca — a Pāli term that is usually translated as conceptual or discursive proliferation or the diversifying tendencies of the mind.

(…)

Planning is a Barrier to Awakening. The problem with planning isn’t just that it agitates the mind, but that it disguises the basic characteristics of existence to which we want to awaken…— Shaila Catherine, Planning and the Busy Mind:

Although planning can appear as a useful activity, we need to examine our actual planning activities to assess how effectively and efficiently we plan. Many of our daily plans don’t actually turn out as planned?

The fact is the plans are not preparation for action — they’re the expression of anxiety or restlessness.

We have not discovered how to keep our minds at rest and be present for things as they’re unfolding.

But some plans are useful; therefore, we must assess our planning on a case by case basis. And to do that, we first have to recognize when we’re planning and how we’re doing it.

When you are planning, are you worrying about how something will turn out in the future?

Are you adding more and more things to your to-do list? Or are you leaving enough room for spontaneity in your day?

Do you notice the peacefulness that arises when you’re not planning anything — just sensing the present moment and letting the day unfold, giving it your clear attention and enjoying the experience and the calm that comes from it.

8. Human spirit

Whereas 2020 showed us the utter foolishness and selfishness of powerful leaders, law-enforcers, and the common man under stress, it has also shown is the generosity of countless human beings, whether they were the health workers or people with the least to offer. Stories of the human spirit by far exceeded the stories of mean-spirited people.

This has reinforced my belief in the human spirit. A story appeared on my Instagram, which is worth mentioning here.

I asked a wise man, “Tell me, Sir, in which field could I make a great career?” He said with a smile, “Be a good human being. There is a lot of opportunity in this area and very little competition.”

I think we have plenty of good human beings in the world, and they don’t believe in competition.

9. Be done with the New Year Resolutions

The trouble with the New Year Resolutions is that we set higher and higher standards for ourselves each year. We already have so much on our plate; we don’t need any more anxiety or pressure.

I am not just my accomplishments. My existence is not for just meeting my goals. My existence is to be here at this moment. To be present in whatever state I am in.

I don’t need to improve continually. As Elizabeth Gilbert put it in an Instagram message at the start of 2020, “I am not a Fortune 500 company that has to show more profit each year.” I am a living being, like any other living being, whether it is a bird, or a fish, or a dog, or a cat. A cat never has to set a New Year Resolution. For her 1st of January is like any other day. As long as she gets food, water, and comfortable surroundings, it is a perfect day.

Why can’t it be the same for us?

Why do we have to make our life miserable by setting higher and higher goals?

If anything, we need to cut out some of the trivial things from our lives.

“You don’t need to waste your time doing those things that are unnecessary and trifling. You do not have to be rich. You do not have to seek fame or power. What you need is freedom, solidity, peace, and joy. You need time and energy to be able to share these things with others.” — Thich Nhat Hanh, No Death No Fear.

I didn’t set any New Year Resolution in 2020. Neither did I set any goals. I didn’t care whether I finish my novel or not. Neither did I care how many posts I manage to publish on my website. I concentrated on building a habit of writing every day. And 2020 was the year I wrote the most.

“You are what you want to become. Why search anymore? You are a wonderful manifestation. The whole universe has come together to make your existence possible. There is nothing that is not you. The Kingdom of God, the Pure Land, nirvana, happiness, and the liberation are all you.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

There it is, some lessons I learned in 2020 that I will be carrying with me into 2021.

What are yours?

Photo by Albany Capture on Unsplash