“Your value will be not what you know; it will be what you share.” – Ginni Rometty
This quote was suggested to me yesterday by the Stoic journaling app I was suggested on the Apple App Store. It’s a great guided journal app, which is something I need lately, since I have a whirlwind constantly going in my head. It’s a good thing I took note of it because the quote it suggests changes every day, so had I not the foresight to save it straightaway when I saw it, I would’ve had to rack my brain to remember it and write about it separately anyway. Considering I got off to a bad start with my laptop glitching out and refusing to open my browser, requiring a restart, I need to already get back to center again.
That rant out of the way, onto the quote. What Ginni Rometty said really speaks to me. I’ve sort of known this intuitively for much of my life. People can talk until they’re blue in the face with lifelong learning, but your knowledge is only valuable if you actually share it with people. You can’t take what you know with you, after all. If you don’t share what you know, put your skills and expertise to use in creating actionable advice and frameworks. Otherwise, you’re just hogging useful information that could better those around you and your immediate world in real and tangible ways.
When it comes to sharing, though, there are many things that I want to share but I don’t necessarily know how to do so effectively. As someone who’s been writing down my thoughts for the majority of my life, it’s immensely frustrating to find myself at an impasse with what exactly I’m trying to say. I’ve written some decent pieces lately, but only after forcing myself to outline what I’m getting at so I don’t fly ridiculously off course like perhaps eighty percent of my drafts inevitably do.
I’m hoping that this guided journaling will be a major boon to my mental health and overall creative well-being. It’s not like I’m stuck on ideation, but when it comes to putting these ideas to work I’m often at a loss. I only allow myself to work on a couple of drafts a day; although, sometimes I end up working on three or four, perhaps more if I’m really struggling to find a draft that’s speaking to me on that particular day. No, I don’t need more drafts, but as long as I’m completing them within a reasonable time frame—the more immediate the better—then I’m going to be able to get in a far better working rhythm and hopefully a much clearer headspace, as well.
I also have been struggling with retreating into myself again. My website doesn’t get nearly the views it once did. Partly this is because I wiped out every post on my site and simply started from scratch. I’ve reposted many of the better things, but it seems that the search engines didn’t treat me kindly with that sudden reboot. Still, it was necessary for my mental health—how could I possibly bring hundreds of essays up to the expectations I now set for website content with them still sitting there live and imperfect?
So, I revived my Instagram, something I told myself I would never do. But I have a specific purpose for it: I need it just to reach out to people and encourage them, sort of what I tried to do with my Twitter Writer’s Lift threads before they turned into spam tracks for Amazon book links and the same blog posts over and over again. Because Instagram isn’t friendly to links, it’s forcing me to post more intentionally. For my first new post, I shared an image that was a friendly reminder to #BeKind and #EndBullying. It didn’t get a ton of attention, but people did see it. So, I may be doing some sort of daily thread again, but I’m sure I’ll have to be extremely patient, as it will likely get no traction for quite some time.
Gone are the days when I could simply post an essay and people would stumble across it and get something out of it. It seems the only thing I can do is give into social media nonsense and have a TikTok if I want to get any eyeballs on my content. I’m not doing that. Really, I’m only going with Instagram because it’s the one account that for some reason wouldn’t close down for me during my social media purge back in 2022. I’m never going back on Facebook and I’ll only reconsider X/Twitter if Elon Musk is out of it—I don’t see that happening.
But just maybe, I’ll be able to revive my Prose Machine Instagram and use it to spread a little kindness like I tried to do back during the Pandemic days. After all, that is how I met Tom in the first place, but all it did was bring me hate otherwise. I know this has become a bit of a ramble, but to tie everything up, I’m only continuing to post on my website and share on Instagram at all because what good is all this writing if I don’t share it?
If no one reads what I have to say, I have to just shrug my shoulders and move on. That critical mass I’ve been chasing for over a decade simply hasn’t come to me yet. I guess I just need to stop chasing it and focus all my energies on simply creating and making sure I’m sharing it in a way that people connect to. Otherwise, I may as well just give up and play Diablo Immortal every waking minute in between Stoic journaling check-ins. What kind of life would that be?
~ Amelia Desertsong
