Helpful hints
There’s no shortage of opinions and advice in this world. The hard part is sifting through all of the inputs. (U.S. National Archives)
As a teenager, I used to read magazines and save them.
Early in my career, I used to keep a file of helpful resources that I’d received via email.
In the heyday of blogs, I carefully subscribed to each of my favorites via RSS and, via a feed reader, pored over articles at my desk during lunch. (If I were ten years younger, they’d have been YouTube videos, and if I were ten years younger than that, they’d have been TikToks.)
Now? Now, there is a constant flow of content coming at me, and to try to save or contain any of it would be like trying to scoop the ocean into a plastic bucket. Even if I could hold on to a little bit, what’s the point? There is always more rushing in.
While there are articles and videos out there that have been memorable enough to go back to, most of what’s out there feels ephemeral — or, to put it more generously, renewable. With such a vast sea of resources out there, I don’t have to cling to what I find. I will find it again, or something else like it.
So I hardly ever save anything anymore. But I still read things and watch things. The way I approach that has changed over the course of the past fourteen years or so of Internet use. Instead of seeking knowledge — helpful hints I can use to make incremental improvements to my life, for free — I’m looking for guidance.
Even more than guidance, I want to find guides. I’m looking for those who can distill all of the existing information into a useful form that yields meaningful growth or even transformation.
I’m happy to pay for the support I receive. I’m too old and impatient to be willing to sift through tons of free stuff to put together a plan, especially when that free stuff is designed to whet my appetite for the key aspects of implementation that have been strategically placed behind a paywall.
As a content creator — meaning, as a writer — this is kind of a funny place to be. If I am exhausted by the idea of “consuming” other people’s helpful hints, I don’t want to put anyone else in the same position with my own.
Not only is the deluge of free material exhausting to process, the helpful hints that can be picked up along the way aren’t going to lead to the kind of profound change that I want to help people create. Even if I were to share something that led someone to see the world differently, that’s probably only going to last for like five minutes until they move on to the next thing. They’re just going to collect more ideas and probably not act on them, just as I have so often done.
I’ll enjoy watching videos from time to time that give me, say, the Top Seven Ways to Do X (“But before we get to the top seven ways later in this video, I wanted to stall for a few minutes so that this video is long enough to be favored by the YouTube algorithm...”). And I’ll share tactical information every so often. But I know that’s not really how most people transform themselves and their lives. It usually takes a plan, along with support to carry out that plan. That’s hard to find. It’s what I’m always trying to find, and what I try to offer.
Nothing against the helpful hints and helpful hint creators out there. They entertain me while I’m eating a sandwich. But if I don’t remember what they said a half hour later, I’m not worried about it. What I really need to know probably isn’t in a random YouTube video. In fact, I probably already know what I need to know. I need to do what I already know I need to do. But I need support on that, and I bet it’s out there.
