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The Secret Benefits of Promoting Other People’s Work
What sharing other people’s work can teach you about sharing your own
One of the scariest things about promoting your own work is the fundamental reality that nobody else cares. It’s not a personal attack on the worth of you or your work; it’s just that people are living their own lives. They experience their own thoughts, curiosities, and challenges.
You may know this in theory, but you don’t feel it in practice. Here’s how you can practice it:
Read, watch, listen to, and use other people’s creative work. If you like it, share it on your social networks or at Reddit or Hacker News. Or share it with a friend, or reply to a newsletter you subscribe to. (I wrote up a longer list of tactics here, which you can apply to other people’s work as well as your own.)
In other words, promote it on their behalf. It takes five seconds to copy and paste the title and link. Optional: Talk about why you like it, what you got out of it, or what thoughts it provoked.
The most important selfish lesson this practice teaches you is that nobody cares about most other people’s work too. You’ll realize, “Wow, this person must’ve spent 40+ hours writing this piece, and I shared it, and it only got 1 heart.” You’ll subconsciously…
