Your Life Is Your Life
Your Life Is Your Life
Don't let it be clubbed into dank submission
A long, long time ago, in the year 2.000, young Philipp discovered a German gamer forum.
Shortly after, he started publishing posts there. This was the first time that he wrote something outside of school. He was just 13.
Just one year later he was the second most active member of the forum and got promoted to being a moderator.
Unfortunately, his first career as a content creator ended somewhere in 2002. High school became too demanding, therefore he cut down on games and on his internet activity.
Looking back at this episode I now realize that this was a huge mistake. I don’t want to dismiss learning for school, but an important part of growing up is also learning to interact with society.
Reading Dumbing us Down by John Taylor Gatto last month made me realize the problems of our “schooled” society once more.
In the offline world, interacting with society as a teenager gets harder and harder. School serves as an artificial system shielding young people from society. When they are dealing with members of society that are not their age, it’s mostly a hierarchical relationship.
But by being active on the internet, young people have the opportunity to break out of this confinement and finally interact with the world on an equal basis.
This is often seen as dangerous by adults, but in fact, it is necessary.
We just need to trust them.
Young people can create great things and thanks to the internet there are tons of young creators out there, who are creating wonderful things.
Take Easlo for example, the now 20-year-old “prince of Notion” who is on the way to building a $ 1 Mio Notion business.
You might believe that he is an overnight success, but in fact, his journey started when he was 16 and tried to build a Youtube Channel.
When I was active in the Gaming Forum, it was the first time in my life that older people took me as an equal. They didn’t care about my age and I could provide some value with my posts, and that actually boosted my confidence and maturity.
Quitting content creation on the net for school was actually a huge setback for me.
Mostly because publishing content regularly (besides consuming) makes the difference between being a consumer and being a creator.
It took me 10 years to start posting regularly on the web again. Today, my whole career is built on online content, but maybe I lost a decade?
At least I started again.
You have probably heard of the 1-10-90 Rules which is stating that only 1% of the users of a website add content, while 9% participate and the other 90% of the participants only lurk.
I believe strongly that this is because we are conditioned from a young age to lurk. To be passive. To wait for permission.
So, if you take anything from this week’s newsletter, just remember that you don’t need permission from anybody, to do the things you want to do in your life.
Or as the old Bukovski was saying:
Your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
Philipp
PS: My Digital Creator Bundle template for Notion will be released soon. If you want to be put on the waiting list for free, do it now, because the paid presale will start next week. Until then, you can register on Gumroad for free.