Know when to block them
Filter the undesirables right out of your experience, and do it unapologetically.
In the coaching world, they teach you to be unapologetic about who you are, what you believe, and what you have to offer as a way to create hell yeses and hell nos.
You WANT people to either be a hell yes or a yell no when it comes to the idea of working with you. You don’t want them to be ambivalent. A strong negative reaction is just as good as a strong positive reaction because a strong negative reaction tells you exactly who is NOT in your audience and allows you to move on from them quickly to find people you can serve.
There is an audience for everyone. And the more you target your audience, the happier you will be in the long-term because it means you are going to work with people who appreciate you for who you are, not because you put on some pretense to sucker them in.
That, inherently, means you will not appeal to a mass audience. To appeal to a mass audience, you have to tip-toe around things, say things you don’t mean, appease people you think are ridiculous, never say anything too controversial. When you focus on a niche audience - your hell yes people - you don’t have to do these things. You may have less ears listening to what you have to say, but those ears will be more valuable because they are people more likey love what you are offering.
Well, let me tell you…people on the internet who patronize the services of so-called influencers for their content do not understand this.
They have been conditioned to believe that it is the job of everyone who creates content on the internet to appeal to everyone.
I fundamentally reject this notion.
And I will block people unapologetically the very moment it becomes clear that they are not people who fit into the “hell no” category when it comes to being able to learn from my content.
There are people who I’m a great teacher for. And there are people I’m a horrible teacher for. Better to remove the people who are not a good fit because that means I’ll be able to focus more of my time and energy on people I can help.
This didn’t use to be a problem. Back when I only had like 6,000 followers on Twitter (the before times), I never had to block people. In environments like that, you can give people time to come around because there just aren’t that many undesirables, relatively speaking. But grow your audience 10 times over and you’re dealing with entirely different circumstances. Suddenly, your audience starts to make demands of you and your content, and those demands may or may not align with where you want your content to go.
Especially when your audience comes from the land of politics. Politics is filled with people who desperately want to be famous, but couldn’t achieve that in entertainment, and so they move to politics to do ith there.
At some point, if you want to achieve any specific goal beyond being famous on social media (and most “influencers” have no desire to achieve any goal beyond that), you have to come up with a filtering mechanism for your audience - a way to identify the people you want around you and the people you DO NOT want around you.
It will also help you maintain your sanity. It’s ESSENTIAL for maintaining your sanity.
Let me give you an example.
Today, I woke up to find the following reply on my Actively Unwoke Twitter account:
I instantly blocked this person and will never have to hear from them again.
Why did I do that?
This person believes that blocking people is censorship, which is untrue and stupid. Blocking people is voluntary association. I’m saying who I want in my timeline, and who I do not want in my timeline. I’m not the government and I have not removed any right to free speech. I’ve just removed their ability to annoy me.
This person argues that blocking is censorship not because they care about free speech, but because they want to be able to harass people.
This person just demonstrated that they are completely incapable of nuance. Anyone who claims I block people for disagreeing with them, when I have explained countless times why I block people, is not someone worth listening to.
If I’m trying to build a community of people who want to learn what I have to teach, the only way I can accomplish that is by immediately removing people like this.
They only serve as a distraction.
They usually suck more of your time and attention complaining.
They usually aren’t smart enough to understand my content to begin with. And what’s worse, they have no desire to understand my content - they just show up to complain.
When they complain, they distract others who are smart enough to understand my content and who actually want to engage with it.
If you keep people like this around, they will drive the good people away from the community.
So, it’s best to just block and be done with them. They showed who they were through their actions. Don’t negotiate. Just block them.
“Why not mute them???”
Because they would still annoy my audience if I did that, and they’d do it where I couldn’t see them doing it.
I want to take care of the people who like my content, not the people who don’t.
I want to take care of the people who are smart enough to understand my content, not the people who aren’t.
I want to take care of the people who I can teach because they are interested in the subject matter, not those who are only interested in complaining and outrage.
I know who my audience is…and I know who they are not.
This will give all sorts of people all sorts of feelings, but their feelings are their responsibility, not mine.
Never buy into the bullshit. Create whatever experience you want online.
And I promise you that if you exercise that block button liberally, you’ll enjoy your time on social media a whole lot more.
(The truth is that so will the people you blocked…they’ll just move on to harass others).