Tim Urban "to not be sh@% on the internet"

Setting, seeing your face, huge. It's very stressful. So, yeah, I want to talk today about being not shitty on the Internet, which is a thing that's, I think, important for all of us to probably get good at. And I'll talk about that through my own experience as a blogger. Some of you have heard of. Wait, but why? Started three years ago, but way before that? What? Almost no one knows that I had another blog called Underneath the Turban that I started. There's an Underneath the Turban fan here that I started in 2005 without really any plan. It was very much a side thing. And it started out modestly. This was my first post. That's the whole post. It's not like the tagline. That's the title and the entire post. And I went from there. That was my starting place. And I started, you know, I said, okay, you know, what can I do on the Internet? I had no guidelines. It was on the side. And so I just started talking like myself. I just started kind of writing like myself. There was no pressure to try to be a journalist or anything like that, but I think that was good for me because I think it helped me to kind of experiment in a. Try to be original, because it just didn't have to conform to anything because it was very much of a side thing. And I would write about all kinds of different things that happened in my day or just observations I had. I wasn't getting into anything too substantial back then, but I found my voice. I wrote 300 blog posts over six years. And I think that was really helpful for me to be able to kind of figure out how I like to write. And it was about five years into those six years that I had an idea. One time I was trying to think of a way to express the concept of how awesome I felt I was with my little beard that I had grown and just touching it. I would just constantly do this, and I just felt awesome as a human. But then I'd look in the mirror and it was a bad situation. It was this. And so I realized that it could just capture it much more if I could just draw it. So I had this idea, and I decided to just. I'm not an artist at all, but let me try to capture this. So I said, that's how it looks, but this is actually how it feels when I'm doing that. And that was it. Simple. But I also realized I really liked drawing. So I kind of found my voice as a writer, and I really liked drawing. And I learned that, and then I started drawing more stick figures towards the end of my time on Underneath the Turban. And all of that was really important for when it came to 2013 and it was time to start a new thing. The idea here was to, instead of doing a blog on the side, it was to do a blog full time. You know, what would happen if instead of spending like five hours on a blog post, I spent like 60 and just really, really tried to do the best thing I could. That was the idea. And it came from this belief that a very important blogger metric is how much people like it when you're in their brain. Because if you write content of any kind, that's what you're doing. You're going into people's brains, they're letting you in for maybe a second. And you gotta do a good job when you're in there. If they don't like having you there, they're gonna kick you out, they're gonna X out the window, you're done. They're not gonna come back, they're not gonna let you in again. If they do like it, a lot more things can happen. So I kind of think of it as a little bit of like a scale. So the worst kind of content is gonna make you go, ugh. This is just like, if I'm a blogger and I make someone feel bad, I'm done. They're never gonna let me in their brain again. The next level up isn't great either. They're kind of like, eh, okay, I've kind of seen this before, Whatever. Not great either. They're not really going to want to click on you again. If you can get a little bit better, mild, positive emotions. It's better in that people have a decent experience. They might click on you again, but you're just short of where all this really important stuff happens if you're in the content world. This is what I've learned. This is what I saw a lot of in 2013. I saw a lot of little listicles and other kind of articles on the Facebook news feed. And they'd have that headline, five things that. And it's about my exact life problem. And the Facebook algorithm knows that. So it's there. And just hate myself, but I'm going to fucking click on it and. And I read it and it's useless. Or maybe it's kind of cute, maybe it's kind of funny, but it's mild. You know, I might be, you know the emotions I'm talking about. I might be a little interested I might be a little bit amused. I might be a little bit motivated. Okay, so those are good. But my goal with weight but why was to get to the next level. Strong positive emotions where something is hilarious or something is fascinating, something is inspirational. The difference between mild and strong in this case is, is the difference between people, again, reading it, clicking out or reading it and saying, that was really good. I gotta share this. I have to have to share this. And I want to. And what's the site called? Let me bookmark it. Let me follow on social media, which is like the next level. That's like going to second base and then going to third base. They subscribe to your email list. That's like the holy grail for a blogger. Subscribe to your email list. Now you've got them. You can build this floating audience that's just there. Whenever you decide you want an audience there. It's this amazing thing, but never going to happen with mild positive emotions. People have way too many things in their inbox to do that. Then if you can somehow make magic. I don't really know if there's any formula for this, but if you can somehow get to the level where people read the article and they're obsessed with it, that's when you get to the promised land blogger, that's a home run and you have a viral post and so in weight. But wise time, you know, I've experienced all of these and I kind of feel like it's just not like a small difference. As I said, even though the quality difference between something that's, you know, mild emotions and strong, and maybe obsessed is only kind of the difference between like a B plus and an A minus. And like an A, it's a huge difference in the return. You get this was the goal. Starting weight. But why? And then they get to the question, okay, who's obsessed? What's going to make this guy obsessed is different than what's going to make that guy obsessed. So I just think of this as the good news with the Internet is you have 7 billion people hanging out on the Internet. Well, less like 3 billion. I don't know the number. Billions of people hanging out on the Internet. And I feel like even if only one in a thousand is kind of like me, maybe even 1 in 10,000 is like really, really like me. Happens to just, you know, see things the way I do. The same values, similar sense of humor. Then we have a million tims out there. So I always picture this like creepy stadium of a million Tims even in this room right now, this is like, you guys represent like 12 millionth of humanity, okay? So if the person in here, whoever you are, who happens to be the most similar to me in what you like, that's a 2 million person audience of just that person in every group. So that was the idea. And then think about, well, who am I? What do I like? I'm a curious baby is the best way I can describe myself as a content consumer. I want depth. I want to be thorough. I want to know everything. I want you to really explain it in heart, you know, not in some dumbed down way. I really want the meat of it. But I'm also going to be bored easily. I don't want you to do it. I want you to treat me like an adult. I want you to explain it to me like I'm five. I want us to be having fun. I want to be having fun and I want to be delighted while I'm doing it, because I'm kind of a baby. I don't like reading a boring adult thing. So that's what I started with. And then I threw all of that away and did a big clickbaity headline as the first post, which was my goal not to do, but I just couldn't resist because I had no audience yet. And so I did a post called 7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook. I got into it and it did well. It got a little bit of initial attention, enough that about eight posts later, a couple months later, I wrote a blog post called why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy. And I introduced a stick figure called Lucy, who I would have worked harder on had I known this was going to go incredibly viral. It was like, still today, the most viral. Wait, but why? Pos I don't know what happened, but apparently there's a lot of strong feelings about millennial unhappiness in the world. And so I kind of. I thought about a way to come up with a term that's memorable, and I kind of said, okay, I think what I'm talking about is not all millennials. I'm talking about the Gen Y protagonists and special yuppies, or gypsies, another acronym I would have thought harder about had I known it was apparently a very racist acronym to use. And then the post went super viral, and I got like 4,000 emails from angry gypsies. But what I said in the post was, gypsies are wildly crazy ambitious, but they're also, like, maybe kind of delusional, you know, Like, I know this is kind of like, you've heard this before, but it's a real thing where everyone can't be special at the same time. It can't be that everyone comes out of college is immediately special. But right now, in this room, all the millennials are thinking, you know, good point, but I actually am special. This is the problem. That laugh was because it's what I just said is true. Now, on top of that, they think they're ambitious, they think that they're made for this world, Then they're also kind of so. Then they're in this hard world with a bad economy. Things aren't going especially well. They're disappointed. Meanwhile, they're taunted on Facebook by all the image crafting that goes on, because everyone else presents this better picture of their own lives than reality. And. And even though you do that too, you forget that you do it and you see them doing it and you think you're miserable about everyone else's success. It's a cocktail of unhappiness. So that was that post, but it really changed everything for the blog. One super viral post completely changes everything. Before that post, there were 300 email subscribers. Ten days later, there were 27,000. Total game changer Sam.