Vanessa Van Edwards stopped chasing views and likes, replacing them with one metric: is this aggressively helpful or funny? She found that focusing on usefulness made content creation easier and more fulfilling, while engagement numbers followed anyway.
How do you know you've done good work? And I'm more interested in knowing that I've done good work.
I was just thinking about this as you said it. So there was a long time with my social media, and social media has been real interesting for me 'cause I started on YouTube and then all these other things came about. And I was frustrated a couple years back with my metrics, right? I did not feel like we were growing as fast as I was putting in effort for it. And I kept looking, you know, I'd refresh my feed and like, metrics aren't growing, metrics aren't growing. So I was like, no more. I told my team, I was like, aggressively helpful. Our new measure is aggressively helpful. If we're gonna put out a video, my mission is to put out free public education every single day. That's what we do. Free public education every single day on social skills so that anyone could learn social skills no matter what. Okay. I love views engagement, don't get me wrong, but like the metric is, is this video aggressively helpful or funny? 'Cause I think funny is also helpful in its own way in this, in this world, right? We need to have a little bit of laughter. Funny is a value, right? So, That became the new metric and everything changed. Of course, content became easier.
