Yesterday I had a conversation with a pretty cool guy, a coach, on Lunchclub.

It’s a digital platform where you can meet ‘random’ people from all over the world, for 45 minutes, to chat about business (mostly) but also personal stuff.

It’s short, pretty refreshing, powered by Artificial Intelligence, and the diversity of the chats makes it quite exciting and inspiring.

So Tuesday, the coach guy and I talked about coaching as our present job and advertising as a former career (we both had that in common), and he mentioned a bit of a struggle with creating content.

He’s still establishing himself in his new profession, wants to keep his blogs really simple and powerful, and had some doubts about how to approach this.

I told him to keep it real and that was the end of the chat, but when I sent my LinkedIn request for connection, I added this for him:

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‘Hey man,

This came up for me, about creating content. Two options:

– You give people what you think or know they like, and then you’ll be like anybody else. It’s safe. It works. But is it cool?

– You give them you. And you teach them to love that. And you’ll have REAL fans.

Have a great day!’

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Of course, this is how I personally go about this.

It’s really my thing.

So it’s not the truth.

There are many, many people churning out content that is wildly popular, even though there’s nothing even remotely fresh or original about it.

They obviously don’t give a shit, and they might be crying all the way to the bank while spitting out cliches.

You can do this too.

Share spiritual and self-development greatest hits.

Post quotes by famous enlightened or successful people.

Put numbers in all the fucking headlines of your blogs (people really like numbers).

And appeal to every single fear of missing out we can imagine.

Nothing wrong with that, really.

It works.

It works amazingly well because most people don’t care about originality or quirkiness: they just want stuff that makes sense, stuff that tastes and eats away like fast food, stuff that’s easy to digest and that their mind can easily agree with.

So that’s fine and, in a way, even quite sensible.

It is.

Unless you don’t feel that approach, and it actually makes your testicles painfully cringe (which I mean in a symbolic way).

Unless you can’t do anything but share your clumsy, imperfect, sloppy stumbling around the planet without making it look like something it isn’t.

Like me.

I would never claim that this is better than the safer and more obvious and polished route: most of my posts only receive a handful of likes and comments, and a lot of them just seem to get squashed and obliterated by algorithms in a deafening silence and utter lack of acknowledgment.

It sucks, but this seems to be my route.

And for a handful of people, this is also the only way to go.

Posting your own insightful, heavily earned shit, no matter what.

And owning that.

Without the assurance that anybody will like it or even get it.

But with the absolute certainty that the people who are touched by it, those relatively rare souls, become real and loyal fans.

Yeah, I know: shitty advice.

Can’t help myself.

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(Photo by @sharmine27, for Unsplash)