The end of the internet, catch-up friends, and the mindf*ck of personal branding
Internet People: Issue 127
Welcome to Internet People 🌀 A weekly roundup of fresh ideas to fuel your creative process & help you navigate the mindf*ck of being a creative person in the digital age
🎨 Bare Minimum Artist’s Way
We’re in full swing of our 12-week Bare Minimum Artist’s Way — our ADHD-friendly take on Julia Cameron’s classic. Why? Because half-assing it to the finish line beats quitting at week 3.
We’re in week 9 of the final stretch of The Artist’s Way, and tbh if we weren’t doing the bare minimum version of it, we definitely would have given up already. Ironically, this week is all about recovering a sense of compassion by urging us to confront the fears and self-sabotaging behaviors that hinder our creative progress… ring a bell???
PS — There’s a glaring mistake in the first 2 minutes of the episode… can you find it?
👉 Listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
👉 Read the article on Substack
💬 Crowdsourced from Coworking Club
Every week, we ask a ~very important~ question to our beloved Coworking Club members, and they chime in with sticky notes. Here’s the latest:
🚨 Happening soon — free coworking session!
There’s a 1-hour session today at 11am PT / 2pm ET and we’d love to see you there!
Our audio class — The Perfectionist’s Guide to Taking Action on Creative Ideas!
If you’ve been sitting on a great idea but your perfectionism has you in a chokehold, we understand. We spent years spiraling over the fonts and colors when the advice to “just start” failed us over and over again.
In this 2 hour audio class (bc who has the attention span for video courses??), we explore:
10 sneaky ways perfectionism might be holding you back
3 mindset shifts to transform your relationship with creative work
5 easy strategies that will actually help you take creative action
We designed this class to feel like a podcast, but wayyyyy deeper and more unmasked than our actual podcast 👀 We open up about our struggles with perfectionism and share the strategies that we use every single day as creative professionals.
In a world of super serious productivity content, this class will inspire you without overwhelming you 😌
📚 Read
We won’t sugarcoat it — personal branding on the internet is one giant mindf*ck. Is anyone else tired of worrying about their niche, bio, and content pillars? Does anyone else just want to exist online without worrying about every last detail??? If so, this article is for you:
Developing a personal brand, however, is the primary way we have learned to garner success and money and clout in digital spaces in the form of likes and follows and shares and saves.
But does it have to be this way? Is there a way to get all that (followers, clout, money — if that’s what you really want) without becoming a brand?
🎧 Listen
Can Ambition be Healthy? by Unpublished
This podcast episode from everyone’s favorite creative mentor
explores the idea of ambition, and everything that comes along with it: hustle culture, guilt, money, leisure, and what it looks like to approach ambition from a healthy place.🔮 Explore
This adorable digital fill-in-the-blank postcard
Having a hard time texting people back? Use this time saving postcard for busy folks instead! This takes being the “catch-up friend” to new levels.
🍿 Watch
One Man’s Trash Instagram Reel
This reel blew us away — it’s a must-watch for anyone swimming in self-doubt right now. The next time you think all of your work is super shitty……you’re in good company!
Hard-hitting questions to stretch your brain (and start more interesting conversations)
Because sometimes, you just need to ~think with your eyes~ to spark your next idea
ttyl :)
& , ur favorite Internet PeopleCheck out last week’s issue:
Happening at Internet People
️👯♀️ Join the Coworking Club — first 3 sessions free with code FOCUS
🪶 90-min Writing Club session every Monday & Saturday!
🎙️ Listen to the Internet People podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcasts
🎧 Grab our $33 audio class for perfectionists & procrastinators
I love this post, but as a visual identity designer, I can tell you that good personal branding is not those things. It is not a box. It’s a visual voice. It is fluid, not rigid. The reason everyone seems to think it’s a terrible thing is because the vast majority of designers apply the traditionally understood model of branding (machinated corporate personas) to individual humans. And it doesn’t translate. I wish more people would consider the concept through the lens of an artist. What is so terrible about a visual narrative?
Loved this!!