Rethink Social Networking
If you want to have it all - and I do - you have to make sacrifices of less-than-worthy activities, obligations, even relationships.
Ouch. Did I just say you have to sacrifice relationships? Well, yes. I believe I did. Let me say it again.
Sometimes you have to sacrifice unimportant relationships to reach important goals.
People are important, but not every person can be important to you. You can’t have twenty best friends and maintain a deep relationship with each one. You can’t say yes to every social invitation and keep your sanity. You don’t have to. You shouldn’t. Online social networking has opened a lot of doors, and, in some ways, has made life easier. You don’t have to call a friend or arrange a lunch date to catch up. You can just get the updates sent to your phone, or go look at the latest photos. Easy. Quick.
All the doors that have been opened, though, create many options. You have a list of 200 friends, the accumulation of all your past and present lives: childhood, high school, college, single life, working world, married, married with children, new career, hobbies, relatives, friends of friends. Now you have a list of 400 friends.
Use the tool with a little self-control.
I don’t write this to vilify online social networking. It is what it is: a tool, a portal, a means. It can make your life easier or make it much more complicated than it needs to be. The purpose of social networking is to meet people and make connections that can help you and help them. You do not need to be active in every single social networking platform out there to accomplish this purpose. In fact, you’ll probably weaken your effect. Ever hear that little phrase, “United we stand, Divided we fall”? Make it personal and apply it to social networking. If you run yourself thin trying to maintain a significant presence of five networking platforms, you are probably accomplishing less than you would by making a concentrated effort on one or two sites.
Limiting yourself can result in finding yourself.
That’s what I mean by sacrificing relationships. If you limit your social networking, you will lose some opportunities. You will miss out on the people who never venture out of their chosen platform. You may not be as aware of the social currents and teeming trouble (or energy) under the waters.
But you will be more aware of yourself, the friends you do have, and the energy you possess. You can develop relationships that go deeper than a daily text message. You can find out more than the surface status of the people you encounter. You can give more of yourself, provide a better value, and maybe find a way to really help someone. Along the way, you might find you are being helped more than you ever were before.
Online social networking makes it possible to stretch yourself over a breadth you could never reach with older methods, but it does not guarantee the depth of your reach. You might have a few miles of shallow water to splash around in, and you can have a good time at it. To reach the deeper water, though, to make real progress, to cross an ocean: you must focus, ignore the shallows, and plunge straight ahead.
What do you think?
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