Pronoia Tweeting
A call for great links
It’s been about two and a half weeks since I started publishing on this Substack, Engineering Agency.
I’m already 16 posts in and feeling like I’m slowly embracing the rhythm of reading, ideating, writing, and publishing. More on what this process looks like in a future post.
But there’s one part that’s still clearly missing: sharing.
For some reason, I can’t get myself to be more vocal about what I’m writing. Of course, this is natural for anyone when they’re getting started. But my situation feels odd because this is exactly what I’ve been doing for the last few years…writing & posting.
It’s the reason I have 21k followers on X, 10k subscribers on my last newsletter, and 39k followers on Farcaster.
Since 2021, I’ve been in the habit of consistently hitting the post button.
So what’s different now? Why do I feel so much friction?
After sitting on it for a week, I’ve realized that it’s not about stage fright but because I don’t want to give other people power over my intellectual curiosity.
Posting on social media requires most creators to pay an invisible tax. Suddenly, you have to care about likes and retweets. I know for a fact that one tweet in I’ll start bargaining away my authenticity just to sound smart for the algorithm.
I don't want the distraction. I want my knowledge work machine to spin faster and faster in its own feedback loop. The silence I have right now feels more akin to efficiency, not laziness. Posting feels like inviting friction into a system that is finally starting to hum.
After identifying why I was feeling the posting resistance, I asked myself if I even needed to post. What would happen if I just continued as is?
Intellectual isolation sounds comforting in the short term but can be somewhat detrimental in the long run. You need to be in touch with reality or else you’ll eventually dive head first into creative burnout.
To me, this craft is not about creating for myself. A big part of what has excited me about creating content is sharing what I’ve made and hearing feedback from readers. Creating without sharing feels borderline selfish. I know it’s an extreme example…but imagine if Jobs and Wozniak built two iPhones and called it a day.
As I mentioned in my post Tune out the current thing…
My work on Engineering Agency deeply matters to me and it’s my moral obligation to work on this craft and gift it to the world.
So I said to myself, ok. I know that I need post in order to fulfill my professional and creative obligations. What’s another angle to look at this?
How can I reframe the idea of posting all together in my head where posting shifts from being friction to becoming a lubricant in my knowledge work machine?
The answer is Pronoia Tweeting.
KK describes Pronoia as the opposite of paranoia.
Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up, and get you on your path. The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up.
Up until now, I’ve been paranoia tweeting. Constantly worried that I’m going to get shit on. That my ideas are dumb and surface level. And that people would shit on me for trying something new.
The funniest part about going from paranoia to pronoia tweeting is that it’s just a mindset change. Like it doesn’t require more time, effort, or skill to do this. I simply need to remind myself the new why of posting on social media.
This is how I’m thinking about it:
Engineering Agency is my job and I want to serve the community that is meant to benefit from my deliberate knowledge work.
I can only find the Engineering Agency tribe if I drop my ego and deliberately put myself out there. It’s essential to ask help from strangers. Hey, what did you think of this post? Any ideas on how it could be more helpful?
As my community grows, it will be a helpful, guiding force in finding the highest leverage resources and ideas to improve my craft at a faster rate. I truly believe they will look out for me, support me, and want me to thrive.
I love how Henrik Karlsson describes this thinking in a blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox:
As you start routing information and putting out blog posts, you will begin to accumulate connections. Useful information will start to stream toward you, turning you into a small hub yourself. This will allow you to collect and curate information and route it back out, which will allow even more people to connect to you, in a flywheel that lets you do increasingly useful and good work.
The mindset I’m embracing going forward is that each tweet I post is another chance for me to connect with someone who will help guide me. Maybe they’ll send me a link to a useful read. Maybe they’ll point to a new creator who I can add to my milieu. Maybe they’ll say they enjoyed a post and that I should lean into that unique thread. Or maybe they’ll connect me with someone I should partner with or learn from.
I can’t say what exactly I’ll get out of the tweets, but I know for a fact that I’ll be openly ready to accept the gifts from the world’s greatest serendipity machine.
Successful posting will no longer be defined by # of likes or # of posts or # of retweets. My new north star for posting will be the number of gifts received from strangers online.