On Yapping

LXI

2024.08.25

Or what Dave Free & Kendrick Lamar taught me about posting online.

No Yap Policy

This week, I read a Dave Free interview this week talking about pgLang’s “no yap” policy. To have an impact, you need to do things, not talk about doing them. 

This led me to reflect on my own digital presence. Over the past year and a half, I went from a digital BigFoot to having a weekly blog, daily LinkedIn posts, and bursts of off the cuff tweets.

While I haven’t crossed the yapping line of no return, I can see how easy it is to go to the other side. 

The Digital Hermit

Like many things in my life, my opinion of how much I should share about myself digitally has ebbed and flowed.

College was punctuated by periods of months-long social media celibacy. I wouldn’t be caught dead posting on LinkedIn. Last week, my average posts per day on LinkedIn was above one. 

There’ve been a lot of reasons that I’ve been adverse to social media in the past. 

When I was in highschool, I thought about social media as if I was standing outside someone’s house. The phone screen in front of me was me peering into their home through a window. Of course, I could only see what they put in front of the window. More than that, every moment I spent looking through those windows was a moment not spent building my own house. 

I’m also afraid of digitizing real life relationships. It’s one thing to evaluate your relationship with people who you met on the internet by how much they engage with you on the internet. Evaluating your relationship with people who you’ve met in the real world by how much they engage with you on the internet is scary, though. Given that we spend so much time online, it’s terrifyingly easy to grade the health of real world relationships based on how many times the other person has liked your posts and how fast they respond to your texts. 

My social media fear most relevant to this post, though, is the insidious way that consuming and producing information can feel like a valid substitute for action.

Information as Action

In the long term, actions will always speak louder than words. After all, it is far easier to talk about doing something than it is to actually do it. 

Sometimes, producing information is itself an action. Such is certainly the case with writing a novel. I believe that is also the case for these blog posts… three or four hours of writing every Sunday morning adds up. Effort goes into make a thoughtful output. But, what about LinkedIn posts or tweets?

When the barrier to produce digital information is low, it is not obvious what portion of producing content is “action” and what portion is just “talk.” This is compounded by the fact that when so much of our experience is digital, producing information can feel like the only real action.

Besides, I still have a hard time drawing a line between words and actions in the real world.  A salesperson is, by definition, a lot of “talk.” They produce information real time and give it to the person in front of them. Selling is still an “action,” though. I think the difference between a snake oil salesman and a sales assassin is whether or not the product they sold actually works to do the things they said it would. Which, generally implies empathy; a good sales person wouldn’t sell a shit product if they knew it was shit.

Is lying about a product what would make a sales person “all talk?”

Return from the Mountain

Despite my austerities and the above reservations, I came down from my faraday cage in the mountains last year to write this blog. 

That was my first turning point, and it was quite tempered–weekly, long form content to an email list is a step or two removed from social media. Still, it was a gateway drug. It made the social media part of the internet feel not so scary.

The second turning point in my relationship with the internet was near the start of this year when I began posting about my last company on LinkedIn. It was very uncomfortable at first, but after post number one, I got some immediate inbound messages from people interested in using the product.

Since then, I’ve been consistently committed to posting regularly on LinkedIn and hitting the maximum number of connection requests every week.* When I was with the last company, a decent portion of our customers actually came from LinkedIn, and I expect a similar thing to happen with BirdDog. 

*Yes, there is a limit. If there wasn’t, I’d keep clicking until I had a 5 figure network. 

No Yap Policy

Enter the Dave Free interview. It was about pgLang’s no yapping policy.

If you’re unfamiliar with pgLang, it’s Kendrick Lamar & Dave Free’s creative brand. The vision seems to be making impactful art that doesn’t compromise its message for the sake of getting more views and clicks in our short attention span era. 

From the interview:

It’s a gospel of putting actions above words. Even pgLang’s website reflects this. The design is glorious… it’s what all of the internet should look like–bare bones html. All the focus is on the sparse words. And, all of the words represent actions.

Sure, they’ll let you know when something is coming. If they’re wrong about a release date, though, they won’t hide it. They’ll strike it through and correct it. 

Unabashed honesty and brutally grounded in reality. The less you say, the easier it is to be sure it’s all true.

BirdDog Yap

This is a roundabout way of saying that when it comes to the internet, while I still don’t know when something distinctly becomes yap, I really do think it has something to do with whether or not it’s substantiated with action. Such is the case in real life.

In real life, I consider someone a yapper (read: insufferable) when they keep talking about doing all of these grand things and then never do them. That can manifest as the activist type that can quickly point out everything wrong with the world or the entrepreneur type that inflates their past and acts as if they’re entitled to a vibrant future with no further action. 

With my BirdDog propaganda, I’m much more afraid of being the latter than the former. You don’t have to worry about being the latter if you never say anything. Selling a product does become a lot easier when you start saying things, though.

So far, everything I’ve said about things I have done have been true. Still, I have made a forward looking goal very, very clear and public, though. And, whether or not it’s achieved is yet to be determined.

I think making it public puts me at risk of being a yapper, depending on how I do benchmarked against it. And, if I fail, I need to strike through the goal, not delete it.

It does seem that writing content more focused on progress and things that have happened and less on the aspirational goal puts me further from yapping than if I were to post about the goal every day.

I don’t know, though. Like so many things in life, I’m new at this.

I’d like to be more like pgLang and Dave Free and Kendrick and less like Drake.

Live Deeply,