Understanding shiny object syndrome... and how to avoid it

Published: Sun, 09/18/22

Hey , hoping this email finds you well.

Before we begin, it'd be remiss not to pay tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth the Second, who passed away and whose state funeral is on Monday.

I tend to take a scenic walk back from the Millennium bridge to London bridge after work. I could see how far the queue to see the Queen lying in state stretched.

It went as far as I could see on heading to west. I walked literally ten minutes east towards London Bridge and people were still queuing.

Outside the Tate, I asked one of the Stewards about the line, at the point I asked him, he said that from this point it is a six hour wait, the back of the line is a nine hour wait - the line was still growing.

Monday will be a strange day, I still remember Princess Diana's funeral. It's powerful how people we may never have met in real life can affect us.

Beware the shiny object syndrome

So over the past couple of weeks I have fallen into (and not for the first time) shiny object syndrome.

In this instance it was seeing others having success on Etsy selling print on demand T-shirts.

Curiosity is generally a good thing, but when you share your curiosity with these super massive search engines, you'll be quickly taken down a rabbit hole of false promises and survivorship bias.

What is survivorship bias, and why you should avoid it.

Survivorship bias is when you only see people who have been successful doing a certain thing and not all the people who haven't been successful.

The internet, social media, and in my case, YouTube take this to a whole different plane.

Very quickly, YouTube was showing me so many videos of successful people making money selling print on demand T-shirts on Etsy, making mind-bogglingly high sales per month.

These videos also promised to show step-by-step how to create an online store that would make sales.

Well, they showed me the first part pretty well, in fact I managed to set up my store over a weekend, here it is if you'd like to see it - https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/ekoPrints

When T-shirts didn't sell, they showed other print on demand items that would sell.

When those didn't sell, they show you how to create digital products that would sell.

When those didn't sell, I sensed I had wasted three weeks of my time; time I could have spent on the main thing.

Keeping the main thing, the main thing

So this is what I learnt, to keep the main thing the main thing and not be influenced by other people telling me that they know what is best for me.

This can work for you too.

You know what is best for you, others don't.

You know what your strengths are and what you enjoy, so why listen to others trying to take you away from that?

You know what your life goals are, others will try to get you to buy into theirs.

In my case, I gave loads of extra watch time to those YouTubers - as lovely as they are, I boosted their numbers and worked to goals they were setting me.

I should have stayed focused on what is true for me.

For me, it's to serve my audience with storytelling, art and I hope sharing my learnings will provide inspiration for others - for me this is writing and publishing Battle Panda.

Fine, if I can do that selling T-shirts, than that is one avenue, it's certainly not the ultimate game.

So henceforth, I am going to focus back on my main game.

I hope this email can bring you some clarity on the things that you want to gain in life.

What I'm reading (listening to)

I just finished listening to Simon Sinek's book, The Infinite Game, I'm hoping to start doing more YouTube videos on going through some of the big ideas I have learnt from these books.

If you haven't already subscribed to my YouTube channel, then please do check it out here - https://www.youtube.com/c/FarhanQureshiDigitopiaFilm/videos

Okay till next time, take care of yourself.

Farhan

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Farhan Qureshi
www.comic.digitopiafilm.com
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Tunst
London Surrey CR0 6TU
UNITED KINGDOM

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