twitter

I’ve been in this world for over 30 years, and people still relate me to the baseball player Randy Johnson.

“Wait, that’s your real name?!?!?”
“Yes.”
“So, I bet your arm is sore from pitching all those years.”
“Ya, I’m actually not the baseball player.”

It’s not a big deal, just annoying when I’m in a conversation with a hardcore sports fanatic. It’s usually an ice-breaker.

“What’s your name, even though I’m bad with names?”
“Well, are you a sports fan?”
“YES! I love baseball and football.”
“Remember Randy Johnson?”
“The pitcher? Hell ya I do! The Big Unit!”
“Well, that’s my name too.”
“NO WAY!!!”

A Few Short, Kind of Funny, Stories

1. Baseball Cards. Most of my friends know that I don’t care much about sports. But most of them don’t know that I used to be crazy about sports. I used to be a big sports card collector, saving up money just so I could ride my bike to the local card shop and buy a new pack of cards. You know, hoping I’d open up a pack in front of the store owner and see the rarest card ever made. In fact, to this day, I bet I have one of the largest Randy Johnson baseball card collections around. I literally have thousands of his cards, many are in hard-plastic cases and graded, and some are autographed. I really have no use for them and they just sit in a box, so I’ll probably wait a couple more years when he gets in the hall of fame and then try and sell them. Should sell for a decent price then.

2. Internet Marketing. One of my skills/services is search engine optimization (SEO). Basically, that fancy terminology means I help my clients rank higher in Google. It’s definitely a time-consuming process. It’s not as easy as flipping a switch and you’re sitting at the top of the first page. It’s a constant effort. Anyways, the more unique your keyword is, the easier it is to rank higher since there is less competition. Take my roommate for example. I setup a site for him and we used his FirstNameLastName.com for the domain name. He has a very unique last name, so it almost doesn’t matter what his first name is, but it’s also not as common. So within a week, he was already ranking number one in Google with pretty much no additional work. So with my name, I’m going to have a tougher time for a couple reasons. One, my last name is very common, and my first name is sort of common. But the biggest reason is, there is a famous person that shares my name. So it’s going to take a ton of work to overcome all of the content on the internet about him. But that’s my goal with this site!

3. Photography. I was doing some research not too long ago regarding the keyword “Randy Johnson” and seeing what sites were showing up after doing a simple search. One stood out for some reason: RJ51Photos.com. I browsed the site for a bit and checked out the Twitter account associated with it. It wasn’t too long after that, I realized after he retired from baseball, he has been focused on photography. Kind of funny since I do some photo and video work. Checking out his about page, I seen he was always into photography and now he had more time for it. I followed him on Twitter and sent him a quick tweet. The next day, I had a new follower… and it was him. I was kind of shocked because he has a ton of followers but only follows like 20-30 people, and I was one of them. Ultimately, he didn’t respond to either of my tweets and eventually unfollowed me, but either way, it was like my 15 minutes of fame. Haha.

I’m not gonna lie, I used to be the guy who had hundreds and hundreds of Facebook friends. I used to think that actually meant something.

Right now I have 116 friends on there. These are strong connections. People I’ve actually met, people I’ve known for years, people I’ve done crazy things with, or people that I’ve talked to about doing work for.

One thing I hate is letting people I don’t know, know every single detail about my life. I don’t want to be “friends” with 100 strangers who live near me and then post how I’m gonna be out of town for a week. That’s like a free invite to come break into my house because they know it’s empty. And they can probably figure out where I live from my previous posts and photos.

But the main reason I hate having so many online friends is because it’s way too time consuming to keep up with all of them! Sure, I can hide people on Facebook, and I do that to almost everyone, but you can’t do that on the other social networks.

On my main Twitter account, I only follow 26 people. And 4 of those are my other accounts. On my personal Instagram account, I only follow 102 people, and 3 of those are my other accounts.

What I’m getting at is, the more people you follow, the more time you have to spend keeping up with all of them. If I don’t look at my Twitter account for a few days, that’s ok. It’s only going to take 5-10 minutes to go through everything I missed. Same with Facebook. Instagram takes a bit longer. If I miss one full day, it’s gonna take 20-30 minutes to look at everything I missed.

Now with that said, I’m bad at going a long time without looking at these apps. I’m always interested in what badass people are doing out in the world. What I should really be doing instead is being one of those badass people.

Can you imagine how much time some people waste though? Like a person who has 500-1000+ Facebook friends (and doesn’t hide any of them), follows 200-500+ celebrities on Twitter, who follows 500-1000+ people on Instagram, and has several other social networks. And what if they are religious about checking all of those accounts and not missing a single update? That’s a full-time job. For real! They will just coast through life, working a shitty job where they can be on their phone or a computer all day for personal use, ignoring people all day, not really enjoying vacations, never building their own business, never becoming a badass. Just watching and following other people doing what they could.

And just an FYI, my other Twitter and Instagram accounts have tons of people that I follow. I do not even look at those updates unless I’m tagged in someone’s post. I just follow all those people in hopes that they will follow back to gain a ton of awareness about my site or brand.

So the next time you say, “There is never enough time to get everything done!”, take a look at where you are spending your time. I’m sure a lot of it is spent on mindless activities like social networks. Don’t even get me started on cable tv.