Having turned into a minimalist this year, advertisements don’t faze me anymore. It’s probably my orientation toward living a life with less stuff that has helped me develop a super power to see beyond the superfluity of what the ads are trying to tell us; about how our lives are incomplete without certain goods and services, and how buying them gets us and the ones we love closer to a happier life.
Guided by my life philosophy “Create more, consume less”, I’m always trying to create something new every week in the form of write-ups and podcast episodes. It becomes tricky then for someone like me to market what I’ve created in a bid to offer value to people around. A perfect example would be that of this website which I launched recently. Contemplating on ways to attract greater traffic to my website, I came up with three:
Continue writing so that my content improves and readers find value in it for themselves.
Ask people who are close to me to share my writings.
Sponsor ads so that Facebook exposes me to potential readers.
My penchant for organic growth makes me want to believe that I should opt for the first option and probably, make do with the second one only on special occasions- such as when I’m desperate or feeling insignificant. I’ve been banking on the former ever since I started writing two and half years ago. However, when you attempt to grow, it is natural for you to yearn better exposure than what you are accustomed to. So if organic growth is what you’re looking at, there are times when you wish someone who found value in stuff you created (and not just your loved ones who do it merely for your sake) goes out and shares them so that people they care about benefit too. I’ve been lucky with these kinds of kind gestures with a couple of my previous essays. But with the onset of a new website, perhaps I could be excused for wanting a lot more people to visit the website and look around and decide if they’d ever want to come back again.
This constant musing made me question: why do we have such desires about the work we do? Is it more money that I’m looking for through advertisements on my website? Or is it the fame that comes with access to a larger audience? Or could it be something entirely different? Constant contemplation has led me to believe that for me, it’s really about putting my creations out there so that people (even if its just one person somewhere out there) resonating with it find value and meaning for themselves. It’s the message that’s important, not the person behind the words (same reason why I didn’t register my domain as http://www.sagarsatyal.com). When my values are clear to me, it’s much easier to decide on a path I wish to tread on.
*Shared with permission from respective conversationalists.
So instead of scampering for more page visits by advertising my work as something great, I want to create valuable content first and share it with the hope that at least one person truly finds it as ‘valuable’ as I may have deemed it to be. And if I’m lucky enough that my readers could resonate with the feeling, I’ll request them to kindly share it with the ones they care about.
Until then, I’ll keep on creating with my faith firmly placed on my readers to share any value they may find in any of my creations.
The Mindful Nepali 
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