How it Started, How It’s Going: The Internet’s Collective Sharing and Celebration of Growth and Progress

This past week, you’ve probably seen the meme of the week:

Pretty wholesome, right? The way most of these tweets go is that they highlight the differences between the first and the second picture, in a way that usually indicates a glow up of some sorts. The first picture will show how a situation started out, such as the first text exchange between two people, an artist’s first drawing that they made as a toddler, a pre-fame celebrity interview where they express their hopes for their career, and the second picture will show their current state, where they’re usually in a better place than the first pic. The screenshot of the text exchange will be followed by a picture indicating that those two are now in a relationship, the artists first drawing will be contrasted with their current level of accomplishment, or perhaps their acceptance to their dream art school, or their first exhibition, so on so forth.

When I see these types of tweets, they inspire me to get better at my own craft, to continue pushing on with my goals. But that’s because I’m relatively /immune/ to the internet’s newest trend of manifesting. For many people, social media can be a place where you get demoralized by other people’s achievements. However, it's important to remind yourself that, while you see the end results of a person’s achievements, you don’t see the hard work that goes into perfecting, experimenting, and tinkering with their product before they publish their results on social media. Many people chosen method of achieving their dreams is to ‘manifest’ them, a la memes that go ‘shut up I’m manifesting’.

There’s nothing inherently harmful about manifesting, but its best to leave it to things that are genuinely out of your control, like BTS’s leader RM sporting pastel pink hair for their next music video (please please please). For results that require effort, manifesting can actually have the negative effect of making the manifester complacent, as if releasing this energy into the world is enough to make it happen.

For example, my goal is to develop myself as a digital marketer, and find myself in a place in my career where I’m empowered, truly invested in the content I produce, encouraged to develop, and am motivated to develop myself to do the best of my ability in my place of work. While I always liked researching material and writing, the aspect of digital marketing content creation I always liked the least was creating the visuals, especially when they weren’t to my own aesthetic preferences.

But I kept chugging along. And the secret to getting good (or at least better) at something, is to do it frequently! The way I’ve experienced it, when you do something for a long period of time, frequently, there’s no way that you won’t see any improvement.

So hopefully that’s how this blog is going to be as well. With his article, I’ll begin my journey of writing a little bit every week, making sure to publish it on this little blog, and hopefully see growth in who follows it, but most importantly, growth in how I research phenomenon and events in the real world and improvement in my writing and motivation to write! That’s it for my first installment, and looking forward to writing more