🦺 Learn To Follow The Right People · The Bunker #13

Let’s get started!

It's a matter of following the right people. It's that easy, and that hard in reality.

This is probably one of the best pieces of advice I've been given in a long time.

I was one of those people who followed family members, friends, clients, content creators, designers, photographers, etc. Everyone.

I found that when I had work to do, my sources of inspiration were Dribbble, Behance, well, the usual, right? Until I realised that social networks could be a very powerful tool to find inspiration, and above all to save you a lot of time. Why? Let me tell you:

🦚It’s important to understand that social networks are not just a tool where you can follow the lives of your friends, for me, knowing that social networks were also for the creators was a real discovery.

More than discovering that people were uploading content instead of things related to their lives, it was a discovery to realise that there was so much quality content accessible.

👨‍🎓Social media is a free university: 3 days ago I graduated from the University of Design, I finished my degree officially (I had already finished it, but we did the ceremony to get my degree and diploma), and after 6 years of working as a freelancer while studying at the university, I can assure you that if you follow the right people on Instagram and Twitter, it's like going to University but getting the value for free basically.

🏉Save tons hours: I have already mentioned that this saves you a lot of time. If you are on the train on your way to work, instead of looking at your friends' personal lives, you save all those resources that are useful to you, this will make your repository grow and when you need it, you will have it fully accessible.

Do some math: This is super important - Unfortunately, in the midst of 2022 on the way to 2023, there are people who still get offended if you unfollow them. They interpret unfollowing a person, with the interpretation that you don't like them, when it has nothing to do with that, you just don't want to have their content in your feed because it doesn't bring you enough useful value (or if it does, who knows).

🎈One of the things that has saved me the most time has been to make different 2 accounts, one for my personal life and where I follow my family and friends, and then a professional account, which I use to share my experience and where I only follow people from my professional environment. This way, when I'm on the train, by only following people from my professional environment, I know that my feed will only be surrounded by professional content.

🎢Now, once you have made the distinction between personal-professional accounts and can divide the content you consume. Now is the most important time of all, learn to follow the right people.

Who are the right people? Those who bring you:

• They bring you value.
• They help you earn money (thanks to the value you receive from them).
• They make you learn something every week.

Value, money & education.

🎃Remove all the people you follow and start following them again. Be very meticulous about the people you choose to follow. And after a while, if they no longer bring you enough value, stop following them. No one will get angry, some come and some go.

🎠How to find the people I’m interested in: This is a very complicated thing to do, and it takes time. But if you can use a trick, what I do is:

1. I make a list of 10-15 people that I am sure I want to follow, either because I like the way they communicate, I like the way they publish, I like their style or because they fulfill the 3 pillars I mentioned before.
2. Once I have a clear idea of the people I am going to follow 100%, my referents so to speak, what I do is go to the followings of these people, and I follow the people who follow my referents. I understand that if they are the way they are, it's partly because they consume content from amazing people every day.
3. As I do not know and have not consumed the content of these people who follow my referrals, what I do is visit their profile, see if their feed is more or less interesting to me and follow them. If in 5 days I haven't seen enough value in them, I stop following them.

I realise whether it brings me value or not the moment I decide to save or not the content that is uploaded. If I see that I save everything a creator publishes, it means that it brings me so much value that I can't consume it now that I need to see it later.

And yes, following the right people is an art, and it's complicated. Follow and unfollow, don't be afraid.

Cheers, Jordi Espinosa.