How to become meaningful

Seth Godin advises us to stop trying to win the game of

"How many eyeballs, how big is the audience, what's the passalong, how many likes, friends, followers, how many hits?"

Are people connected to you? Do they come to your blog because they know it will not be a waste of time? For example, every time Victor Davis Hanson writes a piece, I want to read it, because I know I will learn something, and he will make me think.

Godin writes that the key question to ask is, "Would I miss it if it were gone?" He writes:

It's no longer possible to become important to everyone, not in a reliable, scalable way, not in a way that connects us to people who will read ads or take action, not to people who aren't already clicking away to the next thing by the time they get to the second or third sentence.

But it is possible to become important to a very-small everyone, to a connected tribe that cares about this voice or that story or this particular point of view. It's still possible to become meaningful, meaningful if you don't get short-term greedy about any particular moment of mass, betting on the long run instead. And we need institutions that can reach many of these tribes, that can bind together focused audiences and useful content creators.

If it's not worth subscribing to a particular voice or feature or idea, if it's not worth looking forward to and not worth trusting, I'm not sure it's worth writing, not if your goal is to become meaningful.

Read much more here.