A lot of people want to become known, to get fame and glory.
But fame has one very special characteristic compared to other things, like health, power, or money.
Fame is something that once you get it, you can never get rid of it!
I say this all the time to my daughter who wants to become a pop idol and YouTuber when she grows up.
“If you become famous and then it starts bothering you that people recognize you everywhere and you can’t live a normal life like everyone else, you’ll never be able to go back to where you started,” I tell her — not to scare her, of course, but so she’s aware of a danger she probably can’t fully understand yet.
But me, her 46-year-old dad, I’ve been trying to get a little bit of fame lately — something I never wanted in my entire life. The reason? Because with artificial intelligence, very soon it’s going to be extremely hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake. And the easiest way to know something is real on the internet will be to recognize the human face talking to you on the screen.
In other words:
We’ll trust a familiar face much more easily.
So, with the goal of building my personal brand (as they call it), I’ve changed my social media bios and my blog description countless times. Who I am and what I do.
After tons of thinking, worrying, and experimenting, I even ended up asking my daughter. And one of the answers she gave me was so disarming that it made me rethink my priorities. But most importantly, what the heck I’m actually doing on the internet!
Who Actually Knows Why They’re on the Internet?
It’s been a while since I started working on my Greek blog again. I put a new Ghost theme, translated some of my big English articles with AI, and generally spruced it up a bit.
But the homepage had one problem. A big problem that every website that wants to sell something or keep the visitor on the page has. Which is, after all, the whole point of having a website.
There were two lines of text that I had to write.
You’ll say, “Just two lines and you got stuck?” And yet!
I was thinking about it for weeks.
Because those two lines define what the %#@& I’m doing on the internet!
I’m Jim and…
That’s how the first line starts on my blog. The question is what comes after the “and”!
It looks simple, but it’s anything but simple! I’m telling you, weeks — maybe months — I’ve been thinking about it.
And it’s not just the first line.
