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Stop looking at your stats and analytics every single day. It’s not helping you; it’s messing with you, if anything.

I’ve been on a weight loss kick lately and I think one of the easiest, most seductive patterns to fall into is trying to ensure that you never gain weight when you’re trying to lose it. It’s just not reality. The body is an extraordinarily complex system, and a lot of the things that it does aren’t up to you, so all you can manage are the inputs and measurements.

The problem with measuring things is that you start to become so attached to the record that you take every piece of incoming data as either a finite success or failure. We often determine that if I have a day when the weight is higher, that’s a failure, and it simply isn’t.

I’m reading The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow, and he references Goodhart’s Law. What you measure, you incentivize naturally.

This is exactly what we do with social media. With views we have this tendency to treat it as if it’s a setback if we have fewer views on one particular day, and we start reacting.

You can’t just react every time you have a bad day or even a bad week. Even the best strategy in the world is going to have its ups and downs. It’s like any panicked investor: as soon as things go down, are they going to sell? No, they have to hold on.

Obviously, some things do go bust. We have to make smart choices, but we have to make those choices based on proper measurement.

I don’t give a shit whether it’s Instagram, TikTok, Meta, or Google. They are all playing you, okay? What you need to do is recognize the play and get good at getting what you need from that and getting out ASAP. You cannot get lost in this sauce because that’s when you start to do stupid shit like buying ads without having any sort of fucking clue why you’re doing it.

You got to have a plan and a cycle or review date, and then you set it up.

The baseline is to look at your views, your followers, and your engagement. Set a reminder on your calendar or in your reminders to look at those same numbers. It’s always got to be the same numbers. That’s the key.

Reach is just reach. It’s helpful but not the whole story, and if you make it the whole story, you have already failed. Take it from a guy who has 30+ million views on Instagram and TikTok, had his piece go viral, and hit Good Morning America and a bunch of other viral aggregate sites. It doesn’t really move the needle for you personally without a whole bunch of other foundational stuff in place.

I look at whether people are sharing or saving things on Instagram specifically, and I set that for once a month. It’s how I do it, and I don’t just do it with one or two measurements.

Stop measuring the ups and downs and start measuring the median and the trend.

Let's get into it.

In this episode of Ampocalypse, Damian FitzGerald is joined by Petrol Girls at 2000Trees Festival to find out how they would survive when festival life suddenly becomes permanent.

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