you should tweet

I had dinner with a friend who is interested in becoming active on Twitter. (Yay! I’m always trying to get my friends to use Twitter).

I gave him advice about how to start posting that might be helpful for others:

• You have interesting things to say. You just don’t notice that you have interesting things to say.
• So how do you notice? Start paying attention in conversations with friends. Everytime a friend reacts with ‘huh, interesting’, or ‘LOL’. You’ve got yourself a tweet.
• This is easiest to notice in text conversations. You can go back to an interesting conversation later and mine it for interesting things you said.
• It’s much easier to notice when someone else says something interesting than when you do. So another way to become more active is to post excerpts from books or blogs anytime you have that moment of ‘whoa, interesting’. Most of my early ‘viral’ tweets were quotes from other people that resonated with me, and ended up resonating with others. For example:

“Never attribute to stupidity or malice that which can be adequately explained by structural alignment of incentives.”

-Hanlon's Razor as revised via @kevinakwok

— Priya (@Prigoose) February 28, 2019

• Tweet interesting things as soon as you identify them as interesting. If you wait a few days, the insight will start to feel obvious. But that’s just because you’ve already integrated the idea into your Normal-World-View. Remember that many people in the world are like 2-Days-Ago-You, and will find the idea novel and insightful