When I go viral, you can say you knew me back then

I’ve been inspired to create memes.

You know, those stupid images with captions that tell some kind of story or express some emotion or whatever.

I like the idea of taking a popular meme and reusing it to say something else. “Memejacking”, I guess it’s called.

(I spent some time this morning researching memes, and learning about this kind of terminology.)

I’m envisioning tremendous potential here. Memes would be a great way to say the things I’m already saying, but in a form that is easily digestible and relatable.

OK, that’s from a marketing perspective 👨‍💼. Now, let’s look at it from a Michael perspective 😵.

Whenever possible, I try to make my activities into formal practices. That means turning it into a task that has:

1. a specified length of time, and
2. a precise description of what it means to “do” the task.

I want to eliminate all sense of difficulty or ambiguity from the task. I want to know that after 20 minutes, it will be DONE. The time limit takes care of this easily.

And while I’m doing it, there should be no doubt in my mind about whether I’m doing it correctly. I want to be able to zone out and surrender to the task, going into a flow state as quickly as possible.

It can take some creativity to turn tasks into practices like this.

For meme creation, it’s challenging, because memes need to be funny, relevant, thought-provoking, etc. There’s a lot of luck in that. You have to wait for inspiration to strike.

So, I don’t want to put that pressure on myself. My task is not to make inspiration strike, but to do something stupidly easy that will make it more likely for inspiration to strike.

You can do this with absolutely anything. You can live your whole life this way, if you want (I recommend it.)

It’s easiest to start with meditation, because the definition of success in meditation is easier than with any other activity. It will teach you how to make anything else into a practice. This is why it’s so useful.

But, meditation can be frustrating or demotivating, especially when you’re not approaching it the right way. My course, [No Problem], will show you how to approach it correctly.

(this email is a practice, as well. on to the next.)