Jon Acuff's Blog

It’s easy. Here’s all it takes.

Spend more time practicing your dream than you do promoting your dream.

That’s it.

The Internet has made it ridiculously easy to promote your dream, your craft, your passion, your whatever. As someone who writes books and throws events, that is awesome. But that ease comes with a consequence.

The temptation is to spend more time on promoting what you’re doing instead of practicing what you’re doing. Honing your skills, putting in the hours to improve, working hard while no one is watching. Promoting makes people think you’re great. Practicing actually makes you great. There’s a huge difference between those two things.

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Two weeks ago, my friend Santiago told me something shocking.

He said, “In June of 2011, people spent more time using their mobile apps than they did their desktop browsers.”

This was the first time that had ever happened, but it’s not that surprising. That same month, combined sales of smartphones and tablets were greater than the sales of desktops and notebooks for the first time ever.

That’s not really shocking information. The idea that people use apps a lot won’t knock you over. Small surprise. Thousands of articles have predicted this. What is shocking, though, is how many people missed the arrival of the next Internet.

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(Today we’ve got a guest post from Matt Chambers, the director of SafeWorld! You can follow him on Twitter @chambers_matt, or read his blog http://ethoshift.com.)

conTENT not CONtent by Matt Chambers

I have a confession to make.

I’m a…contentaholic.

Never heard of it? That’s because it’s probably not officially a “real thing.” (Not yet anyways)

But I promise I have it. It’s self-inflicted, easily enabled, and I’ve been struggling with it for years.

Basically, it’s a mental filter that stops enjoying moments of reality for what they are and processes them according to what kind of tweet I could create as a result, or how amazing it would look on Instagram.

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Why do I write dozens of tweets during the Grammy’s?

Steven Pressfield, one of my favorite authors, answers that question in his brilliant book, The War of Art:

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Skrillex is one of the biggest names in electronic music right now. He plays sold out shows across the planet, recently won a bunch of Grammys and has a Facebook fan page that adds 300,000 new fans each week.

His sound is based on the magic he’s able to make with a Macbook and a billion digital files. Knowing his penchant for all things electronic, he’s the last person you’d expect to throw a flag of caution about how much we all use our cellphones. And yet …

This is what Skrillex recently said to a group of people at one his shows as reported by Rolling Stone magazine:

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A while ago, Michael Hyatt wrote a great blog post titled, “Why I won’t retweet you.” (If you’re not reading his blog, you need to. He is a blogging beast.)

He raised some great points that really got me thinking about how I choose what I’m going to retweet. (I’m @jonacuff on Twitter.) I knew that someday I’d do my own version of that post, and today is that day.

Here are the 5 reasons I didn’t retweet you:

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Last fall I had dinner with my friend Bob Goff.

During the dinner, I told him I had a bit of a dilemma. It’s not a big problem, but it has the potential to become a big problem.

What is it?

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Recently a guy on Facebook expressed his extreme disdain for my book Quitter.

Here is an excerpt of what he wrote:

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Last week, we had an influential musician over to our house for dinner. We’d never met before, but had bumped into each other on Twitter a few times and have a lot of mutual friends.

After he went home and my wife and I were getting ready to go to bed, I wrote a tweet that said, “Great day with @__________, an artist who inspires me to be a better me.”

Then I asked myself a three letter word that has the power to radically improve every blog and tweet you ever write:

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A few months ago, my 5-year-old daughter McRae put on a big backpack. The backpack was almost as tall as she is, and it was an adorable moment there in the kitchen.

I said, “McRae, stay for there for a second. I want to take a picture.” Without missing a beat, she said, “No.” I asked her why, and in the way that only kids can, she threw a grenade into the room:

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