How moving away from social media can help you grow your career

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

If you don't want to become a model, then social media is unlikely to help you build a successful career. There are some compelling reasons why it's better to focus entirely on work and stop posting to Facebook about your life.

Calvin Newport, assistant professor of information technology at Georgetown University, Washington, author of books and articles on building a career, advises retiring from social media if you want to achieve high results at work.

This advice goes against our usual understanding of the role of social media in the professional field. We are often told about the importance of maintaining the right "face" on the web, or even building a "self-brand", as this will certainly help us start connecting with "useful" people to move up the career ladder. People fear that without a social media presence, they will become invisible or less visible to a potential employer.

We feel obligated to maintain our pages in a certain way. Now every owner of a page on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, VKontakte, or any other social network, in fact, keeps a blog about his life and must think about its correct filling, being on the review of the entire Internet.

However, the ability to flawlessly manage a page on a social network is not something your potential employer will appreciate. In the labor market, rare or unique skills are well paid. Maintaining your page is definitely not one of such abilities: today any teenager can create a viral text that will receive their 15 minutes of fame, and a candid photo is enough for a large number of comments. It is unlikely that such activity will increase your value as a professional.

It is difficult to become a successful professional, but it is quite possible. The foundation of a successful career is almost always that you are excellent at what is important and necessary for other people. This idea is perhaps best summed up by actor Steve Martin, who advised:

Be so good that you cannot be ignored.

If you do this, then everything else will happen by itself, regardless of the number of your followers on social networks.

One could argue that the use of social networks can not hurt, so why not, while doing your job perfectly, not add connections and possible useful acquaintances that can be acquired through social networks?

Firstly, despite the claims of the supporters of social networks, useful acquaintances in the professional environment are not so rare and offline. The main thing here is not to be afraid to get acquainted and exchange data with colleagues, to maintain professional communication in the event of dismissal or decree, which is just more comfortable to do outside of social networks. Viewing a colleague's personal photos does little to facilitate correct professional communication.

It is also true that the more professional you become, the more offers of cooperation you will receive, and this is not the merit of social networks.

Second, it is questionable whether social media is not harmful. The ability to concentrate on a complex task without distraction is becoming an increasingly valuable quality in today's reality. Social networks weaken this skill because they are specifically designed to lure and hold us. The more you use social media - especially while you work - the better your brain learns to be distracted from work by the slightest boredom or fatigue.

It becomes difficult to complete tasks that involve total immersion in the problem, since the brain simply refuses to concentrate on something for long enough without additional effort. If your job is about focusing, then social media is especially bad for you.

The habit of promoting yourself exclusively on social media is a very passive approach to social promotion in general. It takes your attention and time from your work to convince the world that you are important, substituting a picture for the essence. Moreover, this becomes extremely tempting for many - to pretend to be someone who you are not really - and leads many to the wrong path, replaces their values and makes them unproductive.

If you really want to achieve something, you want to become more efficient, then during work, turn off your smartphone, close the tabs and work tirelessly.