{"id":13107,"date":"2019-05-18T20:13:29","date_gmt":"2019-05-18T12:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/?p=13107"},"modified":"2019-12-12T20:02:47","modified_gmt":"2019-12-12T12:02:47","slug":"attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/blog\/attention\/","title":{"rendered":"\u26a0\ufe0f how to get my attention"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(There’s quite a bit of preamble in this post before I get to the answer \u2013 just scroll down past the hot dogs if you’re too busy for the backstory!)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have a happy problem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have over 10,000 Twitter followers<\/a>. I’d like to think that I’d like to meet every last one of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, I have limited time and attention, and this means I have to prioritize some people over other people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not me making assessments about people’s intrinsic worth \u2013 it’s just me trying to do the best I can with limited time and information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I will readily admit that I’m certainly<\/em> making suboptimal decisions about who to meet. And I think I’m writing this to help people help me make more optimal decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s the defining question I arrived at later in writing this: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do I reduce the role that chance plays in me finding out the deep, intimate ways in which I resonate with people?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I recently spent 2 weeks in California’s Bay Area<\/a>. I think I met ~50-70 people \u2013 and I had great 1-1 conversations with ~20 of them. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, some people even spent time just walking around town with me between appointments. I felt incredibly blessed and nourished by their kindness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s what slightly bums me out \u2013 I wasn’t able to respond to everybody. There are people who DM’ed me asking to meet who I still<\/em> haven’t responded to yet. And there were a few friends that I had made plans to meet, but somehow forgot about while desperately trying to meet everybody I could!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hypothetically, if I were much more effective at managing my schedule, I would probably have been able to meet a few more people. But I’m not going to lose sleep over that. I met more people in two weeks than I’ve met in some entire years<\/em>. I felt electrified by the experience \u2013 literally, I felt like my nervous system was being overloaded with all that social stimuli \u2013 and I’m still (happily) recovering from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m writing this post partially because of a thoughtful, vulnerable DM I got from one of my mutuals (someone who follows me + I follow them back). He DM’d me to tell me that he was disappointed that he didn’t get to spend some 1-1 time with me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We did meet in a group setting, and I enjoyed his company \u2013 and he had joked that it seemed like I only made time for people with large Twitter followings. I don’t remember him saying that, but he DM’d to say that, while it felt true, it probably came from a place of disappointment and insecurity. (Which… is quite a sweet thing to say, and quite flattering to hear.) As our conversation went on, I felt myself more drawn to him, and more in agreement with his assessment that we’d probably have had a great 1-1 conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I want to think about this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be accurate to say that I generally prioritized meeting friends who had larger followings. I don’t think I sought out people who were Twitter-famous simply because they were Twitter-famous. I sought out people who I felt compelled to meet, and it seems to me that I feel more compelled to meet people whose thoughts I have interacted with positively \u2013 and the more Twitter-famous someone is on my timeline, the likelier it is that I’d have seen their tweets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I definitely did meet a bunch of Twitter mutuals and even non-mutuals who don’t<\/em> have huge followings. I think I particularly prioritized meeting women and minorities, for example, to try and hear from people whose voices I felt were underrepresented. I’m personally fascinated by stories of migration and complicated, hyphenated identities, and have always been eager to hear from outsiders of all kinds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The inaugural class of my Twitter coming to Dolores Park \ud83d\udc9a\ud83d\udc9a\ud83d\udc9a\ud83d\udc9a pic.twitter.com\/5bfMIDpmny<\/a><\/p>— Anna G\u00e1t \ud83e\udded (@TheAnnaGat) April 28, 2019<\/a><\/blockquote>