Enough with the life hacks. Too frequently people are now looking for little hacks and don’t want to invest in long term sustainable slow growth anymore. They want to “hack” it.

And by hack, I mean some quirky shortcut that will solve all your issues.

How to hack reading?

Did you know if you listen to an audiobook on 5 times speed whilst driving to work, you can tick of a book a day. Because, really, is sitting and reading is so oldschool and inefficient? The issue here is that we’ve traded real long term solutions and results that are delayed for the quick fix injection of feeling like you’ve got everything figured out.

There’s more though. You can find thousands of articles on hacking every personal interactions, business indutry, marketing practice, and personal growth plans. You can hack PR. You can basically find a shortcut for anything in life. But the question is not whether they exist, but whether they really help you on your journey through life. Not today, but every day for the next 20 years.

Digital marketing relationships

Let’s take digital marketing as an example. It’s a pretty good idea to try and do some online press releases of content, for SEO and lead generation and branding (it’s just a good idea).

Now, on the one hand you could build up a database of thousands of journalists classified by topic with a quick script that scrapes their details of LinkedIn and spam 900 journalists with a $10 bribe in the hopes one of them responds.

But it’s been done a thousand times, and only achieves one single thing. It pisses journalists off.

The way a good PR strategy actually functions is that you get to know a writer, and you show them professional respect, and when you have a real story to tell, you pitch them individually and openly and transparently, without any tricks or hacks or gimmicks, and you pitch them the way they want to be pitched.

There is now in business, such a trend to have “scalable systems” that we throw out humanity and relationships as too unweildy and time-consuming.

It’s just an attitude that I see all the time. People think that because something is innately personal and small and time consuming that it can’t be valuable and isn’t worth our time. Building relationships? Showing respect? Not worth it. Just hack it.

In all of these methods, your just avoiding real life. Because real living isn’t about a shortcut. You have to experience things and struggle through them.

Now talking to one journalist for a day isn’t going to get you fast, instant PR hits. But by building a new relationship, there’s no way of knowing what you’ll pick up along the way.

Quite simply, life can’t be hacked. It has to be lived. With your eyes on the road in front of you, not drfting around in search of a short cut.