This just in: Instagram is the new Facebook. Um, hello. I’m just calling it right now. Heck, it’s the new Twitter, too. Already Instagram has surpassed Twitter in daily mobile users. Recognize. 

But the main point of this post isn’t that. It’s this.

Jam on your hobbies. Hard.

Back in the day I blogged. I was all about it. I started a blog and 4 months later, I started another blog. One was about music, another was about the minutia of my life, another was about other people and how awesome they are. I could not blog enough. And I did it all for fun. Hobby. I loved to blog. I still do.

For a lot of people, Instagram is that. They have a personal Instagram account where they post photos of their life. They have a secondary account where they stick to a more specific theme or style and get really arty. They love Instagram like I loved blogging. (Pssh, I’m kind of like this, too.)

To those people I would like to say, jam. Jam hard. This may seem like fun to you now and hopefully it always is fun for you, but one day, not too far away, someone is going to pay you for your awesome Instagramming. I’m almost tempted myself to list it as skill on LinkedIn and get my peeps to endorse the crap out of me. 

Think I’m joking?  I’m not. Look around. We are a visual culture. We are moved by images, media. It is an entire language all its own. Communicating visually is a skill and it’s not an easy one. The ability to tell a story through image and text is huge. If you can do it, own it. Own it like crazy. And thank me later.