My First 12 Weeks on Substack

5 Takeaways | 🚧 my substack journal no. 002

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I launched my Substack on April 1st, 2024 🚀

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We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude.

— Lewis Hyde, The Gift

I came to Substack to revive my soul and, hopefully, provide value to others in the process.

Here are 5 takeaways from my first 12 weeks on Substack:

1. More Revision ≠ More Success

A Tale of Two Posts

Because I was launching my Substack on my birthday (which happens to be April Fool’s Day), I opted for a “seasonal” post that would take advantage of the calendar: “On Being an April Fool: Or What Do Birthdays Say about Us, Anyway?”

I spent all of March writing, revising, and researching my first post. I initially conceived of it as a sweeping, research-driven personal essay that would tightly braid the history of the holiday, insights/anecdotes about fools in literature, and reflections on how being born an April Fool has both foreshadowed and shaped so much of my life. But, as Rick Rubin observes in The Creative Act, “Another impediment some [artists] come across is that their vision for the work exceeds their ability to manifest it . . . We mistake the fantasy version of the work in our minds for what the actual work has the possibility to become.”

What I had actually conceived of was a short book—not a Substack post. I did not possess the time or the ability to write it.

After realizing this and feeling like I had already invested too much time in it to change directions, I kept revising, revising, revising, hoping to find a more focused direction for the piece. Although I think it’s a fine essay, it is nothing like what I imagined it would be. It finished at 2,169 words (approximately ten minutes reading time, Substack tells me) and as of June 29th, 2024 has received 223 views, 25 likes, 10 comments, 6 restacks and led to 7 new subscribers.

Meanwhile, two weeks later, I wrote “Speaking in Hugs: On Being Hugged by My Autistic Son for the First Time” in a flurry. After experiencing what I describe in the essay and finally getting my son to bed, I reached for my laptop and, overcome with emotion, began writing down my feelings.

With minimal revision over the next couple of days and after filming/editing a short accompanying video (1:50), the post finished at 846 words (4-minute reading time). It quickly became and still is my most successful post with 816 views, 134 likes, 87 comments, 34 restacks, and it led to 31 new subscribers. It also briefly charted on Substack’s literature chart and earned me my first “Buy Me a Coffee” from someone not related to me.

By following inspiration instead of being wedded to a strict content calendar or “seasonal post” and by being willing to let a piece of writing emerge organically and take shape on its own, “Speaking in Hugs” became a striking example of how successful a post can be if you just get out of the way and stop forcing a piece of writing to resemble what you determined it would be when you first sat down to write. There’s power in not knowing where you’re going and letting the prose be a little raw.¹

2. Rediscovering Why I Write

Growth can be deceiving—and how many subscribers is enough, anyway?

Thanks in large part to the success of “Speaking In Hugs,” I hit a major milestone and reached 100 subscribers by the end of my first month on Substack.

I continued to experience steady and validating growth during May. “Scream! Howl! Roar!” along with “Dad Trying to Change” and “I’m Ashamed of My Dirty, Messy House” gained a total of 21 new subscribers. And while my other posts in May “Taking My Daughter to Daycare for the First Time” and “Creating dad trying” only generated one new subscriber each, they still received plenty of likes and comments. For a newbie on Substack with no previous internet following, these were meaningful and reassuring numbers.

June 2024, conversely, has been a deflating experience and shattered any nascent delusions of Substack grandeur.

Although my first post in June “My Brain on Airplane Mode” performed comparatively well, it actually led to a few unsubscribes and no new subscribers. My other three posts of the month—”The Road to HYROX,” “What 5 Father’s Day Cards Taught Me about Being a Dad,” and “Reading How to Change by Katy Milkman”—all steadily declined in views, likes, and comments; they all led to unsubscribes, and none of them led to a single new subscriber.

June was a difficult month for me in terms of my mental health, so the decline in engagement couldn’t have come at a worse time. I’d felt sad, demotivated, exhausted, and overwhelmed for much of the month. Seeing my new subscriber count stagnate and folks unsubscribe after each post only validated the inner critic, the growing chorus of voices shouting “You’re wasting your time—just quit already.”

Perhaps it affected my writing and my videos more than I realized.

The discouragement I’ve felt has forced me to revisit my reasons for starting a Substack in the first place. The reasons are many—hone my craft, make friends, create value for others, and hold myself accountable by documenting my self-improvement journey—but the most powerful reason is captured by Rick Rubin in this excerpt from The Creative Act:

The sensitivity that allows them to make the art is the same vulnerability that makes them more tender to being judged. Still, many continue to share their work and risk criticism in spite of this. It’s as if they have no other choice. Being an artist is who they are, and they are made whole through self-expression.

“Made whole through self-expression” is exactly why I’m here. I feel incomplete when I don’t make things. Expressing myself and sharing my heart through writing and videos makes me whole.

I can definitely quit Substack. I can delete all my posts and all my Notes. I can give up on making videos and go on eBay and sell my camera and my lights and my microphone. With my new spare time, when the family is soundly sleeping or when we have help from a sitter, I can disappear into virtual worlds like I did before Substack, maybe stop this silly alcohol-free streak I’m on and indulge in a few IPAs, and start leveling up my barbarian in Diablo 4 or work on earning mastery camouflage patterns in Call of Duty. I can escape, albeit briefly, into the shallow instant gratification that leaves me numb to both my inner world and the world around me.

But I know I’d leave those indulgent activities feeling incomplete, fragmented, and ashamed for giving in to my lesser nature. “When we drug ourselves to blot out our soul’s call,” writes Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, “we are being good Americans and exemplary consumers.”

So, I write and make videos instead. I keep showing up. I’m on Substack to discover who I’ll become by going through this creative process. I’m here to grow into my artist’s soul and become deserving of its gifts. I’m trying to light up and give expression to what’s hidden away and written on my heart.

It’s holding on to these personal truths that keeps at least a single ember burning inside of me, just enough to reignite the creative fire, just enough to keep it going, illuminating my higher self, and reminding me who I can become by staying committed to the process.

3. Cliché, Yes, but I’m Learning to Love the Process

Finding joy in consistency.

I find comfort when I shift my focus from reception to process.

It’s difficult for me to relinquish control of my writing or my videos once I publish them. I can’t control how my audience feels, but I can control where I put my attention, and twelve weeks on Substack has taught me my attention is best invested in the process and not obsessing over the product.

Earlier this week, feeling down about my work and not seeing the point of continuing my Substack anymore, I found myself listening to an old podcast episode of The Daily Stoic featuring a compilation of Ryan Holiday’s conversations with Steven Pressfield. Cheesy and woo woo as it sounds, I like to think the universe provides what we need and art is often the vessel for its communication. Sometimes things just find you, and this was a conversation I needed to hear, especially Holiday’s observations on process:

This is what the process does. If you don't quit, if you stay at it, eventually the thing emerges. We build up our life, we build up our business, we build up relationships, action by action. No one can stop you from doing that immediate thing in front of you. And if you just focus on that, eventually you start to make progress. — “All Success Comes From This | 9 Stoic Tips for Beating Resistance”

Hearing Holiday and Pressfield talk about the importance of process suddenly made me realize how naive and immature I was being by sulking and reaching for the white flag after only twelve weeks. Apparently, I was under the impression process meant instant success and continual praise.

Embarrassingly, it turns out I was more affected by those Substack “overnight success” stories and “growth hacks” than I realized. Seeing people post gaudy subscriber numbers after only a short time on the platform—I started this morning and just hit 1,000 subscribers!— shifted the goalposts for me and, as a result, I started counting my small wins as losses. Most egregiously, it made me take for granted the attention and praise of my dedicated cohort of awesome weekly readers: You know who you are, and all I can say is thank you for your unwavering support—you’re the collective chorus of encouraging voices I lean on when I want to quit. You deserve better.

What’s somewhat humorous about the whole situation is that I needed to listen to a podcast about process when, at its core, dad trying is nothing more than an ongoing tribute to the beauty, pain, and joy of process; it’s me documenting my journey to become a better husband, dad, teacher, and member of my local community. I’m trying to get my stuff together, in other words, and share what I learn from minds much better than my own.

When I show up each week, I’m holding myself accountable to this process of becoming, of self-discovery, of self-fashioning. It doesn’t matter how many folks “engage” with what I write or what the vanity metrics say because the whole point of this project is to become better by committing to it, and I certainly hope I continue to provide value for my audience along the way. I hope it’s an aspirational place where we can dream and think out loud together about being our best selves—whatever that means for each of us—and to embark on that mission in the service of ourselves, those we love, and the communities we belong to.

Besides, process is where the fun is, and there’s magic to be found in routines. Like I wrote about in “Splash State: My Sacred Morning Writing Ritual,” the process doesn’t always have to be a painful one. It can also heal, inspire, and act as a site of gratitude.

4. I Need More Courage to Keep Making Art

My second post is still one of my favorites.

My second post “The Book That Gave Me the Courage to Start My Substack” was a very personal and meaningful one reflecting on how essential David Bayles and Ted Orland’s book was in helping me take the creative leap I was scared of.

I’m a sensitive person, and I dislike confrontation (arguing on the Internet is a big no for me; I don’t have the constitution for it). In my personal life, I’m also a private and introverted person who only plays the extrovert when I’m at work teaching or at home making Substack videos—when I’m performing, in other words.

There’s this cognitive dissonance, then, of at once wanting to create and share with a large public audience while also wanting to keep everything private and run away forever, deleting every single social media app and piece of content I’ve ever posted.

What a strange feeling to have your dream tethered to something that makes you uncomfortable on a daily basis. I’ve found myself in this odd position of feeling compelled to write personal essays even though they make my Mondays suck because I spend the whole day wringing my hands about how the post will be received, if someone is going to troll me, and whether or not folks will even like or understand the piece.

When I talk about my family, like when I write about my relationship with my dad in “That Time I Got My Ass Kicked,” the stakes are even higher because I don’t want to subject my loved ones to criticism they didn’t ask for, and I worry constantly about misrepresenting events or my relationships simply due to my lousy memory or my inability to translate these personal histories to the page with the grace and complexity they deserve.

Yet, it’s self-centered and arrogant to expect everyone who encounters my work to like it. You can’t ask for attention—Read! Subscribe! Like! Comment!—and expect it all to be positive. Substack keeps me humble.

Each week reminds me I can’t create art from a place of fear. If I’m going to commit to this project—to making things for a public audience—then I need to work on being more courageous.

5. I Love Notes but They Give Me Anxiety

My first Note.

I love posting Notes.

I posted at least one Note every day from April 1st to June 1st.

I love Notes for two reasons: 1) I’ve never had or used Twitter/X, so this way of using social media is new to me, and 2) I find the form or genre of Notes/Tweets compelling because they’re capable of achieving so much with so little; each Note I compose feels like a fun exercise in brevity and a test of my writerly imagination. In this way, Notes can be a surprisingly generative place to hone one’s skills and a laboratory to experiment with and test ideas on a diverse audience that (sometimes) gives immediate feedback.

It’s easy to be cynical about short-form content and attention spans these days, but there’s something magical and impressive about an expertly crafted Note that’s able to express a profound truth or make hundreds of readers laugh with only a handful of words.

And I’d be remiss not to mention that Notes are also a great way to talk with subscribers, build friendships, discover new Substacks, and send much-deserved praise to my favorite writers.

But the last Note I posted was on June 6th, and I don’t know when I’ll resume posting. I don’t even scroll through my Notes feed anymore.

This is partly attributed to Notes being the only place on Substack where I’ve encountered some negativity via the occasional pedantic commenter or person who just misinterpreted what I was trying to communicate—or maybe I didn’t make myself clear because I was trying to post a Note before I fell asleep. Regardless, I always feel anxious after I post a Note and worry about how it’ll be received.

It’s unpleasant, then, to open my app after dinner or when the kids fall asleep and have these worries confirmed when I see combative or sarcastic comments from folks who aren’t subscribed to me—who don’t care about my work—and I know I could have just avoided the whole thing by focusing on my weekly post instead.

My resistance to Notes, though, has more to do with how I behave when I post one. I find myself checking on it constantly because a Note’s quality or “worth” seems more tied to vanity metrics than a post. If a Note doesn’t quickly garner a bunch of likes and restacks, then what’s the point of its existence? It’s like going to a big party and just standing in the corner of the room mumbling to yourself or, even worse, telling a joke to a large group of people and watching them stare at their shoes in awkward silence. Yikes.

Returning to the value of process, I always learn and improve by going through the process of writing my weekly posts and making new videos. Conversely, a Note is often composed so quickly there’s little “process” to be had and therefore little benefit other than the act of sharing itself. The juice just isn’t worth the squeezing—at least for now, anyway. Not posting Notes has hurt my growth on the platform, but at least I feel better.

Postscript: What’s Next?

With every passing week and every post, I’m faced with a decision: Keep chasing my dream or retreat into comfort.

But I’ve learned that a certain amount of discomfort is the price of progress, and I can’t expect to grow without it.

Whatever the cost, the work is worth it.

I’ll see you next week.

Thanks for Reading.

1. This observation extends to my most popular Notes as well. The ones I composed in the moment and just hit post were the most successful while the ones I spent time meticulously crafting—the ones I thought for sure would be a smash—were always received with crickets by comparison.