It’s Day 5 for me on Substack. I have been dealing with strong bouts of both excitement and discomfort about it. The excitement came from finally doing something I’ve been thinking FOR YEARS about. The discomfort came from different things.
Firstly, I realized that progress would be very slow. By this point, I have exactly one follower on Substack and two on X. I was getting demotivated by this, and then swinging in the other direction and taking wild action: starting a Twitter account, commenting left and right on people’s posts etc. A second, closely linked, reason for my discomfort was that I did not like how much hold Substack immediately had on me. As soon as I launched my publication, I was hooked. I had been wanting to build an online business for years; and now that I had started, I was naturally impatient to make progress. I kept wanting to go back to my homepage, tinker with it, check view counts, wonder how I can get people’s attention etc. Importantly, I feel there is also an addictive quality to Substack, not unlike Instagram (which I quit a while back as I did not like the hold it had on me).
As I was thinking about the week’s journey and fretting about these aspects, I got the idea to track my Substack journey in a five-year daily journal, which unexpectedly started to give me so much relief. Upon reflection, I started to realize that it’s due to two things: a daily journal is obviously a powerful tool to keep me on track, and, crucially, this particular one can keep me focused on the right time horizon. I want to share more about the latter in this post.
But first, meet Sage.
Why does a five-year horizon feel right to me?
My focus needs to go to my corporate career for now. I want to develop Substack as an independent income source for myself, as well as a creative outlet. Having an eventual secondary income is important to me for financial security as well as the power and freedom it would provide to focus on what I want to do in life instead of being dependent on an employer. However, right now I am still primarily focused on a corporate career. There are elements of it that I still enjoy, and I do not think I am ready yet to completely change direction. So I need to focus primarily on my corporate career for now. I can definitely spend time writing on Substack alongside my job, but I cannot spend a lot of time strategizing and experimenting on Substack without it diverting focus away from my career.
It feels like the right horizon for what I want to build. I do not want to sacrifice quality for short-term results. I see so many messages in my Substack feed giving writing, audience or motivation advice, from people positioning themselves as experts on how to succeed on Substack. Many of them barely have over 100 subscribers! There are beginner Substackers whose Substacks are dedicated to teaching others how to succeed on Substack. Recently I even came across someone with a very modest follower count selling a USD 1000 course on it! These things blow my mind, but I also understand that if so many people are doing it, it must be working. I certainly click when I see such posts. But I also get very annoyed once I see the profile of the author and realize they have no credentials to talk about it yet (in fact, I get so annoyed that I mute the author altogether). I’m sure not everyone mutes, so people are getting some audience for cheap this way, but that’s not the audience I am after. I would love to build an audience of smart, discerning people who are actually interested in my voice. I know that the way to get there is mostly organically, and through consistency. That is surely going to take time.
It takes the pressure off. Every time I get disheartened by zero views (which is 100% of posts so far, I think all views are mine), I can remember now that my horizon is five years. I love to remember this quote by Anthony Trollope: “A small daily task, if it really be daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” Of course, I will not settle on a daily schedule, but if I have a consistent schedule of publishing quality writing over five years… something will surely get built by then.
That’s it. Wish me luck!