Permission to be Not Good Yet | #30
Hello ladies and gentlemen!
The Pole has not seen the light of day of y’all’s inboxes for like.. a month now or something. Ok, it’s longer than that.
Which is fine! (He tells himself, attempting to be convincing to himself.)
hahaha
This will be a self-indulgent edition where I write this entirely for me. I’ll talk about some of my struggles and my goals.
Which is terrifying, because I do feel the need to write something such that, when you finish skimming this newsletter, you think to yourself, “yeah, I’m glad I read that.”
I feel the need to organize my thoughts to make it more digestible for you.
I feel the need to write a ‘lil summary so that you know what you’re getting into.
But I alsoooo need to make this doable for me.
I need to make it something I’m excited to do.
I need to make it something I can consistently show up for. Specifically when I’m stretched thin.
And I haven’t consistently shown up lately.
Why? The shallow answer is because I’ve Been Busy, and this newsletter has been a lower priority.
A realer answer is:
I’m shifting my business (and therefore content) goals. A lot of that requires me learning a bunch of new things. I have not yet developed the skill of “talking about the things I’m learning about in an interesting, narrative-driven way” - and I don’t want to disappoint the folks that read this with sub-par content.
But, well, something something the road to good starts with sucking.
And I have to give myself permission to suck.
But I don’t like that framing. Words matter. Language influences thoughts influences beliefs, etc.
It’s more like.. Not Good Yet.
I’m giving myself permission to be Not Good Yet.
Which means that I’m giving myself permission to be rambly, not include a fancy summary, and generally cut corners.
At your expense! Sorry.
But I’m giving myself permission with the conviction that this is temporary.
That through iterations, I will find and get used to a format that I like doing and is also a joy for you to read.
I just have to KEEP. IT. UP.
And to be clear, that doesn’t mean: I Must Publish At A Strict Cadence OR ELSE
I don’t want to be cranking out garbage for the sake of cranking. I want to be legibly learning from each iteration, and if I need to take more time on a specific iteration to get something out of it, I will.
But I also want to set the expectation to you and myself that the default is I will publish weekly.
Because I’m allergic to not learning things.
It’s unlikely that a week will go by and I will not learn something. If I did learn something and successfully integrated it, I NEED TO HIT PUBLISH, DAMN IT.
Discomfort is not a reason to not hit publish.
Not being sure about what I’m saying is not a reason to not hit publish.
(But also, I must specify that I am not sure. No pretending to know things that I don’t know!)
Not being ready IS a reason to not hit publish.
The challenge, of course, is differentiating between “Not Ready” (i.e. you have permission to not publish) and “Uncomfortable” (i.e. you need to hit publish anyway).
And I suspect I will.. as you might suspect, get better at differentiating with practice.
Anyway, all of this is kinda abstract. I suspect you’re wondering:
So, what the heck is this newsletter going to be about?
The short answer is: stuff I learn as I progress towards my goal of making money from the internet, plus some personal stuff here and there.
The slightly longer answer is:
I’m fascinated by exploring how media (e.g. videos, essays, tweets) makes us feel things.
Why is this tweet funny and this one isn’t?
Why did I read this person’s essay and now I feel like we’re friends?
Why did I watch that video and now I want to buy that kitchen tool they were using?
That feels like something I can create a business around.
Down the road, maybe that means
getting hired to make content for people
making a course about how to make {videos, essays, tweets} that make people {laugh, cry, want to buy things}
building an audience for the purpose of shilling stuff I believe will add value to their lives (sponsorships, affiliate links, etc)
Who knows? We will see.
I just know that I have to get good at making content that makes people feel things first.
For me, that looks like,
reading books about how to be funny, how to persuade people, etc
learning to make impactful videos (e.g. Premiere Pro, After Effects)
learning various design elements (color theory, typography, UX design, form, texture, shape, Gestalt principles, etc)
Right now, I suck.. er I’m Not Yet Good at any of that stuff.
But I’m fascinated by all of it, and I have faith that if I keep showing up, I will eventually be good at it.
Hence, a lot of what I’ve been up to the past two months has been building infrastructure to make showing up easier.
For example, my 1,000 days of accountability Twitter thread.
I’ve also been setting up (and learning) Notion in order to make my project management less daunting and stressful. My system is complicated, but I feel like it needs to take in that complexity in order to make my day-to-day less complicated. Short term pain for long term gain.
Anyway. That’s where I’m at right now.
This newsletter will primarily be about what I learn about how to make people feel things with media.
But also, occasionally other juicy things, like dating or finance.
So, yeah! I hope you enjoyed this ramble. Even though I wrote this for me. I want to have my cake and eat it, too.
See you next week! Probably. Maybe. We’ll see.