R.W.A - Substack

I cut all this out...

As a follow up to yesterday’s email, I thought I’d give you some R.W.A. or Real World Application. It’s all fine and good to talk about making stuff without tons of editing, but what does it look like?

I’ll use my daily newsletter on Substack as an example of how to shorten the distance between an idea and the publish button.

First of all, I would point out that my email newsletter has not always been great about publishing regularly. And at times I had to make a ton of mistakes just to figure out what I wanted in the first place. It’s taken years of writing for me to get a sense of what I want to say and how I want to say it.

KEY POINT - I had to practice this skill hundreds of times to figure out what I was doing.

Second, I decided to make this a daily email newsletter. A daily email is a lot different than a weekly or monthly newsletter. The format and style is different. If I was going to send out a weekly or monthly email, they would be more in-depth and complex. Something more akin to a chapter in a book than a short update or fleeting thought.

Not only was the format different, but the weight of a daily writing feels different because it’s daily. I got to come up with something new and interesting to say each and every day. To make that work I have to limit expectations and production in what I do.

It’s sort of like if you gave George Lucas $250 million and 3-5 years, he can make you a Star Wars movie. If he had to put out a Star Wars video every day with no budget, I bet he would make a talking head YouTube vlog about Star Wars.

KEY POINT - I had to change my expectations for this newsletter to be able to hit the publish button every day. It had to be smaller, tighter, and less fancy.

Third, I cut out a ton of “extra” things I used to do with my email newsletter. For Substack, I used to always include some kind of nice photo or image in each post. It would look cooler on the newsletter page and on social media. As it turns out, I don’t care to go hunting for images every time I write an email.

So no images.

And I used to post/repost on Twitter/LinkedIn/Facebook/etc. many of my Substack newsletters. Or when I was doing tutorial videos I’d link them on YouTube. In reality, I never got much engagement on social media for posting my Substack articles, so I stopped that.

No more social media.

On things like tutorials when I was doing Zero To Python, I tried to really up the production quality, embed the YouTube videos, have beautiful code examples, and make it as high quality as possible. But that led me to burn out on the project. I’d rather not burn out. So I stopped doing on the newsletter, found a simpler way to do/host tutorials on my own site, and abandoned any sense of premium production.

No more fancy formatted premium content.

I keep going on and on like this to make this newsletter as minimal as possible. Cutting out every possible thing that would take away from the joy of just writing down an idea and hitting send on the next email.

KEY POINT - I have to cut and re-cut out parts of the newsletter that aren’t 100% necessary. Eventually I will run out of things to cut, but we aren’t there yet!

The last point is I used to want this newsletter to grow. Back when it started as part of Code Career Genius, the goal was to grow it to be big enough to go full time as a writer/content creator/coach kind of thing.

My hope was if it grew big enough, I could “live the dream”.

I see this project differently now. I don’t have the ambition for this to be a full time gig. Or even a paid gig. At least, not in any kind of obvious or direct way.

And I think trying to grow the newsletter was a mistake. It led me to pander to what the audience was asking for, instead of what I wanted to say. In the end, neither I nor you was fully satisfied with where it was going.

The goal has changed. Now I’m just here looking to write an email each day.

This is one way for me to shorten the distance between an idea in my head making it into the world. It’s a useful creative practice. It makes me a better writer. It hopefully helps you (the reader) in some way too.

KEY POINT - Even my motivation had to change to make this project work. I had to let go of “the dream” to find this little daily email thing hiding behind it.

In the end, for me to be able to sustain the work of writing a daily email, I went through many changes. It’s taken time and it isn’t easy. I’m not even sure if this will continue to work or if I have even more changes to make (I probably do).

All of this is in service of shortening the distance between the idea in my head and an email in your inbox each day.

Now I must go find a new idea that I can quickly turn into an email. Otherwise tomorrow your inbox would be empty… except for all those pesky spammers, scammers, and social media notification emails that will keep you warm and cozy by the fire as you read them.

-Brian