It hit me this week...
Even if I don't have a thousand subscribers yet, I've written a lot in my first year. Doesn't that mean something?
It’s hard not to compare yourself to others. It’s hard not to worry about achieving success. It’s hard not to get down when you fail.
It’s even harder not to get into a cycle of being hard on yourself.
My sense of self-disappointment grows much stronger when (1) I think I should’ve reached a milestone that I haven’t yet and (2) I compare my own progress to that of others.
This may be relatable to my Substack readers. You might see, for instance, that someone has gained 100 subscribers in their first week on the platform, or that someone’s note has gone viral even though it doesn’t seem all that insightful. You put a lot of time and effort into your publication, but you don’t see the results you’re looking for.
When you give it room to grow, self-disappointment will expand. You allow this by creating space for disappointment within yourself, but also by providing it with multiple vantage points for it to attack you from.
For me, the root of the issue is the multitude of avenues by which I allow myself to feel disappointed. It’s not just Substack success that I get wrapped up in. It’s also Instagram, Facebook, face-to-face networking, website visits, cold emails, client/sales data, and progress on my novel. It’s become anything that I think has the potential to make me a “successful” writer, but that I’m not excelling at.
Here, I’m defining “successful” as being able to make a living off of my craft.
Man, wouldn’t it be cool if I didn’t have to make money as a writer, though? Wouldn’t it be cool if I could just write and write and write, and not have to worry about funds? And this dream isn’t out of laziness, either, but out of pure passion and love for the art of writing.
A major benefit to the capitalist system is that it incentivizes people to work, rather than to sit around being lazy. But what happens when you want to work hard at what you love and it just doesn’t pay your rent?
What happens, you ask? You work harder, or you pick up a regular job while you’re trying to make your dream come true. That’s life; that’s the world we live in; you can’t always have your cake and eat it too.
And that’s okay! Hard work, boring work, unfulfilling work that pays is actually okay in the abstract - it just can’t be your everything or your forever.
But I’m glad to say that something neat occurred to me this week - I’ve accomplished so much thus far, and that’s pretty special. I’ve written/edited half of my novel, written/edited/gotten printed an extensive love story for my two best friends, published 25 Substack posts & lots of notes since early July (and grown my publication by over 70 subs in the process!), added audio to all my Substack posts, grown my Instagram and made consistent postings there, completed 4 client projects, gone to networking events, made/printed/posted flyers about my services, talked to countless people about what I do, pitched to newspapers, worked on freelance platforms… The list goes on.
I’ve done a lot in the past 3 months, and I know that I should be proud of that. But sometimes, I still don’t feel like I’m good enough or doing enough!
Do you ever feel like this? Like you know that you’re doing all you can, but you still feel like you’re not doing enough because you aren’t seeing the exact results that you were hoping for?
How do you balance that feeling with your passion and drive yourself to keep moving forward?
That’s all for today :). A bit of an all-over-the-place post, but I really wanted to put these couple of quick thoughts out there this week. Thanks for reading today’s article!
Your description says you quit work to be a writer. That adds pressure to your mind. Why does it not work as fast as I hoped, asked almost every writer ever (the ones who didn’t, you know about since it was so unusual they had to write stories about it).
You are doing great, just not as great as your brain says you should. Tell your brain: shush, I’m working here.
I think when reading everything you've accomplished recently it's very impressive, very productive and from my view very prolific in terms of volume of creative output. You're certainly building lots of forward momentum and also providing motivation in the personalized narrative tone in which you write to anyone else here trying to write and in early stages of growing their audience. That's an objective outside view looking at it.