What do I want from this Substack
It’s good to have goals
Hey! After years of hoping and wishing to find the right time to write more, I have decided to instead not plan it to the point where I don’t want to do it anymore and just go for it. I have had various starts and stops over the years, but always only on my own personal blog that no one would ever find. It was very low risk.
I don’t even know what all I want to write about. The common advice is always to find a niche and drill down into it. That advice is for those trying to get a lot of followers and make money from it, which is not my goal at this time. My current goals are extremely fluid. I think they will definitely change over time, the fun will be figuring out how and when I want to change them.
I listen to a lot of podcasts, one of my favorites is the Chasing Excellence podcast. One of the recurring themes that Patrick likes to bring up, is not to just have a vision, but have an anti-vision. You know what you want or where you want to go, but just as much (or even more) you know what you need to avoid.
Goals
I mentioned that I listen to a lot of podcasts, one that I more recently was told about by a coworker was ‘Deep Questions with Cal Newport’. Being a software engineer who loves to read, Cal Newport is one of my favorite authors. In a podcast episode, he outlined what he described as a ‘cognitive fitness routine’.
Essentially, his theory is in the 1900’s with the rise of knowledge work, physical fitness needed to be intentionally taken care of for the first time in human history. With the rise of AI, cognitive fitness will need to become more of a priority. Even though I feel the future of AI replacing knowledge work isn’t necessarily a given, I still agree that I should work on my own cognitive fitness. It’s the same reason I work on my physical fitness, so that I am already working on it before it starts declining.
Listen to the entire podcast episode if you want all of his cognitive fitness exercises and techniques. My biggest miss from his list was writing. The many ways that writing something yourself from scratch works your brain, the forced focus of creating something that is actually coherent throughout the entire article.
I have not really written anything since I was writing essays for college. I never got really good at it. I’m working on it.
I am mostly trying to push my own abilities, build a skill in writing that I would enjoy developing, and express my interest in many areas that I hope others also find enjoyable.
Anti-goals
It’s good to also keep in mind what I want to avoid so that I can try to steer in the right direction as I write more here. To start, I’m not looking to make this a career. I have a job that I like and I’m not looking to replace it.
A lot of the advice for having a successful writing career is to find a niche you like and become the go to person for that niche. I’m not trying to have a successful writing career. I’m trying to push to be a better version of myself than I was yesterday. Sticking to a specific niche does not really interest me. My brain is too scattered and too interested in too many things to stick to one subject, no matter how broad. If that limits the number of followers or amount of success I have on this platform, I don’t really care all that much.
I am just going to keep my goals in mind. Any success or non-success from my writing in ancillary at best. Over time, I am hoping to express what I find interesting (which is a lot of things) and either introduce those things to others, or find others who share that specific interest from that specific post.
Monetary success on the Substack platform is not a goal of mine. I would be a supplementary accomplishment if it ever happens at all.
Expectations for myself
On the imaginary scale of being overly critical or having too high of expectations for myself or being completely apathetic about whatever my pursuit, I tend to be pretty hard on myself. I expect a lot and expect less from others. It is just the way that I am wired.
With that, I am trying to set good, honest, and achievable expectations for myself that are the proper mix of pushing to be better, without being
Ludacris to the point of being unattainable
Completely outside of my own control
Setting an expectation of a subscriber count is pointless. Unless I am going to make the accounts myself in some type of vapid ruse, I have no control over that. Setting a ‘number of posts per week/month’ expectation at this point would also feel absurd since I have next to no information about how long of articles or the topics I want to write about. My expectations need to be different at this point. Once I have more data on my workflow and process, then I can set expectations on frequency of posts.
With that, my current expectations are fairly straightforward.
I am going to give this my full attention and be intentional about making time regularly to make progress towards my next article. At first this may be two times a week. It may be multiple weeks of research, writing and editing before releasing. But it will be a part of my routine. I am setting that expectation.
A more practical expectation is that I am not going to use AI for writing. I use AI every day in my day job writing software. I have a role that requires me to be knowledgeable about bleeding edge AI tech in the code gen space. This substack is an effort to get away from that. I don’t want it to divulge into rants and monologues about my frustrations with the space either. I plan to mostly stay away from that and focus on interests outside of my day to day work.
My final expectation is that I write about what I want to write about. This goes in line with my goals and anti-goals. But if I am doing anything for clicks or money, then this won’t be enjoyable for me anymore and I will need to reevaluate what I am even doing.
There. Now that I got all of that out of my system, let’s begin.