Announcement: New Schedule / #1 Lesson Learned

The Announcement

Moving forward, I’m going to switch to two posts per week rather than three. More specifically, I will post on Monday and Thursday at 5:00am EST.

Why I’m Making The Change

I’ve done my best to make three post per week work, but the reality is that I’m still working on many nights and all weekends, which is increasingly unsustainable for my family and my soul.

Furthermore, with the three posts per week schedule, I’m not able to do a lot of important things…

• I’m not able to sit on ideas and let them ruminate.

• I have less time to collect feedback from others.

• I less time to edit posts.

• I have dramatically slowed down on curating videos.

• I haven’t been able to publish the posts by 5:00am EST.

• I haven’t had time to be as deliberate about improvement.

• I haven’t had time to work on longer posts that need more research.

Not only that, I feel better making this decision given reader feedback that fully digesting three really long posts every week is hard.

What Ultimately Pushed Me Over The Edge

Despite all of these disadvantages, I kept on doing three posts per week for several reasons:

• My writing was still good enough to get increasing traction and paying subscribers.

• Producing 60+ articles in four months made me feel proud.

• I was sitting on a goldmine of research that I had never published before, so I knew I could keep writing and not run out of transformative things to write about.

• The deadline constraint really pushed me to make more out of my time than I even thought was possible.

But, I was pushed over the edge after reading two posts by two of Substack’s top writers.

First, I read 500,000: Ten lessons learned from building this newsletter by

Lenny Rachitsky

. Under Lesson 9: It’s not all rainbows and butterflies, Rachitsky writes…

I’m used to it now, but this is what every week basically feels like:

While writing under these conditions does feel exhilarating, because it pushes me to make the most out of every moment, when I read that, I knew that I didn’t want that to be my lifestyle moving forward.

Next, I read One Hundred Thousand: The hard-earned advice I would give to myself before starting The Generalist by

Mario Gabriele

. One excerpt stood out…

The entirety of building The Generalist has been done amidst wild phosphorescence. I am grateful for this. I do not think I could have made this a viable business if I wasn’t willing to work seven days a week for several years, nor would I have improved as quickly as an analyst if I hadn’t committed to shipping 5,000 to 10,000 words nearly every week. 

But earlier this year, the bulb went out. I had felt tired for the better part of eighteen months, but this was the first time it felt actively painful to sit in front of my computer and write. Writing is rarely easy, but when it's hard, it's hard in the way that running or solving a difficult puzzle is hard. There is strain and effort but also a sense of something valuable being worked. This felt different: a stubbed toe, a sliver of wood under a fingernail, lemon juice squeezed onto the frontal lobe. A varietal of unpleasantness with no bloom and no fruit.

After reading this, I realized that while I could keep going at the same rate, I would likely get burned out over time. Furthermore, fundamentally, I want a lifestyle where I feel pulled to work hard because of Infinite Devotion, not where I feel pushed because of an arbitrary schedule I think is required for success, but may not be.

Finally, my ultimate goal with everything is personal growth. I believe that, in the long-term, everything I write is a result of my level of development. By keeping a really high output, I slow down my growth, which ultimately kills the goose that lays the golden egg.

Lesson Learned

As longtime readers know, I’m fascinated by how to best balance quality and quantity. Over the last five years, I’ve had a super high quality standard for my online writing:

• Keep improving it until I can’t improve it any more.

• Don’t keep it to a schedule. It’s done when it’s done.

• Aim to write the best article that has ever been written on every topic.

With this approach, I wrote about four longform articles per year on Medium. While this approach has been successful, part of me felt like it wasn’t optimal.

This year, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to experiment with different formats that were lower quality or shorter, but with enough quality to still get traction.

As a result, I now see quality as a continuum rather than it just being black and white...

Before launching this newsletter I was dangerously close to the perfectionism line. I wasn’t publishing a lot of my research, because I didn’t feel like it could be a viral, blockbuster hit. In retrospect, I think a lot of it was still super high-quality research that was valuable and was worth publishing.

After this four month sprint, I have an understanding of what it feels like to be close to the stagnation line. Orange was still enough to become successful, but it wasn’t sustainable. I’m a big believer that if you’re not improving, you moving backwards. And because of pushing myself too hard, I was at risk of burning out.

The good news with this Quality Continuum model is that that there are multiple levels of quality that seem to work. Stated differently, there isn’t just one way to create high-quality that works.

My hope is that this new posting schedule pushes me into the green zone.

Thank You

I want to thank you for your patience as I explore what works best. Love you all!

See you on Thursday!