Three Things from a Gray Brain, 20241230
Moving a newsletter, unsetting goals, and Simone Giertz
A while back I wrote an article here and on substack about a quick and foolproof way to easily write a newsletter every week. The intended audience was those creators, artists, or solopreneurs who know they are supposed to write a newsletter in order to be relevant, but really dread having to actually fill the content week after week.
https://medium.com/better-marketing/the-easy-three-step-method-to-publishing-an-artist-newsletter-for-artists-who-hate-newsletters-f1e1d7c8a98d
In other words, the intended audience was me.
I’ve been doing it for the last month-plus over on SubStack, but I am leaving that platform as its enshittification accelerates. The main place I want to have this, really, is my own newsletter/blog platform, but until I work that out, here’s the latest example:
Something I’m Doing: writing, even when I don’t know where to put it.
One of the good things about 2024 was that I seemed to come back to the kind of writing that feels good, feels sustainable, and even, at times, feels valuable.
But while Substack has a lovely interface that makes it really easy to launch a newsletter or podcast, I’m finding more and more that the decisions they make are leading it to be less and less sustainable, less enjoyable, and frankly less moral.
I have several web domains, and my writing will likely live in each of them: http://creativegray.me and http://adhdopen.space . Right now, though, both are long out of date, aren’t optimized for newsletter-like content much less monetization.
But there are platforms like ghost.io that supposedly “puts the power back in the hands of the content creator”…which is exactly what Substack promised, back in the day. I’m no stranger to building and rebuilding websites and implementing platforms…but I find myself hesitating due to the potential time wasted switching to the wrong one.
At least while I do think about it and try to figure it out, I am doing the Most Important Thing: I’m still writing.
Something I’m thinking about: unsetting goals.
It’s the turning of the year, and as always the air is replete with people talking about goals and aspirations and changes and…ugh. Even with the whole statistic that fifteen out of every ten people* quit their New Years Resolutions by December 33rd**, I’ve never liked goal setting, simply because they almost always end up with one of two results:
- You fail to achieve it, and feel like a failure, because (checks the internet) everyone else was able to do it easily while also losing five pounds in the process.
- You do achieve it, and discover that it was not as good as you hoped, which means
- …you just have another goal to set, because surely that one will work better? “Moving Goalposts” is my least favorite game.
To some extent I’ve been able to get past my aversion to goals by focusing on practices instead. I’m not going to try to lose X pounds, I’m going to practice eating better. I’m not going to try to write a book, I’m going to try to write every day. I’m not going to set a schedule for checking up on my friends or family — but I am going to create shortcuts on my phone that one-touch-dial people I would like to be closer to, and odds are I’ll press one.
However, there is still that urge to Do All the Things — or, I guess, Practice All the Practices. I’m trying to combine a few different sources of advice that resonated recently:
- Do fewer things
- Care about quality
- Work at a sustainable pace (these are paraphrases of Cal Newport’s Slow Work book)
- Write, create, and set metrics for myself, not for other people’s expectations (or what I think they might be)
There’s a few more rules of thumb, but since one of them is basically don’t overshare I’ll leave it at that, and just quote another smart guy, Charlie Gilkey, whose most recent newsletter had a headline that REALLY resonated: Let’s trade “just do it” for “just don’t.”
Something Cool: Simone Giertz’s YouTube Channel
You may be saying “Simone who?” until I say “ Simone Giertz — remember that woman who invented useless robots, like the “wake-up bot” that slapped her in the face?”
https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxkFXtvk_DOHgTS2cZaCIXeSPLYJ1jZNRK?si=_C9pU-vD9E2qTrcK
And then you’ll say “oh, yeah…whatever happened to her?”
Well, after becoming internet-famous, she made the very astute realization that making useless robots wasn’t a sustainable business model (tech bros take note) and began doing inventions that were useful, if only for very specific problems:
- A desk chair with room for her three-legged dog
- A table that would hold a puzzle underneath a roll-top surface
- A “truckla” (a Tesla car modified into a version of a camino real, with a truck bed in back).
- A chair with a rotating rail specifically for holding your laundry
And she takes you step by step through the builds and the results on her channel, and some of her pieces are even for sale (biggest hits being a foldable hanger and a 500-piece all-white puzzle with one piece deliberately missing).
Mainly, though, I enjoy the asides and bits of wisdom that she drops on the way through each build. Quotes like:
…key learning for me is that it’s a lot better to hire smart people to learn than to hire stupid people to do something that they already know how to.
or my favorite,
…money I like to call “life lube” because it makes everything go easier and it can also give you access to places you wouldn’t otherwise be able to go.
Anyway, I’ve really enjoyed her YouTube work, because while I’m sure she does show “highlights” like all content creators (including me) she includes the mistakes, the blunders, and the feeling of “I dunno if this will work, but I’ll try it anyway.”
If you haven’t checked out her channel or her store, it’s worth a click.
* I never did take statistics. My brother’s the numbers guy.
** I also am not very good with dates.
