Hello... again. And again. And again.
It's been a fair while since I started this. I barely started it before it seemed like it finished... so what IS the direction for the future?
Hi there. It’s Josh. I started this Substack a fair while ago… and it VERY quickly got put to the wayside. Far quicker than I would have liked it to go (and certainly far quicker than I envisaged)!
I am ‘back’. Back in inverted commas, as I’m also very conscious that this could be the first post before another four months pass by with nothing. Hopefully that WON’T be the case - but let’s look at where it all initially went wrong, and perhaps more importantly: what’s the direction for the future?
I do want to keep this Substack going ‘as a thing’. That is to say, I enjoy doing them. It is an enjoyable way to keep a hold of the cultural, linguistic and topical matters, and I appreciate the responses that you all gave to my posts; something such as this feels like a necessary and useful contribution, so I want to ensure it becomes far more fruitful!
So how come I - to be blunt about it - fell off so quickly?
There are three mistakes I made that come to mind from the offset:
Trying to run before I could walk. Or perhaps more aptly, trying to progress before I could proceed.
A rookie error people make when they start on any new venture: “ah it’s going to be brilliant!” “I can include all of these different things!” “Oh wait, I need to find things to fill up this regular feature!” “Erm life has got in the way and I don’t know what to do.” “Time to put this to the wayside now.”
The first newsletter (which I will say I am rather proud of as an opening feature) contained four separate features:
A Slice of Global Culture
You should pay attention to…
Short Essay
Promotion Podium
The idea was fantastic: put together a newsletter that encompasses different, current and useful elements of the cultural world and which uses different sections to talk about the various things. The general structure will remain as so in future editions, but I think I might remove the ‘Short Essay’ part, and that will form every other week’s post… which I’ll develop more in my final point at the end of this post.
Essentially, when you try and condense multiple different things into one, and especially when some of them are on wildly different topics (good memories of the ‘work ethic’ post before, well, this hiatus whilst focusing on other things), it seems only logical that you could run into a situation where you’re trying to implement a wider range than you have the natural, osmotic capacity to encounter. The idea was pretty decently executed in those first two newsletters, and I’m glad that that’s the approach I took from the off… but I think the fact of trying to condense so much so quickly was one of the bigger reasons for the near-instant dropping of the metaphorical ball.
Having no plan is not always better than having some sort of plan - even for me.
Anyone who knows me will know that when I go travelling, I have next to no plans of how I do it. First I’ll take a train or plane to a country, and then once I’m there, I’ll just gallivant to different cities and towns, and decide as each day goes what I’m going to do and where I’m going to go next.
It’s almost as if I took the same approach from the beginning with the Substack. ‘OK… so this week I’m going to write about Eurovision. Then I’ve just got to wait for a week and see what I encounter before I write about the next thing that happens.
OK, great. What if it’s a fairly quiet week? What if you have a problem at some point and can’t write at all? What if the major event that takes place is a really controversial one and it’s hard to find the right words to be able to produce a piece on it?
Again, a fine enough idea — but in this instance, at least some plan is seemingly necessary, even if it’s in the form of a regularly updated Notes page. When I started developing the Substack, the plan was “I will write a newsletter every week about cultural and linguistic things”. That’s not a plan; that’s a motivation. The motivation paid off from the beginning, but the plan just… wasn’t there. Now once that plan is in motion and it’s running, it can develop into greater things - but those greater things aren’t necessarily going to happen instantly. That’s the 2nd mistake I made.
I’m not necessarily going to plan the writing, but more the content involved in it.
The idea of doing the thing is often so much more motivational than actually doing the thing.
Initially, this sounds like I’m saying “I love the idea of putting in the work to create something but actually putting in the work takes effort so no thanks”. What it really is meant to sound like is “I can think about doing something and how it’s going to come together, but then if you don’t start that thing as intended, it’s harder to see it the whole way through.” I think.
In essence, my lack of real planning (again, relating back to #2) beyond “this would be a fun idea and I look forward to doing it” very quickly became “I’m enjoying doing this, but I’m not sticking to a relatively tight enough plan for it to be a fruitful endeavour”.
Come to think of it… it also probably didn’t help that I had barely even spent 2 minutes trying to get to the basics of Substack before trying to succeed immediately on it. Let’s treat that as an addendum.
So what is the future for the Substack?
So I am going to stick with it, worry not about that. But I also don’t need to go so head-first in it that I did initially. At the time I began, it was a sudden endeavour that didn’t really ‘attach’ to anything beyond my own will to produce a newsletter about culture.
So I’m going to try a whole new approach going forward… and we’ll see how we do.
This is my general proposition:
Instead of a consistent, regular newsletter with the same style, I’m going to try and spice it up a little. It will still be about language, culture, travel, music, media, etc etc etc etc… but I’m going to try and ‘widen’ it a bit.
So my plan going forward will (hopefully) be the following:
The newsletter will be produced every week, with an aim to produce it just before or after the weekend, but it will be produced on a rotating basis.
Every other week will be the all-encompassing format as highlighted above. I’m going to adapt the format slightly, where I don’t remove any features, but change them. The ‘Short Essay’ feels a little too loose to have as an individual feature, so that will be the most changed.
In the remaining weeks, I’ll try to look at one specific thing. It could be a language learning app, it could be highlighting a podcast, it could be a run down of songs on my Spotify Release Radar that have some sort of cultural note… but it will be slightly less ‘Jack of many trades’ and focus more succinctly on something that is of interest.
Will it work? Will it flop?
Will I stop doing it quickly, or will the newsletter go to the very top?
Who knows?
But with deviation comes innovation, and with innovation comes motivation.
So I will hopefully see you next week, when I’ll provide something from the vault of discoveries… and I hope you’re happy to support me on that future journey.
Thanks for all your support so far; it means an immense amount!