The shape of things to come
new Substack format, more oversharing, more money (hopefully)
This blog started nearly a year ago with a story of breakdown. It was a gritty affair: sharing felt like survival.
The time since then has been focused on rest and renewal. Wounds have been tended and new paths have opened up with the practices I explored and the people I met through sharing my story.
Now, things are shifting into a new phase. Not unlike the garden, there is an escalating sense of fruition.
I'll be building a lot over the next couple of years: a new career and the realisation of some goals I've had since I was a kid. It's going to be a creative adventure. Or a dead end. Or something else entirely.
Here’s what it’s going to look like.
Prelude: on jobs
Having a job is not easy, but it is simple.
I remember it well. You do that thing each day and—as long as you don't really fuck it up—you get paid a fixed amount of money every month.
I’m not doing that anymore. Not because I'm beyond that or won't go crawling back to a job in Tech if this all collapses into a puddle of misguided dreams. But because it's just not enough for me. The price of not acting on the other things I want to do feels too high.
This isn’t a cold start: I’m already working as a coach alongside some part-time consultancy work. But it's only viable right now because I have savings. I will starve to death in approximately 12 months. This will make next year’s anniversary blog post less upbeat.
In a job, you don't have to convince your manager to pay you. It's built into the agreement. When working for yourself, you must explain to everyone why you're worth their money. The payslip doesn't arrive otherwise. Marketing is a requirement, not an icky afterthought.
There is also the dizzying freedom of having a bazillion projects I could work on. The tradeoff in not having a boss is having to prioritise for myself. This is an often intolerable burden for most human beings, myself included.
But it might be worth it if you value what you get in exchange: self-determination, autonomy and your time back. More than that, it's a way of meeting people in a sphere of equality, beyond the mediated relationship of working-for-a-company. I love it. If I earned 1/3 of what I used to earn, I would still love it.
It's going to be a lot of work to make it sustainable. But it's also going to be an investment in the rest of my life. This is the beginning of a 10-year plan.
3 paths to profit
So I need to be able to support myself. Here's the birds-eye view of what that looks like:
Coaching. I'll be scaling my coaching practice up and trying to narrow down on my sweet spots: where I can best help people in ways they're excited to pay for.
Writing. More on this below. I love writing but I don't love writing things that pop up in an inbox and then disappear forever.
Consultancy. I do some consultancy and advisory work for startups.
New format Substack
Until now, my Substack posts have been relatively infrequent and mid- to long-form.
It's a large time investment for something that gets delivered and then disappears into the ether a couple of days later. It also makes it hard to ascertain how much value people get from it because there is no exchange beyond the clicking of the like button.
I also try to write something I want to read. I find myself reading less and less long-form online content these days, so expecting others to continue to do what I don’t feels disingenuous. I always turn to books when I want to go deep. And the newsletters I get the most value from are more about personal processes, recommendations and interests. I want to know what interesting people are up to, how they’re going about it, and who they’re paying attention to.
The upshot of this is that this Substack will become shorter yet more frequent. It will focus on:
Things I'm finding interesting or exciting. A curated collection of the good, the true and the beautiful, from the profound to the everyday.
How things are going on Project: Don’t Starve.
Previews of the bigger-picture projects I’m working on.
There might still be some longer pieces as they bubble up but they will likely be for paid Substackeroos only.
Re: 1) — I love sharing things that I find useful and placing them in a wider picture of What Matters. Whether a product, book, habit or perspective, recommendations are a natural overflow of my own wonder and curiosity. Here are some recurring things that I find interesting:
Learning to surf the tornado of human experience, from the sublime to the absurd
Poetry and prose from great writers
Anti-positive thinking & finding the depths in the darkness
How to be a real person on the internet
Reflections on writing and the creative process
Reflections on how important it is to reflect
How to make money on the internet 💰
Reflections on coaching and human transformation
Wellbeing beyond "mental" vs "physical" health
Thoughts on directly realising your nature beyond name & form
Embarrassing stories
Tapping into the wisdom of the body
How to manage and design a life in the fragmented clusterfuck that is the Third Millennium
Personal updates
Alongside the recommendations, I will be 2) trying to figure out how to make enough money doing these things I actually love. I don’t know what will land and what will leave a bruise. It's going to be unpredictable, embarrassing, and perhaps at some point, rewarding.
In my tradition of oversharing, I'd like to bring you along for the ride. I'll be sharing insights and annoyances. What's working, what's not, failed experiments. Goals, dreams and deficiencies.
If you're someone interested in side hustles, working for yourself, connecting with a more creative side or stealing all my best ideas as soon as I announce them, these updates are for you. They will be a raw, under-the-hood look at how scaling this up works in practice.
There will probably be numbers too. Small aside: there are lots of courses on making 6, 7 or 8 figures as a digital creator—usually by writing books about writing books, making videos about making videos... and of course that drop-shipping business you've always dreamed of. I'll spare you. 5 figures is fine for me, right now.
I know what I need to earn to live contently. ~£2500 per month covers rent, being a dog dad, owning a car, eating food and some nice things like hot yoga, flat whites, esoteric meditation books etc. I could break even on less, but I want to be living comfortably, not living to requirement. At some point, I will also want to buy a house again. So consistency will become more important, alongside rebuilding savings.
Writing words that people pay money to read
Whilst Substack will switch to fewer yet more frequent words, my overall writing effort will ramp up dramatically, into creating guides, books and courses.
I love to write, and I want people to love it enough to pay for it. Like some people, I used to find this idea uncomfortable. But as Derek Sivers puts it:
Money is nothing more than neutral proof that you’re adding value to people’s lives.
Making sure you’re making money is just a way of making sure you’re doing something of value to others.
Source (…kind of; I saved this quote years ago and prefer the wording.)
The writing projects I'm working on will be deeper dives into things I get excited about; opportunities to write more practical guides that bring quality writing, powerful ideas and field-tested practices together.
Here are some ideas I'm bouncing around to give you a flavour:
Vipassana: A Recovery Guide
Beyond self-improvement: the well-cultivated life
TRE for meditators
The alternative guide to burnout
Authentic brands for internet weirdos
A guide to beating panic attacks
Awakening for muggles
If any of those call to you, tell me why and the main question you’d like to see addressed:
Shipping things is also a great way to deepen your learning even further. As another fine Bartlett put it, to master something, create an obligation to teach it.
Thanks for still being here a year on. Look out for the first new-format newsletter next week ✨