CTLR+ALT+DLT
March 28th, 2024
In this issue:
LWHš” Face-Lift
Business Goals vs. Hobby Goals (Mini-Essay)
1. LWHš” Face-Lift
Itās time for another Long Way Homeš” face-lift.
Without the urgency of a regular publishing cadence, Iām afraid Iāve given myself permission to drag my feet. I mull over ideas for pieces long after mulling has reached its usefulness. I let concepts simmer until theyāre burn to a crisp.
But thatās not all; sending essays to inboxes (albeit, surprisingly unreliably) and then promptly losing them to the bowels of the internet feels antithetical to my goal of building a catalogue of evergreen, easily accessible content. Dooming thoughtful and effortful pieces to languish in peopleās junk mail feels counterproductive. There must be a better way.
Hereās my solution:
Restarting the weekly Substack newsletter. Iāll informally discuss and share cool things I find and share half-baked thoughts without the pressure of crafting a cohesive essay. Iāll also talk about things going on in my life as I process them in real time (e.g., moving to Rochester in a couple months). Maybe itāll feel like a journal entry thatās been properly spell-checked. Weekly issues will have the publish date in their subtitles (like this one).
Sharing essays separately on Substack. For me, essays center on a unifying idea and generally attempt to persuade the reader to do or believe something. Writing good essays is extremely tough for me, but also the most rewarding. I donāt have the capacity to ship fleshed-out essays each week anymore (I did 40 in a row at the beginning of my LWHš” journey), but I think my effort there is the most worthwhile. Deeply thinking through ideas (again with the mulling), doing a bit of research, obsessing over crafting precise sentencesāthose are the most fun parts of this writing project for me. To reach my goal of developing a body of work thatās useful for young South Asians, I think shipping essays is a requirement. My solution is to post these on the same Substack newsletter feed in addition to the weekly posts. These posts will have no date in the subtitle and may have ā(Essay)ā after their titles.
Compiling my best content on Medium as a āgreatest hitsā. Right now, there is no internet repository where someone can flip through my writing other than my Substack back-catalogue. That doesnāt feel right. The quality and subject matter varies as Iāve taken the newsletter through different experimental phases, so a first impression is heavily dependent on which piece you choose to open first. So I plan to go through my back catalogue, clean up/edit as needed, and repost them to Medium. Further, as I continue to write pieces I think are deserving of the āgreatest hitsā categorization, Iāll continue adding them to my Medium repertoire and share the links broadly.
With this new posting system, I hope to write and publish more, and highlight the pieces I think are deserving of some extra attention. Thank you to everyone who reads, likes, comments on, and shares my posts. Your encouragement is enlivening and motivates me to continue.
2. Business Goals vs. Hobby Goals (Mini-Essay)
The following concept, I believe, is at the heart of the problem for almost every frustrated young creator I have seen, including myself.
Young creators love making things and want to create a life where they make lots of things. They get excited about starting a new creative project to make more things, make better things, and share things they make with people who will love and respect their creations (i.e., fellow makers). These are what we call hobby goals.
These young creators are deeply influenced by others who make things online. They get enchanted by creators who talk about how they were able to make money, grow an audience, and find incredible opportunities through their hobby. Young creators see the popularity, interesting content, and riches, and believe thatās a natural end-state for their journey if they follow the guidance (e.g., āstay consistentā and āfind your nicheā).
As young creators see more of this content, they get ensnared by the notion of building a lifestyle around their hobby and living off it full time. They see other creators monetizing, building brands, growing an audience, and winning speaking engagements, and they reset their expectations. Sneakily, their goals change; they believe unless theyāre making money or growing a followership, theyāre not successful.
This is core to the tension. Monetizing, building an audience, and getting paid for your craft are what we call business goals. Doing more of the hobby will not help us achieve business goals, it will help us achieve hobby goals. If we are no longer satisfied by achieving hobby goals, however, because we are convinced business goals are worth more, we will be perpetually dissatisfied and frustrated.
Creators never achieve business goals through hobby approaches. To achieve business outcomes, creators must have business approaches.
Unfortunately, having a business approach and running a business requires very little of doing the hobby and making the thing. Letās go back to where we startedāyoung creators started because they were excited about making lots of things, making better things, and sharing them with people who care. The business activities embedded within the business approach required to achieve business outcomes will leave most people unfulfilled and exhausted. Generally, for most people, these business activities are horribly boring, stressful, tedious, and unsatisfying. After all, theyāre doing very little of the thing they set out to do. Itās not what got them excited in the first place.
Young creators ping-pong back and forth between having a hobby approach and expecting business outcomes, and beginning business activities but wanting hobby outcomes deep down. Starting and stopping many different projects is a telltale sign of this. Their relationship with their hobby grows increasingly fraught through all this acquired baggage, complicating the simple hobby goals with which they started.
I think the first step out of this vicious cycle is to pause and figure out which goals you actually want, and really understand why. Write it out. Donāt show anyone else so you can be brutally honest. If you want fame and money and you want people to like you, great, be honest and write that down. Thereās no inherent value attributed to our motivations, and our judgments of these motivations just guarantee we will not get what we want and will end up unhappy.
Iām going through this exercise right now myself. The reason this idea is so fascinating to me is because itās essentially my story over the course of my 20s. Creatively unsatisfied, a trail of unfinished projects left in my wake.
Once Iāve clarified my goals, I can identify the specific approaches and systems required to achieve those goals. Right now, I actually donāt know if I want business outcomes or hobby outcomes. Maybe my answer is hobby outcomes with extra, opportunistic business bonuses? Iām not really sure.
I do know, however, that whatever my goals are, none of them will be achieved unless I suck it up and hit that publish button.
Goalsetting,
Vandanš”
@vandan_jhaveri