Two years on Substack

A different kind of 1% achievement

I have now been writing a weekly essay on Substack for two years, so it seems like a good occasion to pause and reflect about what I've written. (I did likewise a year ago)

My original motivation for writing on Substack was to “use up” various essays that I had accumulated with the idea of a possible sequel to my book Bits to Bitcoin: How Our Digital Stuff Works. Initially, I thought that it would be a simple matter of working my way through the essays one per week, and then I would run out and be done. Instead, it has become an interesting new discipline in my life to continue publishing every week. I have also found that, far from simply using up the essays that I had written, I seem to be generating them faster than I can publish them. Or at least, I generate possible topics faster: I now have a list of some 70 subjects where I think my thoughts might be worth working out and sharing. However, it’s still a pretty slow process to get them to the point where I think they're worth sharing with anyone else.

Looking over the last year’s 52 essays, I count 35 that have some element of philosophy and 13 that have some element of technology. As was true the previous year, those two areas made up the vast majority of my writing; unlike the previous year, I wrote much more often about philosophy than about tech. There were also three essays with some element of music, another three about art, and three with some element of memoir. Some essays have more than one aspect, so the numbers don’t add up to exactly 52. The most popular post was Bad Art, closely followed by Two Different Ways of Being a Good Friend. The least popular post (in the last year) was Identity and Attraction as Dreams. It is always a surprise to me which essays attract interest or comments, and who I get the comments from. It has been delightful to hear from readers who liked something or wanted to offer additional perspectives, but I could never have predicted any of it.

Along the way, it has been interesting to have a weekly nudge from Substack and a weekly reward, telling me how many weeks I've been writing an essay and what fraction of writers I have beaten by having a streak that long.

A year ago (week 52), I had reached the level of beating 95% of other writers – I had joined the top 5%. I wasn’t really expecting much improvement from there, but I did have steady progress over the year. At week 61, I moved up to 96%. At week 69, I moved up to 97%. At week 84, I moved up to 98%. And, somewhat to my surprise, at week 95, I moved up to 99%. I’m pretty sure that’s all the improvement I’m going to see in this dimension.

In getting the numbers right for this post, I noticed for the first time that Substack had some glitches in their messages to me around the 98%-to-99% transition. On both weeks 93 and 94, they sent me a note congratulating me for 94 weeks and beating 98% of writers. Then on both weeks 95 and 96, they sent me a note congratulating me for 96 weeks and beating 99% of writers. I don’t know what was going on, or why they made those mistakes.

Because I’m not particularly concerned about these figures, I didn’t notice the duplication at the time. I just saw the usual email saying some version of “you’ve written for many weeks and you have a longer streak than many writers” and didn’t have any reason to notice that they had an error in the week count.

Since I didn’t get a message for week 95, I don’t know whether that was the magic number for getting to the 1% achievement level or not. Regardless, I’m well past that point now.

A year ago, I wrote:

I don’t know if I will be able to do another full year of weekly items, but I’m certainly continuing on the same course. My pile of candidate half-baked material is somewhat smaller than it was when I started, and doesn’t have as many items that are clearly ready to go as it did a year ago. Balancing that, I think I have developed my skills of both creating an initial rough draft and refining it subsequently.

It turns out that I was indeed able to do another full year of weekly items. And now, onward for perhaps another year.