I Turned One 🎈

I'm not a baby writer anymore. I became a toddler between writers.

Happy anniversary to me. 🎉

This month I’m celebrating my first year on Substack. Actually, scratch that. It’s my first year of consistently writing and publishing for an audience other than me.

It’s quite an achievement, to be honest, since this time I did not quit.

I tried before setting the course for the open sea, but I always got scared of sailing that far and abandoned the ship before even leaving the harbor. Maybe it was because of anticipating the unexpected moods of the water, or the possibility of sharks circling my boat. Or perhaps because I’m not the kind of captain who likes to adventure too far in the deep waters, afraid of mythical sea creatures.

If you’re into numbers, I didn’t get further than one essay.

My first attempt was 11 years ago when I started a programming blog. I did a presentation at a local conference where I talked about demystifying iOS app crash logs (I was an iOS app developer back then) and I accompanied the presentation with a blog post. But the next article was never written.

Sometimes I wonder what asset I could have grown if I had continued that initiative. With or without writing articles, the time has passed anyway. 🥲

My second attempt was 2 years ago, in September 2022, when I thought I was ready to start over, now with a blog anything but technical. I was then when I published the first version of The Lazy Way to Track Your Expenses issue, but nothing more than paying the ghost.io subscription for five months happened.

It was last year that I finally dared to sail outside the harbor.

So, Why Am I Still Navigating These Waters?

I’ve been asking myself the same question a lot lately.

Why do I want so badly to write and always come back and try again, failure after failure?

The answer is more emotional than I can express with words, but I will do my best.

I often fantasized that when I retire I will write a blog (or newsletter) to document my journey and share what I’ve learned with others. To have a community to connect with. I get energized when I share my software engineering knowledge with my team, so this seemed something I’d love to do for a wider audience.

So, I asked myself “If I won the lottery and I didn’t have to work for money anymore, is writing something I’d do for the rest of my life?”. Answering this question is not straightforward, so I’ve set myself a 12-month experiment to answer it.

Setting a smaller deadline could have been too easy. I had 3-month long projects in the past (like Peppermint and API Seed, my open-source projects) and successfully delivered them. Now, I needed something that felt like a lifetime, so 12 months seemed to be the sweet spot, to test my hypothesis that this is something I would do for retirement.

The second reason I’ve decided to start writing is thanks to Jordan Peterson who, after watching one of his many interviews, convinced me that writing is the best and most efficient way to become articulate in my speech. As an introvert, this is something I’ve struggled my whole life with. I’ve always found it hard to organize my thoughts and arguments on the fly, and even harder to coherently deliver them in conversations.

And this sucks because maybe I had good ideas and they got rejected because I failed to argue them. Sometimes, I wonder how many opportunities I have missed because of not being articulated.

Washed away by the Waves

With these two WHYs in my sleeves, I crafted an objective to validate my assumptions and gave myself one year to achieve it.

How it turned out and what I learned in my first 12 months of writing is a story for next time.

One thing is sure, navigating the deep waters is quite a journey, and I’m far from being done. Let’s see where the waves will take me next.

—Alex

PS: Ideally, to be sustainable as a retriment activity, writing should also serve as a source of income and partially cover my lifestyle. However, I wanted to see if this could be an intrinsically driven activity and unlink it from any external motivating factors. Thus, for the time being, any income is donated.