Is Substack work, or is it play?

because oh boy, do I want that bestseller badge

I show up here on Substack thinking: I refuse to make this miserable.

It almost sounds juvenile as I write it, but … I do what I want! This is a space I come to have fun, not to work.*

The whole point of building something for ourselves is for our days to be different, not to reconstruct our corporate experience, right?

But holding on to that idea, that vision for how this should feel, isn’t really working for me. Because at the same time, oh boy, do I want that bestseller badge, and the dashboard numbers to tick up. (You can take the girl out of the stakeholder review, but it’s not so easy to take the false urgency out of the girl.)

So I avoid things I know I should be doing; then I feel bad that I’m not doing those things.

I have a specific idea of how I want to show up here, and what I want the next few months to look like. And I worry about how I’m going to fail if it doesn’t go exactly that way, which I know is bananas.

And I know I’m going to have to do some things I won’t totally enjoy in order to get there.

I’m clinging to the dream. Mad at myself, and ashamed, and stuck.

Last weekend my six year old was sobbing in the pool, crying that half of him wants to go down the big water slide - and he wants to do it TODAY!!!! NOT NEXT WEEKEND!! - but the other half of him does NOT, AT ALL, want to go down the slide.

My mini me. 🥹

forcing, forcing forcing

Last week, it was setting up an LLC.

This week, it’s an email.

Orbit - the Substack dashboard that shows your relationships, not your email open rate - undeniably needs a weekly email moment. Who’s showing up in your orbit that you haven’t talked to, who went quiet, what new friends should you make?

Claude has flagged this lack of an engagement loop repeatedly as the biggest product gap. I agree. And - I would genuinely like to receive that email!

It’s extra funny, to me, because I’ve built it before. At Ellevate, a “personalized community digest” was one of the things I built that remains on my resume today - a host of custom endpoints, special SendGrid triggers, a whack-a-doodle hand-written HTML template that was so long that Gmail truncated it. If you built email templates in a time before AI and wanted them to render moderately well in different clients, you know.

It was a good email! It drove a lot of engagement!

So - I know it’s right. I’ve literally built it before. And when I sit down to build it now - total. physical. repulsion.

Meanwhile other ideas on my list (a little panel within Substack that shows what you and the person you’re replying to have talked about before; a new capture of people commenting alongside you who you should get to know?) are cool, fun ideas. They’re novel. I want to shut out the world and build right now!

So this is kind of about the email - but like all things, it’s actually about me, and the self-management that solo building requires, when you don’t have a team and a boss and OKRs and a deadline after which you clock out.

I worry I’m turning my special space into a place where I’m being told what to do.

And I don’t want to do the right thing to do!

why the grip

I’ve been so protective of this space - the one place I do what I want and I’m not performing. I’m afraid of building something on the side - taking a risk - and having it suck more than my full time job. Afraid I’ll build my way into another role I don’t like, for less money.

So “only do what’s fun” is insurance against exactly that. Nothing un-fun allowed!

I know I need to lower the stakes dramatically, and care a lot less.

As they say - something has changed within me - maybe this next phase doesn’t need the space protected so tightly.

it comes back around

Here’s what I actually did about the email… nothing. I backed all the way off and decided I don’t need to do it right now.

Then one day on the train, I came back around to wanting to build it, pulled to it. I found myself working on it, forgetting it was something I guilted myself about for weeks.

Reflecting on this, I did a quick search in Magpie, and found a voice note from February.

"And if I'm trying to control every step instead of letting something unfold then sometimes I can't get as far down the path in order to even find those options and I feel like I'm just stuck spinning."

I knew in February, but gripped anyway. This is me writing it down again, and again, so maybe I remember.

It’s pretty clear to me I can’t both be “successful” and guard this space so tightly. It’s never gonna work if I can’t let myself off the hook.

And I don’t have to protect a tiny cage of freedom… I can choose to feel expansive. Freedom big enough to include things I should do, and big enough to let go of a should and trust I’ll want to do it someday. Big enough, maybe, to have fun and want the bestseller badge too. It could all be bigger, actually.

I have to practice having a little more fun, giving myself a little more freedom, and not assume that skill will magically appear someday.

It doesn’t matter how fast anyone else is going. It matters if I’m enjoying the ride, today.

So I’m building the email. Not because it’s the right thing to do - because once I let go of it being something I have to do, I found myself wanting to do it.

Funny how that works?

He went down the slide, by the way. I went first; then he let me push him, just a little.

Remind me when I forget tomorrow.

---

* The fun we’re having, specifically: Tiffany Soroko DM'd me about her time audit a while back, and after asked "okay, I think we're friends now - could we be friends now?" Answer - yes, absolutely. Now she, Jen Nordhem, and I - three new internet friends with July birthdays - are throwing a joint virtual birthday party on the 26th, cake included. You're all invited, obviously. RSVP

---