Ask successful people how they got to where they are - and you’ll tend to hear the same thing. Some variant of Oh I Worked So Hard Sisyphus Would Cry.
Which is probably true. But it’s also insufficient. Worked so hard at what, exactly?
I started this blog fairly recently, and right away I knew it would get no traffic on its own - Substack does not organically promote content (unless that content already has decent traffic). So the minute I heard people talking about posting consistently, I thought: absolutely, I should keep this in mind. But…
I also thought - this seems to be the most common advice, and yet it feels the least useful. My inner simulator was saying something like: hmm, this sounds good, and it probably is good. But it doesn’t solve the fundamental issue I think most people are concerned about: “How do I get people to actually read my blog?”.
When you ask people for advice on how to get good at dating, the most common advice is: “Just be yourself”.
Now, if you’re already great with girls/guys, that’s great. But you wouldn’t be asking for advice if you were already great with the opposite sex.
I think some people are afraid of approaching things too mechanistically, even for themselves. The more detail you go into, the more programmatic things seem.
If you tell a person “Ask her deep questions, but not too early on, and try to mix the deep questions with jokes and teases so it never gets too heavy” it will help them far more than “Just be yourself”. But it starts becoming more mechanistic. You can go into even more depth than that, which I suppose then makes things more difficult to grasp and more mechanistic. But this is a deep problem for lots of people, so why would you not want to go deeper?
If you listen closely, you should be able to seperate the dull thud of vague advice from the colourful orchestra of specific advice.
We’ll use growing on Substack as a case study here: I haven’t been blogging long - but in the couple of weeks I’ve been here, I’ve heard a lot of different advice.
Some of it sticks out as veritable gold dust. And some of it… not so much.
Let’s go through all the advice I’ve heard.
Post consistently
Don’t worry too much about what to write
Post your blog to newsletter directories
Interact with others in ‘Notes’
Engage in cross-promotion (Blogging on each other’s platforms)
Ask for recommendations
Use social media (Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit) to promote
Be Authentic
Post about your blog in Facebook groups/communities
Look for people with Substacks similar to your own, follow people who follow them, and interact with THEM in notes
Ask people who are subscribed to you who have publications to recommend your blog
Actually write things people would want to read
Start a fun series (I actually can’t remember hearing this one but someone probably said it)
As I go through these, almost all of them are at least somewhat helpful, but if you look closely, some feel intuitively far more valuable than others.
For me, they are:
Look for people with Substacks similar to your own, follow people who follow them, and interact with THEM in notes
Ask people who are subscribed to you who have publications to recommend your blog
The reason they stick out is because their specificity paints a map in my brain, and the map seems to make sense.
However
Use social media (Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit) to promote
On the other hand makes me feel like growing on Substack is impossible. For anyone without a pre-existing audience on these platforms, it’s like saying ‘learn to speak in an alien language by first learning the language of these other aliens.’
I should make clear here that it’s likely every strategy listed above works - and will probably use almost all of them long term - but I am also certain there are many specifics and often hidden pre-requisites for them to work properly. The real value in them is figuring out what specific cases they work in and experimenting on how they can work for you (also simply thinking of how you can make them more effective gives a lot of value here).
What if instead of
Use social media (Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Youtube, Reddit) to promote
We had
Search ‘[Your Niche] subreddit’ into google
Click into each subreddit, and look at the rules of the sub
Add any that are even semi-open to self promotion to a list
Contact the moderators - there’s a section to the bottom right - of the ones that are semi-open to see if they’d be open to self promotion in your case (they sometimes have discretion).
Post your articles in the subreddits that you’ve determined will allow you to (and include a link!)
You can see how something like this points you in a very specific direction instead of simply saying ‘head North’.
There are some who are successful and go into very exacting detail on what they did to get there. These people are heroes. They give advice that’s specific, and often falsifiable - something the general advice often lacks.
But the most popular people seem often to be the ones who go into the least detail.
When The Specifics Arrive by Accident
In ‘Self-help is prompt engineering the unconscious’, Nathaniel Hendrix compares prompting LLMs to reading Self-help books. Sometimes Chat-GPT will fail to do something completely straight forward. So you change the prompt, maybe wording it a little differently. And that fails. So you ask it to think through its answer, or to take a deep breath. And then… you get the correct answer (maybe).
With humans, sometimes a self-help book tells you ‘YOLO’, and you tell it no. But then it says ‘Just Do It’, and you become Buddha. Or something.
Each book or seminar is an attempt at finding the right incantation that we can deploy to get the unconscious to behave itself. This maybe explains the diversity of approaches and the enduring appeal of self-help materials. The same prompt won’t work for every LLM, and our unconsciouses are constantly changing with the environment and our experiences.
Which mirrors perfectly what I’ve thought for a while - self-help seminars are predominantly injections of motivation + needle-in-a-haystack solutions consisting of hitting just the right combination of words, probably at just the right time. Which, okay cool, it does something, and it occasionally delivers a nice result. But it seems like it’s usually an accident (however LLMs are probably easier to coax than our own minds).
Now, I’m all for some motivation - but as any self-respecting human being knows, it’s generally fleeting. Unless you’re at the deepest trough of rock bottom, motivation is the road to becoming one of the 99% of dieters who fail. You need specifics to help you out - not only motivation.
Sometimes those specifics come in mindset shifts - but how do you install a new mindset? Where’s the instruction manual for that?
There is of course the issue of getting people to listen to the advice - but I think some good questions to ask are: if someone is 100% ernest and hard-working, will my advice help them? If I sell someone my hammer, will it actually stick a nail through wood? Or will the nail destroy the hammer?
Too often it feels like people are being sold the hammer that crumbles over the nail.
Having said this, I do have my own experience of self-help books prompting my subconscious to better results. Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations helped me through a very painful breakup and put words together that helped me in a way no other book or person did. It contained many instances of the correct combination of magic words.
But I read many books and listened to many people during that time - it’s hardly surprisingly at least one worked.
Surely we can do better.
I think the ultimate solution to accomplishing almost everything is some version of:
Look for specific ways to get and keep your motivation for doing the thing high
Look for specific ways to do the technical aspect of the thing as well as possible
Good self-help would be some combination of the two.
Good Sub-Stack growth would be some combination of the two.
And you better bet your bottom dollar achieving your dreams would be some combination of them too.
I don’t think I’ve written anything yet on specific ways to go about this ‘ultimate solution’; the truth is there are many specific ways, but in the spirit of this article I’ll try to have one up soon. In the meantime, I think the takeaway of keeping your ears tuned for advice that sounds specific and detailed is quite helpful. At a minimum it should keep you from spinning your wheels too much.
Takeaway: Attune your ears to specific advice, skip the vague stuff
See also: Advice gets good when it gets specific
Until next time.
I'm glad my ponderings managed to prompt your own reflections. :) Your dedication to writing frequently is inspiring and reminds me that it's something I should try to do every day too. I've enjoyed reading your substack, keep up the good work!
Liked this one. You seem to put a lot of thought into granular specifics (more than most people) which I find both helpful and interesting/unique