The Substacker's Credo

TigerBites #1

The legendary English DJ Andrew Weatherall was famous for having a particular phrase tattooed across both his arms, owing from a chance encounter with a local fisherman in Cork county. It said ‘Fail we may, sail we must’. It was a mantra that would become forever be associated with Weatherall right upto his death in early 2020.

When I started writing online in March of the same year, I didn’t think it was going to become a permanent fixture in my life. A one-off essay would soon morph into a Substack side-hustle, which eventually became a good enough reason to quit my last professional gig in November 2021 to do this full time.

Two and a half years later, my writing process hasn’t changed all that much. It mostly comes down to finding a balance between content consumption and content production - a task that’s far easier said than done. Like a whaleshark risking massive indigestion, I consume an ocean’s worth of content in different formats everyday, attempting to parse through gallons of information to pick out quotes, anecdotes, references and ideas that I think could add richness to my essays.

The tricky part is knowing when to draw the line between passive consumption and active writing. The border between research and procrastination can be dangerously porous. Let your guard down and you’ll suddenly find yourself knee-deep in a Wikipedia rabbit-hole reading about the history of pro-wrestling in Mexico. What’s worse is you won’t have any memory of how you got there (and often no map to find your way back to where you were). To be able to sit down and focus on a daily and hourly basis is a constant struggle - an ongoing battle that I’m still figuring out how to win on a consistent basis.

What has changed for me in the last two and a half years is the expectation I place onto any single piece of work. When we started this adventure with Tigerfeathers, I used to imbue the weight of my hopes and dreams into whatever piece was queued up to be published next. I used to think that the next piece would be the one, the one that would bring in thousands of new subscribers, the one that would definitively validate my pursuit, the one that would unleash new connections and opportunities, the one that would signal to the high chiefs of the Internet that they needed to stop what they were doing and pay attention to what we were doing.

I don’t think that way anymore.

For one, that is unfair pressure to place onto yourself (or any single piece of output). And two, I’ve realised the Internet doesn’t really work that way. 

If you peel back the curtain behind your favourite Internet creators - podcasters, writers, Youtubers, artists, streamers - you will likely find a long trail of output that leads up to their privileged positions at the head of their respective tables. These paths are almost always long and winding. They are typically rough around the edges early on before gradually becoming more polished the longer someone has been in the game. They alternate between stretches of gruelling uphill climbs and thrilling breezy descents. They require commitment and thick skin. They are beset with pitfalls and distractions.

What each of these creative paths has in common, regardless of the domain, is the conspicuous lack of shortcuts. There is no 2-minute-maggi option when it comes to creative success.

The best in the business demonstrate that you have to do the work, over and over again, getting better as you go along, before earning the right to see the results you imagined when you first set out to start creating on the Internet. That’s what I’ve learnt. That’s what I’m learning.

The dangers of having early success as an online writer is that it seduces you into thinking that you’re entitled to every one of your essays being a ‘hit’. And if you’re pinning your satisfaction on the measurable outcomes and responses generated by any single piece of output, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. You won’t always get the result you’re looking for. Even Ronaldo doesn’t score every game.

This is trickier still for me, because I tend to write chunky pieces that can take several weeks to put together, meaning that my feedback loops are longer than they would be for someone writing a daily or weekly blog. If I write something that doesn’t resonate with my intended audience it can take a while before I have the chance to make up for it. I’ve found that the only way to keep sane throughout the creative grind is by extracting your reward from the process long before you hit ‘publish’.

“Fail we may, sail we must”.

There’s a certain humility you acquire when you don’t get the response you envisioned for a piece of work you felt strongly about. Especially if its something you put your heart and soul into. Especially if its something you worked on for a long time. Especially if you were convinced it was good.

I don’t think you can ever insure yourself completely against the risk of your work not being received the way you anticipated. It’s part of the gig. But there is a perspective shift you can nurture that obviates the need to worry too much about this eventuality.

“You are only entitled to the work, never to its fruits.” — Bhagavad Gita

Jack Butcher is one of my favourite Internet creators. He’s a visual artist that’s developed a brand around his signature minimalist depictions of profound ideas, concepts and theories. I once heard him say on a podcast that ‘for any creative work, the joy must come before the jury’. This statement might not be verbatim, but the sentiment is certainly accurate. And I’m inclined to agree.

As we shape the early foundations of Tigerfeathers, I don’t panic over the ‘performance’ of any single essay anymore. Instead I think about how each piece will eventually fit together into a broader body of work that will someday offer something to someone curious enough to enter our little corner of the Internet. It’s not about any one piece. It’s about all of them, and how they perfectly or imperfectly contribute to the assembly of the Tigerfeathers puzzle. It’s about chasing my own curiosities and building a treasury of knowledge and a record of public thinking. It’s about constructing a library of quality work over time and trusting the Internet to do its magic. I’ve basically swapped out the temptation for a quick fix in exchange for a seat as a disciple at the Church of Compounding.

In this regard I’m reminded of a quote written by the social reformer Jacob Riis, colloquially known as The Stonecutter’s Credo, that hangs in the locker room of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs. It says:

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it—but all that had gone before.”

Truth be told we have far more work ahead of us than behind. We are closer to the start of our compounding journey than the end. But we’re on our way, and for now, that’s enough.