My post âThe Piss Testâ was wildly successfulâin my Substack dashboardâs opinionâby increasing paid subscriptions 25% on the first day, and 50% in two weeks.
Iâm very pleased and gratefulâI think? I would like to know what it means, and hope you can tell me!
I write mainly to be useful to readers. Of the hundreds of things I might write, which can be most useful? Counts of restacks/retweets and Likes are one way to guess. Economists might say how willing people are to pay is the best measure of value. It can be misleading for many reasons, but itâs certainly a measure.
If the welcome tsunami of paid subscripts does reflect the value you received, I want to write more things like that. But did it? And âlikeâ in what way?
I worry a bit that I created clickbait by mistake. Most of âThe Piss Testâ was paywalled, following what the industry calls a âteaser.â âClickbaitâ means posts that have a compelling title or teaser, but the body does not deliver what they promised. Thatâs unethical, and I donât want to do it. It seems to me that the rest of the post does deliver what the public introduction says, but maybe Iâm mistaken? (I paywalled it mainly because I was concerned it would cause religious outrage.)
I didnât expect people to like the post at all. The day before publishing it, I said in a comment thread that âMy next Substack post will probably offend the few people who read it. Was that the best use of four daysâ worth of writing effort?â
Well, was it?
If you signed up with a new paid subscription (thank you!), why?
How did you feel after reading it?
If you want more like thatâcan you say in what way similar?
If it was unsatisfactoryâwhat were you hoping for that you didnât get?
More personal and more concrete
I frequently ask readers, and poll twitter: which of my projects would you most like more of next? Answers are about evenly divided, so thatâs not very helpful. (Although âwe want more of everythingâ is gratifying to hear!)
I may have been thinking about this wrong. Readers have recently expressed a desire for posts that are more personal and more concrete. (Thank you for the feedback!) This is very helpful, and is making me rethink. It shaped the following post, âSteam engine, startup, podcast, leaf devil.â
This is a âNews and Notesâ post; theyâre about The Making Of, discussing my process. In the March one I said Iâd do these monthly, but there was nothing much to say about April!
âSteam engineâ is about my self. Canât get much more personal than that! And itâs in the form of an audio monologue, which may feel more personal than text. (Full text is also available; I usually prefer that myself.) And itâs peppered with examples from my life.
Listener/reader feedback has been enthusiastic. So, perhaps I was thinking about âwhat to writeâ wrong. Maybe itâs not what I write about that matters to you, but how I write about it?
That might be uncomfortable to me. Writing is my medium, but I donât want to be âa writer.â What I care about is figuring out unusual things to get answers that make your life better. I try to be entertaining sometimes, but thatâs just because my explanations may seem quite dry without some humor. For me, itâs about the content, not the writing.
Thereâs another uncomfortable possibility: that you may find me interesting as a person, and read what I write (or listen) partly to learn more about me and feel a sense of connection. As an autistic hermit, this seems quite frightening!Â
And, as a Tantric Buddhist and amateur developmental psychologist, I want to lean into discomfort and be more open to personal connections. Both to expand my self and to be more effective in my work.
I intend to think harder about what Iâm trying to accomplish overall, and how best to do that. I want to have a clearer understanding of âwho am I working on behalf of?â and âwhat ways of communicating will be most effective for them?â
Podcasting: harder than it sounds
Iâve thought for a couple years that audio monologues could be the best way to communicate some figurings-out. Iâve made quite a few attempts, ten perhaps, all of which failed before âSteam engine.â Iâve found the technology surprisingly recalcitrant. Iâve also found it surprisingly difficult to sound coherent, and to avoid saying âum, you know, uhâ every two seconds.
Iâm getting slowly better, by doing it badly many times. âSteam engineâ was the first recording I considered minimally acceptable. I will keep at it. Iâll aim for⌠one audio episode per month, maybe?
When problem solving isn't enough
I had a lot of fun yesterday making this video clip from an interview with my spouse
. Itâs about how they work with clients who are already highly competent, as STEM professionals or in management, but have reached the limits of the systematic mode of being.A lot of my clients know themselves already to be good at solving problems. They're not flailing around in life not knowing how to fix problems. They already have a really good problem solving base. And what happens is that they get to a point where the problem solving isn't enough. Like, it feels like a problem, but a problem that has no solution.
Charlie is leading a relevant workshop in New York, September 14th and 15th: âLiberating Shadow: Discover a New Self-Possibility.â
Up next
History shows that my predictions of what I will write next are completely worthless.
However, I expect the next two posts to be:
âOblivious technical management rationalismâ: the next section of the software architecting chapter of the meta-rationality book; how not to do it.
âUnavailable dakini catalystâ: how falling in love with someone you canât get may blow up your whole carefully-shielded system of life, forcing you out of developmental stage four and into the storm-tossed ocean between it and stage five.
Lol, I somehow initially read "Plus: The Making Of" in the subtitle to refer to the making of Piss Buddha. And then was kind of relieved to realise it referred to something else, that's probably a level of insight into the artistic process we don't need :)
I'm liking the mix of stuff so far!
I'd been meaning to subscribe and this post just pushed me over the edge. Sensationalism sells, haha! The post was 'clickbait' in the sense that it was 'scandalous' but not in the sense that I felt cheated. Been around long enough to know what I was going to get. :)
I broadly divide your writing into two - things that are useful at 'work' (professional life, metarationality) and things that are useful at 'home' (personal life, selfing, vajrayana, shadow etc.). Being an introverted nerd, there is a lot of personal identification there. In my 20s, at the start of my career, getting a handle on technical work, becoming a 'good engineer' was very important. But with time, even at work, 'human issues' are becoming more and more important. I want to graduate from being just an engineer. Technical issues are in a sense easy. Working with messy human beings not so much. You can't really do metarationality unless you understand human beings and their interactions very well. And you can't do any of this if your personal life is in shambles, as I discovered through personal experience. So that's been the growth edge for me, not necessarily better technical understanding.
Like you, I value content over form. I'll read even if the writing was dry, though more entertainment isn't a *bad* thing. :)