It has only taken me 1000 days to feel complete with my blog!
I write everyday. I also publish (almost) everyday. It took me 6 years to build this habit and make it effortless (Wu Wei). Once the daily writing habit is set, I was greedy to share it with my community. I shared in social media and slowly in publications and my writings got fragmented in multiple places. 3 years ago I started a blog and I started it purely to keep all my writing from everywhere (from LinkedIn, substack, medium, WhatsApp, notion etc) in one place.
Notes that are worth preserving and sharing is what I wanted to put in my blog. I did it. For 250 days I shared without any hesitation. Then a hesitation creeped in as I started seeing churn in the blog audience.
I honestly don't care if people leave as audience building is not my goal with the blog. However the researcher in me was curious to know why people leave. I got an insight based on a few interviews that their email box was filled with Karthi, Karthi, Karthi (from my daily writing) when they open it after a period of time. That is when I understood the real problem.
As long as I don't dominate their inbox they are fine being in the mail list and when it is super valuable they don't want to go away despite the annoyance of daily emails. This made me reflect more deeply.
I do the same thing. Especially when good creators become sellers. Gosh! my mailbox is filled with 3 more days, 24 hours, last chance and the same creator sells the same damn course at 60% offer in the Black Friday. These created urgencies are annoying. I deliberately let go of some of my subscriptions as I felt the annoyance >> value they created. This experience made me stop writing in my blog but I continued writing whatsoever. But a part of me was unhappy that I am not using the blog for my original intended purpose: "Saving my notes in one place".
I have been on and off with my blog. Recently I found a way to keep my notes, not dominate inboxes and share value every week without doing much work. yup!
I found the publish only feature in Ghost that is super useful. Now I publish all my writings in my blog but not send out as an email. That feature is an inbox saver 🤪
Now I can write my Sunday snippets as 3 big ideas from the week and writings from the week that I found useful as one newsletter from the blog itself. Sounds super simple but it took me 1000 days to figure it out. Either I am dumb or my ego did not allow me to be so flexible and stay true to the core.
Meditation helped me to drop that part of me and stay in the path of truth. I am grateful I found this neat trick. Now you can subscribe and you will see Karthi only on Sundays and no other day + no selling whatsoever. Pifo cohorts anyway get sold in a day (max a week) so I don't have to sell you anything anymore.
If you want to read my notes, you can always hop on to Karthis dot blog and read away. The best of all worlds is here and it is a happy place.
