While I’ve dropped Substack, it most definitely was not a waste of time for me.
However to realize this, I had to let go of my initial plan of what I wanted to do with it and instead be open to what opportunities were emerging from it itself.
So yes, my initial plan was to move over to Substack and get rid of my WordPress hosted website to reduce my costs.
This didn’t work out due to a myriad of factors that made Substack more frustrating to use than WordPress and thus limited how I wanted to structure and organize my work upon it.
But over the last day in committing to drop Substack and transferring my work I had done on it over to my website, something dawned on me in reflecting upon this work as a whole, particularly with regards to the way people were writing on the platform.
Simply put, the writers on Substack are phenomenal at describing vertical development without the need to use words like “vertical development.”
They are able to do this by using simple, relatable terms for growth and development that actually have meaning for most people.
If I could describe this even more succinctly, I’d say that they are using extremely simple metaphors to describe growth and development.
So what seemed like a waste of time, trying to move over to Substack, was anything but.
If anything, it emerged as a learning opportunity for me, to see how I can break down and humanize my own work as well.
One final thing to note. What’s also interesting about this all is how it embodies the shift from a Self-Authoring Mind to a Self-Transforming Mind. It’s about letting go of plans and focusing on intentions instead which is about embracing uncertainty and the opportunities that emerge from it.