most people will agree that it's good to play long games, but in the short run people do often get flustered or critical when you seem to don't have much to show for it. this is understandable. it's part of why so few people persist all the way through. the dip is disheartening
i don't really have a simple, succinct, clever answer for how to persist through the dip (that feels correct). persisting through the dip takes everything you got and then some. you could say it takes faith. you could say it takes delusion. idk. quitting is the likeliest outcome
idk if it answers the question to say "it takes dynamism", where "dynamic" is oppositional to "static". it takes an ayy lmao attitude. you have to be indifferent to results when it's helpful to be indifferent, but not in a totalizing way
in 2010 I wrote a v earnest, grandiose blogpost that even my most supportive close friends told me was absolutely terrible, wrong-headed, etc. I remember saying, "oh, ok, oops, guess I need a different approach, i need to write it differently". it never occurred to me to quit
this is kind of a mystery to me, too. idk for sure why i didn't quit. one explanation that feels roughly correct is that i felt so strongly in my heart that I was right abt the underlying thing, and so when people misunderstood me, i assumed i was just conveying it wrong
and like... there's a suicidal intensity to the depth of that feeling. like truly i felt that i'd rather die trying than give up. i was willing to talk to thousands of people and rewrite the thing thousands of times until i got it right, which is basically what i've been doing
here's a thread i wrote 5 years after the shitty blogpost, 8 years before today, where i was very much deep in the dip. are there any clues here?
sitting with it... right now i feel like... giving up just never seemed like an option. it would mean that the haters and critics were right. and i would rather die than admit that those miserable fuckers were right. i'd rather die in my wrongness than live in their rightness
and i don't mean right/wrong in the specificsβ when everyone read the shitty blogpost and hated it, they were right to hate it, and i accept that interpretation, but i refused to accept the prescription ("you should quit"). fuck you, i should get better!
idk, i'll have a better version of this thread in 10 years
maybe it's as simple as
i made a promise to this kid
and i intend to keep it
i made a promise to this kid
and i intend to keep it
a year after this i got my all-time high in 2012 of 19,550 hits/day, which made me kinda sick actually and made me decide to stop thinking in terms of traffic (I used to write abt local politics). so 2015 was very dippy when all those numbers dried up
i have to laugh whenever anyone calls me a grifter today because do you know how easy it is for me to get traffic, hits, etc by simply talking about politics? gender discourse etc? poking at cultural conflict fault lines? i've done it before and I could do it 50x better now
"oh yea that guy encouraging people to be kinder to each other, to be more prolific and follow their curiosity, what a grift" π
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