This is a story about writing. And motivation. And motivational written Notes on Substack. And of course Nirvana. A fallacy.
The day after creating Substack felt pretty good. I was motivated to write, was glad to have found this well-intentioned community on Substack and stumbled upon the Notes tab.
In there was what seemed to be paradise. “How I got 1000 Subscribers from one note”. “How I got from $0 to $2000 in six months”. “How I quit my full-time job to become a writer”. And so on. I think you know it.
Between many people who made it on Substack, the rest seemed to be giving (or rather selling) tips on how to be successful on Substack. This gave me a feeling of motivation to start writing.
So I did. And nothing happened. One view after some days. No subscribers. No paid subscribers.
“Maybe the next post will change it…”. So I published the next one. And again. Nearly no interaction. This led to me questioning myself if what I write about is really interesting for others.
Shortly before pausing my posting on Substack, I saw a short movie mentioning the Nirvana Fallacy. As Harold Demsetz defines it, the Nirvana Fallacy is the informal fallacy of comparing actual things with unrealistic, idealised alternatives.
I noticed that I’ve fallen for the fallacy. I only compared myself to those who already had thousands of subscribers and could make a living from it. After this realisation, I more often noticed all of those Notes having 0 or 1 likes between the massive amounts of Notes showing off flashy subscriber and income numbers.
Now I’m more than ever motivated to write this blog. But as I’ve written in my post about starting to blog, my main focus still is to share stuff I’m interested in. If this leads to someone liking the posts or subscribing to my blog, I’m more than happy.
I have a full-time job which I enjoy and which pays for my living; thus I don’t have to pressure myself to make money from writing. I solely write because I like to write. Hopefully, it stays this way and Nirvana only influences me by myself listening to their music!
P.S.: I’m genuinely interested in the view numbers of this post. Reading all the flashy Notes I’ve mentioned before, “writing about writing” should be very successful on Substack. So let’s see.
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P. S.: I’m not a native speaker and my posts are not written by an AI, so please look over possible writing errors 🙂