If it is worth anything, I love your posts and how you engage with comments, especially how open you are to frank, respectful discussions. I've missed the last ones because I've had to cope with too many health issues.
Thanks, Andrea, I appreciate your kind words. And I'm sorry about your health issues. I wish we could all be healthy and happy all the time.
We need those discussions. All of us. Some people have others around them to discuss with, while we are some who don't. For us, the silence of the Internet can be killing.
A writer's inner dialog doesn't fool the writer into believing that he's talking to someone ;) That talk comes after publication, if it comes. And then it is very much valued. No matter how small and simple the text is.
It has been a pleasure reading your work, Jorgen. I always thought the idea of having so many stacks a bit weird honestly, because that just means you have much more work to do, and more stuff to keep eyes on.
I haven't been able to post anything on the one measly stack that I have, since I got into 9-5 work again. So I can't even imagine handling multiple stacks at once :")
Also, you wrote that you hoped to use your business related stacks for attracting customers, but there is a missing step there. Why would potential customers ever come to that Substack of yours? I think Substack is not the right place for it. Maybe LinkedIn was. But both you and me know how bad that got.
I feel like we have wasted our energies in the wrong places (or maybe places that were right initially but later became wrong). At this point, I don't even know what place is right anymore, so we gotta enjoy what we have for now, hehe.
Thank you. The amount of stacks really isn't a problem – it is similar to have several copybooks to write in, one for each topic. The writing doesn't get more difficult from that. Actually, this concept provides some kind of order, and by that, some level of freedom to spread the thinking and writing a bit further out within the limits set for each stack.
I refer to the business-oriented stacks from my company website, for instance, and have tried to sneak in a link here and there.
Apart from the general lack of will to follow a link out of the platform people are watching, there is another problem with exactly Substack: You will meet a wall as the first thing, if you are not already a user and already logged in.
That wall is called a "welcome page" by Substack, but it is the opposite: it scares people away, because it looks like a paywall. You'll have to give your email address as the payment, at first, and then the next step is usually to ask for some kind of paid subscription, people fear, and therefore they break off at that point.
The diminutive little link that can be pushed if you want to read the article without giving your email, is easy to not see at all, and it is too short, too little descriptive, to convince you that there is a real option here.
I agree that Substack isn't the right place for a business-oriented portfolio, but I had hoped that it would be. Me being naive, I admit, but what else do we have than hope? And if we never dare, we'll never win. Medium was a complete disaster, and there really are no other options.
WordPress or other CMS-based platforms allow you to do a lot more design and to create exactly what you want, but Google is in general not showing your own website in the search results unless you spend time and money on buying adwords and doing other tricks, and even then, you cannot attract much traffic to such a site anymore.
We have seen and had the luck to try out the wonders of the Internet, and now we have witnessed its decline.
What is generally the situation now is that there are billions of users, but you can't get in touch with any of them without paying some big tech for letting you.
I agree. Sadly, that is the state of the internet right now. We somehow have the most advanced connectivity options and yet can't go beyond our real life circles easily without bowing down to and pleasing the algorithms, or, as you said, simply paying up for more visibility.
Well, sometimes we can't even pay our way forward. I had a discussion with LinkedIn's support the other day, with several different people involved.
My questions were simply: 1) How can I buy a Premium subscription for my company, and 2) Can you guarantee that it will 4x my impressions, as you say in your advertising for the service?
To take the second answer first – it took a while to get it, but, basically they cannot guarantee anything, and they claim that my writing is the biggest factor when determining the number of impressions. Well, you and I, Sameer, we know that impressions come before reading – there will be no more readers if there are no more impressions, but apparently, the support at LinkedIn doesn't know that – and in any case, they were not willing to promise anything at all.
The first question was more weird: I live in Sweden, and my LinkedIn profile says that. Therefore, I cannot buy a subscription for my company, which is in Estonia. That's the typical American logic – they insist, in various situations, to write to me in Estonian language, for instance, most often machine translated, because they send a letter to me in my Estonian company. American big tech has no imagination to understand that it is possible to even be physically in a country without speaking the national language, and if I'm not even living there. Why can't they just talk to me in English, as was the language we used when I became a customer? At other times, they insist on speaking Swedish to me, because I live in Sweden. They almost never allow me to pick the language I prefer.
Well, in any case. I'll have to live in Estonia to buy a LinkedIn subscription for my Estonian company! Apparently, it might work to just set my profile to tell that I live there. I will still not be able to provide the company name and address for the receipt, and they refuse to issue an invoice, even though this is required by European laws – all companies operating in Europe must issue proper invoices, unless they are selling icecream on the beach or similar, where it would be impossibe.
Without a proper invoice, with company name and address, I might get trouble with the tax authorities. How many hundreds of millions of customers do they have, who are in a similar situation? Couldn't they find a bit of money to fix that invoicing problem?
Now I can do that, but what will happen with the automatic renewal, when it's time for that? When I have switched my country back to Sweden?
And, of course, what would be the purpose to buy anything if it will not help me gain some more visibility?
I think they have lost it completely. They are not seeing the people who are their users, and they do not care about their users' needs.
Most likely, these supporters weren't even from LinkedIn and had no special knowledge or abilities to do anything. In fact, this kind of support is very close to be a scam, in my opinion, as it isn't what it pretends to be. And LinkedIn's Premium subscriptions seem to be in that same category.
That's honestly worse than what I could imagine. They just don't care at this point.
Funnily, it ties back to the thing we were discussing in another of my comments on your post "the nature of things", that how the corporate world keeps getting hostile but apparently they all think it's normal.
We run into it everywhere. My guess is that we are, by large, dealing with a couple of generations in most countries who never experiences it differently and therefore don't know that it shouldn't be like that.
But I think that the companies have miscalculated things: Because, why would I buy this when it is so complicated and without advantages (and expensive, too)?
Most people today are thinking like that, more and more often. So people will stop buying Disney's cable TV and Microsoft's Office package, and all the other things that for a while were automatic purchases.
And after a while, there will be an aura hanging over such services that they are a scam. And then there's no return for them.
True. I already see plenty of videos on YouTube where people are actually promoting pirating games, apps, and movies as an appropriate response to corporate greed (and stupidity). Restores some faith in humanity (not because of piracy, but because at least people are revolting in some way.)
I like the idea of a book, Jorgen. I think like me, you have a variety of areas of interest and/or expertise. It's difficult until you hone in on one, find that group and where they live and begin connecting. I struggle with this. I feel in some ways I am not living up to my potential by focusing so much on photography when I have the other areas of interest. Nevertheless, it's working for me now for my meager intentions, which are not monetary btw.
Thanks! Focus isn't as attractive for me as the broad coverage of topics, but you are probably right in that it would accelerate success. Many people like to look at others as "a carpenter" or "a doctor" or whatever, not really recognizing the many other skills and areas of knowledge, or simply interests, that also describe that person.
You can be proud of your ability to shine through a defined talent that many recognizes and want to take part in by following you. Being talented is itself a skill, I guess, so that comes along with the actual talent you display – like the inner structure of a building that then, on the outside, may be of a certain design or for a certain purpose, but really, to a large extent, consists of the good and fundamental qualities of a building. People see the outside, and only you know how much work it takes to also make the structure work.
Well, thank you Jorgen but funny enough, I don’t consider myself too defined of a talent. I’m not exactly “Jack of all trades, master of none” but I have so many areas of practice, it’s really hard to be able to say I’m an expert in anything! I do want to ask you though: What would success in your writing look like to you? How do you define success?
I'm sure you have many talents or areas of practice, as you say. But you also manage to be quite consistent in the way you write on your Substack. And that's a talent in itself. Perhaps I should mention, as I have done on every occasion possible when the talk is about talent, that I don't believe that talent in general is something we are born with – it is merely a thing that we have learned to do well, or even just come to do a lot, thereby gaining some skills here and there in the area.
That is not to say that talent isn't good and valuable, it is just to say that all people have talents, even though it varies which ones, and all people can develop new ones. Some can become extremely good at something, and others may not be able to reach that level in that area, but, probably they are in one or more other areas.
About your question: There are many varieties of success.
One is about that feeling when something turns out well in the writing itself – when I feel that I managed to say something well.
Another is a general recognition from my surroundings that I am able to write – not with Pulitzer prizes or similar, but just a simple recognition, like when they know and are willing to admit that I can hang up a shelf on the wall or that I have the "talent" of riding a bicycle.
A third is when someone bids in to what I have written and adds their thoughts – because whatever I wrote inspired them to think and do that (like you do now).
A fourth is when someone genuinely recommends reading something I wrote to people who wouldn't otherwise get in touch with it.
A fifth, a bit abstract, perhaps, but it is when I have managed to find a place to publish it that isn't just an echo chamber, and where it isn't ignored, but where some people will read it, take it seriously, and let it become part of their input to shape their thoughts about the world.
So, in short, I don't need prizes or money to feel successful, I don't need a lot of back-padding and appraisal (even though that is nice), I simply need to know that some people see what I write and somehow get moved by it, considering it to be valuable input.
I think you're right. We all have talent in varying degrees and levels. I do think we carry in our DNA some leaning to certain areas. For example, there are so many famous musicians with children who followed in their footsteps. They may not have risen to the same level of fame, but their talent is evident.
I'm glad you have a clear idea of what success means to you. I admire your clarity with these things! I'm not sure I can answer my own question :) but it does start with a feeling of internal satisfaction such that if the other things after that didn't line up, I'd be ok.
If it is worth anything, I love your posts and how you engage with comments, especially how open you are to frank, respectful discussions. I've missed the last ones because I've had to cope with too many health issues.
Thanks, Andrea, I appreciate your kind words. And I'm sorry about your health issues. I wish we could all be healthy and happy all the time.
We need those discussions. All of us. Some people have others around them to discuss with, while we are some who don't. For us, the silence of the Internet can be killing.
A writer's inner dialog doesn't fool the writer into believing that he's talking to someone ;) That talk comes after publication, if it comes. And then it is very much valued. No matter how small and simple the text is.
It has been a pleasure reading your work, Jorgen. I always thought the idea of having so many stacks a bit weird honestly, because that just means you have much more work to do, and more stuff to keep eyes on.
I haven't been able to post anything on the one measly stack that I have, since I got into 9-5 work again. So I can't even imagine handling multiple stacks at once :")
Also, you wrote that you hoped to use your business related stacks for attracting customers, but there is a missing step there. Why would potential customers ever come to that Substack of yours? I think Substack is not the right place for it. Maybe LinkedIn was. But both you and me know how bad that got.
I feel like we have wasted our energies in the wrong places (or maybe places that were right initially but later became wrong). At this point, I don't even know what place is right anymore, so we gotta enjoy what we have for now, hehe.
Thank you. The amount of stacks really isn't a problem – it is similar to have several copybooks to write in, one for each topic. The writing doesn't get more difficult from that. Actually, this concept provides some kind of order, and by that, some level of freedom to spread the thinking and writing a bit further out within the limits set for each stack.
I refer to the business-oriented stacks from my company website, for instance, and have tried to sneak in a link here and there.
Apart from the general lack of will to follow a link out of the platform people are watching, there is another problem with exactly Substack: You will meet a wall as the first thing, if you are not already a user and already logged in.
That wall is called a "welcome page" by Substack, but it is the opposite: it scares people away, because it looks like a paywall. You'll have to give your email address as the payment, at first, and then the next step is usually to ask for some kind of paid subscription, people fear, and therefore they break off at that point.
The diminutive little link that can be pushed if you want to read the article without giving your email, is easy to not see at all, and it is too short, too little descriptive, to convince you that there is a real option here.
I agree that Substack isn't the right place for a business-oriented portfolio, but I had hoped that it would be. Me being naive, I admit, but what else do we have than hope? And if we never dare, we'll never win. Medium was a complete disaster, and there really are no other options.
WordPress or other CMS-based platforms allow you to do a lot more design and to create exactly what you want, but Google is in general not showing your own website in the search results unless you spend time and money on buying adwords and doing other tricks, and even then, you cannot attract much traffic to such a site anymore.
We have seen and had the luck to try out the wonders of the Internet, and now we have witnessed its decline.
What is generally the situation now is that there are billions of users, but you can't get in touch with any of them without paying some big tech for letting you.
I agree. Sadly, that is the state of the internet right now. We somehow have the most advanced connectivity options and yet can't go beyond our real life circles easily without bowing down to and pleasing the algorithms, or, as you said, simply paying up for more visibility.
Well, sometimes we can't even pay our way forward. I had a discussion with LinkedIn's support the other day, with several different people involved.
My questions were simply: 1) How can I buy a Premium subscription for my company, and 2) Can you guarantee that it will 4x my impressions, as you say in your advertising for the service?
To take the second answer first – it took a while to get it, but, basically they cannot guarantee anything, and they claim that my writing is the biggest factor when determining the number of impressions. Well, you and I, Sameer, we know that impressions come before reading – there will be no more readers if there are no more impressions, but apparently, the support at LinkedIn doesn't know that – and in any case, they were not willing to promise anything at all.
The first question was more weird: I live in Sweden, and my LinkedIn profile says that. Therefore, I cannot buy a subscription for my company, which is in Estonia. That's the typical American logic – they insist, in various situations, to write to me in Estonian language, for instance, most often machine translated, because they send a letter to me in my Estonian company. American big tech has no imagination to understand that it is possible to even be physically in a country without speaking the national language, and if I'm not even living there. Why can't they just talk to me in English, as was the language we used when I became a customer? At other times, they insist on speaking Swedish to me, because I live in Sweden. They almost never allow me to pick the language I prefer.
Well, in any case. I'll have to live in Estonia to buy a LinkedIn subscription for my Estonian company! Apparently, it might work to just set my profile to tell that I live there. I will still not be able to provide the company name and address for the receipt, and they refuse to issue an invoice, even though this is required by European laws – all companies operating in Europe must issue proper invoices, unless they are selling icecream on the beach or similar, where it would be impossibe.
Without a proper invoice, with company name and address, I might get trouble with the tax authorities. How many hundreds of millions of customers do they have, who are in a similar situation? Couldn't they find a bit of money to fix that invoicing problem?
Now I can do that, but what will happen with the automatic renewal, when it's time for that? When I have switched my country back to Sweden?
And, of course, what would be the purpose to buy anything if it will not help me gain some more visibility?
I think they have lost it completely. They are not seeing the people who are their users, and they do not care about their users' needs.
Most likely, these supporters weren't even from LinkedIn and had no special knowledge or abilities to do anything. In fact, this kind of support is very close to be a scam, in my opinion, as it isn't what it pretends to be. And LinkedIn's Premium subscriptions seem to be in that same category.
That's honestly worse than what I could imagine. They just don't care at this point.
Funnily, it ties back to the thing we were discussing in another of my comments on your post "the nature of things", that how the corporate world keeps getting hostile but apparently they all think it's normal.
We run into it everywhere. My guess is that we are, by large, dealing with a couple of generations in most countries who never experiences it differently and therefore don't know that it shouldn't be like that.
But I think that the companies have miscalculated things: Because, why would I buy this when it is so complicated and without advantages (and expensive, too)?
Most people today are thinking like that, more and more often. So people will stop buying Disney's cable TV and Microsoft's Office package, and all the other things that for a while were automatic purchases.
And after a while, there will be an aura hanging over such services that they are a scam. And then there's no return for them.
True. I already see plenty of videos on YouTube where people are actually promoting pirating games, apps, and movies as an appropriate response to corporate greed (and stupidity). Restores some faith in humanity (not because of piracy, but because at least people are revolting in some way.)
I like the idea of a book, Jorgen. I think like me, you have a variety of areas of interest and/or expertise. It's difficult until you hone in on one, find that group and where they live and begin connecting. I struggle with this. I feel in some ways I am not living up to my potential by focusing so much on photography when I have the other areas of interest. Nevertheless, it's working for me now for my meager intentions, which are not monetary btw.
Thanks! Focus isn't as attractive for me as the broad coverage of topics, but you are probably right in that it would accelerate success. Many people like to look at others as "a carpenter" or "a doctor" or whatever, not really recognizing the many other skills and areas of knowledge, or simply interests, that also describe that person.
You can be proud of your ability to shine through a defined talent that many recognizes and want to take part in by following you. Being talented is itself a skill, I guess, so that comes along with the actual talent you display – like the inner structure of a building that then, on the outside, may be of a certain design or for a certain purpose, but really, to a large extent, consists of the good and fundamental qualities of a building. People see the outside, and only you know how much work it takes to also make the structure work.
Well, thank you Jorgen but funny enough, I don’t consider myself too defined of a talent. I’m not exactly “Jack of all trades, master of none” but I have so many areas of practice, it’s really hard to be able to say I’m an expert in anything! I do want to ask you though: What would success in your writing look like to you? How do you define success?
I'm sure you have many talents or areas of practice, as you say. But you also manage to be quite consistent in the way you write on your Substack. And that's a talent in itself. Perhaps I should mention, as I have done on every occasion possible when the talk is about talent, that I don't believe that talent in general is something we are born with – it is merely a thing that we have learned to do well, or even just come to do a lot, thereby gaining some skills here and there in the area.
That is not to say that talent isn't good and valuable, it is just to say that all people have talents, even though it varies which ones, and all people can develop new ones. Some can become extremely good at something, and others may not be able to reach that level in that area, but, probably they are in one or more other areas.
About your question: There are many varieties of success.
One is about that feeling when something turns out well in the writing itself – when I feel that I managed to say something well.
Another is a general recognition from my surroundings that I am able to write – not with Pulitzer prizes or similar, but just a simple recognition, like when they know and are willing to admit that I can hang up a shelf on the wall or that I have the "talent" of riding a bicycle.
A third is when someone bids in to what I have written and adds their thoughts – because whatever I wrote inspired them to think and do that (like you do now).
A fourth is when someone genuinely recommends reading something I wrote to people who wouldn't otherwise get in touch with it.
A fifth, a bit abstract, perhaps, but it is when I have managed to find a place to publish it that isn't just an echo chamber, and where it isn't ignored, but where some people will read it, take it seriously, and let it become part of their input to shape their thoughts about the world.
So, in short, I don't need prizes or money to feel successful, I don't need a lot of back-padding and appraisal (even though that is nice), I simply need to know that some people see what I write and somehow get moved by it, considering it to be valuable input.
I think you're right. We all have talent in varying degrees and levels. I do think we carry in our DNA some leaning to certain areas. For example, there are so many famous musicians with children who followed in their footsteps. They may not have risen to the same level of fame, but their talent is evident.
I'm glad you have a clear idea of what success means to you. I admire your clarity with these things! I'm not sure I can answer my own question :) but it does start with a feeling of internal satisfaction such that if the other things after that didn't line up, I'd be ok.