Redefining Success & Failure

Stay the course, reinvent, or accept defeat?

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

I’ve been hurting these past few weeks, and that has me thinking.

After two years of slow and steady growth on Substack, new subscribers have slowed and unsubscribes have increased. On an intellectual level, I fully understand it. After all, I am guilty of unsubscribing to thirty or so publications recently since I simply could not keep up with all of them.

I felt awful and immediately posted an apology on Notes.

In the whole scheme of things, the number of subscribers I lost was probably within an expected norm. But it still hurts. And it prompts me to question and reflect.

When I listen to my heart, I know that I have not failed (more on that in a moment) – so accepting defeat and giving up is not something I am considering. At worst, I had an unrealistic hope or expectation, and that can be recalibrated.

What does success look like?

It is hard to disengage from the Substack noise machine that pushes for a definition of success that is tied to the number of paid subscribers. Substack only gets paid when writers get paid, so of course this is an important part of their thinking – and rightly so.

I don’t have a paid subscription offering, so is success even possible for me?

Is it time to call “uncle” and stop publishing, or reinvent what I offer? Or just maybe this is an opportunity to reconsider what success looks like. For me, it’s never been about money, though I welcome the possibility. Writing is a creative outlet that allows me to connect with like-minded people and share life-affirming ways of being.

What I have always wanted is to build a community, and I believe that has happened. I base that achievement on the rich and thoughtful interaction with readers who comment on my posts.

Sadly, if you are reading this as an email, you don’t automatically see the comments. To help with that, I added a link at the bottom of each email that opens the Random Conversations homepage with access to all my posts, including their comments.

Reader comments fill my heart each week. They add to the conversation in deep and meaningful ways. Readers have also shared the most incredible feedback on my work and how it affects them, for which I am deeply grateful.

One said she reads my posts because they make her happy. Another told me they give her a sense of hope. Another shared that a little piece of her faith in humanity is restored each time she reads my work.

Additionally, two people ended our recent conversations by saying, “Keep writing.” What gentle words of encouragement, exactly when I needed them.

I cannot tell you how much these statements affect me. They touch me to my core. For me, this is what success looks like – and it’s an empowering reframe.

So, if allowing a space for this incredible community to form and flourish is my marker of success, then the choice is clearly to stay the course – with a bit of nuance.

Staying the course does not mean never changing. Instead, it opens paths for growth, and continuing to learn and grow is important to me. I would welcome having more incredible readers adding their thoughtful and inspiring voices to our community.

But how to do that.

Bringing you into the conversation

As I consider how to best grow this community, my thought is to turn to you. I want to get to know you better and, with that, how my posts can better serve you. It’s not surprising that I gravitate to initiating a conversation.

Would you have interest in joining me in a conversation – our own Random Conversation?!

I am not in any way asking for a commitment and I will not hold you to your response. This is something that is still in the thinking stage, and not at all ready to roll out. But it is at the stage of asking for input.

Perhaps you might enjoy knowing me a bit better – or you might have questions about anything I write about. I’ll be happy to offer my perspective or share my experience related to an area of interest to you. Of course it would come with a big dose of positivity. After all, that is the lens through which I view life.

This would not represent a reinvention, but more of an expansion that I can offer to my subscribers. And that feels right.

I would welcome hearing your thoughts in the comments.