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Season's greetings + wrapping up the newsletter challenge
jacobm.substack.com

Season's greetings + wrapping up the newsletter challenge

Jacob Mørch
Dec 20, 2021
2
Share this post
Season's greetings + wrapping up the newsletter challenge
jacobm.substack.com

Greetings friends and strangers!

I hope you’re getting into the holiday mood wherever you are. I don’t have much else to say this week than Merry Christmas, so I’ll keep this one short.

This is the 20th edition of this newsletter, which means I’ve completed the challenge I gave myself on August 9th: do publish one new newsletter every Monday for 20 consecutive weeks. Why? As I wrote back in August..

I think 20 is enough to find answers to two important questions:

1) Do I enjoy this enough to continue? This is a prototype, remember. If I really enjoy it, great, continue writing. If no, I give myself permission to quit after those 20 editions, because then at least I’ll know I gave it a serious attempt.

2) Does anyone care? Compound interest takes time. Building an audience takes time. Finding a voice and a set of topics to write about which resonate with people takes time. I think 20 newsletter sendouts is enough time to see at least some indications of traction. The harsh truth is this: if I can’t make a serious number of people care after 20 editions, I should probably take the hint and go do something else with my time. Life is too short to keep doing things that don’t reach product/market fit.

Having completed the challenge – what now? Will I continue writing? Probably, yes. The weekly publishing schedule is an excellent forcing function to get myself to write on a regular basis, which I believe is a good thing. But I’ve changed my mind before, so time will tell!

My most popular posts so far

Looking back at this “season” of the newsletter, I checked out the stats from the last 20 posts to see what resonated most. Here are the top 5 posts according to my readers, as sorted by number of email opens:

  1. Annual Review season is here! (Last week’s post took the top spot!)

  2. My $20.000 Bet on The Future of Art: Part One (the first NFT post from back in August).

  3. When do you exit the DeFi rollercoaster? (How to think about exiting high-risk crypto bets)

  4. Jacob's Journal #1: Prototyping the Writer's Lifestyle (The post that kicked off this 20-post experiment)

  5. The Constitutional Bounceback: How I made a 20x Return on a Donation (About weird things that happen when you play around enough in cryptoland)

My personal favourites

I found those stats interesting, because they don’t overlap with my own favourites at all. If I could vote on my own posts, none of your top 5 would make the list!

Instead, I would recommend these 3 – feel free to check them out when you need a break from Santa, gingerbread lads, gift galore and all the rest of it.

  1. Infinite Entrepreneurship - A Philosophy for Work and Life

  2. A Life Well Managed: A Simple Framework for Living

  3. How to Apply Leverage to Create Outsized Results

Merry Christmas! 🎅

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Season's greetings + wrapping up the newsletter challenge
jacobm.substack.com
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