It’s a story as old as the hills.
Man gets sudden flurry of inspiration.
Starts a ‘weekly’ newsletter.
Posts four issues.
Never to be heard from again…
That’s more-or-less the story of ‘Full Stack Thinking’ so far.
Iteration & Motivation
When I started this newsletter back in May of this year, I tried to articulate exactly why I was starting it in the very first issue.
To save you reading issue #001, I can summarise the reasons I gave as the following:
Identifying the signal admist the noise of the internet.
Documenting my thoughts for posterity (and sanity).
At the time I’d convinced myself of reason no.1 - it seemed like something genuinely worth shooting for, but it didn’t jump out at me conceptually until I’d talked myself into it.
Reason no.2, on the other hand, was the organic reason. Putting pen-to-paper on my thoughts on a regular basis an instinctive draw to starting my own newsletter.
After posting the first couple of editions, it became clear very quickly that the second reason carried a lot more weight for me.
I found myself wanting to write more frequently than ever, but I felt completely hamstrung by the thematic constraint reason 1 was imposing.
Fever To The Format
To compound that problem, I’d made the oh-so-clever mistake of picking a snazzy format to write in.
I really liked it, and I still do. But it was yet another constraint I had unwittingly added into the mix.
Another reason not to write.
“It was the horcrux I never meant to make“
- Lord Voldemort, on the woes of newsletter-formatting
I’ll be honest, I think the format fit the “Full Stack” theme perfectly. And I was damn proud of it.
An opening section for weekly, blog-like musings. Followed-up with my selected highlights from the internet (the ‘signal’ amongst the noise), with quotes to boot. And finished with a smattering of the super-impressive (heavy sarcasm implied) things I’d been up to that week.
What could go wrong?
Well, clearly life doesn’t fit into neat little buckets like those, and neither did my weekly browsing habits.
It wouldn’t have been impossible to keep up, but the format I chose was just another thing getting in the way of what I actually wanted to - write.
The Phoenix Rises
They say most podcasts fail within the first 7 episodes, but I didn’t even get that far before I dropped the ball.
And it took me another 6 months to pick it up again.
Comparing this soft re-boot of the newsletter to the reincarnation of a revered mythical creature is heavily tongue-in-cheek, don’t worry.
But the rebirth analogy is useful - I’m not simply deleting the back-catalog (all 4 of them..) and starting afresh.
If anybody does choose to read the newsletter going forward, I’d like to keep the evidence that I failed fast and pivoted. I don’t think there’s any shame in that.
So what next?
Well, I start writing weekly again, about what I really care about at the time, but without the burden of theme or format to weight me down.
What do you really care about?
Bitcoin, comedy, technology, football, politics, film-making, science - my interests are broad and so should the writing be.
Going forward this newsletter will be what it should have been from the beginning: a place to share my thoughts on any and all of these topics, as and when they become relevant.
Why not just journal?
A good question. My answer is two-fold:
Accountability - posting weekly in public *should* help keep me consistent.
Synthesis - writing on the internet demands a higher quality of work than writing a weekly journal entry in private. I want this medium to force me to challenge and develop my own thinking in a way that journalling would not.
What will it look like?
Well, any good pivot deserves a commensurate rebrand to back it up.
From next week, this newsletter will have a new look and feel entirely, so keep your eyes peeled for something diffferent.
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