Patience for Substack Writers
Patience for Substack Writers
Or how to succeed on Substack while really trying
Substack requires patience. A lot of patience.
I’ve always thought having patience meant being able to wait in a long line without being a jerk.
But it’s legit suffering. The actual definition of patience is the “calm, uncomplaining endurance of pain [and] affliction.”
Pain and affliction. We’re talking Middle Ages pain and affliction, which is when the word first came into use. Think: Medieval torture devices like the rack, the breast ripper, and the head crusher.
It can be painful to watch others gain a gazillion subscribers in a day (or so it seems) while you trudge along, working hard, writing (writing, writing), and going (largely) unnoticed.
Studies show that uncertain waiting periods are the most suffering-inducing. One of the questions I’m asked most often in my work with Substack writers is, How long do you think it will take me to ______ [earn an income, quit my job, get x number of subscribers]? To which I always say, It depends.
I speak from experience. Yes, I’ve seen tremendous growth with Substack Writers at Work and quite good growth on my author Substack and the serialization of my memoir Cured.
But there were two long years when I wrote a Substack called Start with a Question that got zero traction. I mean zero. Zero as in I don’t think I got a single new subscriber in two years. Two years.
It wasn’t the quality of my work; my Substack was later chosen as a featured publication. It wasn’t that I wasn’t patient; I knew Substack was a long game.
It was my approach to patience. I assumed being patient meant just waiting.
Patience doesn’t = passivity
Patience doesn’t equal passivity. Sarah Schnitker, an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Baylor University, is a patience scholar. She writes about the four dimensions of patience.
We can be
patient and not assertive (passive),
assertive and not patient (the jerk in line),
not patient and not assertive (passive-aggressive/stewing),
patient and assertive (calmly moving toward our goals).
We want patient and assertive.
This combination is Aristotle’s golden mean. (Enter patience as a virtue.) On Substack, patience means staying between two extremes:
recklessness and pushing toward the goal and
disengagement and giving up.
Pushing is a deficiency of patience; disengagement and giving up is an excess of patience.
We want a calming, efficient, fun blend of patience and assertiveness.
The 3 qualities needed for calm, efficient, fun Substack success
After two years of (literally) zero growth, I was lucky enough to be part of the beta run of Notes. It was a blast. It started with very few Substack writers and the Substack team.
The writers were primarily heavy hitters, our Substack superstars. And the three things I learned from them changed me:
They had total confidence in their Substacks.
They were pros—the writing mattered and so did the numbers.
They never doubted that Substack was their home and that they belonged.
These three qualities (knowing what my Substack is and how to make it part of people’s lives, being a pro, and feeling like I belonged) gave me patience and assertiveness.
I knew what I wanted and how to get it. And I did.
Patience and assertiveness can be taught
The golden mean of patience and assertiveness aren’t difficult when you feel connected and supported.
Impatience occurs when we think others impede us from achieving our goals (e.g., Get out of my way to the car ahead of us in traffic). That’s suffering.
The key is to reconnect with the larger picture and the Substack network. (If it sounds like I’m preaching the religion of Substack, which I’m pretty sure it does, it’s because I’ve been listening to Yale’s theology podcast lately. Highly recommended.)
How to practice Substack patience
When you feel out of balance and impatience creeps in, when it feels like you should be growing faster with more subscribers, likes, shares, comments, etc., try this. It’s based on Dr. Schnitker’s work:
⇢ STEP 1: Note any slippery FOMO that might be occurring and disregard it.
⇢ STEP 2: Identify the primary painful emotion behind it—anger, sadness (including loneliness), fear (anxiety, dread, panic), disgust (contempt), shame (embarrassment).
⇢ STEP 3: Acknowledge that it’s okay to feel this way—you’re a human.
⇢ STEP 4: Reframe—not in a pollyannaish, everything’s-great way but a this-sucks-and-it-could-also-be-a-good-thing way.
⇢ STEP 5: Connect—get on Notes, come to the Substack Writers at Work Office Party (free to all), (yes) join the Cohort, and/or just take a moment and remind yourself that you belong on here.
And get back to the golden mean: patience and assertiveness.