What I Learned In 1 Year of Writing A Newsletter

Hey Friends,

A year ago — in June 2022 — I started this newsletter.

I had so many ideas of what I wanted this newsletter to be: copywriting and creativity, behavioural science, business, or personal essays.

But after a year of writing Left to Write, I discovered an important insight:

The most important part of a newsletter isn’t the ‘news’ but the ‘letter’. That’s what makes it so special: It’s intimate. It’s personal. But I’ll get more on to this later.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve not missed a week and written to you 54 times in the twelve months. This newsletter has also grown from 2 people to over 170+ readers. I know it’s not astronomical numbers, but reframed as a percentage, that’s an 8600% growth.

I do want to say, from the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who has accompanied me on this journey. Thank you for investing your time with me. I know time is a precious resource, so I do really appreciate you spending roughly five minutes each week to read what I have to say.

It’s been great fun sitting down each week to write to you. Yes, there have been some weeks when writing has caused a lot of anxiety and terror. But looking back I’ve loved every moment of it.

I know what I write is often written from a personal perspective. The reason is that I believe that life is a single-player game. We all have a unique perspective, upbringing and experiences in life. So I can only share what works for me. I can’t tell you what to do. Only you, at the end of the day, can figure out what works and what doesn’t. All I can hope for is that my perspective causes you to consider a different viewpoint.

That said, I would like to share what I’ve learned this past year of writing a newsletter.

Just Do It Good Enough

I write every day.

Usually in scraps. Either scribbling in my notepad or WhatsApp-ing messages to myself.

But when it comes to writing a full piece, there are some days when I struggle and feel like I don’t have anything good to say.

This often is because I’m overthinking the piece and trying to be a perfectionist.

I’m never quite satisfied with anything. There’s always something wrong or that I could do better. So nothing I do ever feels quite right.

To overcome this, I’ve stuck a post-it-note in the middle of my Dell 30” monitor saying:

It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just good enough.

It’s a reminder to me that it’s better to be consistently good than occasionally great. Because when we’re consistent, compound interest works its magic.

And if I zoom out and think about my newsletter in decades, I see the act of writing and publishing each week as practice towards perfection.

Write for one person

I learned this from copywriting: Write for an audience of one.

When I started out, I used to overthink whether anyone would care about what I had to say. I would put so much pressure on myself to say something profound.

When you raise the stakes like that it becomes hard to meet those expectations.

I decided I would write to the young version of me. The version of me who is clueless and needs to read what the present me has to say. All I could hope for was that others would also get something out of it too.

Some weeks I write for a different one person. It could be a friend or my youngest brother, or my aunt.

It doesn’t matter who it is, but when you focus on writing to one person, it alleviates a lot of the pressure.

I don’t expect my writing to change the world, but if it’s valuable to even one person, then it’s worth my time to share what I know.

This is what hard feels like

Last year, a thread on Twitter claimed that 99% of people who start podcasts don’t make it to the twentieth episode.

If you released an episode a week, that is less than half a year.

I suspect that is also true of many blogs and newsletters.

I’ve certainly felt like giving up sometimes. But I remind myself this is what hard feels like.

Creating is hard because it requires being comfortable with uncertainty. There’s a tension that arises when I write. I don’t know what lies beyond the next sentence. And I don’t fully know what I’m going to say or what the final outcome will be.

I just have to trust the process and keep going.

Be you

When I started this newsletter, the conventional advice given to me was to niche down. This plagued me for months.

See, the problem with that advice is, what if you’re too curious about too many things?

So instead of restricting myself to certain topics or themes, I just thought fuck it, I’ll share my thoughts on things I observed in my own personal life. There’s a story behind each post, whether that’s a conversation I had, something I wish I could tell somebody, something I read or watched, or an interesting insight I’ve discovered in my personal and business adventures.

I think it’s a big reason why I’ve managed to stay so consistent. It’s so much easier to write about what interests me that week.

I don’t dispute that the niching down advice doesn’t work. I’m sure it does. But I suspect that advice is for people who want to grow an audience quickly. I’m not optimising for rapid audience growth. If I did, I would’ve stayed on Medium. I care more about attracting high-quality connections.

Which leads me to my last lesson.

Not a distribution strategy but a relationship builder

I’ve often said I’m not a writer in the artistic sense. I find it hard to invoke artful imagery with my words.

I’d say my writing style is the “honest voice”. It’s my personality. My point of view. And it’s what I meant by the most important part of a newsletter is the “letter” and not the “news.”

I’m not just showing you what I think but who I am and how I think.

Because although the what may attract an audience, the who and how will build a long-lasting relationship between me and you. It’ll help you decide whether you stay because of my values or unsubscribe.

It always makes my day when I hear you tell me what I wrote was insightful or that it made you pause and think, or that you needed to hear what I had to say.

It is my goal to disseminate ideas and insights from what I’ve learned so that it may help you in your personal and professional life.

Once again, I’d like to thank you for reading and being part of the journey. It really means a lot, and I appreciate you.

— Jason Vu Nguyen