I've Sent My Newsletter Every Single Week for the Last Seven Years. Here's the Biggest Thing I Learned.
No, it's not a hack.
I sent the first edition of my newsletter The Profile seven years ago.
I never thought it would lead me to quitting my full time job, seeing Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson share my work, and publishing a book, yet here we are.
One of the biggest things I've learned is that nothing in this life is guaranteed. Not trust. Not respect. Not luck.
But the one thing you can control is staying the course with a level head over a long period of time. If you focus on delivering a consistent, high-quality product, that’s when miracles happen.
I tend to be an emotional person who's rocked by every up and down (especially by the downs), but my husband once drew me the chart below and said, "The waves symbolize all the things life will throw your way. Your job is to be the red line."
But let me tell you, being that red line is damn hard.
I published my interview with New Balance CEO Joe Preston this week, and he gave me some solid training advice about my half marathon in April, which can also be applied to any endeavor.
He said:
“Make sure that you're pacing yourself. You don't want to overtrain. Some people come out too quickly, and they could get stress injuries. My encouragement to you is to try to find a plan with consistency to it, and make sure you don't overtrain within it as well.”
Consistency.
I’m convinced this is the secret to getting anything you want in life, whether it’s a dedicated newsletter readership, a romantic partner’s trust, or a marathon finish time you can be proud of.
Let me explain.
When I started training for my half, I came out hot. I kept thinking I could sustain a pace that was way too fast for me. I couldn’t. So, naturally, I hurt my knee, and I missed two weeks of training. I felt like an idiot because if I had just started slow, I could’ve actually made much more progress.
The question I am most often asked from fresh, happy, excited, energized, naïve newsletter writers is, “How do you think about cadence?” In other words, “How often should I send the email to my readers?”
My advice has always been: “It’s better to speed up than slow down.”
Like inexperienced runners just starting out, hotheaded writers often feel a burst of inspiration and energy in the beginning and mistakenly think they can write a daily newsletter for a long period of time. Unless you’re hyper-focused (and slightly masochistic), it can be brutal.
As someone who used to write a beast of a newsletter called “Term Sheet” every single day for almost three years at FORTUNE magazine, I can tell you that it’s not for the faint of heart.
I had to send that thing out from an airplane with crappy Wi-Fi, from California at 4 a.m. PST, from my great-grandmother’s house in Bulgaria using an iPhone hot spot.
Because to be consistent means keeping your promise to your reader (or your customer, your listener, your romantic partner, or yourself). And those people don’t necessarily care about your travel plans, bad Wi-Fi, and time zone change. They care about seeing you deliver on your promise. Those moments build into weeks, months, and years, and trust begins to compound.
The more consistent the action, the faster the compounding. In other words, the two key ingredients for trust are time and consistency. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman says the formula for earning trust is as follows: Trust = Consistency + Time
So if you send your newsletter every month consistently for a long period of time, you will be a trusted person. It doesn’t matter that you’re sending fewer editions than the writer who sends it daily.
The reason I say that it’s better to speed up than slow down is because no one is mad at the writer who writes every month and then speeds it up to every week. But the opposite is not true. People tend to get upset when the email you promised you’d send is not promptly in their inbox every week. (They’re even more upset if they pay to receive your newsletter.)
It’s a tale of two sends. It’s the difference between, “I am so excited to do this that I’ve decided to increase the frequency of my newsletter…” and “I’ve gotten so burnt out from writing weekly that you will now be receiving my newsletter every month.”
Neither one is necessarily bad, but my message here is that you can avoid burnout and dread by starting slow. With my writing (and my running), I’ve learned to start slow and speed up later, rather than come out hot and have to slow down right before the finish line.
There’s no rush. Deliver the highest-quality product on as much of a reasonable timeline as you can. And stamp it with a promise.
As the late investor Charlie Munger said, "The highest form that civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.” And that seamless web of deserved trust can only happen with one fulfilled promise at a time.
I am so eternally grateful to the hundreds of thousands of readers who allow me to do this for a living. Your time, generosity, and feedback is something that means the world to me. Cheers to the next seven years.
— Polina
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"And that seamless web of deserved trust can only happen with one fulfilled promise at a time." What a beautiful coda to my favorite Charlie Munger quote!
No instant breakthroughs, but luck born out of trust and consistency.
1. Do good work.
2. Let people know you do what you do.