Start Saying "Not My Business"
Avoid the multiple side quests that corporate giants add to your todo list
I’m officially in “Not My Business” Season, for which I owe a debt of thanks to Olivia Rafferty for describing how I’ve been feeling most of this year.
This isn’t just for Substack authors- it’s for every creative person.
Social media made us believe we must become graphic designers, video editors, sound engineers, interview hosts, SEO experts, copywriters, and about a dozen other things in addition to the thing we do.
Experts will have you believe that if you tweak your About page a little bit more, focus on SEO, or make better thumbnails, then success is just around the corner!
Not my business.
Sure, there are some “best practices,” but the bar is low (ahem, a website and an email list). We’re not here to chase lowest common denominator tactics, we’re here to shift culture and change the world, right?
Imagine spending more time on things that rejuvenate your soul instead of cosplaying as an overworked social media manager.
Instead of learning how to navigate all the new features that Meta has set up on Instagram, imagine becoming a better musician, photographer, or artist.
Spend most of our non-day job hours honing our craft rather than becoming part-time “content creators” while expecting full-time results.
There’s a screen time app, but where’s the guitar time app, or painting time app? Imagine if we tracked our creative practice and saw that we spent three hours a day writing. We’d celebrate that, wouldn’t we? 
We don’t need more subscribers; we need more heartbreak, laughter, and / or deep metaphysical talks about the afterlife in cemeteries on rainy evenings.
That’s the business I want.
Let’s stop worrying about growing our audience. Open your contacts app and reconnect with the people who came into your life but you stopped talking to because you felt just posting on social media was enough.
Get in the business of building connections instead of shouting.
We’re talking about art here, people. We’re not selling USB cables or homeowner insurance, we’re channeling the divine, spending time in the fog, smelling the flowers, jumping in puddles, and walking around museums.
That’s our business.
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Like another commenter, I did actually update my about me page last week, but I also got something useful out of it. I used it as an exercise in how to tell the story of my newsletter better. It’s especially important for me to do that because I’m an anti-niche newsletter. I write about the things that are important to me, but the theme that they all have is the same one that I would say binds everything I do together—doing things with an eye toward how it’ll affect things in the long term rather than just what I can get out of them right now. Making sure I tell that story well to potential subscribers also helps remind me to make sure I have that element present and prevalent in each one of my posts.
I wrote about *not* running a marathon as a first race for today’s newsletter, and it’s generated a ton of conversation among my online friends off-platform. I’m trying to remember that the writing itself is the goal, not the numbers go up good feeling. This post was well-timed.
Thanks for this great advice, Seth. I've found that being myself and expressing what's important to me, without bells and whistles, attracts others with the same concern.
Quiet authenticity still seems to work.