Start the week #78

A mini essay, plus links to articles and videos

Terry cogitates about what success means, provides a link to a quiz from circa 2001, and links to a couple of interesting articles on Substack.

Greetings!

Look, here in the UK it’s a bank holiday, aka a day off, meaning that either hardly any Brits will read this or lots of them will because it’s a day off. I’m glad that’s been clarified.

But enough of this persiflage! On with the newsletter.

Success

I’ve been thinking about definitions of success recently, which is why I wrote Success At Last. Also, because nearly every time I wonder to myself if it’s worth continuing with this series, at least one person will leave a comment to the effect that they look forward to reading it. That makes me remember that success is not just a numbers game.

I’ve also started to think of success in terms of longevity. As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve been working my way through my archive of published articles, digitising them and, in some cases, republishing them. Something I’ve noticed when engaged in the latter activity is that almost all of the websites that I’ve linked to in my education articles are no longer active. There were all these people and organisations that presented themselves as the hero we’ve all been waiting for, and where are they now?

I started my first website in 1996 — and it’s still going. Yes, it’s been through changes in design and emphasis, but it’s still very much active. So, nearly thirty years of publishing original articles week in and week out, and for much of that period between three and five times a week, should, in my view, count as success.

Has it been successful in other, more material, ways? Yes. And moreover without a lot of self-publicity. In fact, I think I must be one of the worst self-publicists around, because I don’t like it.

These reflections have led me to formulate a theory, which is that in order to be successful, the strategies one adopts have to reflect one’s personality. For example, I’ve tried the sort of things people recommend here, like sticking a Subscribe button near the top of an article, or posting a lot on Notes, with no discernible benefit. Someone I met on a creative writing course, someone who had done very well financially by advising companies on how to get to the top of Google’s search pages, very kindly gave me free advice on how my education website could perform even better. I spent several hours implementing all the design changes he recommended. The result? I had one query, from someone who said he’d like to avail himself of my services but didn’t have any money. Well, I do a lot of voluntary stuff, but I’m not a charity. After a year of no further queries, I deleted that portion of the website. With no discernible detrimental effect, I might add. (In fact, I just did.)

Now, it may be that I am incredibly unlucky or unpopular. I can post something quite insightful on Linkedin and, despite having a lot of connections and followers, enjoy virtually no response. And yet, since 2004, when I went independent, virtually all my work has come by word of mouth or my website, with almost no self-promotion at all.

My conclusion from all this is that we live in an age that is very much extrovert-centred. People think that in order to be successful you have to shout about yourself from the rooftops. I don’t think that’s true, and my own experience tells me that it isn’t true.

So, if like me you don’t yet have 1,000 subscribers on Substack, with the resultant self-doubt that that might entail, and you don’t want to go against your principles and preferences in the publicity department, I would suggest that rather than trying ideas which are very much outside your comfort zone and make you feel icky, redefine success. For example:

• Posting original stuff consistently.

• Giving other people pleasure when they read your stuff.

• Writing to please yourself and your readers, not some algorithm whose parameters will inevitably change with no warning.

  

  My website, circa 2001

  The education website I alluded to above looked like this in 2001:

  

  Here’s the url, courtesy of the Wayback machine. If you want a laugh, click on the Quiz graphic. The questions are pretty ordinary, but the possible answers are nuts. I especially like the ones I suggested for question 10. Don’t bother to click on Submit, because that no longer works.

A literary map

Every so often I devise a non-writing writing day, in which I garner ideas for future articles. Sometimes, as was the case recently, this takes the form of a kind of literary tour. Last week, this is what it looked like:

A literary map, by Terry Freedman

Key

1. Foyles bookshop.

2. Any Amount of Books, a second-hand bookshop, which hadn’t opened yet.

3. The London Library, where I read a couple of articles in journals and borrowed The Penguin Book of Bengali Short Stories.

4. The RSA, to which I returned a library book, and where I had a coffee and read the New Yorker.

5. Number 2 again, by which time it was open.

What were the benefits?

Discovering some new books that I hadn’t come across, such as the Bengali short stories one. Also, reading an article in the Massachusetts Review called A Real Person, by Nadine Browne. I hadn’t heard of her before, which is a shame because her writing is beautiful.

Other people’s articles

Here are two articles I enjoyed reading this week. In Things at the side of the road

Tom Pendergast

discusses, with illustrations, stuff people leave at the side of the road, as the title suggests. It’s very interesting, and apparently the start of a new series. I’m looking forward to following that.

In Beautiful Women And The Indecency Of Powerful Men,

david roberts

discusses some men’s predatory behaviour towards women, and boundaries. For example, and this is my comment rather than David’s is it appropriate to compliment a woman, or does it depend on the circumstances and how you do it? The comments are very interesting.

My articles, in case you missed them

Experiments in style extra

Success at last!

On Wednesday I’ll be writing to

Rebecca Holden

so make sure you subscribe to her lovely newsletter in order to read her reply the following Wednesday.

Videos

I really like this one, especially the bleak feel and the black and whiteness:

Another really daft joke from Mick Miller:

That’s it from me for this week. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it.