A Value Proposition
What's it worth to you?
Hey there friends,
Substack was actually down earlier and that’s why this is coming so late in the day. I was READY! But anyway.
I don’t know if you know this, but my newsletter is magic. Every one I send out seems to reach just the right person with just the right message at just the right time. The most frequent reply I receive is also the biggest compliment I could possibly wish for: that the letter sounds like me talking to you. That you can hear my voice when you’re reading.
It makes sense. I often think that this letter, if not most of what I write, is essentially an inner monologue spit-shined and made presentable with some cultivated vocabulary and an easily scannable layout. Yet frankly, I don't always feel great about this. We are so inundated with content coming at us from every direction – and I'm not even talking about the daily avalanche of emails and tweets and listicles –but really good, high-quality content produced at an astounding clip by brilliant writers. Who can keep up? I have to wonder why anyone would bother with yet another personal newsletter.
In a widely-circulated missive, writer Erica Buist was already lamenting 'peak newsletter' more than two years ago (lady, we were barely cresting the wave!) for all the obvious reasons: reading material overwhelm, their seemingly self-indulgent nature, and particularly the unpaid labor of 'brand-building,' not only for oneself as a writer, but also on behalf of the platforms (like this one) on which one’s income streams may now depend.
The question then becomes one of value, as in "how do you add value," or "what is your value proposition." Value creation is the vernacular of the startup world, and what is a writer if not a single-founder startup. Having spent plenty of time drinking and doling out the startup kool-aid myself, I'm not immune to this line of thinking. In fact, it's what's been on my mind this week, when, as part of my writing program I've been considering what it means to "deliver value" to you, my dear present and future readers.
The conventional wisdom is to write what you know, but in the seminal words of Operation Ivy, "all I know is that I don't know nothin'." Thankfully I came across a great article on content strategy that recommended turning this idea on its head, suggesting that in order to find a good angle, consider a reason to believe that a truism might not hold up. In other words, a more insightful angle might be to write what I don't know, or more pointedly, what I want to know instead. Ok, I'll buy it, and I hope that you will, too. Looking at it this way, at least part of the value of this letter is its curiosity, or, I guess, my curiosity about myself and the world. I write to think, I write to learn, I write because I'm trying to figure shit out.
This leads me to a second so-called truism of delivering value as a writer, which is to write what your audience wants to read. Approaching this head-on, I'm making the very risky and dangerously narcissistic assumption that someone would want to tag along for the ride of me figuring shit out. Given our cultural investment in the giddy hate-read, this makes me more than a little nervous. Am I your schadenfreunde? (See what I did there?)
I'm reminded of a line from this funny-cuz-its-true essay by Tim Kreider:
"There’s something existentially alarming about finding out how little room we occupy, and how little allegiance we command, in other people’s heads."
But if I follow the advice of flipping the script on this one as well, that I should write what people don't want to read, then I think I'm actually doing just fine. That's not self-deprecation, either. Well, maybe a little bit. When I write about my own frustration, I'm writing about your frustration. When I'm writing about my anxieties, I'm writing about your anxieties. When I'm writing about my shit? Well, friend, it's your shit, too. We see ourselves in one another. Still, it's easier to go along thinking you're reading about my subjective shit instead of your own, even if it is a trick mirror.
To Kreider's point:
"It is simply not pleasant to be objectively observed — it’s like seeing a candid photo of yourself online, not smiling or posing, but simply looking the way you apparently always do, oblivious and mush-faced with your mouth open. It’s proof that we are visible to others, that we are seen, in all our naked silliness and stupidity."
There's a vogue-ish concept in Silicon Valley at the moment: building in public. Arguably, the whole internet is an ongoing experiment of building in public, but the core idea here is what you might call radical transparency. Startups of all sizes are rejecting the prevailing mindset of operating in 'stealth mode,' protecting that most precious commodity of Intellectual Property at all costs. Instead, in the words of one of the movement's advocates, Kevon Cheung, "...more focus is now placed on execution and things that aren't easy to be copied, such as culture, brand, community, and of course, personality." Whether it's sharing their processes and protocols, pulling back the curtain on fundraising and finances, or just speaking openly about the highs and lows of their journey, these companies are creating a "narrative an audience can follow and get behind," according to investor Gaby Goldberg.
But just as it seems I was about to give credit to these brave new startups, Cheung ruins the vibe by acknowledging my worst suspicion, that when you're building in public, your audience is both your supporter and your future consumer, and accordingly, the ethos is as much a growth strategy as it is a mindset. Which is why I'm concerned, or maybe even outright offended by the idea of reducing the tender relationship between writer and reader to one of value exchange.
Why I find this so onerous is because in a way, it feels like that's what I'm doing myself, building in public, putting myself out there as an example of another person who's figuring it out as they go, just trying to do my part in reminding you of your own aliveness. Vulnerability is what we most fundamentally recognize in each other, and I want you to know that I see you, as you see me. Call me by your name.
However, remembering that there is a business-end of writing, that icky brand-building Erika Buist was talking about, when I start thinking in terms of what value an audience can derive from the narrative I am creating, my vulnerability takes on a pallor of commodification itself. After all, what else is implied by the idea of 'adding value' or 'creating value' if not a sense of one's worth, one's utility as a resource, and therefore one's potential dispensability. At what point will my value run out, and what happens then?
“We are called to resist viewing ourselves as consumers or as commodities. We are called to savor the process of our own slow, patient development, instead of suffering in an enervated, anxious state over our value and our popularity.” – from "The Miracle of the Mundane" by Heather Havrilesky in What If This Is Enough
The truth is that I don't know what else to write about so I write about myself. I don't have any ideas of my own, so I go in search of other people's to seed my material. I don't have any lessons to share and I'm not trying to convince you to do anything, believe anything, or be anything other than yourself. There's no product, only process, and man is it messy. Like Havrilesky says in her Ask Polly evil-twin newsletter, Ask Molly, "I like to think of my own meaning-making as a kind of arts and crafts project of the soul, for idiots. Whatever I happen to believe on any given day, I just tell myself it's true."
So then what is the value of a voice?
At some point in my teens, I acquired the hefty paperback doorstop of The Voice That Is Great Within Us, a well-known anthology of twentieth-century American poems first published in 1970. I turn to its pages often, but it's the title that has stayed fixed in my head like a mantra all these years. Finding your voice is the holy grail of writing. Craft can be learned, skill is honed over time with practice and constructive feedback, everyone has a story – no, stories – within them. But words and sentences themselves are incomplete, even inadequate vectors of transmission. Words stand still; voices carry.
It's clear that the 'us' of the title has a double meaning. There is the voice that is great within each of us, my voice and your voice, singing our solos, whispering our secrets, speaking our truths. Maybe it's the voice you hear in your head right now. But there is also our voice, the resounding choir of us, amplifying one another in concert, all singing our own wobbly part of the same song in the key of life. And that's the voice I hear when I write.
I am absolutely, irrepressibly fucking rubbish at following my own rules.
Here’s a poem. (It’s one from The Voice That Is Great Within Us)
Maximus, to himself
BY CHARLES OLSON
I have had to learn the simplest things
last. Which made for difficulties.
Even at sea I was slow, to get the hand out, or to cross
a wet deck.
The sea was not, finally, my trade.
But even my trade, at it, I stood estranged
from that which was most familiar. Was delayed,
and not content with the man’s argument
that such postponement
is now the nature of
obedience,
that we are all late
in a slow time,
that we grow up many
And the single
is not easily
known
It could be, though the sharpness (the achiote)
I note in others,
makes more sense
than my own distances. The agilities
they show daily
who do the world’s
businesses
And who do nature’s
as I have no sense
I have done either
I have made dialogues,
have discussed ancient texts,
have thrown what light I could, offered
what pleasures
doceat allows
But the known?
This, I have had to be given,
a life, love, and from one man
the world.
Tokens.
But sitting here
I look out as a wind
and water man, testing
And missing
some proof
I know the quarters
of the weather, where it comes from,
where it goes. But the stem of me,
this I took from their welcome,
or their rejection, of me
And my arrogance
was neither diminished
nor increased,
by the communication
2
It is undone business
I speak of, this morning,
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet