14. The Weekly - Pursuing Happiness
On creative discipline, pursuing happiness and neon power.
Welcome to the Happy Medium newsletter! If you’re new here, this is where I share inspiration and bite-sized musings on creative business each week. Enjoy!
Inspiration
Things that have inspired me this week.
The Nature of Electricity
Electricity feels like such a human invention but it’s also part of nature. Artist Emilija Povilanskaite “explores the potential for ordinary elements of nature to embody extraordinary energy transformations, akin to the way static amber can generate electrical charge.” Source
Happiness of the Pursuit
When you're in the midst of doing something hard, it can be difficult to know if the uncomfortableness you’re feeling is the good ‘growth’ type or the horrible ‘impending heart attack’ type of uncomfortable.
Always supportive when I need a pep talk, my partner, Rae likes to say, “it’s the happiness of the pursuit, not the pursuit of happiness”. What he means is the art of finding joy and satisfaction in the daily routines that maintain your best self.
After all if you reach your goals but were miserable every day leading up to that one day of success, what kind of life is that?
The article by Andy John has a few too many steps for me personally, but I like his idea of identifying your personal parameters of when you feel good, and what are the signs you are creeping towards your intolerable zone.
Quick Thoughts
Musings on business, creativity, psychology and more.
Creative Discipline
To consistently deliver good quality creative work, you need a creative process. Having a process takes the mental energy out of working out what you need to do each time.
To develop your process you can consider;
Brief - what inputs do you need to get started?
Environment - where do you do your best work?
Collaboration - who do you work best with?
Incubation time - time spent away from the project
Active Work time - hours of action required
Remember to allow enough space in the timeline so your creative process is protected.
Switching Systems
Or why I switched from Squarespace email campaigns to Substack
I recently switched my newsletter from the inbuilt Squarespace email campaigns to Substack. I don’t take software changes lightly because switching takes time and effort (often more than you think) and this change would directly impact my subscribers (hello!).
These are the factors I considered:
Headspace & Time: I was maintaining two newsletters with overlapping but slightly different audiences which was adding unnecessary time and taking up headspace. I spent a lot of time thinking about what each audience was expecting to see so I would end up sharing less frequently because I didn’t want to bore people with repeated content but also didn’t want one group to miss out. Now I have one audience (Hi!), and I can share more frequently, then you, dear reader, can let me know what you like.
Aesthetics: Substack just looks better. Long form content is easier to read when it looks good. The lack of design customisability is a feature and avoids time spent making it look nice - it already looks nice, so you can just start writing. (Sidenote: this is also why I use Notion).
Function: This is where I had to weigh a couple of things up.
SEO: I had been maintaining a blog on Squarespace purely for SEO so that Happy Medium can appear in google searches for key words. However on Substack, the opportunity to improve your discoverability with the existing Substack audience is much higher (plus you still appear in google results, but it drives traffic to your post, not your website.)
Sign up: To avoid creating a manual process, I needed to embed the Substack sign up into my website. This was easy to do but it doesn’t look as pretty as the native Squarespace sign up. On the other hand the Substack welcome flow is much better so that was an easy switch.
Purpose: Substack is specifically for newsletters. Squarespace mailer is a generalist tool designed to do anything from retargeting shoppers to sharing blogs. Now that I had experimented with both, I knew what I wanted my newsletter to be and that Substack was the better platform for that content.
Testing: I spent a lot of time testing the change. I wanted to understand what it would look like from a subscribers perspective so I would go through each version of the user flow with my own email addresses. Before any testing though, I have used the platform for years - I like using Substack so I feel safe recommending it to you.
Cost: Substack is free! And Squarespace email is about $20 a month-so that’s a win. Substack makes money from creators who have paid subscriptions so there are no annoying ads.
If you’re feeling like you might watch to switch or introduce a software system into your business, my Automate your Admin course walks you through the steps so you don’t waste time and headspace doing a bunch of free trials.
If you are finding that a software solution is just one part of your Problem Spaghetti and you’re not sure where to start, I have three spots left for 1:1 business strategy support before the end of this financial year. You can find out more here.
That’s it for this week! As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, or DM me if you’re shy.
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