Personal Update #1

In this issue of the newsletter, I’m going to do something different.

I’m not going to try and teach you any tips, techniques or tools. Nor am I trying to show you something that worked for me that might work for you. I’m going to give you an update on what’s going on in my life and my content creation journey.

Read on for insights and my plans for the future.

1. Exams

I’m an English MA student, and this time of year is when my exams are going on.

I have two exams this semester:

• Translation

• Creative Writing

Both of these courses require an assignment handed in by the end of the first week of January. And the great part of these exams is that I can write about whatever I want. So I am.

Among other things, I’m going to do a translation from a chapter of American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

2. No scheduled content

For the last week or so I’ve had no planned content on X.

Meaning that I’ve had to write all the content for the day on the day and in the moment. This has led me to write some stuff that I’m proud of and some stuff I’m less proud of. But it also showed me a great thing.

I CAN write good content in the moment.

3. Quality on X going down

But ultimately, the quality has been going down and that needs to change.

Ever since I started, I’ve felt the need to plan content out in the future, so that my profile can work for me while I sleep. And for the last week that hasn’t happened, and I need to do it again. This will lead to more quality-written content and a better ability to plan stuff for the future.

So expect the quality to change.

4. Feeling overwhelmed

Being in the moment at all times and never planning for the future overwhelmed me.

I’ve been too overwhelmed to engage with many more than the people who engaged with my posts. And as a result, I’ve seen the engagement on my posts go down. The only reason I’ve been able to keep my numbers up anyway was because I started posting more than I did before.

Scheduling is something I need to do in order to stay open to whatever else happens.

5. What’s in the future

I’ve been thinking about what my plans are for the future.

And this heading is probably going to be a constant part of future newsletter updates, now that I think about it.

Recently I posted this on X:

And this is my plan for the future as of now. But I know that writing a book is going to take time, which is why I’m going to try and do it in public. In other words that means that I’m going to share on X and in this newsletter the things that I learn while I write it. This means that some of the first drafts for parts of chapters are going to be tested out and repurposed as content.

I’m looking forward to starting the process of that this week.

Weekly Resource

This week’s resource is a video from Ali Abdaal in which he discussed the next stage of his creator journey and shared some of the things he has learned on the way to where he is today.

And it’s not completely related to what I’m talking about in this week’s newsletter, but it’s something I’ve watched this week which helped me feel better about myself and my journey while feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Weekly Highlight

This week’s highlight is ‘My 12 biggest lessons from 2023’.

In this post, I share some of the best things I learned during this year, now that it’s about to end.

Hope these are useful to you as well 😁

Free Resources

• My Ultimate Guide for Building an Email Newsletter

• The Content Creation List (Template)

• The Newsletter Template

• Medium Article (Template)

Until Next Time…

Hope this different kind of newsletter is useful to you as well as the more educating ones.

I plan to do this around every 10th issue.