Recently, for the first time, I noticed daily stories making their way through the newsletter community on Twitter.
Similar to the way national news has a handful of daily stories that all the channels cover, the newsletter industry is now big enough and has enough people talking about it that my feed was filling up with different takes on the same topic every day.
One day, it was, “Beehiiv or Sparkloop?” The next, “Are we in a newsletter bubble?” Or perhaps, “Can you really call creators business owners?” Etc., etc., etc…
It reminded me of this quote from Hemingway:
“Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle…”
Green Hills of Africa
That book is one of my favorites, by the way. I’m convinced you can learn everything worth knowing about writing by just studying that one your entire career.
Anyways, I realized I was spending too much time in the bottle, and it was affecting what I thought I should write about. It was also making me feel less relevant if I didn’t comment on the topic of the day.
Of course, any time spent focusing on today’s “thing” is time you don’t get to spend making something that lasts a long, long time. And that’s a problem.
So I unfollowed everyone, on Twitter at least.
I do still read their long-form stuff, either via their blogs or newsletters, and this has two important benefits over social media:
First, it’s long form. They’re usually exploring an idea in much more detail, and you’re absorbing more deeply.
But second, and perhaps more importantly, you’re taking each person on their own, rather than as a chorus. And the difference between those two things is the difference between signal and noise.