Resource allocation

I’ve heard the argument that the best minds of our generation are going towards tweaking the engagement of Facebook, Instagram, and Google instead of building rockets to the moon.

This is a variation on that, but for writers, Getting too Good at the Wrong Thing:

I worry that some of the best writers of our generation are stuck making tweets and newsletters.

How many newsletters have you printed out and put on your bookshelf?

How many articles from five or ten years ago do you still go back and read? Or recommend?

And what about tweets? Are there any threads that rise to the level of books?

Yet, as increasingly unvaluable as blogging feels, there would be no book without this blog. If you aren’t a conventionally laureled writer, your worth is your email list. No other metric particularly matters. And so, to some extent, you must focus on a newsletter to build that initial base of readers so you can convince a publisher that you’re worth paying attention to

So, this has been my conundrum. I can’t deny this publication’s importance in getting my career to this point. But I also can’t deny the ways it might distract from my ultimate goals moving forward. And I’m unsure how much of my sense that “I need to keep publishing here and on Twitter” is an accurate assessment of the best use of my time, or merely some combination of FOMO and a desire to make numbers go up.