The Worst Substack Strategy Ever

I know exactly how to grow a Substack. Watch me not.

I know exactly how to grow a Substack, which is the embarrassing part. The part I’d prefer to leave out of the story, because the whole thing would be so much more forgivable if I were simply ignorant. But I’m not. I’ve spent twenty years making content engineered to do something: register for the webinar, book the call, download the guide, wire the funds, click the very specific button.

So when the newsletter people with their tidy six-figure subscriber counts explain how it’s done, I don’t roll my eyes at the advice. I nod along because I actually completely agree with it. Pick a niche, be relentlessly consistent, set an expectation and then meet it, teach the thing you teach until the algorithm and the human finally agree that you are The Person Who Knows About That Thing. It’s good advice. I’d give it. I have given it, to clients, with a straight face and an invoice attached.

I just appear to be constitutionally incapable of taking it.

A short and fairly damning inventory of recent topics: jobs, honesty, spirituality, freedom, friendship, and a modest screed about why I can no longer listen to certain podcasts without wanting to gently drive into the nearest lake. This week, apparently, I’m writing about writing, which is the literary equivalent of a chef bringing you a plate with a smaller plate on it.

Oh believe me, there is a spreadsheet, a content calendar color-coded by theme, a twelve-month roadmap. There’s a Notion, and an AirTable and a Google Folder. There are pillars, funnels, and master plans for Substack. I can’t help myself, its what I do. I love the structure, and the planning. I even love the execution and measuring the results. I’ve been trained to do this work for all of my career.

It’s just when it comes to this newsletter, something in me has been literally incapable of following any of it consistently.

By the way, I’m not cleverly withholding anything of this for dramatic effect, and when you scroll down further - you’ll get a link to my masterclass. Nope…nothing…nada..no course…not even a PDF.

Most weeks I have no idea what I’m writing until a few hours before I write it, when whatever has been rattling around my skull, a conversation, an irritation, a question I can’t put down, finally becomes more annoying to ignore than to address. I haven’t posted anything for the last month. But I actually have 4 essays written, but not quite finalized. Essays on healing, adult friendships, bullshit jobs, tarot cards, the universe, certainty - I just haven’t been compelled to publish them.

This is not, I’m reliably told, how serious operators run a media business. And yet here I am.

The longer I sit with it, the more I suspect this isn’t really about Substack at all. It’s that this might be the only thing in my life without an agenda, which is a strange and faintly humiliating thing to notice about yourself at this age.

Agendas aren’t the villain here. I have a career because of agendas. Events need warm bodies, websites need traffic, businesses need clients, and somewhere in that chain a marketer gets to keep her job. I totally understand outcomes. I respect them. I have manufactured them on demand for almost a quarter of a century.

But at some point the habit metastasized, and everything, my health, my relationships, my spiritual life, my own interior weather, quietly became a project to be scoped, optimized, and eventually delivered. Even the vocabulary gives the game away. Growth. Progress. Transformation. We talk as though there’s a better, finished version of ourselves waiting just around the corner, tapping her foot, checking her watch, mildly disappointed we’re running late.

I wonder how much of my life I’ve spent trying to get somewhere, instead of noticing where I already was.

For most of my life I started with the outcome and worked backward toward it. This newsletter may be the first thing I’ve ever made where I genuinely have no idea what success would even look like, and somehow that’s precisely why I keep showing up for it.

If you asked me what The Reinvented Soul is about, I could not give you an answer that wouldn’t make a branding consultant’s eye twitch. It’s not about spirituality, except when it is. It’s not about work, or midlife, or personal development, except that it’s about all three and stubbornly refuses to be only one.

The subject changes constantly; the question almost never does. Strip away the week’s particular costume and it’s always some version of the same inquiry: what happens when the things that used to define you stop making sense? The job, role, career, relationship and most importantly - the certainty. The version of yourself that worked beautifully for years and then, without filing any paperwork or giving notice, stopped being entirely true. That question turns up in careers and marriages and friendships and prayer and the bathroom mirror at six in the morning. The doorway keeps changing, but the room behind it is depressingly familiar.

Which brings me to the advice I keep declining. You know, the one about becoming a smaller, more legible version of yourself. Choose one thing. Say the one thing. Repeat the one thing until you and the thing become indistinguishable in the public imagination. It works; I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending it doesn’t. But lately I’ve caught myself resisting it, not because niches are wrong, but because humans are so much more interesting than niches.

I can spend a morning weighing whether to launch RIA Creative while still drawing a salary somewhere respectable, an afternoon genuinely mystified that adult friendship now requires the logistical planning of a minor military operation, and an evening wondering whether “the nervous system” has quietly become the wellness industry’s newest tote-bag slogan. All of that belongs to a single life. All of it is me. I’m not sure why I’d pretend otherwise just to keep my spreadsheet happy.

Maybe the theme was never the topic. Maybe the theme is me.

People don’t stay subscribed because every essay is about the same thing. They stay because every essay comes from the same place. It’s the same voice, the same set of stubborn questions, the same woman trying to make sense of her own life slightly too publicly for comfort.

So here is the uncomfortable, honest part. I don’t know what this becomes. I’ve run down the whole list. A book, maybe (yes, I have actually written a freaking amazing forward and the first few chapters)? A community? A clutch of women gathering in a coffee shop (yes, I’ve had a go at creating a meetup that just didn’t work out). A podcast (started on….then stopped one).. A business (maybe, but could never figure out how or what). Or nothing at all but a contented pile of spent Saturdays.

Every professional reflex I own wants that settled yesterday: the strategist wants a plan, the entrepreneur wants a model, the responsible adult wants the small comfort of knowing. Instead I’m doing the genuinely foreign thing of following curiosity simply because it happens to be the part that feels most alive, and at this point in my life, that has started to look like reason enough.

Maybe it really is the worst Substack strategy ever attempted. No niche, no framework, no publishing schedule I’d be willing to defend. Just a woman writing about whatever she can’t stop thinking about that week.

But I think something quieter is moving underneath all of it. The older I get, the less interested I am in controlling every outcome. Not because outcomes stopped mattering, but because the things that have meant the most to me tended to arrive gradually, half-formed, refusing to announce in advance what they were. Relationships. Creative work. Whole chapters of a life. You rarely know what they are at the beginning. Sometimes the most competent thing you can do is pay attention, show up, follow the thread, and see where it insists on going.

According to the Substack pros, that’s a terrible way to build a Substack.

I’m beginning to suspect it’s a pretty good way to live.

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