[AKN #104] Why I Want To Grow Full Of KRapp

LAUGH: Wow. , LOVE: Cities Then And Now

Jul 27, 2022

Sup homies?

Today marks the two year anniversary of my newsletter about nothing.

How fun is that?

I still remember when I started this thing.

It was the height of the pandemic and I spent enough time sheltering in place that I could no longer ignore this nagging feeling that I would like to start writing again.

Repressing the urge to express myself was actively making me depressed so I joined this online course Write of Passage and away I went.

Initially, I found many components of newslettering (word?) difficult to juggle. Like:

Keeping up with posting every week. What was I going to write about? What do people want to hear about? Just because they want to hear about it, does that mean I should write it?
Does this content fit? I routinely found myself in analysis paralysis about whether or not the content “fits” my target market.
Positioning. Who the fuck is my target market again??
How do I grow my distribution? I read blog post after blog post where I was bombarded with tactics, tips, and “growth hacks.” Use Twitter. Use Reddit. Buy ads. AHH!

It became clear early on that if I focused on everything, I would become overwhelmed and simply stop writing.

So I made a singular goal for myself:

I’m only going to focus on churning out content I am proud of week over week for the first two years.

I wasn’t going to focus at all on positioning, niching down, or growth. I was simply going to write about the things I felt drawn towards.

I’m very glad I did this.

This goal allowed me to go through a low stakes sampling period of whether or not this is something I even wanted to do.

Plus I knew I liked writing so my worst case scenario from pursuing this goal was I would get through 2 years and have consistently done something I enjoy for 2 years. Didn’t sound too bad…

Over the last two years, I learned more about writing and what I like to write about than I did the previous 30 years. For example, I learned:

Writing is hard. And it remains hard even after years of doing it consistently. That’s just the game.
I DEFINITELY don’t want to touch certain topics. Like if I want to be miserable and hate writing this newsletter, I should focus exclusively on covering politics. The replies to your emails are a dumpster fire whenever you mention anything political.
I greatly enjoy comedy writing, but I don’t want the only value of the newsletter to be entertainment. Comedy is fun and it will forever be part of my life and infused into my writing. But I don’t want my writing to be purely fart jokes. Rather I want to seamlessly intermingle fart jokes with Man’s Search for Meaning.

I’ve also become a different person from pursuing this goal.

Writing every single week for two years helped me become more introspective about what I even want and what I want to do with this newsletter.

It also helped me define my newest goal for the newsletter which is to grow my distribution.

Or to define it as a SMART goal, I am going to grow my list to 10,000 homies by August 2023 — around my birthday.

(I am at around 300 subscribers now.)

As I am at the beginning stages of goal pursuit, I thought it would be fun and meta to write an entire post about the most important part of goal setting: getting in touch with your why.

Why do I even want to achieve this goal?

Why do I want to grow this?

Why should I put the effort in?

If I clearly understand my reason or purpose, I usually have no issue with achieving some goal.

And that dearest homies, is what brings me to today’s post.

On to the newsletter!

LIVE: Why I Want To Grow Full Of KRapp

A hand crafted, artisanal post from me

In my senior year of college, I almost killed myself.

It’s not something I talk about often because — believe it or not — its not a fun memory to relive! But I have talked about it before here.

Every time I revisit that memory, I recall the contradiction I was back then.

On one hand, a cloud of darkness hung over my internal world. Every morning was a struggle to wake up and making it through the day was a chore.

On the other hand, my outer world looked lovely. I went to a great college. I had many close relationships with friends and family. I was constantly laughing and having a good time. People considered me “the life of the party”…or at least I thought they did. Though tbh calling yourself the life of the party sounds like something a loser would do so maybe I wasn't…

Anyway.

The difference between my internal and external worlds was so stark that everyone who knew me back then expresses disbelief that this is something I went through.

Not like “you are lying” type disbelief, more like “how could someone so happy be so sad?” or “how could I have not seen it?” disbelief.

What can I say, I was GREAT at hiding my pain. Historians argue that the performance I put on during my senior year of college was akin to the greatness demonstrated by Barry Bonds in his 2004 season. Barry reached base 60.9% of the time, I avoided jumping in front of a train despite being depressed 100% of the time. Don’t even get me started on my sabermetrics.

When revisiting those memories of my Depression Hall of Fame year, I’m also struck by one other realization — that memory feels like a completely different life.

Honestly, I can’t even imagine feeling like that anymore. Which is quite the remarkable turnaround. I don’t know the statistics, but I’m guessing the odds weren’t in my favor.

Which leads to the natural question: So what changed?

In short, a lot.

But if I were to generalize it, I learned I had the power to change my circumstances.

All I needed to do was find the appropriate information at the appropriate time from the appropriate person and act on it.

Allow me to elaborate.

Retrospectively, the root cause of all my issues was either:

I did not have the appropriate information to solve my problem. For example, when I was in my darkest period, I wasn’t aware that by remaining quiet I was allowing that shame to grow in the silence. This made my depression much worse. I now know that I will be consumed by the darkness if I don't share my emotions with an empathetic witness.
I had the correct information, but it wasn’t given to me at the exact time I needed it. Like maybe I learned about atoms, but when I was put into the real world, I might not have connected that everything I am looking at at all times are atoms.
I had the correct information and it was given to me at the correct time, but I hated the person who provided the information. Like the main reason I would never go vegan — despite it clearly being the most effective thing you could do on a personal level to fight global warming — is because vegans are intolerable people. I would rather die in a spectacular heat death than have anything in common with them.
I had the correct information at the correct time delivered by the exact right person, but I didn’t act on it. Like we all know if you just count your calories using MyFitnessPal and set a caloric deficit, you will lose weight. So why don’t we all do it?

So to solve my problems even faster, I just would have needed to act on the right information given at the right time by the right person earlier.

But that’s easier said than done.

Nowadays, we are bombarded with useless information every single waking minute from awful human beings who take themselves too seriously.

Which has lead to the main issue of the Information Age:

Figuring out how to solve your problem has surprisingly become very difficult unless you want to spend an afternoon plumbing the depths of the Google Search results.

So if a theoretical 20 year old Kevin was alive in 2022, how could he have found the information he needed to hear faster than he did?

I want this newsletter to be the answer.

I want to be the hero for my younger self.

To do that, I plan to pull younger Kevin in with comedy. Like I will hit him hard and fast with a monologue about how Southwest is a terrible airline.

Ok, great. Now I have him laughing. Now it’s time to deploy the Jedi mind tricks.

Because you see — to paraphrase George Carlin — once his mouth is open, there is space to insert some food for thought.

Next, I will tell him stories of how I changed my life or things I’ve learned and let him draw his own conclusions about whether or not it could apply to him as well.

Because who knows?

Maybe he would realize:

Or maybe he would listen to none of it, but at least every Tuesday he would open up this email and laugh about something stupid like the United Mother Bird Option.

And for that brief moment he would be elevated above the depression.

Because some days, that’s all we can really ask for.

I write this newsletter for him and those like him.

Because maybe, just maybe, I can change that kid’s life before it is too late.

Of course, to change that kid’s life, he needs to know this newsletter even exists so that is why I am making an effort to grow it.

Because yes, self promotion will be brutally awkward, but if I can get it in front of younger me’s eyeballs, who knows what might change for him.

So I would now like to make a request to you.

If you have ever received any value from my posts, I would appreciate your help with growing the newsletter by either subscribing below:

Or sharing the post with a friend who you think should be a member of the homies:

Oh wow, your friend would love this? Well then why not pass it along?

PS: If you don’t want to share it, no worries.

I get how awkward it is to push things on your friends. Like what are you even supposed to say? Read this shit cause I like it?

I get that can be an issue so I would like to help you word the value proposition by giving you direct quotes from other readers of another krappy newsletter:

“Your newsletter is fucking funny and surprisingly thought provoking.”

“I never thought newsletters can be funny, informative and interesting. Your newsletter is just that.”

“I know I’ve said this before, but your newsletters sometimes hit perfectly on stuff I go through. Sometimes just knowing I have friends going through very similar things makes me feel less isolated.”

Maybe that type of endorsement will make them want to join.

And if you still don’t want to send it to them, don’t you fear, we are still homies <3