100 - A Retrospective 💯
Hey there, !
ONE. HUNDRED. POSTS.
Has time flown or is it just lockdown? The big 100!
I think this is one of the only projects I’ve started and continued for this long. I started this newsletter 2 years ago and thought it might struggle to continue as I lost interest / ran out of topics to write about. The mind boggles that I’ve been able to bullshit about 100 different(ish) things - I guess lockdown really helped :D
I wanted to thank you all for continuing to read this - I think on average I have a 50% open rate (which is pretty good considering it consistently sits at this level every week!) - and though I don’t check the analytics that often, it’s nice to know I’m not shouting into a void.
This time round I wanted to keep it short, so it won’t be full of graphics or anything; just some quick stats and some highlights from the last year of Potentially Interesting content :)
P.S. If you want to read my previous retrospective for the year milestone - click here!
Quick stats
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I’ve written ~68k words for this newsletter across the last 51 or so posts (which is weirdly similar to how much I wrote for the first 52!) - this time, it’s an average of about 1400 words per post - I’m improving in word-count (or wafflage). The word counter website I used gave me a few other stats too:
- Reading level: 11th - 12th grade (lol?)
- Total reading time: 4 hours, 8 minutes
- Total speaking time: 6 hours, 20 minutes
- Top used words:
- about (315)
- just (273)
- like (271)
- how (264)
- one (234)
- more (225)
- really (208)
- time (208)
- people (196)
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As of August 2021, I have 77 subscribers which break down in the following way:
- Deloitte: 40 (though about 25 are ‘stale’ subscribers - maybe my emails aren’t getting through the quarantine filter?)
- Uni: 11
- School: 20
- Family: 3
- Boardgames: 3
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I haven’t marketed the newsletter very widely since last year, so there hasn’t been that much growth, but I’m happy where it’s at anyway!
- N.B. I had my first unsubscriber in June! But he rapidly rejoined with another email account so I didn’t have to be too sad :D
Post highlights
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Open rate: 55 - Anti Conspiracy Conspiracies with a 65.3% open rate - pretty high! Looks like y’all want to know about conspiracies a lot, hey?
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Total number of opens: 77 - The daredevil club - this one had someone open it 103 times?! I have no idea what happened here :D Thanks? This was also the first email that I started using emojis in the title (did you notice?).
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My personal favourites:
- 69 - They call it YUMMM cha - a close second for open rates at 64.6% - this has garnered literally the most opinions of all (and gave me a spree of tier lists to write about). I loved this one and learned that people have really strong opinions about yum cha.
- 79 - Manners Maketh Man - I was extremely proud of this one; it’s been something I have thought about for a long time and putting it down of paper helped solidify a lot of thoughts I had. Surprisingly this was read mainly by females who are subscribed to the newsletter - at least, based on analytics, it was opened the most times by them!
- 92 - Influential Book #2: Hogfather - A reflection on the nature of belief which sparked the best conversations I had with family and friends. I really love Terry Pratchett and writing about one of my favourite authors is always fun :)
Survey thoughts
Low sample size (<10) but adding my own reflections as well:
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People are still reading on mobile devices - so I’ll make sure it’s still optimised for this :)
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Surprisingly, survey respondents said they all come to read the post! Why is it surprising? From my own personal experience talking to people, a lot of them scan the post, see if it’s interesting, and if not will just bounce - so I expected more people to say they didn’t actually read the post. Good to have #real #data to compare to!
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Top enjoyable types of posts:
- Personal stories (by a significant margin)
- Brainstorming
- Food
- Tier Lists
- Educational content
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Unsurprisingly, fiction stories didn’t do too well in the rankings - it was a bit of a stab in the dark, but I’m going to move this to another blog altogether. I still love writing stories, I’ll just find a different outlet for it. Don’t worry - I’ll let you know where it lands (most likely a revival of this old blog)!
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Favourite verbatim:
Don’t really care about the plant hahaha
Feleafcia’s doing fine, thanks for asking ;)
Goals
I did start this newsletter with the goal to just have somewhere that I write something every week, without fail. I think I’ve done that, and I’m going to continue doing this as long as I can.
However, I do feel like I’ve got some things that need to improve, and these are new goals I’m going to set myself - so please let me know if you feel like I’m not achieving them:
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Shorter, more edited posts: though I love writing, I feel that I have slowly grown how much I can cram in the space of one post. Some of these grow to nearly 2000 words - which is fun for me, but not necessarily fun for you. I want to make sure these are edited more rigidly - I usually write a post and lightly edit it once over before I send it out…but sometimes I think it could do with a more critical edit. For those who love long posts - don’t worry, they’ll still be around! I just want to be more impactful with how I write.
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Less essays, more day-to-day: sometimes the brain doesn’t come up with great ideas for essays, and instead I just pull from my early life (of which I have surprising number of stories?!). But I want to start documenting current life things as well - even if it’s boring events - mainly because it’ll give me time to work on the big posts! It’ll also help me with the above goal - shorter posts about smaller things in my life.
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Improved prose: for different tones, and content, I want to make sure I’m using the right writing style. I love to write in a conversational way because I’m essentially speaking out what I want to say from my brain to the page (including emojis, pauses, exclamations, emphases etc.), but I want to improve my own technique as well. Onwards and upwards - always.
In reading my thoughts from last year’s retro, I realised there are a lot of different things that are similar to the above, and things that are different. Mainly, that I want to continue honing my technique, and that the same types of content were liked the most. I never got around to implementing a premium tier to vote on posts, so I never got around to it - but I will look into this soon :)
Anyway, let me know if you have any thoughts on this - and again thank you so much for continuing to read this! Love you all <3
Chat soon :)
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
✔️ Real Life Recommendations
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Nine Days - a fascinating, otherwordly, art-house-y film about souls being interviewed to join Earth. Its messages are subtle, and it slowly reveals an interesting exploration of who “gets” to go to Earth, and what it means to be softer and empathetic in a hard, uncaring world. It has some spectacular performances by Winston Duke, Benedict Wong, Zazie Beetz and Tony Hale, and asks some great metaphysical questions about existence. I couldn’t find any discussions of it on Reddit - FLABBERGASTED honestly - it’s such a good movie! Please go watch it and tell me what you think!
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Pokemon Unite - honestly never thought I’d ever play a MOBA, but this one was too good to pass up. I thought it would need Nintendo Switch Online - it doesn’t! So I went straight in and it is extremely well designed…to make you as addicted as possible to it. There are so many currencies, shops, items, behavioural nudges and triggers to get you to keep playing - it’s actually a marvel of design (but not necessarily in a good way). The gameplay is extremely fun though - highly recommended if you can control your spending :D
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Wrong ideas about work - an interesting breakdown of ideas, and a discussion of the mindsets behind them:
Here’s the list of wrong ideas:
- Work is the soul-sucking thing I do every day to get money.
- I need to do work I’m passionate about.
- I need to know exactly what I want to do with my life.
- I’m not qualified to do this work.
- I need this job because I need the money.
Now you might think, “these are totally reasonable ideas!” And you’d be right!
Here’s the problem: These ideas can be right for some people, but wrong for others. The problem arises when it’s actually the wrong idea for you but you fail to see that. This means you get unnecessarily stuck by a self-limiting worldview that wasn’t actually true for you.
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Should you pursue a psychologically rich life? (Tweet Thread) - move aside ‘happy’ or ‘meaningful’ lives, a new paper is coming out regarding how many people are actually looking for a ‘psychologically rich’ life…one which has novelty, is interesting, is vivid and full of variety. I don’t know how they define it specifically (does it mean a variety of bad things happening to you is also psychologically rich?) - but it’s a fun tweetstorm nonetheless.
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There’s nothing wrong with a traditional career - living a normal, humble life is pretty cool too.
I’m fed up with entrepreneurship Twitter. I’m tired of hearing about side hustles, the 4-hour work week, and escaping the rat race. Not because I am against any of these pursuits in and of themselves, but because of the culture projected by many of those who pursue them. I call this the entrepreneurship superiority complex.