I made the 1%

Creating weekly for 3 years

The world really does have a sense of humour.

Just last week, I contemplated scaling down my weekly essay-publishing practice because I was working on a bigger project, my book Bite-Sized Creativity. A few days later, Substack sent me an email that I made it to the top 1% of publishers for publishing 93 weeks in a row.

I’ve never been a 1%-er in anything, so I was pretty surprised. The journey here took a while to get to. It didn’t even start on Substack.

It started on YouTube.

During the COVID years, I filled my idle time with YouTube videos. Jenn Im accompanied me while folding laundry. Peter McKinnon took me to Banff as I cooked mapo tofu. Matt D’Avella showed me his minimalist closet (actually, there wasn’t much to see). He had all these life mottos and one of them was the Three-Year Rule: give any endeavour three years for it to have a chance to succeed.

I was inspired by the panoply of YouTubers then. I thought, “how hard could this video thing be?” and decided to give it a shot. Three years, I committed. I was going to play the long game.

I waited till my girlfriend Jin left the flat, clamped my iPhone 11 to a top-down tabletop rig, and recorded my first video in December 2021, unboxing a watercolour palette that I loved. I hit upload, didn’t tell anyone, and went about my day.

Only engaging with online content is the equivalent of living in the monochrome world of Kansas, oblivious to the colourful possibilities beyond. But when I pressed the record button, I shifted from consumer to creator. Uploading that first YouTube video was my first step down the Yellow Brick Road.

Unsurprisingly, the numbers were small at first. Matt said in that video: “People expect things to happen overnight, not over time”. So while the videos had no immediate impact on my life, I kept going. Every week, I posted one video of me painting outdoors in Hong Kong. I painted in the sweltering summer heat. I attached my cameras to moving trams to draw a fellow passenger. Even when I was hit by the virus, I set up an easel on my dining table and painted until I tested negative and could go outside again. I finally got monetized in April 2023, over 130 videos in.

A year and a half into weekly video uploads, I found a writing course. I had already bought into the idea that creating online was the future, so I thought having a writing-video skill combo was a good way to double down. I added weekly Substack essays on top of my weekly YouTube videos. After six months of two-timing, I felt more attracted to this new, young, hot platform. Substack was my Emerald City — its gleam entranced me. I abandoned YouTube and went all in on Substack in that October. I have been publishing weekly since.

My life transformed quite a bit in those three years of weekly publishing. I printed an art book featuring my painting. I connected with fellow creators and met up with them whenever I traveled. I wrote a book that’s now deep in the rewriting process — I’m on-track to be a published author. I’m even oiling up the Final Cut Pro gears to return to Kansas, aligning my content on both YouTube and Substack to surround the practice of living a creative life, aka Bite-Sized Creativity.

Making it to Substack’s top 1% was never a goal — I didn’t know this upper echelon was achievable in under two years — but it’s a nice checkpoint. So much so that I wrote a whole essay about it 😗

One Short Day (three short years) of weekly publishing got me to a life full of technicolour. One that is pretty dang different from where I was in 2021. It’s a transformation that can only be achieved through the weekly cadence of iterations that would compound to exponential growth. Change did happen over time. Thanks, Matt.

Oddly enough, I feel like the journey is just getting started — that the past three years is just prep work for a lifetime of creating, very likely still online.

I just have to give this ongoing endeavour a fair chance of succeeding.

Thank you to friends who gave this essay a chance of succeeding:

Karena

,

Rick McClelland

, and

Rik

.

---

Update log:

• 📰 The Nuns Trying to Save the Women on Texas’s Death Row via The New Yorker. A haunting intertwining of religion, murder, and capital punishment.

• 🥘 Barely left the house this weekend. I just read and wrote and cooked. It was wonderful.

• 💰 Inspired by Ramit Sethi’s interview with Matt D’Avella, I asked Jin if she’s open to more money conversations. I have no idea how to do this. But we’ll figure it out now that we’re in it together.

• 📹 The result of oiling up Final Cut Pro: a vlog on YouTube.

• 🫂 Have been in a spiral with some creative stuff.

  Michelle Elisabeth Varghese
  ,
  Camilo Moreno-Salamanca
  , and
  Kelly Davis
  all jumped in to gently smack some sense into me.

• 📲 Had a spontaneous, 5-hour call with my two besties that lived in New York & Melbourne. It’s very hard to align our times so the fact that we were all coincidentally free was really nice. We talked over each other a lot. I love them.

Book a call: Have a bite-sized creative project? Let’s give you a starting line boost a la Mario Kart - https://calendly.com/beckyisj/

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