What Do I Hope to Accomplish?
An off the cuff discussion of my goals on the Substack platform, and a lot of fan appreciation while I'm at it.
My name is Robbie Marriage, and it’s been a while since I’ve spoken in my real voice in this setting.
Generally, you guys are used to seeing me speak in a third person omniscient narrative voice, even in interactions that are supposed to be more personal, like a Note or a comment or even a DM. This is just the way I write most effectively, and everything I do around here is based entirely around making the writing the most effective it possibly can be.
That’s actually what I wanted to talk about today.
I got inspired to think along these lines when I saw this Note, written by my Substack friend
.I like William Miller. Nothing about this is a shot at him. I do recommend his publication Authentic Intel after all, so the proof is in the pudding. My relationship with him is much like the one with another good internet friend of mine,
, in that most times we speak it’s in the form of an argument, but this doesn’t mean I dislike him. Quite the opposite. I don’t argue with people that I don’t respect.It’s what he said that stuck out to me.
William and I have spoken before about how posting memes is much more productive (from an audience growth standpoint) than doing anything substantive over on Notes. Everybody knows this to be the truth. I see Notes making fun of this exact thing all the time, and the proof is in the pudding with my friend here. Judging by my language (with ‘memes’ and ‘substantive’ being posed as enemies in the sentence) you can tell what I think of this whole thing, but that still doesn’t stop it from being the truth.
There’s a broader inconvenient truth that I’m driving at here. Putting it in small Substacker language, there are two ways to really boost your audience within this platform. The first is to do something viral on Notes. The second is to get noticed by ‘a checkmark.’
I put ‘checkmark’ in quotes like this because I’ve had positive interactions with a few different people now with checkmarks beside their names. They have names, faces, and are nice people in my experience. Using the term ‘a checkmark’ feels ruthless, treating these people as if they’re commodities to be used for your gain, so I strongly dislike it, but in the age of verification checkmarks elsewhere and bestseller checkmarks here, it’s a term that comes up often in the small internet profile world.
Once again, I find myself thinking about a growth strategy, and coming out of the process with a bad taste in my mouth. I just don’t like it, and this continues a common theme for me. As a small Substack profile, I don’t want to bend over backwards to try to get noticed by popular people, who may or may not promote me. I also don’t want to put out low effort Notes that nevertheless perform well.
I’ll be honest. This moral qualm of mine has resulted in a lot of struggle in the size of audience department, and for a lot of time, I wondered why I was doing this to myself. Why am I putting myself through this? Why am I conditioned to feel so bad about taking the easy way?
This question was turning itself over in my head for a long time, both before and after I wrote my piece about how I’m no use to a gambler, disavowing the oversaturation of predictive value, leading to constant stories with no ending, and declaring that I want to stick to writing in the past, unless something in the present interesting enough happens that I need to write about it right away (i.e. 2024 Chiefs, luckiest team ever, that’s interesting), a mission statement that I have stuck with ever since.
Even when I did that little self-therapy session, deciding writing about the present will not be the easy way for me, that did not rule out all the other means of taking the easy way. Why don’t I post Notes that are just engagement farms? Why don’t I post frivolous comments under posts, just to get another link to myself out there? Why don’t I allow myself to fall into the internet growth sleaze that so many small profiles on various platforms fall into? Why do I insist on being so substantive all the time?
Note that I could’ve changed all this growth technique without changing a single thing about the mothership. All of the longform posts could’ve remained exactly the same, while just changing some ancillary things around it to make my Substack profile a little bit more conducive to gaining followers (even if they were not the most productive followers), but I just never did it.
For a while I wondered why this was. I couldn’t figure it out. For a not insignificant amount of time, I thought it could be part of an elaborate effort to self-sabotage, forcing myself to put all this effort into writing great stuff, that nobody reads, when (at least theoretically) the readership could be much bigger, but at the same time, my readership numbers have never bothered me, and I mean truly never bothered me.
If anything has ever truly bothered you, you know the difference between lying to yourself about something not bothering you, and it actually not bothering you. This makes me extremely confident in my assertion that numbers have never ever been a thing that bothered me, because I know what lying to yourself about not being upset feels like, and it’s not this.
So what then?
I couldn’t figure it out either, so I took this exact question to my actual therapist. We talked about it for a while, and I think I’ve got it figured out.
Let’s talk about the goal of my internet presence.
First of all, these feelings of mine are natural. It is not a mindset. I’ve never tried to train myself to think a certain way. Therefore, this is not a self help piece. I’m not looking to inform anything about your life. This is not really designed to help you, hurt you, change your mindset at all, or make you feel bad or good about anything. This piece is simply designed to educate my readers on a deeper aspect of the personality behind the Sports Passion Project, which begins with my perspective on the question that everybody who wants to be happy in life must answer.
Respect, or recognition. Which is more valuable to you?
Everybody has a different answer to that question, and none of them are incorrect. Some humans really want to be recognised for the things they do. Others truly don’t care, so long as they are respected by those whose respect they desire. There is a cultural stigma both in favour of (deifying celebrities) and against (glory hogs) seeking recognition, but I’m truly not against it. I simply choose not to partake.
I have always been able to live my life with very little recognition. Pats on the back and ‘atta boys have never really had much of an impact on me. It’s not as if I dislike compliments, but showing me the respect that I feel that I deserve on an interaction-to-interaction basis will always be much more valuable to me than any individual act of recognition. Once again, that is not true for everybody.
For instance, Valentine’s Day just passed. That’s a day of the year all about individual acts of recognition. There are people out there who genuinely love Valentine’s Day, which gives away to me that those people are generally on the recognition side of the respect-recognition spectrum. That fact in itself means nothing. I love people who love Valentine’s Day. It’s just an example to prove that there are recognition seekers out there, and they are not bad people.
They’re just not me.
What I do is yearn for people’s respect. I’m perpetually trying to make my peers and the world at large respect me. I don’t beg for respect, because in real life you often don’t have to. If you act like you deserve somebody’s respect, oftentimes you will receive it.
How does this translate to a Substack publication?
Well, this is precisely the topic that came up in therapy when discussing the divergence in growth strategy. Do I crave respect, or do I crave recognition? The answer came to mind immediately, and that’s when all the doubts in my mind faded away. It’s an odd experience having an epiphany like this, because you’re simultaneously grateful that you understand something you’ve been yearning to understand for so long, but also feeling somewhat foolish for not understanding it sooner.
I finally understood what I was looking to accomplish with my Sports Passion Project.
All I want is to become a respected voice in the community.
This may not seem like a big step to you, but the recognition of this one simple fact assuaged many of the doubts I’d been having. For instance, I could post a funny meme or a photo of my cat every day, just praying for one to go viral, like more people do on the internet than we’d like to admit. I have faith in the universe’s good intentions for me, so eventually, one would pop off. It’d get me a whole influx of new audience, a healthy amount of new subscribers, and what?
Nothing.
In terms of my goal for this publication, to become a respected voice in the internet football community, that viral meme/cat photo/engagement farm of some other type, and all the new subscribers that come with it, would get me precisely nowhere. It wouldn’t gain me any ground. I’m finally able to rationalise to myself why these ‘get subscriber quick’ schemes have never sounded appealing to me.
More subscribers sounds like a fantastic thing, but the pull was just never there for me, and now I understand why.
Similarly, I have always pulled crazy amounts of monthly views for my subscriber count. For instance, February is at roughly two thousand views in the month so far, off a subscriber count at the start of the month of 134. This indicates to me that my longform posts are uniquely bad at converting readers into subscribers. However, for reasons that I did not understand until recently, this did not bother me either.
What bothered me was to not understand why these numbers did not affect me like I thought they should, but now I get it. I would love if every one of these humans used the subscribe button, but even if they don’t (and they don’t, trust me), is that going to make anybody respect my voice any less?
It just isn’t.
For all of those who are in the ‘views don’t matter, it’s engagement that counts’ crowd, my engagement rates are persistently really bad as well, and it’s the same story. It doesn’t bother me. It’s just a number.
These are examples of things that my naturally born mindset helps me overcome, that could hurt other people’s continued commitment, but my line of thinking is not strictly positive. There are some instances where it greatly hurts me. A perfect example is the collaboration post I did with
, where the comments underneath it made clear that the readers did not even take the time to adequately read what I had written.
This killed me. It hurt me really badly. It put me in a bad state mentally for a longer time than I’d like to admit. It’s not because the man with more followers wins the argument. I knew that going in. It’s not even because the comments were negative. There have been several negative comments in the history of this publication that put me in a great headspace, because people cared enough to criticize (including several from my friend
). I’ve written a whole article about my first comment that I ever got, which was negative in tone, telling me that I was underrating Tony Gonzalez, from my friend , and the tremendously positive impact that it had on me.It’s not the negative comments that bothered me, it’s that what I wrote was not powerful enough to entice Smayan’s readership (at least the ones that commented) to even take a pause and read it. A Substack writer more focused on recognition (i.e. subscribers and engagement numbers) would have viewed the whole experience as a positive. It did get my name in front of several people who’d never seen it before, some of whom my name is still in front of to this day, but due to my specific goals for this project, I can’t help but look back at the day that guest post came out as one of the worst days of my life as an internet writer, perhaps the very worst.
This is what I’m trying to get across. I am likely not going to be a big time internet presence, because I truly do not want to be a big internet presence. If I ever do build up a following big enough that my name is widely known, it will be purely incidental, because it’s not going to be due to effort on my part. What I want out of this is to build up a voice for myself that people like hearing. An ideal outcome for me would be to become the Swans of Substack, if you will.
The Swans are not a popular music group, but people in the know about music know who the Swans are, and when they drop a new record, people pay attention. Not many people, because the Swans are not for casuals, but people who know what they’re doing know that the Swans are fantastic. If I can ever get myself into that position, my Sports Passion Project will have been a success.
The good news is, I think I’m already getting there. I’ll show you a few examples.
I talked before about how I was not willing to sell my soul to attract the eyeballs and marketing power of somebody with a bestseller checkmark beside their name, but somehow (I still don’t know how), I managed to attract
’s eyes anyway. Since then, he’s become one of my most loyal and active subscribers, and this all paid off in a big way, just recently, when he did this for me.
To a more recognition-oriented person, all the meaning from this action would come from the recommendation itself, in an article and not in the link dump, which singlehandedly boosted my audience by about 7% overnight, by bringing double digit subscribers to a publication sitting at about 140 at the time, but as you’ve likely gleamed by now, this is not where I derived my meaning from this interaction.
What made me see this and think to myself that I’ve made it, is the multifaceted meaning of the single word ‘patented.’ I’m not going to tell you what Neil meant by it. I am not Neil, but to me, this one word is all it took to confirm what I was saying before. Somebody who knows what they’re doing thinks I’m good. The recommendation could’ve been exactly the same as it was, but without the word ‘patented,’ and it would’ve meant exactly the same thing, audience gain-wise, but it would’ve meant substantially less to me. That one word indicates that
knows me for something. I occupy some space in his head. This is somebody I respect, and I believe he has respect for me.This indicates to me that I am doing something correctly. Of course, I am the Swans. My patent is in 10000 word stories, something which will never be super popular, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m getting where I want to go.
This is easy to say when it’s
. He’s the mythical ‘checkmark’ that I was discussing earlier. Him breathing in my general direction is going to mean great things to a publication as small as mine, so it doesn’t necessarily prove my hypothesis very much. Let me show you something else, from somebody I respect just as much, that gained me not a single subscriber, that meant just as much to me as Neil’s acknowledgement did.
This is a comment from the ever-entertaining
, left on September 20, 2024. Like I said earlier, most times Gary and I speak, it becomes an argument, but nevertheless he became my second ever Substack subscriber. I respect him a lot, and so reading something like this meant a lot to me. He even took time to remember I am Canadian, which is ever-present in that I spell the word ‘offence’ with a C, but not something that I bring up explicitly often.This means that I am something that exists in the world of
. Somebody who I like and respect thinks enough of me that he would write something like this, and even include a minute detail like that. Unlike Neil Paine’s shoutout, this one did not net me a single subscriber. It was in my own comments section, but it meant just as much to me. Somebody whose respect I wanted was indicating that he had respect for what I do, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted out of this.P.S. show Gary and his Chiefs Chronicles publication some love if you get the chance. He’s been going through some tough times recently, both in a ‘ha ha, Chiefs lost’ kind of way, and a real life way. He may be wrong about the Chiefs a lot, but I’ve got all the love in the world for him and what he does.
There are many instances of myself winning over people that I really wanted to win over. I’d love to show my initial exchange with
here. It was a lovely interaction, but quite frankly it was in a third party comment section, and I forget which article we were talking under. However, if you have any contact with Grant at any point, you know that his is a voice you need to respect, and his becoming a paying subscriber of mine is perhaps the ultimate gratification I’ve ever gotten here.Not because of his $50 CAD. I could find that anywhere. It’s because of what the 50 Canadian dollars say. Somebody I respect thinks I know what I’m doing. As far as helping to gain an audience, this did not help me whatsoever, but is still perhaps the most meaningful thing that’s ever happened to me related to the Sports Passion Project. The wonderful
is a very similar story (and a fantastic Notes follow if you’re into baseball by the way).I think we get the picture by this point. Where I gain value from being a writer on the internet is not from follower counts. It’s not from views numbers. It’s from valued opinions from people I respect, that tell me that what I’m doing is worth continuing. There are other people and other incidents that I did not name, but I see all of you, and I remember all of you. That I promise. Those incidents of interaction are what I do this for. If not for them, I would quit tomorrow, even if I had a million subscribers, all of them paying.
Which brings me back to William’s Note from the very beginning. After going through this whole process of thought, what do I think about it?
First and foremost, I’m happy for my friend. William has always been one to desire a big audience, so I’m happy something hit big for him. There was a time that he and I had approximately the same size of audience. That time is long gone now. He has approximately 4x the number of subscribers that I do these days, and I’m happy for him, because that’s his goal and he’s heading towards it.
But it’s not my goal.
In my opinion, I’m accomplishing my goal just as well as my buddy is accomplishing his. What I want to do is captivate you. I want to make you think. I want to occupy space in your head. From my perspective, it’s okay with me whether you agree or disagree with what I say. It’s even okay if you immediately check out again right after you close the article, and never think about me again for the rest of the week. All I need is your undivided attention over the course of those 10000 words, and I’ll be a happy man.
Whether you’re
or , and leave a comment requiring an index after the experience, or you’re one of the many who quietly click the like button and leave (I see you all), or you’re one of the many who read to the bottom and leave without clicking any buttons (whom I can’t see, but I know you’re out there), I love you all. You are my goal. You are what make the stories worth writing.Thanks so much for reading.
I enjoyed it, as always, Robbie. Thanks for the mention and letting me know how I’m often wrong about the Chiefs.😂🤔🙄
What blows my mind is your output! I’m in awe of the sheer amount of words you get out. I love writing but my process is slow and disorganized. It feels like each column, for me, is like a difficult childbirth- a lot of pain, struggle, and effort that ends with something I’m proud of. Ish.
I’m doing it the hard way and you’ve got, what? Some sort of high-efficiency cloning machine that pumps out non-sequential, fraternal twins (columns or articles or newsletters or whatever you like to call them)?! They share the same DNA but each one is their own individual (huge) being?!?!?
I digress. You’re a good guy, Robbie. As I’ve said before, we will probably always disagree on most things Chiefs-related, but I like you anyway. Plus, you’re Canadian and Strange Brew is one of my all-time favorite movies.
Alright, I’m going through Covid Round 2: The Paxlovid Bounce Back, and it has been pretty crappy. Watched that Super Bowl (which I still need to write about) and then got mega-sick with COVID, literally an hour after it ended. Felt better after a week and then a couple days later got it again. Been exhausted, so this is the most I’ve written in weeks.
Tomorrow would have been my 30th wedding anniversary and being sick has screwed up my routine. Not sure if I’ll go out to places Kelly loved tomorrow (like the beach and Los Bagels), but I’ll try to do something if I’m not too sick.
I’ve lost all focus and don’t know how to wrap this up. So I’ll just go with this:
Good night, Robbie. Good work. Sleep well. I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.🏴☠️🤺👸🏼
Man Robbie, don't you even worry about my comments section. In fact, don't look at the comments at all. I may respond to every comment I get, but unless it's from someone I highly regard (you're right here), from some of my loyal subscribers, or a great comment in general, I forget about it in 3-4 days!
We as writers need to realize that many people who troll on the internet are people who are being bullied outside, or they're in a different state, and instead of taking it as bad things, we should be thinking about it as motivation.
I loved doing that collaboration with you, I would do it again if you would like to, and to date, if any of my friends are looking for a story, I always recommend your site. And if I was being fairly honest, many of my friends thought you won that, and won't stop mocking me about it.
More than that, it was so insightful to see what you wrote. After all, you're the one who made me realize Tom isn't what we all think he is, the one who taught me the CPOE stat, and were a part inspiration for me for what I'll be introducing soon to Sports Square, the Clutchness Factor Algorithm.
I'm extremely sorry that it came out to be the worst of your life, and I was in shock that happened, even if I didn't express it online. Whenever I bring a writer onto my platform, it's mainly because I love their writing skills, and feel like it would be great to feature them in my tiny corner of the internet. No way would I ever care about recognition, because I love sports, and while writing has never been my thing, I wanted to try something new. It's been a year now, and I love sports writing. I love it so much. That's why I'm doing this.
Robbie, all I can say is just keep grinding man. Just do it for the love of the art. I love your content, and I'm happy that I'm a part of your journey. I respect you quite a bit, friend.