Extrapolating Success

Late last night (or early this morning, take your pick), I posted a link to a short Canva presentation by Lenny Rachitsky: How I (unexpectedly) now make a living writing a newsletter. ¹

I posted it to The School of Design Slack, sharing it with the participants on my Sell While You Sleep course. ² If you haven’t seen the presentation, Rachitsky shares some of the lessons he’s learned writing a paid newsletter.

A few hours later, Charles Burdett – who I invited to The School of Design’s Slack community to share the lessons he’d learned designing and building Workshop Tactics – posted a short PSA:

Be wary of, “How I did X,” and remember, if that person were to repeat the same steps themselves, now… they might not get the same result. It’s like saying, “Here’s the lottery ticket I used to great success.” Whilst it’s not all luck, there are a huge range of factors involved in success that cannot be replicated.

Burdett makes a great point. There’s no – repeatable – formula for success. Indeed if we switch to a parallel track (and another link I shared to the Slack from the land of insomnia), you have to find your own path, not borrow another’s. As Bill Grundfest notes:

You have to find your own rainbow to follow. There is no gold at the end of somebody else’s rainbow.

Whenever I find resource’s like Rachitsky’s, I try to extrapolate the underlying lessons from the story. In Rachitsky’s case:

• Deliver consistent value.
• Don’t be shy about sharing.
• Commit yourself to the long-term.

If you’re embarking on the newsletter journey – unpaid or paid – these three rules are useful to live by. You need to focus on delivering value, avoiding the trap of using your newsletter exclusively as a sales tool. (I’d suggest an 80:20 approach: Give, Give, Give, Give, Ask.)

Don’t be shy. This is an issue I run into often, especially with mid-level designers I’m coaching. They hide their light under a bushel. Don’t be shy. If you’ve learned lessons, share them.

Lastly, commit to the long-term. There’s no such things as an overnight success (and this is where Burdett’s observation hits home). You have to be in it for the long-haul. Look at Rachitsky’s deck and you’ll see that his success is hard won.