The Predicament I Face: Explainer Burnout
What I'm Up To (Philosophy), What I Reflected On (Explainer Burnout), and What's Occupying My Mind (Design) - all part of Allen's Friday Flights
HELLO to the Friday Flights
You’re here because you want to descend into madness with me. So let’s get to it!
Ciao!
Allen
Past Publications
6/24 - The Multiverse of Me
6/17 - Career ADD, I guess
Inside:
What I’m up to
What I reflected on
What thing occupies my mind
What I’m Up To
TL;DR: I have solved philosophy
The Things:
I had the chance to talk to Brittany F. about Career pivots, but more importantly, where we derived the power that fuels our professional confidence. Rooting for you Brittany!
I also had the pleasure of meeting Daniel K., engaging in the build up that eventually led to both of our career breaks. I’m cheering for your curiosity journey, Daniel!
I saw Top Gun. Then I saw Top Gun Maverick. All back to back. 10/10.
Started playing They Are Billions, after beating Before We Leave.
Ran 10 miles straight this past Saturday while listening to The Path Is The Goal, a 3 hour book about Buddhist Meditation. No I didn’t finish…the book.
I’ve been binging Not Just Bikes, and now I’m anti-car and anti-U.S. city redesigns (did you know that Los Angeles was actually a public transit mecca, complete with electric carts? Damn. What a dream)
BLURP: If you’re in LA and OC, ISFFA, a non-profit that I was used to be heavily involved with that focuses on the development of emerging professionals, is hosting its once every two years national conference in Disneyland from July 31 to August 2.
You can solve philosophy too! My score is 93.
What I Reflected On
TL;DR: The Explainer Burnout Predicament
The Predicament I Face: Explainer Burnout
Unconventional, and also, I’m still delaying the sequel to this post, but given the six month timing of it all, and the nature of this piece, I have to share this with you.
I’m actually hitting a burn out point in Wednesday Explainer Content writing.
You read it right! I’m still figuring out if I have process burnout, and by affliation, it’s giving a heavy weight to any topic I could focus on, or if it is content type burn out, where the nature of the content has a fixed run way that after 6 months, I’ve hit.
Here are my most formed thoughts on this important matter:
The Types of Content Creating
There are three kinds of content that can be created online at any given point in time.
Curated Content ← I don’t focus on this.
Explainer First Content ← This happens every Wednesday
Relationship First Content ← I’m starting to do this through Friday Flights
Curated Content can be a way to build an audience online, but they mostly take the form of reposts and soulless spamming. Curation doesn’t make you a better writer, but they do make you a better researcher. However, my goal was to become a better writer to help bring clarity to my own thoughts, and if I’m constantly borrowing memes and threads from others, when do I get to see my own original thoughts?
Explainer First Content is what happens when someone focuses on teaching new things all the time. The goal is to teach new knowledge. They are a great way to attract an audience, and prove yourself to be credible. Except when you do it frequently enough, you’ll end up with the same fate as every online content creator out there: Burn out. The well does dry out - whether its what to talk about, to the energy pool used to constantly grind the answer of thinking “what’s next”. A lot of Youtubers burnout this way because it’s an incredible long-term energy burn when put to a consistent cadence.
Relationship First Content is content that focuses on sharing with you, the reader, my experiences, rationale, and reflections. The goal is to create a bridge for you to relate to me, and I to you. From here I am taking the intentional position to share with you something about me that is uniquely me, and walk you through my own thoughts and vulnerabilities. You actually start to see this in my NFT debacle stories, and I started intentionally doing it through the Friday Flights.
Back to the Challenges:
I mentioned that I’m hitting a burn out point on Wednesday Explainer content.
I am.
I could tell you that I don’t know what to write about next.
There is some truth to that. I often find myself writing explainers the evening before, to meet my self imposed publication timeline of 9 a.m. every Wednesday.
Sometimes the writing itself isn’t fun for me, and I rely on the discipline of articulting and formulating thoughts into paper to carry me through.
There’s a lot of fun writing the Friday Flight pieces and doing relational content. But explainer, well that’s a bit different.
Perhaps I need to pivot and iterate the explainers to something I am both satisfied, and can sustainably create. But there are many possibilities.
What should I do?
Here are some thoughts
Spread it out - I can elect to take one post’s worth, and actually “cut it up” so that it would be distribute over 2 to 4 weeks. Pace it in a way that the beginning of the month introduces the “what”, the second week talks about the “how”, and the third week is a “reflection” after participating in it, researching it, or using it.
Reduce frequency - I can elect to reduce posting every Wednesday, to every other Wednesday.
Take a Break - Quite literally pause it, and come back when there is a sufficient bucket of curiosity to be shared about Crypto.
Shorten the Content - I can also elect to place a 500 word, or 1000 word, or 2 minute read, or 5 minute read, cap on what I write. Complexity is easy, simplicity is hard. But that’s the challenge, right?
Take a New Form - So this piece itself is a new form, lifted from the Friday Flights. Quick Intro, Thought 1, Thought 2, exit - current explainers have at minimum 3 connected thoughts, with a maximum of 7 thoughts.
Expand My Content Intake - I have a decent feed that I keep up with to help inspire my next writing. I would like more, but it’s hard to find new insights and inspiration from content creators who aren’t shilling the same 3 points about why Bitcoin is the greatest thing on the planet.
Focus on Reactionary Explainer Pieces - Everytime a new thing gets published, like whatever Ethereum Co-Founder Vitalik publishes, I explain what they just said. Or maybe focus on hot things that hit the internet that you might want to know.
Ask You On What to Explain Next - What do you, dear reader, want to know about next and have explained, or even expanded on? Perhaps your curiosity will fuel my own.
Thanks for reading.
p.s. this is absolutely a Relationship-First content.
What’s On My Mind
TL;DR: Reassessing design principles for the newsletter.
The Design
Design plays an important role in writing and it goes beyond graphics. How things present itself, is as important as the content being presented.
Incorporation of white space, clear cut sections, graphic highlighting, and so forth - that’s all design!
When I first started writing, I had no idea what the design of the newsletter would be, and where it would evolve. I am genuinely proud that out the door, Cryptomining 100 piece, set a good cadence of how things would be structured. It is the piece that set the process and design for all future publications.
Here are my design principles:
Design Principles:
Skimmable - I’m short attention span too.
TL;DRs - Too Long; Did not read.
Lead with Question - Every section is posed as a question.
When I published the piece I also unknowingly created an energy intensive process trap for myself: PowerPoint Graphic Supplements. You’ll notice in all my writing, I have a lot of a PowerPoint-driven graphic supplements. They show up as headers for sections, or as a visualization assistance to show “before” and “after”.
When I first did it, it was “going to be easy” and I was going to simply reskin a templated file all the time.
To a certain extent, it worked. But there were times when it felt useless, or poorly executed.
The Worst PowerPoint Graphic Usage (also IMO)
Metaverse - This didn’t really do anything for me and progressively gets worse. I also hate the Metaverse so that might be the other part.
Cryptomining 200 - I forced people to squint. My bad.
DeFi Yield Farming 101 - I think the PowerPoint graphics are incredibly unnecessary.
It became an unusually demanding process to sustain compared to pure writing. Designing the graphics took time and it often overcomplicated things for me. Exporting the graphics into substack also took time, and I encountered technical difficulties frequently.
But when they worked, they worked really well.
The Best PowerPoint Graphic Usage (IMO)
DeFi Yield Farming 100 - When I’m comparing seperate methods, the graphics came in handy.
How Decentralized Exchanges Work - When I’m comparing the landscape, the graphics came in handy.
Decentralized Autonomous Organization - When I’m comparing two models in a giant list, the graphics came in handy.
At this point, I am mulling around in a redesign to see if I want to continue you have those giant, powerpoint created, graphic headers.
Do you think I should keep it, or should I substitute it with images like my Friday Flights have?
See you next time. :)