Andrew: Hey, Tanya. Nice to talk to you today. Okay, well, let’s just get right into it. The predominant question is how can I help? What are you feeling stuck on?
Tanya: So thank you so much for taking the time to meet. And the thing I’m feeling stuck on is I have a Substack and also have a Twitter and I am trying for it to grow and I am not sure how. Twitter especially, I feel like I’m sending messages into the void which is okay, like I enjoy it being that way but I think with greater outreach, having it be bigger could be fun and I could meet more people.
Yeah, so my Twitter and my Substack, I’m trying to grow them and I’m publishing kind of frequently on Twitter, kind of frequently on Substack. So yeah, any thoughts you have there. And then I feel like also in general, I have a tendency to do too many projects together. When I’m feeling creative, I do a lot of things. And then when I’m not creative, I go through seasons of creativity and no creativity. When I’m feeling creative, I start a bunch of shit, do a bunch of shit, but I don’t think I do devotion to one. I just kind of go 15 tabs, open everything, and I was just curious how do you manage having a lot of creative projects and finishing them? Because I’m doing a lot of side things for fun. So I’m like, should I be goal-oriented about I should be doing X, Y, Z, or should I just do whatever feels good? I want to make progress, but I don’t want to be lost in the sauce.
Andrew: Definitely. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to answer the question. I’m going to ask you a lot of questions, kind of rapid fire. They might seem irrelevant or unrelated, but a big part of life is like one thing. So figuring out how to help somebody in your particular circumstance requires me to know a little bit about your circumstance. So the first question is just you mentioned wanting to make progress and also wanting to grow. And I’m just curious what that means? Like what’s the point of the progress? What is there at the end of growth that you want?
Tanya: I don’t know, I just think it should feel like X input leads to X output. So when X input doesn’t lead to X output, you’re like, what am I doing? So to feel energized by your input, I think seeing some X output is just valuable. That’s important for growth. And in terms of writing, for example, Substack, it’s very rewarding. It feels really good when something you write resonates with people and it feels like it matters. When nobody reads it, it feels like it doesn’t matter. And should I be writing more? Maybe I’m a bad writer or whatever. So it energizes me to create more input, to have more output.
Andrew: But like, what’s the point? Like, let’s say you had all the success that you wanted, what would you be doing with it?
Tanya: I mean there’s no point at the end of the day with anything. It’s just like the doors that open, I guess. Paths are created by opportunities. I don’t know. Like, I don’t know what my future entails. If I become this popular writer who has 20,000 subscribers or 30,000 subscribers, like what can I do with that? I don’t know. When I get there, I’ll do some things with it and maybe I can start book reading stuff or write a book or something. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do with it, but I think paths lead to places. So you just have to walk on the path. So yeah, I mean, making money with it.
Andrew: But you can walk on any path you want. Okay, okay. We can move on from this question. I’ll come back to it. Yeah, I want to talk about money. So first of all, do you have enough money? Like, can you afford to pay your rent? Do you have all the money to pay your bills? Can you afford a home?
Tanya: Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup. I work in Big Tech, so I have pretty good money. Not crazy, but pretty good enough.
Andrew: Okay, so your financial needs are met and then are you spiritually happy? Are you happy with your life? Do you have loved ones? Like what, how are you feeling in terms of all of your other needs?
Tanya: I think I’m feeling pretty good. Right now I go through seasons. I go through seasons of really feeling really good and feeling really shitty. I’m a very devoted to season person, but right now I’m feeling great. In general, yeah, a lot of loved ones. Everything’s great. The reason I want, I feel like I do a technical job and I feel like I’m a more creative person. So I’m finding all these avenues to do other creative things. I just started a graphic design course. I’m writing. So if I could create at least some adjacent expression, money-wise or just like I think money just legitimizes it in some ways. I know it shouldn’t but it just legitimizes it some way and if I could create more avenues and creative expressions, that’s what I’m looking for, I guess.
Andrew: Okay, well the first thing I’d say is I’d say just drop the money thing because it’s misleading you. That’s my first piece of advice and we’ll talk about that in a second. But we’ll get around to it. I think by the end of the call I’ll probably have you convinced that money legitimizes it if you have no other idea what legitimizes it. But the point of this call and the point of your work as a creative is to figure out what legitimizes your work. And it’s almost never going to be money for creatives because it’s just not a good way to make money. It’s better to make money in the economy by doing industry and stuff like that. So that’s not to say that you can’t make money. It’s just the thing that legitimizes the work should be something and then you can make money, but that’s irrelevant. So the question I have now that’s just worth exploring is what do you want to say? What is the thing? Why do you say you’re creative? Like, why are you creative? What do you want to say to people? What have you been trying to say since you were a kid that you just have never been able to convince people of?
Tanya: There’s no one thing, I just feel like, yeah, there’s just no one thing. It’s just, I feel like I have a lot to say. If you see my writing, it’s around the theme of friendship and anxiety and all the things I’ve felt. I feel like I just have a lot to say, which I do express with friends, but producing a piece of writing or a tweet is a different way to express, which is not in a one-on-one interpersonal way, which I really enjoy. I feel like I can express myself fully. In fact, I feel like I take less space in, I have so much to say that if I create all these things, then I can be more present with other people. Otherwise I’m just like, listen, I got to tell you blah, blah, blah. And I am a worse listener if I don’t create. And I think I’m a better listener because now I have capacity to absorb before I only had capacity because I have so much to say. So that I guess. Yeah, I think you’re right. I actually agreed on second thought. It’s not about the money. It’s more about feeling like it matters. Just expressing and then just creating and having other people read it just feels good. I don’t know, not because they can give me money or that can make me money, but just because it feels like I feel seen.
Andrew: Yeah. What would happen if you just didn’t change anything? What if you just kept writing the way that you’re writing now and you just didn’t worry about it?
Tanya: I mean, probably that’s fine. It’s not the worst. I mean, I will probably just do that. That was my plan. And I was just hoping if you had better advice of what I could do or what I should do.
Andrew: Well, the question is, are you stuck? Like, what are you actually stuck on? It sounds like your life is going really well and you have a writing practice and you say all the things that you want to say.
Tanya: Right. Yeah. I guess there’s some latency between when I scheduled this call and today. So in between that latency, the feelings are moving. Today I don’t feel stuck on this today. I’m feeling like, I just want to create and it doesn’t matter. But when I first scheduled this call, I was like, damn, I want to write more, but I feel confused. I feel lost, blah, blah, but I’m not feeling lost and confused right now. I might go back to it. I think it’s very easy to produce work when you’re feeling good and when you’re not feeling good, it’s like the hardest thing in the world. So I guess what I’m feeling stuck on, yeah.
Andrew: So the thing that if anything makes you stuck is sometimes you feel bad?
Tanya: Yeah, I go through seasons of feeling bad when it’s impossible to make progress on anything. And so I guess in my season of feeling bad it’s very hard to make progress on any creative project and then in my season of feeling good I get, maybe if I were to, I wouldn’t call it stuck, but one thing to improve could just be I’m interested in too many things and I’m not very devoted. I can be very distracted.
Andrew: Yeah. Okay, let me just try to make sure I ask all the questions I want to ask and then we can dive in. Is the primary problem, there’s too many, what is the recurring anxiety or the recurring stuckness that causes you to feel bad? Is it there’s too many things and I’m not making enough progress? Is it there’s a specific ambition that I’m not getting any closer to? Is it interpersonal feelings? The thing that I’m interested in is what’s the primary source of anxiety that you keep running into?
Tanya: Yeah, I feel like in the last year or two years or so, my primary anxiety comes from not having a long-term partner. And sometimes I start feeling worried about that a lot. And sometimes I’m like, it’s fine. It goes away. I’m right now not concerned by it, but sometimes I’m so consumed by it.
Andrew: Right. And then that’s related to feeling like you have too many projects and that not enough stuff is getting done and that you’re not making enough progress basically. Like somehow this all wraps up within itself.
Tanya: It’s not. Like basically when I start feeling anxious about that, everything else just feels meaningless kind of. It just feels like I’m behind, I’m stuck, I need to resolve this otherwise it’s all fucked up. Like I’ve lost life, I’ve failed life, you know? It starts feeling like that.
Andrew: Yeah. Okay.
Tanya: Which I know is not exactly what I said and right now I’m not feeling that way, but it comes and goes.
Andrew: If you, it’s great that you’re not feeling that way right now. In fact, it makes it easier to have calls like this. So if you never felt that way, let’s say, do you feel like that would resolve most of the anxiety here? And then you would just feel like you’d just be making consistent progress and there’d be ups and downs and whatever, it’s regular, but there wouldn’t be anything crippling. You’d basically be on track.
Tanya: Yeah, in this season of life maybe there’d be a different problem but I don’t have any other anxiety. I feel like life’s perfect. I have awesome friends, awesome job. I love my job, awesome family. Everything’s perfect except when I start getting crippling anxiety about this problem.
Andrew: Okay, cool. So there’s a bunch of things that we could talk about on the tactical side of how do you go viral and how do you get people to respond to you and how do you improve your writing and stuff like that. And we could have a more tactical call on that side of things. Honestly though, the advice is relatively straightforward. I noticed that on your Twitter, you only have 1,240 posts, but I have 17,800 posts and Visa for instance has 250,000 posts or whatever. So the lesson is there’s this guy I really like, Matt Bateman. And at one point he tweeted like, wait, so all I have to do is tweet more and then I’ll gain more followers. He has 34,000 posts now and now he has 31,000 followers. And similarly, it’s like there really is, in fact, you just have to post more. That’s how you, that’s it. There’s no other lesson. That’s literally the only lesson. There’s no more lessons. So we don’t need to have too long of a call on tactics. It’s literally just actually post way more. Also true on Substack, post way more. The core thing has to do with the emotions. It’s like, well, if I feel bad, I can’t post more. Like, what if I don’t have enough good ideas? Or what if I don’t like my ideas? Or what if I get anxiety when I type things into the box? It’s all that stuff that needs to be worked through. But if you’re feeling good, just post way more than you’re posting. It’s obviously hard if you have a full-time job, but.
Tanya: It just feels crazy to sometimes feel, yeah, I feel like I love posting and I don’t even give a shit that I get zero, consistently, if you look at my things, I’m just fucking posting for shit, no. And I just like the documentation part. But I love rereading my own tweets, but it just feels kind of like I’m, I feel like a crazy person sometimes. The critical part of me is just like, why are you shouting in the void?
Andrew: That’s a great question. You don’t have to, but you said that you wanted more followers and all this stuff. Exactly. I don’t know. It is a good question. Why are you shouting at the void? Maybe you should tweet that. That’s a good post.
Tanya: I just like reading all my shit. I just love, instead of texting a friend, honestly one of the things I express myself on internet is because I have too much to say and it’s nice to not have one person to say it to and it’s not like, it’s internet. I can do whatever. So that’s why I do it.
Andrew: Yeah, you should tweet that. You should literally tweet that. Everything here you should tweet. And so the core thing that people fail to see is your tweets aren’t supposed to be useful. They’re not supposed to be useful. They’re not supposed to be insightful. They’re not supposed to be helpful. They’re just supposed to be what you love. You’re supposed to say what you love. And if you do that, you attract people to you because you become a kind of holy person because it’s like, this person is always talking about the stuff that they love. And then all the other people who see that and want to emulate you and want to notice your virtue, they’ll follow you, even if they don’t love the same things you love, because they see that you love it. And that’s the part that attracts them. It’s that you love it and you care about it. And so the thing that you’re supposed to be doing on Twitter is that you’re supposed to be getting as much value as possible. It’s not about other people. It’s not about helping other people. It’s just about you and helping yourself. The more that you help yourself just by tweeting as much as possible, the more people will like you. It’s very like a self feedback loop. I think that it’s possible to create a golden age for humanity by coordinating everybody toward building the kingdom of heaven on earth, basically. And so I tweet because I think that that’s possible. And then the other reasons that I tweet are more mundane. It’s like I tweet because it’s a really good way to find a bunch of people in my life, to make friends, to find business partners. I tweet because I want people to know what I’m up to and it’s a really low effort way to tell people what I’m up to because I’m really bad about status updates and documentation. So it’s kind of just like an active rolling log of what’s going on. I tweet because I basically think that my life’s really good and I feel like other people should know that it’s possible to live a really good life and it’s possible to build that. My life was not very good when I started tweeting compared to how good it is now and I just kept making it better. And I feel like I tweet partially to just keep telling the story of, hey, it’s possible to just keep making your life better over time.
But I don’t think you need a good reason, except a reason that makes you happy. For me, it’s like, I don’t know, I just like it. At the end of the day, that’s the reason that I tweet, is I just like tweeting. I like when people on Twitter respond. Some seasons I don’t like tweeting, and so I don’t tweet very much. And that’s why I’m not very famous on Twitter, is just I don’t like Twitter as much as Visa likes Twitter. I only have 17,000 posts, but Visa has 300,000 or whatever. And so that’s why he’s more famous. He just likes the medium more. There’s obviously a different way that you can go down or a different path that has more to do with gaming the system and learning about the algorithm and all this stuff. And you can really engineer it. But the reason I don’t recommend it is because at the end of all of that, you didn’t actually do what you wanted necessarily. If you do want to engineer the system, then that’s fine. And then you should just do it. But again, you should still just do it more. All the famous people who engineer the system have a lot of tweets. What else is worth noting here? Go ahead.
Tanya: It’s really good to hear that you looked at mine and you said you only have 1,700 posts while I have 34,000 because I thought I was a crazy Twitter addict, you know? I was like, I’m just a crazy person writing all the time and there’s just my inner critic sometimes. So it’s really good to hear. Me even thinking I did so much, you’re like, you didn’t do half as much as you could. So it’s good to hear that, very reassuring.
Andrew: Yeah. The other thing that’s worth noting is I noticed I checked your account and you seem to tweet more than you reply. That’s really bad for growing your following. So almost all of your followers will come from replies and almost all of your practicing, replying is the art. Because remember Twitter is a social media platform. Your thoughts are interesting. Sure. But your thoughts are part of a conversation. And so you want to connect with the network in the parts of the network that you love. And then that’s how you get from one to 3,000. So your first 3,000 followers or so that’s all going to come from replies, not from your tweets. Your tweets will all have almost no likes, but your replies will get lots of likes and comments and stuff like that. Then after you have 3,000 followers or so, then people will start retweeting and doing your tweets too, and you’ll be able to do both replies and tweets, but still the way to grow is replies. The way to grow is always replies. Even if you’re at 100,000 followers, the way to grow your following is replies and not tweets. Tweets are just things that you tell people, but replies are the way that you get more people to follow you.
Tanya: Right. And do you have any idea about Substack? Would you say same or no or you don’t know?
Andrew: Substack’s more complicated. But yes, in both cases, it’s just write more, you know, publish way more and you’ll get more followers. There are different mediums.
Tanya: Quantity over quality.
Andrew: Well, they’re the same thing. There’s no such thing as quality that is not related with quantity. They’re part and parcel. Obviously if you have AI write all your posts and, no, not quantity over quality. But if you are writing, the thing that is quality is the amount that you write. That’s just what, that’s where quality comes from. And this is true of most famous artists, you know, Picasso made multiple paintings per day for his entire career. Four or five paintings per day. Just an insanely prolific guy. And this is just true of so many artists. There are a couple people who are insanely talented, but if you’re not insanely talented, you’ll get good inevitably if you just do it more than everybody else.
Andrew: Okay. Then the thing that we should talk about is the blocker here also. Let’s talk a little bit about our feelings and how it gets all wrapped up. I’m interested in, especially that you don’t feel so bad right now. That’s really good. So it makes it easier to look at this, but I’m interested in the chain of reasoning that goes from, I’m not making progress on finding my spouse, to therefore I am behind. I’m curious in this conception of behind and also how that causes the despair or how it causes a kind of loop that prevents you from wanting to do anything else.
Tanya: Yeah, I actually realized very recently that I feel sad about it a lot but actually never go on dates because previously when I was, okay what causes it first is the age composition. As soon as it’s my birthday or when it’s the age thing somehow, there’s some kind of milestone where it rings in my head of like okay 27, 28. The age really, birthdays are triggers or seeing really close friends get married is a trigger. So those are triggers. And then I think what makes me feel shitty about it is I start feeling like, you know, there are less, and also the assumption that as you get older, there are less available people, or the good ones are taken, or most people meet their partners when they’re younger or whatever, all these assumptions. So age is definitely a trigger and all of these assumptions are triggers.
And then I just, if I go on dates, I feel like I am, I feel like damn, I’m really good at making friends. I have a million friends. I’m really, really good at connecting platonically or in a non-romantic setting. But as soon as there’s a romantic expectation or I go on a date per se, then I’m like, oh God, this sucks. Because I feel like I get in my head about it and I recently realized that actually I was not even giving it a fair shot. I wasn’t even going on dates. There’s this really good essay by Katherine where it’s like you get stuck in the agency when you first encountered the problem. And I was in long-term relationships. When I was 17, I got in a five-year relationship and then I was immediately in a two-year relationship. So I think I had to discover dating as a 27, 28 year old for the first time, especially in America, I grew up in India. So I have to figure all these nuances and complicated things of what do I want?
What do I like? I didn’t know all of the shit that I had to go through. I also have a meeting so I have to drop soon, but those are my thoughts, I guess, that make me get fucked up in those circles where I’m like, I’m gonna die alone. I’m like, damn, I fucked up. I should have not been in that five year relationship. I should have not been in that two year relationship. I should have explored and all my exploring is behind me or whatever. That’s what makes me feel shitty.
Andrew: Well, if it’s helpful, I know you have to go. But if it’s helpful, I was in a two year relationship when I was 14. And then once I was 16 and a half, I got into a five and a half year relationship. And then we broke up horrifically, really, really tragic. She really broke my heart. And then I was depressed for eight months, maybe nine months. And then I met my wife. And now we’re married. So I think there is some, the fact that you know how to be in long term relationships is actually much more important than the fact that you know how to date. I don’t, I never dated, I’ve never dated. I just don’t even know what that means. I’ve just fallen in love with people and then I married the one that I fell in love with.
And so I think it’s like, okay, you’re going to be okay. You’re going to figure it out. Your body knows how to do this. You know how to fall in love. You’re going to fall in love. If you fall in love, you’re going to know what to do. But yeah, it’s really scary. All right, I’ll let you go. But my overall recommendation is courage. Just have courage. You’re not stuck. You’re doing the right thing. It sounds like you’re going to get married. It sounds like you know how to be in long-term relationships. It sounds like you know how to write. It sounds like you have a good job. I don’t think you’re stuck. Maybe surround yourself with people who are more ambitious. Might be very helpful because just knowing that these are normal feelings that you stumble across on the road and that your companions are there to help you might be helpful.
Tanya: Thank you, that’s really helpful. Thank you, I appreciate it. Have a good one. Bye-bye.
Andrew: Bye.
