I admit I have been hung up on the idea of toiling in obscurity lately.
We live in this era where unless you have millions of followers the general consensus is that it’s not worth it to even try.
As I write this I have hundreds of followers, many of whom are probably bots, and yet here I am—trying. Call me crazy for going in against the grain of common sense.
The attention economy has warped our perception of what it means to do valuable work. I can sit here and write tens of thousands of words and to many—perhaps even to the opinion of most—that is all wasted effort unless I’m simultaneously hustling and selling and going viral and changing the whole damn world.
Rather, I sit here writing, toiling in obscurity, and trying not to internalize any of that. Were I to let those feelings seep into my heart they would manifest as nothing more than a shard of failure stabbing me right through.
Of course, I have given myself a double challenge. Climbing out of the hole of obscurity is hard enough, and deeply more so is climbing out weighted down by a less popular media format like—ugh—the written word.
It’s a small thing but I try to look at each of these entries, each word and sentence and thought and idea, as something vital in a long game to make something bigger. I try to focus on making a thing that I would like to discover, not looking for a hole to fill and trying to fill it but rather making a mark and making it bigger and bigger until maybe, perhaps, possibly it gets noticed.
That is the opposite of embracing failure.