I’ve been on Substack for five years and I just got my 500th subscriber.

I have never had a single piece I’ve written “go viral.”

I don’t have outside social media on which to promote my work and bring in new readers.

Sometimes it feels a little like I’m talking to myself (which I do quite often in my offline life, so it’s kind of fitting).

But yesterday I ran into a high school friend’s mother at the library and she gushed over how much she loves receiving my weekly newsletter.

Nearly every week, I get a text from my dad saying how much he enjoyed reading what I had to say.

A couple weeks ago, a good friend and I got together for dinner and spent a decent chunk of that time digging deeper into a topic from a recent newsletter of mine.

Here’s the thing: It’s easy to compare ourselves to the person with 50,000 subscribers, to get caught up in the rat race of constant explosive growth. But writing something we’d most want to read has value. Being the person whose words make another person slow down for a minute and think about an important topic has value. Writing just for the pleasure of it, regardless of who reads it, has value.

Some of the people who read our work aren’t writers themselves, and the topic we think has already been thoroughly covered on Substack hasn’t even crossed their minds. Write it anyway. Write it all anyway.