Hi all,

This week we delve into one of my favorite topics: Stoicism. I also share some juicy updates regarding the platform and the work I'm doing.

Stoicism

Stoicism is a philosophy of life — a collection of mental frameworks, strategies, and ideas aimed at improving our lives and making us better members of society.

In my latest blog, Best Stoicism Books, I introduce the philosophy and talk about the best books on Stoicism. I highly recommend checking this one out.

Website Enhancements

On a different note, there have been many small improvements to the website and its underlying infrastructure in the past week. The effort resulted in the site being faster and looking better than it ever did!

I've received some feedback that, understandably, points out there are too many buttons on the homepage, which can feel jarring and spammy. I've taken this on board and will look to simplify the interface in the coming week.

While I'm still deciding what topic will be in the next blog, I'm inclined to pick up a writing-based one. This should help kick-start some momentum for my novel, A Wizard's Hunt, for which progress has somewhat stagnated in the past week.

Promoting the Platform

I've been doing promotional work on sites like Reddit, which helps me share the platform with other writers and web developers. Subreddits like r/webdev, r/writing, and r/fantasywriters have regular self-promotion threads that are quite popular. This has helped get some eyes on the website. On Thursday, I also plan to publish the project on all of my social media platforms. 🎉

First Month's Numbers

I'm a firm believer in sharing the process when building something. I've built a whole platform around this idea, which I've learned in Show Your Work!​

In the following weeks, I plan to write a blog post dedicated to breaking down viewership numbers for the past month. In the meantime, here are some figures:

In the past month, we've seen a total of 720 views across 150 unique users. This is more eyes than I could have hoped for, and I'm extremely grateful for the feedback I've received to date.

I believe some of the traffic to be organic via Google and other search engines, however, most of it likely originates from my promotional posts on Reddit.

Looking at the figure above, most people visit on a laptop or desktop — this figure may be biased, as most of my viewers probably come from Reddit.

I expect mobile to win over the ratio as the platform grows organically.

On the other hand, the blog and the platform as a whole are geared towards writers, who likely use devices that make it easy to write — laptops and desktops! This means I must keep the desktop version of the site in stellar condition.

However, it's still crucial to build the site with mobile in mind, and I believe this gives the site a much better chance of growing organically. Going forward, I'll keep focusing on aligning the experience between mobile and desktop.

The reality of building a site for both desktop and mobile is that, oftentimes, you are building things twice. But it's worth the extra effort.

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📖 Novels

A Wizard's Hunt 🏹

Progress: 20%

This week, building out some critical features on the website, and doing promotional work has taken precedence over progressing A Wizard's Hunt.

I plan to pick the momentum back up on the novella in the coming week.

🗞️ Blog

Best Stoicism Books

Explore the best books on Stoicism and learn the key principles behind the philosophy.

✒️ Writer's Circle

Our discord community, Writer's Circle, is currently being built out. Look out for updates on future Newsletter issues!

💡 Life Hacks

The Trap of Self-Improvement

I love doing things for a purpose.

The truth is, when I find purpose in the things I'm doing, it's very difficult to detach from it.

This, slowly and over months and years, can cause us to attach purpose to everything that we do. While this is not always a bad thing, we must be careful not to push this to the extreme.

For instance, have you ever thought something like:

While it's great to feel like our actions are having a positive impact on our lives, it's important to take time during the day to do things just for the sake of doing them... because it's fun!

Pushing this idea one step further, we should aim to do at least a few things that have no positive benefit at all. I know that's hard to accept. But the harder it is for you, the more likely it is you need to do it, and that's certainly the case for me.

Have a great one.

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