What I learned from writing 700 of these things
Oh, hi friends!
Today is my anniversary. I have somehow, strangely, I don’t know, written seven hundred of these newsletters?
Seven hundred?!
I sent the first one almost three years ago today — January 17, 2017.
A bit of background: I started this newsletter to connect to people, share links and thoughts about making good work, staying creative, and to fashion a kind of arrow for myself. Keep following something. Do that work. Don’t stop.
If you told me then that I’d meet hundreds of people from around the world who wanted to talk and think about the same topics, I wouldn’t have believed you. And if you told me then that Brass Ring Daily would get shoutouts in Lifehacker, Vanity Fair, and the gosh-darn New York Times — and that I’d get a book deal to write a motivational journal based on ideas in this same newsletter (see you in September 2020!), I’d say, I definitely don’t believe you. I never thought subscribers would grow from 17 to 4,200. I never thought anything.
All I knew was that I wanted to make something, and I wanted to own it. The only factor stopping me would be myself. There would be no editors to ghost me, no magazines that would suddenly fold, no invoice hoops to jump through. Of course, I could grow tired or bored or frustrated or look at how many people unsubscribed or never opened a single one.
Or I could simply…keep writing. Because I wanted to make something, because I wanted to own it.
And so here we are, seven hundred newsletters later. The message I wrote in the very first one still holds true. Here it is (apparently I used to have brevity?):
Six Sentences on Nerves: Nervous means you're trying. Nervous means you're open. Nervous means you're saying something real. Nervous means discomfort, growth, everything. So, I've gotta ask...when's the last time you felt nervous? And when will be the next time?
Starting this newsletter made me very nervous, and was also the greatest decision I’ve ever made in my creative life.
Go toward your nerves today — you’ll be glad you did.
“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread…for a sort of life rather than a Monday-through-Friday sort of dying.”
Oral historian, Pulitzer Prize winner, and radio show host Studs Terkel knew it all.
My friend and fellow BMI lyricist Alison J. Freeman is performing and posting one musical theater song every day on her YouTube channel — for the entire year! She’s calling it the 2020 project and I love this challenge almost as much as I love her performances.
Here she is with “April Fooled Me” by Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields — and you can follow along with the rest on her page here.
PS — What might you want to do every day for a year?
Do you like these daily emails? Please share with a friend!
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara