the outlier №243 - summer parties
and becoming a high-performing letterman
This week has been long and quite intense leaving no opportunity to Outlier so here we are on a beautifully sunny Friday instead.
On the traditional party day of Tuesday, I got invited to a lovely lunch in central London with one of the Substack cofounders to talk about the platform, what we were doing on it, how to do it better and to just generally have a nice time. It was very convivial which continued into the evening with their Summer Party. I just about made the last train home.
There’s an amazing breadth of stuff going on on Substack and meeting other contributors is always a good idea, helping you build out your conception of what’s going on outside your little sphere of references. I even met a former rugby player who now works at the company (former Wallaby Clyde Rathbone for any 2000s Super Rugby nerds) and it was fun to be two oddly shaped men at a gathering of scrawny writer nerds. Like me, Clyde switched gears after rugby by founding Letter, a public correspondence startup, before joining Substack a couple of years ago.
The whole experience has spurred me on to become…
a letterman
Ed West’s A Golden Age of Letters does a good job of explaining a little of what I’ve been aiming at for a long time and why Substack seems to be the best place to do it at the moment. He says,
While I wouldn’t advise you to enter the media, I would suggest that you might become a man or woman of letters, which is a different thing altogether.
One of the reasons I’ve avoided traditional journalism, much to the bemusement of older family friends who can’t believe people don’t behave exactly like them when it comes to consuming news, is that it is demonstrably in decline. Hitching my career change horse to a wagon with bits falling off seemed like a bad idea when I left rugby behind and now, that seems like one of my more sensible decisions.
Also, when I could have made a run at rugby writing after the success of my first book Fringes (which no traditional publisher wanted before its release), I preferred to branch out in my subject matter. Writing this newsletter, letting myself try out all kinds of other topics and subject matter, has been immense fun and helped me improve my writing in all sorts of ways.
I still think sport is underrepresented on this platform (a really good example of what’s possible is Billy Carpenter’s Arsenal blog) and I am a little tempted to write some rugby-related pieces for the upcoming Lions Tour. Let’s see.
The other big surprise, and no one is more surprised than me, has been my social media endeavours. I disliked social media as a rugby player but as I now often repeat, that was more a failure of imagination on my part than anyone else’s fault. Starting a TikTok account about books has completely changed my life, almost entirely for the better.
But even if the social posts didn’t take off in the networks they belong to, I was always conscious of showcasing skills. Actual things you can do that people can see and pay you for. If you need evidence someone can actually do what they say on their CV and they have publicly available work, that’s the best evidence. I wanted to write, narrate and create and posting online has brought that to fruition. Substack began as a writing platform but its suite of creative possibilities now make it a very good home for my versions of those activities.
In short, I wish to be a man of letters. A letterman. Here is where I’ll be doing it for the most part.
It’s time to commit to this whole bit.
high performance
Not knowing who I was, Clyde made the usual logical leap when confronted with a former athlete turned writer and asked if my writing was about high performance.
It isn’t really but it also sort of is.
I’m not that interested in rugby any more, even if I’m still optimistic Bath are going to finally become Premiership champions for the first time since the 90s this weekend, but I do still deal with high performance in various forms. This week I’ve been editing interviews with former Olympians turned entrepreneurs doing extraordinary things like former powerlifter Ali Jawad, who is working on an app to make gyms and personal training available to people with impairments. It’s been long, laborious work and irritatingly, I’ve probably missed a way to make it simpler.
Then later in the week, I spent two days on set of a shoot for a major commercial endeavour at a beautiful country house. Seeing the machinery around this kind of endeavour and the degree of talent, research and experience involved is another kind of high performance. Even the location was something out of the ordinary.
(It struck me that the best possible business venture is to live in a massive, beautiful house with different commercial possibilities arranged around its grounds. If anyone would like to fund my new startup for 0% equity in the venture then apply within.)
Despite my protestations that performance is not my thing, this letter is called The Outlier. I like to think it deals in the unusual and high performance is not normal. It’s definitely involved here somewhere.
All this to say, I’ve discovered a few ways I can do this whole thing a bit better and over the next few weeks, I’ll be rolling them out. Call it high performance lettermaning.
a book
No major reading completed this week but I am enjoying Ryan Cahill’s Of Darkness and Light, the second part of a fantasy series. It’s good, easy reading pleasure.
a listen
Henrik Karlsson writes one of the more intriguing letters on Substack and his set of life decisions – homeschooling, moving to a remote island, working in an art gallery and becoming a man of letters – makes him an interesting interviewee.
If you want something specifically bookish, this episode of Caroline O’Donoghue’s Sentimental Garbage about Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials has a nicely judged informed casualness to it.
lastly
Thanks for reading! My work is made possible by you so if you’d like to support me you can buy my books, hire me to do something or you can become a paid subscriber using the button below.
If you want to help me out for free, you can share this letter with someone who might enjoy it, either on social media or by directly sending it to them using the button.
I’ll see you next time.