On Friday evening, I opened my weekend calendar and felt my chest tighten and my stomach drop. I had five coaching calls on Saturday and four more on Sunday.
I work full time. Add the commute to forty hours at the office, and fifty hours of my week are spoken for before I write a single word. Everything I build here happens in stolen time: before the house wakes up, in parking lots, wherever I can find ten quiet minutes.
I stared at those nine calls and a thought slipped in. Am I going to burn out?
So I decided to test it. I would go into the weekend curious, as if each conversation could teach me something about myself, and see how I felt by Sunday night.
What I heard on the calls
Call after call, I heard a version of the same story. People know they want to write and create. They want to coach, consult or launch the paid tier. They still aren’t doing it, and they can’t figure out why.
One writer has his paid subscription ready to switch on. He told me he’s afraid people will pay, and then he’ll have to deliver.
Another stepped away from Substack this year after a project he cared about fizzled. He took it personally, as if the result said something about who he is.
Both of them can picture what’s possible. Neither feels ready for it to arrive.
What a lab knows about failure
One of Saturday’s calls was with a researcher who spends his days in a lab. He described six hours of sample prep for a single run, and a leak that once contaminated his data. In the lab, a result like that means you repeat the experiment. When our conversation moved from his work to his own life, he apologized for over explaining. I told him, “It’s not over explaining. It’s reporting results of the experiments that you are running.”
His next sentence sounded like a lab note: he had expected to be having fun, and he wasn’t. Somewhere in that conversation I said out loud that I love the idea of life as a Petri dish, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
I worked in a lab once too. As a psychology undergrad, I ran participants through experiments comparing collectivistic and individualistic cultures, reading the same standardized script to every person who sat down across from me. Participants didn’t show up, misunderstood the task, or gave answers we had to throw out, far more often than I ever expected. My lab had no Petri dishes, but it ran on the same rule as his. A lost session told us something about the setup. It said nothing about the person running it.
What my own numbers show
People ask me how I did it. In October 2025, Courage to Create had 984 subscribers. Today it has 10,177. My answer disappoints them a little. I wrote every day, kept showing up, and treated posts as an experiment.
Most of those experiments failed, and I mean that literally. When I pulled my numbers this month, about 450 of my Notes had brought one or two subscribers each. A typical essay brings zero to two. Seven Letters from the In-Between, published as regular posts, brought one new subscriber between them. Search and social media together brought 70 all year.
Then one essay, “Once you understand neuroplasticity, you stop waiting to feel ready,” published on June 10, reached 53,006 views and brought 686 signups. Notes brought about 4,900 subscribers, and two of them did roughly half of that work. One shared an essay. The other told my story of living two lives, corporate strategist by day and identity architect by night, and it brought just as many readers.
Your Substack is a Petri dish
Every post you publish is a sample. A post with three likes tells you something about the topic, the headline, or the timing. When a paid tier brings in two subscribers, you have a result to study. Each result is data about the experiment. It says nothing about whether you’re a real writer.
The writer with the paid tier could switch it on as a 30-day experiment: deliver one thing to whoever shows up, watch what they respond to, and adjust. The one who stepped away could count that fizzled project as one sample in a long series.
Sunday night
By Sunday night, after the ninth call, I felt energized. The burnout I had braced for on Friday never showed up.
On Saturday’s call with the researcher, I heard myself say, “My experiments are as important to myself as they are important to other people.” I meant it. After nine calls of giving and experimenting, that sentence was the result worth writing down.
If you’ve been waiting on something you want to make, it deserves a place on your calendar next to everyone else’s. Pick one thing. Make it small enough to finish before your coffee gets cold. Run it this week as an experiment, and write down what happened.
Then tell me in the comments: what are you putting in your Petri dish?
Magdalena
P.S. If the thing you’ve been waiting on is already written, sitting in your archive or at the bottom of a drawer, that’s what the Writing Lab is for. We finish the essays, articles, and books you started, and we publish them while the inner critic is still talking.
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Magdalena - Congratulations! I imagine that feels wonderful and strange at the same time. You've put in a lot of hard work! So a lot of your growth came from one essay and another two notes going viral? I never have figured out the Substack algorithm.
I keep trying though! Again - I've seen you put in the work.