So inspiration struck a few days ago. I wrote a blog post in about one hour. Didn’t edit or rewrite it. Then submitted it to HN and a few people liked it enough to upvote.

It got about 8.8k visits.

The 3 days before that, my blog literally got 0 visitors.

To me this again shows there’s no linearity in any of this. Small acts can have big outcomes. Weeks of nothingness, of almost giving up can be swept away with one seemingly random decision.

Some learnings:

• I need to keep pushing for way longer than I think necessary to achieve big things. Everything is compounding. If you stop a project, a blog, a career, you have to start over. You keep your learnings and your skills but the brand is destroyed. And most of the value is probably in the brand, the goodwill, the idea etc.
• Whenever I feel like people are watching me, I get anxious. When no-one was reading this blog, I could write about anything without people judging me. Now, however small the audience, there is the feeling that “the next blog post needs to be top notch or I will lose ‘em!”. Which of course makes it worse. Whenever I write for an audience, I’m not being authentic and it quickly becomes boring as fuck. So I will just imagine I’m writing for no-one and basically honest post.
• I might have ADD as several people commented in the hackernews comments. Yeah sounds about right. But I don’t want to focus on that. I don’t want to take stimulants. I stopped drinking even just regular coffee. And I feel great. Hard to describe but it feels like I “feel more” without caffeine. My senses are widened or something. So yeah no I’m going to completely ignore this information and keep trucking on. I like the hyperfocus part. Not so much the “I’ll procrastinate on my very busy work day til late afternoon” part. Ah well, win some lose some.
• One comment in particular struck me. Mainly because it is scarily accurate. Here it is:

I am anxious. I hate being publicly exposed. I’m a very private person. I do think people judge me and I’m scared of failure and rejection. I was bullied a little bit as a child, but not so much. And I was extremely scared of being ostracized as a kid, but as far as I remember that wasn’t really the case, I had friends around me. I don’t know where that fear came from. Probably lots more to uncover there. I believe every human has a very deep unconsciousness and we only see a glimpse in our daily lives.

To answer the question, “How to get on the front page of Hackernews”. I have no idea, but if I had to guess:

• Title needs to evoke curiosity. There needs to be a burning question in the mind of the reader that NEEDS to be answered
• Write honestly and authentically about stuff that matters to you
• Do not in any way try to game the results. Just submit your article and get a bit lucky!