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I’m not sure how long I’ve been staring. It must have been just a moment or two, yet it felt I had been staring for minutes. The slow change of the colour from white to light amber brought me out of my reverie.

I glanced at the clock to confirm that dusk had fallen. I did not need to look out of the window for validation.

With a start, I stare back again at the screen. And it stares right back at me and its annoyance at me. A single pulsing vertical line blinks at me, and it felt to me that it was pulsing a bit more aggressively, or was it my heart that seemed to be beating in time with that cursor?

With a roll of my wrists followed by a cracking of my knuckles, I set my palm on the keyboard and my fingers assume their starting positions on the keyboard, like sprinters in an Olympic final settling into their blocks.

I give myself a short pep talk, “Let’s get this started.”

And then I freeze… All those words that were roiling through my mind boiled away, all those strings of thoughts that sprung up shrank into nothingness, and emptiness settled in.

I’m not sure how long I’ve been staring at it for. It must have been just a moment or two…

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Seth Godin’s smallest viable audience seems like an interesting idea to adopt.

Most often, we want our work to reach a wider audience. So we tend to cover all our bases when creating stuff.

When we define the smallest viable audience for our work, we can become better at producing something useful and something the audience can connect to. Being very specific allows us to create with the knowledge that there is someone that our work is tailored to. Think of it as creating bespoke content.

Applied to writing, we can choose who we want to write for. It could be someone you know or don’t know. It could even be a note to your selves (future, present, or past).

So who is your smallest viable audience?

Addendum: I always had an audience taxonomy available on this site for a few years. Though I haven’t explicitly made it visible to readers, it has always been there. You can see an example here: bibliophiles for.

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When trying to learn or master a new skill, failure is the best teacher.
Tasting successes early on has the risk of building overconfidence or delusion. Failing early on enables us to examine the effort and improve the next time around.
Loss should not be seen as a personal defeat but rather as a learning opportunity.