Burnout, The Promised Land & Taking A Break

After many weeks of debate & deliberation, I’ve made the difficult decision to hit pause on publishing Front Month posts for the immediate future. For paid subscribers, this means future billing charges will be paused & no new premium posts will be released for the time being; for free readers, this means my weekly Friday posts will be taking a hiatus while I consider what the future of this newsletter looks like.

The truth, while unfortunate, is unavoidable - I need a break. Managing this newsletter & a normal, full-time job at the same time is difficult, and has recently become too much to handle. I hope you can understand.

I want to take the rest of this post to share a bit more about the events, mindset & logic behind my decision, because I believe it’s important detail worth sharing.

To be clear, the decision to pause new posts comes amid an all-time high in subscribers, page views & annualized revenue. We recently surpassed 400,000 cumulative page views since inception & can count ourselves among the 25 largest finance newsletters on Substack. Market structure is getting the spotlight it deserves!

I’m extremely happy with & proud of the progress we’ve made in the last two years. Front Month’s audience has grown into a deep, diverse community of the smartest minds in finance. Performance has surpassed all my expectations.

Given all the recent success, the question remains - why halt momentum now? Why take a break with everything seemingly going our way?

I want to approach an answer to this question through the lens of a great visual by design legend Jack Butcher. I’ve found a lot of inspiration from his Visualize Value course & related images, led by this one:

The visual’s message is clear - patience & persistence pay off exponentially in the long run; success lies just beyond your breaking point, as long as you don’t stop building. Don’t stop working hard. Don’t stop writing.

Don’t. Stop.

I had seen this visual long before starting Front Month. I understood its message well. I also knew that the newsletter business had high rates of burnout & very few publications lasted longer than a few months, let alone long enough to support a full time job. I started this newsletter regardless, because of one thought, one bet, that drove me forward - I can get to the Promised Land™ before burnout catches up to me.

What is the Promised Land™, you ask?

The Promised Land™ is the place we find ourselves when the side hustle becomes the main thing. Where the hobby makes enough income to support the desired lifestyle. Where the best creators, influencers, and new-age entrepreneurs supposedly live, without a worry or care in the world.

Does the Promised Land™ exist in real life? Probably not as I had originally, maybe naively, envisioned it. I think many people, including most aspiring Substack writers & young creators, have a version of the Promised Land™ firmly fixed in their heads, and are doing everything they can to reach it before burnout catches up to them, whether their imaginary land exists or not.

For me, the Promised Land™ was a Substack income that was equal to or greater than my full-time job’s salary. Imagine that looks something like this on Jack Butcher’s visual:

When I started, my goal was simple - hit the dotted line as quickly as possible. Take on an unsustainable amount of work for a year, or two, or as long as it took to reach the Promised Land™. With enough time, enough research, enough writing, I thought I could get there. In my mind, it was a question of when rather than if.

It wasn’t until recently that burnout started to become a problem. Burnout is defined as:

“A state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress. It occurs when you feel overwhelmed, emotionally drained, and unable to meet constant demands. As the stress continues, you begin to lose the interest and motivation that led you to take on a certain role in the first place.”

(Source)

For over a year, I felt no burnout whatsoever. I really enjoyed getting to research, write & share market structure stories with an ever-growing audience, and was able to push myself to perform on a consistent schedule.

As the weeks wore on, however, I could start to see the impact this job+side hustle operation was having on my mental & physical health. My daily routine, my time on social media & the internet in general, and even the normal workings of my brain became optimized towards market structure research & content generation. If a piece of information wasn’t directly relevant to writing my next article, it was deemed not worth my immediate attention & tossed aside. With at least one weekly newsletter post on the working table at any point in time, there never came a point where I had time or brain space for anything else. I became an idea factory, an information triage center, a zinger-tweet flashy-title conveyor belt. It produced results, but it also made me exhausted. Factories don’t make for healthy people.

Relating this back to Jack Butcher’s visual, while Front Month built momentum that might have ultimately led it to the Promised Land™, it didn’t do so in time to out-run the 🥵 and 😵 phases of burnout that I unfortunately find myself in today.

Which brings us to the break. I need to take a few weeks off to rest, recharge, and work to turn the 😵 back into a 😃. While doing that, I plan to give a lot of thought to the future of this newsletter. How can I better organize my research & writing process to keep putting out high quality posts readers enjoy? What do I need to better prioritize? Is a paid model the right approach? Are weekly updates the right frequency? Is there a model I can support on top of a full-time job for many more years to come?

You can expect to hear from me again in early June of this year. To premium subscribers, if I choose to do away with a paid model if/when I return, you can expect a prompt pro-rata refund of your subscription fee & my genuine thanks for your patience & support. To all readers, I can’t thank you enough for taking the time to follow my work. If you have any questions, feedback or potential ideas for me, you can always find me via email (hidenotslide@joinfrontmonth.com) or on Twitter.

To a writing hiatus I go!

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. Nothing on this site or in the Front Month newsletter should be considered investment advice. Any discussion about future results or projections may not pan out as expected. Do your own research & speak to a licensed professional before making any investment decisions. As of the publishing of this newsletter, I am long ICE, CME, TW, SPGI, NDAQ and VIRT. I am also long BTC, ETH, LOOKS and SOL.