Hey friends,
It’s edition 200 of Nina’s Notes. 200 of these little notes. 🥹
Hard to believe.
This milestone means a lot to me, mostly because you all keep reading!
200 notes means four years of consistent writing…
And many many many weeks of texting my editor (re: my best friend) saying…”Ahhhh the Note this week is late! I haven’t written it yet.”
Even if it meant waking up at 6am Wednesday morning to get Nina’s Notes out on time, I did it.
It was a deadline that meant something to me.
That I was showing up for all 4000 of you readers.
To celebrate this milestone, I want to walk down memory lane a little bit.
First, here are the most read pieces of Nina’s Notes over the last 4 years.
#171: The Glymphatic System Hack
#169: How I Fixed My Dad’s Diabetes Crashes in 4 Weeks
#164: The Estrogen-ADHD Connection That No One Talks About
#176: What Having Two Chronically Ill Parents Taught Me About Longevity
#21: Heart Disease And The Quest For A Cure
Next, I want to talk to you about what writing this newsletter has really done for me.
Xoxo,
Nina
💬 In this note:
✍🏼 What Writing This Newsletter Weekly for Four Years Has Taught Me
#200: ✍🏼 What Writing This Newsletter Weekly for 4 Years Has Taught Me
Let's start at the beginning.
It was September 2022.
I was going through one of the hardest years of my life and had just broken up with my long-term partner in Berlin.
We had lived together, so I moved out, and was renting a friend's place in Friedrichshain.
I was doing my best to make that space my own, while enjoying the cozy space my friends had already created in it.
On top of that, I had also made the difficult decision to close my business, Memido and I didn't know who I was without identifying as a founder.
I shifted from being a founder to being...what exactly? What am I now without Memido?
That was really hard to sit with.
I really think it's difficult for founders to make these big life changes because we so deeply identify with that life., Plusand it was my very first business too. This was my baby, and now I wasn't going to be running it anymore.
But I knew that I was a writer.
I had been journaling every day that year because it was so emotionally challenging, going through all those life changes.
Over the years prior, I'd written a couple pieces here and there on various platforms, but I never really stuck with a consistent writing habit.
So I sat down and I set myself a goal.
I said, "Okay, I am going to write. I'm going to start a newsletter. I'm going to do this once a week for 10 weeks before I really share it with anybody. That’s my goal."
But the most important thing to me was the habit of writing weekly.
When my whole life was turned upside down, I didn't have a routine.
I didn't know what I was going to work on next.
But writing kept me grounded.
People were pulling me in different directions, asking me what I'd be curious to work on.
I had just been working in diagnostics for the last 8 years, so everyone was trying to pull me into a new diagnostics company.
But I was so exhausted and scared to jump into the same thing, again.
I wanted to do something different. But didn’t know what.
So I started writing about longevity and psychedelics because of what I had studied during my PhD, and I wanted to basically just get up to date in the field.
Meanwhile, I was being encouraged by a lot of friends that said, "Nina, you are good at teaching, and you're good at explaining things in a clear and concise way."
And in my founder mindset, I thought, "Okay, how can I do that in a scalable way?"
My answer was writing those first 10 newsletters to a small mailing list of 12 readers. I didn’t want anyone to know I was writing this newsletter, not yet.
I would spend a whole week writing the newsletter - putting way too much into each one. Writing about three or four topics each.
Those early ones are embarrassing. Titled Nina’s Notes #1 - #10. Go back to the archives to check them out, they are all still there.
Despite them not being my best work…I still sent them out, on time, every Wednesday.
After 10, I think I finally had the courage to post about it on my Instagram. That’s how I got my first 100 subscribers.
Then it grew organically over the last 4 years to 4,000 readers between Substack and LinkedIn Newsletter.
Over those years, you wouldn’t believe the opportunities that have come my way simply because I write this newsletter.
I've been invited to give 33 talks on topics ranging from women's health and psychedelics, to starting a company, to the future of health tech, to immersive technology for mental health, to innovation, and finding my voice along the way.
I was even invited to speak at Oxford about women’s health and psychedelics. Because I wrote a newsletter about the topic, before anyone else.
These are opportunities that I created for myself simply by showing up week-after-week and writing about questions you ask me, or that I find interesting.
However, despite this recognition, this newsletters sometimes feels small and unserious, although it's quite the opposite.
I think that's because I'm an academic.
In academia, writing needs to be official and approved by peer review in order to be taken seriously and that’s the source of the imposter syndrome I feel.
But here I am, nonetheless, writing a weekly blog about topics that people are curious about in a way that people can understand, and that gets me on stage to talk about it.
It feels incredibly rewarding and powerful.
Through this endeavor, I built up my confidence to become a professional speaker and learned how to structure talks in a way that I can update constantly without having to rack my brain practicing it over and over.
When I was working towards my PhD, preparing for a presentation, I would spend weeks fine-tuning my slides, preparing the data, and getting everything ready to present. Because the other academics would be quick to poke a hole in any questionable data.
Now because of this practice of writing and organizing my thoughts, I can think, "Oh, I'll give a talk about newsletter 55, 165 and 131. That's an amazing talk because I've thought out very clearly what all those points are, and I can just put them together."
Creating this body of work has made me immensely proud.
It's not easy to write something every week for 4 years.
When I was feeling really low in those moments when I was closing my business, and I wasn't sure what to do next, It felt like getting the newsletter out was the only reason for me to make it through the week.
There were times when the newsletter slipped my mind because there were so many other things on my plate that I didn't know if I was going to be able to get it out as planned.
Sometimes I’m a day late, and one of my subscribers messages me and says, "Hey, what happened to the newsletter this week?"
Then I would think, "Oh, there's somebody out there waiting for this. I want to show up for them."
I've taken this newsletter on such a ride over the last 4 years as well.
I started recording myself reading these out loud around number 80 and started the Nina’s Notes podcast so that my dad, who's losing his vision, could listen to the newsletters every week.
I've had moments where I can put more of my own personal time and funding into making Nina’s Notes grow, like when I was writing guidebooks and doing podcasts and interviews.
Healthtech and biotech companies have come to me to help shape and share their message about their product to the public.
Nina’s Notes is something that I want to continue to grow and evolve for the next 4 years and even longer.
It's called Nina's Notes for a reason. I chose that name so that I didn't have to stay in one lane and I could write about whatever the fuck I want to write about.
I've been writing about longevity. I’ve written about psychedelics. I've written about neuroscience. I've written about startup life. Now I'm writing about AI and Claude and I hope that you all keep coming along for the ride.
All 200 of these newsletters have done so many things for me. It curated a community of genuinely curious individuals that like my newsletter because they don't know what topic they're going to get in their inbox each week. It's allowed me to explore different subjects that I wouldn't have been able to write about had I had to stay strictly in biotech.
It allowed me to create in person communities through Longevity Wednesdays, and larger events like Longevity Day.
I learned how to write and read sources and then publish a newsletter in an incredibly quick amount of time.
I've learned that AI sucks at writing, and it's fun in the beginning because you think, "Wow, that just made a pretty decent article” but then realized that it sounds nothing like me and is flat and boring.
I learned to write as a way of expressing what my soul has to say, while also expressing who I am and what my thoughts are (and AI has no place to replace the joy of doing that).
I’ve learned to press publish before a piece is “perfect”.
That consistency and the deadline matters more to me than how ‘good’ the piece is. Those feelings can’t be replicated at all by AI.
To all of the newsletter writers who are trying to save time by having an AI draft, schedule and publish for them, please know, there’s a character-building moment in being about to miss a deadline and getting the piece out anyway.
The beauty of the raw-unfiltered words that make it into a piece because the clock is ticking.
I'd rather have it be rough around the edges and with the occasional typo that slips through, (sorry to my editor), but that's what I really want to bring to these pieces.
I've never had a strategic direction with this newsletter, what has mattered to me most is that I've wanted it to bring joy and education to my readers.
I've wanted Nina’s Notes to be something that people look forward to seeing in their inbox and not something that they just sort of skip over.
If it's done that for you, I'd love you to write a comment, like this post, share it and restack it.
Tell me what you've learned from my 4 years of writing for you.
Tell me what you'd like me to write more about in the future.
But most importantly, thank you for reading.
P.S. Did you know I have a podcast? My YouTube channel is officially 1 year old, and is about to cross 900 subscribers. Go over there, like it, and subscribe!
Edited by Wright Time Publishing