Here are 14 things I learned from the project (setting up a WordPress website, curating the site, writing articles, writing a Wikipedia article, researching, writing and publishing a book):
1. Persistence.
It is easy to start something. It’s much harder to keep it going.
Persistence is not a feeling, it’s a doing.
I feel it is an cheesy thing to say, but it is nonetheless true that, unlike in the movies, there is no music in life. You are not going to hear the “hero” music when you are working hard / working late. If you are waiting for it, you are going to be disappointed.
Many of the successes from the work were experienced in the quiet of the night when there was no one around to celebrate with. For instance, discovering a key piece of evidence, or completing an interview on a major podcast (such as James Delingpole’s Delingpod that wrapped up at 1:35 am).
Glory days don’t feel glorious, so don’t expect them to.
2. Ignore so-called “best practice” when appropriate.
There were many times when, preparing an article for publication, I glanced at the “Yoast” score[1] and noticed that it was very low. “Indistinct keywords”, “too many indirect verbs” and other suggestions indicated how I should amend the article to make it suitable for the web. There was one problem: what I had typed was a quotation of the writing of G.K. Chesterton or Dr. Halliday Sutherland so I couldn’t change the words and, given the calibre of the writers, would not want to anyway.
On other occasions, expert opinion advised me to keep articles short – no more than 250 words – yet the issues I was summarising could not be limited without losing credibility. In other words, I had to provide the detail in order to maintain my credibility on the issue.
So, by all means use “best practice” and tools and measures, but know when to ignore them.
3. Don’t do the work of your enemies for them.
The project related to the portrayal of my grandfather, Dr Halliday Sutherland, in history books and biographies. When I began the project, there was little information about him on the Internet. What there was showed him in a bad light – well-practiced lies about a bigoted Roman Catholic doctor and the misrepresentation of his cause so that his opposition to eugenics was not mentioned. The project to change this required a lot of work and even today, some nine years after it started, there is a long way to go. When you look at the journey ahead, it can be disheartening to see how far you have to go and the difficulties you will face.
I was aware that there were many people who opposed the project – ideological opponents of Dr Sutherland and people too lazy to rearrange the false knowledge embedded in their brains despite the evidence to the contrary.
These challenges create negative emotions that have physical manifestations: a twist (or a pain) in your stomach or a sleepless night, for example. Remember that if you allow these to be inflicted on yourself, they can result in pain and illness and may eventually destroy you. And whose interests does that serve? Who wants to stop you work?
Don’t do the work of your enemies for them.
4. It’s not just about the numbers.
There were times when I looked at the numbers of people reading my blog articles and worried that they were too low. Often, I felt that I had wasted my time and that I should give up.
That said, I didn’t and pressed on writing at least one article each month. Over time, the number of articles grew and it became apparent that there was a body of work. It turned out that the value of, say, the first 50 articles was not the number of readers they attracted, but that someone coming late to look at your work would see that it existed.
Let me explain: when I contacted podcasters for interviews, it was about a story they neither knew nor cared about. If they had heard about it, in the version they had, the opposite had happened. One of the first things they would have done would have been to look at hallidaysutherland.com
On doing so, they would have seen that a number of articles had been published regularly over several years, so in their mind it became “a thing”. The value of the early articles was not the number of times they were read, but because of the impression they created.
5. Embrace your mistakes.
In life, you will make mistakes. I squirm when I think of the things I have done to promote the project. The fellow at the dinner party who politely cut me off when I started to talk about it with “yes, you told me about that the last time I met you” (I hadn’t recognized him and was embarrassed being confronted by the fact that I had been a bore on the subject). The person I was at school with who I used to try to promote the story, asking him to promote it to the old boys society – he never replied. The marketing of the book when many people had been placed under house-arrest (the so-called “lockdowns”) so their workplaces did not forward the book to them.
These may not appear to be mistakes to you, but I still squirm about them when they come to mind. Yet, had I avoided these moments, I would not have achieved the successes. Mistakes are part and parcel of work. In hindsight, there have been lots of things I could have done better, but I have learned that criticising myself constantly about it doesn’t help – trying to do better right now does.
6. Get it shipped!
Seth Godin always talks about getting the worked “shipped” by which he means getting the work out to the marketplace, into the hands of the customer. Your work is never going to be perfect, mostly because “perfect” is not a tangible quality but a perception in your mind.
The work is completed if it is in the marketplace or in the hands of the customer.
Get it shipped rather than procrastinate for the perfection that never comes.
7. Be intensely regular.
I publish an article on hallidaysutherland.com on the first day of each month (except April when I publish it on the second) at 5 PM Sydney time. Humans recognize patterns quickly, so it is vital to embed and reinforce that pattern in the minds of your readers. Failing to publish on time or being irregular will cause them to be disappointed, distracted and they won’t come back.
8. Write from a good place.
Your mood shows in your work. When you write articles, do it from a good place otherwise it will show. On one occasion, I wrote an article that related to a particularly nasty calumny about Dr Sutherland and my anger showed in the article. The angry tone of the article distracted from its credibility and weakened the evidence I presented.
The impression conveyed by the article I wrote (before it was amended) was therefore completely off-message. The first article conveyed “Mark Sutherland is very angry about this issue” and it needed to be changed to “these assertions about Dr Sutherland are entirely false”.
Remember: “You cannot not communicate” and “It’s not what you say, it’s what goes in their head.”
9. Never, ever overreach. Ever.
Much of the work involved rebutting the falsehoods of biographers or historians and bringing to the fore unimpeachable evidence that showed what they had written or said was false.
In such times, one has to summarise the material a process that can lead to the simplification of what was said or done. At times, it is tempting to take shortcuts and to exaggerate the evidence to make a point more easily. To do this is to overreach and will lead to your case falling over. It is what your enemies want. Don’t do what your enemies want!
10. Be nice, especially when dealing with people whose views may oppose your own.
There were times it the project when I contacted people who had written or spoken a lot of nonsense about Dr Sutherland and his work. Be nice to them, be polite. You don’t why they hold the views that they do and you should not take it personally. If you are nasty and critical of them, they are not going to read or listen to what you have to say.
Remember it isn’t about you or them, but about the issue.
11. Leave it in God’s hands.
In a project you care about, there is a lot of anxiety and tension. Much of this is wasted effort and the best approach is to leave what happens in God’s hands.
Many times on the project I have seen signs that things were as they should be, from being aware of Dr. Sutherland’s presence when I studied the contents of his suitcase under his portrait, to finding an old “LP” album on a nature strip in Annandale.[2] There were other occasions as well.
That said, there were times that things were not happening as fast as I wanted them.
The first article I wrote for an online magazine took them eleven months to publish; it took three years from my offer to be interviewed on a podcast to the interview happening. Three articles I wrote remain unpublished (including a 5,000 word piece), in each case despite the promises of the editor.
If its meant to be it will be, just not as quickly as you might like.
12. Wheat and chaff.
I forget where I heard it or who said it, but there is a saying that a true friend sees you for the wheat and not the chaff. In a similar way, the best supporters of the project are those who listen to what you say and focus on the wheat and not on the chaff. If you don’t have this sort of support for your projects, make sure to enlist them.
13. You don’t see most of what you have influenced, so don’t sweat it.
Sometimes you see events that happen in relation to your work and you are not sure if you caused them or not. When they happen, you think: “Did I influence that? What can I do more to enhance my influence?”
Likewise, on certain social media platforms I felt that I was wasting my time because I perceived I was being surreptitiously censorsed.
The fact is that, I am not aware of most of the conversations about Exterminating Poverty or the results of my work. Just because you are not aware of something does not mean that it didn’t happen, so don’t spent time worrying about it.
14. Engage with your audience.
I was particularly careful to engage with anyone who sent me a message of engaged with the blog. Look after them, thank them, because it is a great influencer and keeps you away from hubris.
[1] “Yoast” is an online media marketing company and the tool advises you on how to get your material ranked highly by search engines.
[2] The album was The Hound of Heaven, a recording of poems read by Richard Burton. It was on top of a stack of 20 LPs on the nature strip. The second line of The Hound of Heaven contains the phrase the Arches of the Years which was the title of Dr Sutherland’s 1933 autobiography.