24. 'Focus' - Our Word for 2024
The Action Plan for increasing our Surface Area of Serendipity
Dear Reader,
A couple of weeks ago, our Storyteller-in-Chief
wrote a letter summing up our journey so far, delivering justice to our word for 2023 - ‘Reflect’.If you haven’t read it yet, here’s a nudge.
22. Looking Back on 4 Years of Project Bibliotherapy
Dear Reader, Last month, on the 22nd, Project Bibliotherapy turned 4! You may know us only in our current avatar, but it’s been a long, strange trip getting here. We’re a brand that helps people build a better reading habit through our ‘Readers of 42’ community.
Building Project Bibliotherapy has been an education, invaluable beyond belief. One crazy impossible ride to the point where we are ready to launch the next stage of our lives, universes, and everything, on our terms.
Graduation Day is over. Time to enter the real world and make the dream come true. Time to ‘focus’ on the road ahead.
And yet, April has been a month of overthinking, procrastinating, and being too overwhelmed to step into action.
puts in words exactly how I’ve been feeling the past month.
Good news, though - May is here.
My turn to do justice to our Word for this year and ‘focus’ on the need of the hour - increasing our Surface Area of Serendipity (or Luck).
This term has been occupying my thoughts ever since I heard
talk about it during his fascinating conversation with .While watching this episode of Everything is Everything with Amit Varma and Ajay Shah…
…I stumbled upon this ModelThinkers.com article by Jason Roberts, which says -
“Luck, by definition, is about chance, but it's not totally out of your control. So why not use this model to increase your chance of luck?
The Surface Area of Luck, or your chance of being lucky, is equivalent to the action you take towards your passion, multiplied by the number of people you effectively communicate your passion and activities to.
Put simply: Luck = (Passionate) Doing x (Effective) Telling.
START DOING, AMPLIFY WITH TELLING.”
We’ve had more than our fair share of serendipity getting here. We wouldn’t have been able to build this dream project till now without our privilege and the unwavering support of our loved ones. We sure can’t complain :)
The best way to show our gratitude is to put all our energy into taking Project Bibliotherapy to the next level going forward.
How? Where?
Let’s look at each element of the Luck = Doing x Telling equation to find out!
(Passionate) DOING
We officially rolled out our one-year Global Reading Program for our existing Readers of 42 on April 1.
Every single action, feedback, and learning in the past four years has contributed to the structure and design of our offering to enhance your reading habit.
‘Readers of 42’ benefits include -
#1. 42 Good Reads of the Internet zines (4 Volumes) - Get 4 curated guides designed to nudge you toward building a better reading habit over 12 months.
#2. Access to Monthly Readathons and the Readers of 42 Library on Substack - Receive 1 handpicked read from our zines via email at 6:42 AM IST daily from the 1st to the 14th of every month.
#3. Access to the 'Readers of 42' WhatsApp private broadcast - Stay updated through our admin-only group.
No spam. We promise.
#4. Access to all our offline and online Reader Experiences - Meet fellow readers at our Guided Reading Meditations, bookstore mixers, and live streams with priority invites at special prices.
The plan is to host at least one offline and online Reader Experience each month. We will also be sharing fun events from our calendar for your benefit. Find all updates in this permanent Substack post.
#5. Exclusive early access to all our future endeavours - Books, newsletters, podcasts, collaborations, merch, and lots more.
Anyone anywhere in the world looking to build a better reading habit can avail of these benefits by joining the Readers of 42 at an introductory price of ₹2000 / $25 for a year.
(Effective) TELLING
We have introduced Project Bibliotherapy to almost everyone we have met, online or offline, over the past 4 years. They include folks and communities from the reading ecosystem - authors, publishers, booksellers, book clubs, fellow readers, creators, cultural hubs, and so on.
As Nandini details in her previous letter, we have experimented with our pitch on-ground at multiple pop-ups to different audiences.
The feedback and initial reaction to the idea of PB has mostly been positive.
We are still learning about building a business from scratch, identifying our readers and tweaking our communication.
Meanwhile, over the past few days, I have been working on a master list of all the people & communities who benefit from being showcased in our zines.
The action plan for the next few months - focus on this list for Project Bibliotherapy’s outreach. Direct mails, clear asks.
As Sumit from
writes in this post about their successful Kickstarter campaign -“The only thing that got us backers is when we wrote to people directly. We had put together a team for this of about 20 people – 10 who worked at Bakarmax and 10 others who were ready to help us.
All of us wrote to the people we knew and sent them direct emails. That did everything.”
Our Surface Area of Serendipity
Serendipity (or Luck) = Doing x Telling
With the Doing being constant, our Luck is directly proportional to the number of people we effectively tell about Project Bibliotherapy.
The only metric in focus: number of emails sent per day.
Time to get going. Thank you for reading!
Help & suggestions are most welcome :)
~ Nitin
Reader-in-Chief
PS. Like what we do? Support us. Thanks in advance :)
PPS. Know someone who’ll benefit from reading more, reading better?
PPPS. What are you reading these days?
PPPPS. If you received this post as a forward, click the below button to receive all updates directly in your email inbox. A new Readathon starts on the first of each month.
Mostly works in Russian (in the Russian original; post glasnost fiction) and contemporary fiction in Tamil. I follow ALDaily and "Browser." Contemporary novels, non-fiction, etc in English I am tending to listen on audio, on recommendation by friends. My eyes aren't so strong.
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