A Steady Milestone

Thank you

I understand that we tend to celebrate round numbers as milestones — birthdays, anniversaries, high school and college reunions.  

It is also true that life really doesn’t work that way. We accrue time moment by moment, day by day. Important events can pop up whenever. This isn’t true only for time. We like to talk about round numbers when it comes to groups of people, whether that’s voters in an election or the population of a city. Once again, this distorts reality. These are groupings of people, each one of whom matters as an individual. 

And yet, round numbers can give us an excuse to step back from the pace of daily life and take stock. And it is in that vein that we wanted to reach out to all of you today. 

Something remarkable happened last night in our Steady community. And it can be illustrated in a series of screenshots we captured from the data section of our publication (basically Elliot doing rapid refreshes).

We share them here:

There you have it. We passed 200,000 total subscribers. I don’t think we will ever know which one of you was number 199,999, or number 200,000, or for that matter number 200,001. Frankly, it doesn’t matter. At all. 

Because this is about all of you, the ones who have been here from the beginning and the ones who just joined. This is about becoming a dynamic place of conversation and hopefully reflection. This is about building something that endures because of your participation. 

To say this far surpasses anything we could have hoped for when we started this endeavor is itself an understatement. And we want to give a very special thank you to all of you who are paying subscribers. Your support allows us to share our content widely and with people on fixed incomes and others who may not be able to afford a paid subscription. 

200,000 is a very big number in our book. But what’s more impressive is what we hear from you. We cannot think of a more intelligent, more empathetic, more curious group anywhere online. Of course we may be a bit biased. But so be it. 

One of the main reasons we wanted to start this newsletter was to reach people directly, without having to succumb to the algorithms of social media. Your enthusiasm and encouragement convince us daily that we made the right decision. 

Thank you. And please spread the word to others. We would like to grow the Steady community, particularly in its diversity. And a gentle nudge to those of you who have thought about switching to a paid subscription. Please consider doing so only if you can readily afford it. 

Not to get greedy, but a quarter million subscribers seems like a nice round number too, right? :).