From the Blog
Organic Growth
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Healthy growth is organic growth.
Organic growth is growth that happens naturally. Growth that takes the time it needs. As it is meant to. As it should. There is effort, but there is no force, urgency, demand or aggression driving it.
Organic growth is growth spurred by the natural environment, our biological constitution, unfolding events and the exercise of our bestowed abilities within their limited powers. There is no artifice, no augmentation.
Organic growth is not fast growth. It is not speeded up. It is not exponential. It is growth unhindered and unhastened by injections, special fertiliser, hacks, tips, accelerators, artificial strategies and hothouse incubators.
I am all for organic growth. That is the way I have approached developing From the Bar Stool (FTBS). But that is the way I approach most things. Let it develop naturally. See what happens. Be pleasantly surprised. Or not.
What do I mean by achieving organic growth? That means adopting a more or less nonchalant light touch attitude. I write my piece. Generate a picture for it. Upload them. Post it up every Friday morning on LinkedIn, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and Threads. Then I am done.
It’s once a week because that’s all I can commit to given my professional, social, private and family schedules. If I can do more, I do more. But I don’t force, push or drive myself to do it. It happens if it happens.
Despite my nonchalance, I check the backend stats. Not to see how to boost readership or coverage. Rather, to see how an essay is received. It is to see if I can discern patterns and connections from the data. Now, anyway.
There was a time I was caught up with the idea of boosting the stats for FTBS. High or big readership numbers are seductive. We feel acknowledged, relevant and influential. Dangerous for the ego. And there is always a sense of being beholden that lurks about having influence.
Sometime in my second and third year of FTBS, twice I experimented boosting readership. I blame this lapse on my ego urgings. I bought ads on Facebook, posted twice, sometimes thrice a week, found more places to post, tweaked my titles to be ‘effective’, wrote content that might pique curiousity, and did those things ‘experts’ tell us we should do to boost our hits.
I gave it a go twice. I gave it up after each attempt.
I gave it up because I felt I was violating my natural approach to doing things. I felt uneasy about adopting such surreptitious, insidious ways to increase the stats. The expert recommendations felt too goal-oriented and distracted from the reasons I started up FTBS in the first place.
It did not sit well with me. I felt the anxiety and stress of having to come up with essays more frequently and quickly. I didn’t like paying strangers to like my post. It felt like cheating. On top of that, I felt cheated by the Facebook ads I purchased. The boosted posts were liked by sham accounts, the majority of which had profile pictures of Indonesian unemployed men. Some of them in sarongs and t-shirts. All of them looked like they had nothing to do with the law, legal practice and had a grasp of its finer issues.
The whole thing felt like a drag. Somehow amidst that, I was thankful I was reminded why I set up FTBS. It was to empty my head, get things off my chest and speak from the heart (as much as possible), and in some way, share what I can with the incoming generation so they can learn from or laugh at my experiences. FTBS was an experiment for me to have fun with and delight in, not another excuse to be miserable about.
Most importantly, it never was about the numbers. I never had any ambitions for the blog other than a place I enjoy writing. It was never to achieve or secure anything beyond the immediate entertainment or edification of whoever stopped by FTBS for a read. If they liked it, great. If they don’t, it’s alright.
What are hot posts? Examples are useful ones like Part A, B and C of the Court Common Bundles for Trial. Even though I posted this in July 2023, it continues to be frequently read. It has remained on list of top ten essays since it was posted. There are the controversial ones like Renouncing Islam in the Federal Territories of Malaysia. That was posted in February 2022 and is also a top tenner. There are the funny ones that get their moment of velocity like Agong’s Counsel and In Someone Else’s Clothes. There are those that express our aspirations and fears like, Will I Ever Argue a Case of Some Importance? And the occasional polemic such as The Bar Council Maligned.
It’s not that I don’t know how to boost readership or pack FTBS or my essays with viral elements. I have picked up strategies and tricks to boost the numbers and make the stats look good. I observed that when I do post more, I get more visitors, sessions and pageviews. There is a direct relationship between how much we post and how much activity a website generates. I could make the titles more dramatic or compelling. I could write on more controversial or current topics more frequently. I could write a polemic. I could reveal inconvenient truths. I could add more to FTBS – podcasts, citizen guides, forums, etc.
I like the idea, but I couldn’t be arsed.
Or I will get around to it if and when I feel like it. In my time. Maybe. See what happens.
That’s what I mean by organic. I don’t do more than what I feel like doing, and I surrender the rest of it to the universe. Keep my thoughts and intention genuine and writing true and the rest should take care of itself.
Despite that, it doesn’t mean there is no self-censorship. This is Malaysia. I am a lawyer. I know the lines. I may stand on them and kick my feet, but I am not going to cross them.
Just because it’s genuine doesn’t mean mean each post will be good. Like everyone else, I have good weeks and bad weeks, which means some good posts and could-do-better posts. But what I commit myself to is to give it my best shot for that week. Just be kind to ourselves. Not all our best shots look like our best shots. And that’s okay.
Although I don’t do anything to boost the stats, I do things to bring it down when things get hot. Sometimes, when I have a couple of hot posts in a month, I deliberately put up an essay to bring the numbers down. These are the cold posts. They are almost always the pensive, reflective pieces, those with an unsexy title or those without any immediate utility, entertainment or of ambiguous edification.
Why do I do this? I cannot explain other than to look at it as a form of pruning, which is necessary for organic growth. There must be some resistance to the growth to keep it resilient, growing and robust. I see a cold post as functioning as that resistance. To keep it within the bounds of the organic and not letting it escape into the exponential.
Since starting, FTBS has grown from a regular readership of a handful when I first started to a few hundred after the first year to between three to four thousand readers a month. I’d like to think all of it has been through organic growth as I described earlier. I didn’t pick up any genuine or interested readers from my boosting efforts.
I am a big believer that organic growth is likelier to achieve not just sustainable, formidable and compound long term growth, but within that trajectory of growth there are opportunities for learning, gaining insight and entertainment.
As humans, we are meant for organic growth. Attempts to go beyond that unduly stresses ourselves and others. It’s not to say we are incapable of exponential growth (or scale). We can. We just tend to overlook the dehumanising and unhealthy dimension that comes with going beyond our natural inclination and limits.
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1 thought on “Organic Growth”
I can definitely vouch that my journey to discovering this blog was organic. Can’t pinpoint which post led me to this blog, but it started from reading a post or two whenever I was reminded of FTSB’s existence, to looking forward to read a new thought provoking piece every Friday.