Rehearsing In The Dark

The Hotpot | January 2026 | By Lisanne

20.1

When we buy a ticket to the Arctic Monkeys, we already have an idea of what we’re going to get.

We’re buying into a specific experience—a sound and an energy they’ve spent years perfecting. We trust them with our Saturday night because they’ve proven, thousands of times over, that they know exactly how to hold the room.

A similar thing happened to my newsletter. When people see The Hotpot today, they most likely notice its reach. But reach definitely didn’t come first.

To gain reach, there was a long journey of getting comfortable with the embarrassment of writing for an audience that wasn’t there yet.

It’s easy to look at the “stadium tour” and forget that every big stage started in the corner of a quiet pub.

We might obsess over the seating capacity—the follower count, and the likes—before we’ve even finished writing the show. Before we’ve given anyone a reason to buy a ticket at all.

However, filling a room with strangers is unlikely without first giving them a reason to care.

Instead, I published three times a week to what felt like an empty theatre for months.
Most of it felt like words sent into the dark. The work wasn’t answered back. Not yet.
But seventy-eight readers eventually became hundreds.

I think it boils down to something simple, but profound:

We have to give someone something to carry home from the street corner first, before they want to sit front row.

Maybe the secret to growth is paying the price of entry: the willingness to give our heart and soul to an empty room first. It forces the question: what, exactly, are we willing to stand for when no one is there to applaud?

It also means showing up for those first seventy-eight subscribers with the same intensity as I do today.

By consistently training in the dark, we learn the mechanics of our craft. We are finding the resonance of our own voice in the silence. We eventually become something worth watching, because we did the hard work of becoming the kind of creators who can actually hold a crowd once they arrive.

By consistently training in the dark, we give ourselves the chance to learn what it takes to eventually become something worth watching.

Thanks for reading! Question of today:

Are you currently focused on the size of the room, or the quality of the performance?

Let me know in the comments!

Curious to see more reflections like this? Click through to see the rest of the series on success. I’d love to hear what resonates with you.