Silly + Serious = Superpowers

I have been a fan of the StoryGraph for a while now. I’m not a big goal-setter when it comes to reading; I read what I read when I read it. I don’t aim for a number of books or pages, nor do I usually read according to genre or anything. I’ve never, for instance, declared a year of reading women or a goal of reading more sci-fi. Because I read so much, though, I tend to lose track of what I’ve read, so that’s how I use the StoryGraph: as a memory boost. Plus I like to look at graphs, and it has graphs.

Here’s my 2024 so far in a pretty graph:

I also enjoy reading founder Nadia Odunayo’s newsletter, now called The One-Woman Dev Team Diaries. She shares her goals for features she’s working on for the StoryGraph, and her progress on those goals, even when business emergencies and other life events get in the way and that progress is zero. Rockstar programmers! They’re just like us!

In her latest newsletter, Odunayo shares that she sets goals for herself every month, and every month comes up short. But the miracle–what her friend calls her superpower–is that this does not get her down or discourage her or dissuade her at all. She just notes that some progress has been made and rolls the unfinished goals over to the next month until they get done. She calls his a delusion, but this superpower is actually the solution to the problem of moving forward on a massive project. Thus the title of that particular newsletter: Delulu Is the Solulu.

Since I read it on Monday, I cannot stop thinking about it. First, the fantastic phrase “delulu is the solulu.” It’s the perfect mix of silly and serious. And it rhymes. Is it my next tattoo? No. Did I spend too long making a dumb inspirational wallpaper for our phones? Hell yes. Download this to feel both ridiculous and motivated every day:

It takes some serious delulu to think you can build a reading app to rival Goodreads, one with more than 2 million users (that’s what Odunayo did). It also takes delulu to write books, to translate literature, to publish yourself or to find an agent, to send out newsletters, to contact bookstores. To paint. To write songs. To build furniture. To do any of the creative, crafty things we do.

The delulu is the solulu because, well, how else is any of this going to get done? Keep writing, keep reading, keep coding, keep crafting. Solidarity in delulu.

You can buy all of KHG’s books and those she recommends at Bookshop.org. You can also buy her books in paperback and ebook formats directly from her shop.

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