On Rejection: Mike Sowden

When I first started getting more involved with Substack by participating in weekly threads and showing up for writers’ events, Mike Sowden was one of the first people that reached out and made me feel welcome. He writes the incredible Everything Is Amazing, which is an amazing ‘stack, and his Twitter threads are a marvel. So glad he’s here this week talking about rejection. Enjoy!

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Hi Mike! Tell us about a time you experienced rejection.

A decade ago I applied to work on the editorial team at WordPress.com (run by Automattic) - and, incredibly, I was the winning candidate. This was a fantastic opportunity for a relatively new writer like me: brilliant people to work with, exceptionally well-paid, incredible vocational training in one of the hottest distributed companies on the planet - absolutely the best thing that could have happened to me at that stage (or perhaps any stage) of my career.

So of course I did what anyone would do with the opportunity of a lifetime: I totally blew it. My work was sloppy, I was catastrophically disorganised, I promised things I clearly wasn't capable of delivering, and around a month later, they declined to continue my trial period - which is a nice way of saying "they fired me without hesitation."  

How did you get over it?

Oh, it still makes me cringe. I made such a mess of it - and to be clear, I absolutely understood why they were doing it and didn't blame them in the least. I was in so much denial that I could pull myself together in time and step up to do the job they were asking of me. Well, not so much, it turned out! It was a very unfair and unbalanced situation, in that I eventually discovered I'd got so much out of it, and they'd had to put up with me making a mess for a full month. I know - that's what trial periods are for, right? But it still makes me cringe thinking of how unprofessional I was, just by my sheer inability to do the work in a careful, timely manner... 

But I'd never worked in such a precise and high-pressure environment, and it was the bucket of ice-water into the face that I needed. Any time I suspect I'm getting too big for my boots or that I'm kidding myself about what I'm capable of achieving, I pull up those memories and curl into a ball on the floor for a while. A healthy reminder.

If you could go back and tell yourself anything right before that experience, what would you say? 

You think you're up for this job, Mike! I know you do! But you're not. You're being the guy in the pub bragging to his mates that he could easily run a marathon, having previously never run for anything except the bus. You lack the experience, you lack the humility, but most of all you lack the work ethic. Put your ego aside, stop wasting their time and go learn to write harder, faster and smarter. There's no shame in getting real with yourself. Far from it! (Hey, try it more often!)  

You currently write Everything Is Amazing, which is all about curiosity. What got you, well, curious about curiosity? 

Around the same time I was trying to make a start as a writer of...I didn't quite know what (I danced around the edges of travel writing for a long time, but I was never quite a "travel writer" in the sense most people think of) my late mother was starting to behave erratically. It turned out she had dementia, and that turned the following half-decade into an incredibly stressful time. It all but destroyed my ability to write in the way I wanted to write: with hopeful, infectious nerdy joy and wide-eyed wonder. I lost all of it. Scoured away.

My ma passed away in 2018, and I spent a very numb year dealing with the aftermath and selling the family home. After this, I took a year out. Initially, I thought it'd be a year of recovering my ability to write again, but it wasn't. In a way, I had nothing to write with. The inside of my mind felt burnt out. So in fact it became a year of reading. I holed myself up in apartments in Greece and Spain and elsewhere, and revisited the books that inspired me when I first started writing online, and then tried to throw my literary net as widely as possible: anything and everything, in the hope that something would wake me up. I also had something of a half-idea about a newsletter about curiosity itself, the science of how we learn and how we want to learn, of awe and wonder, and ultimately of hopefulness (when you realise the world is far more interesting than you ever guessed, it's a lovely little jolt of optimism which can really add up).

So I bounced around Europe for a while - and then, right when I was starting to feel like I had enough of an overarching theme to start my newsletter, the pandemic struck. Since I'd sold the family home and gone fully nomadic I didn't have anywhere to go - but I'd stayed in a little cottage in Scotland in February of 2020. I asked the owners if it was available. It wasn't - but they had a wooden cabin nearby, overlooking the Firth of Clyde with the isle of Arran in the distance. I've been here ever since, and it's the peace & quiet I needed to put my plans together properly and finally launch the newsletter, so I could start the long process of learning what was going to be fun and get me an audience, and what was going to fail completely. I anticipated a lot of failed experiments!  

What are you working on now?

The newsletter's gone better than I could ever have hoped - particularly since February 2022, when an experiment in getting readers by doing rambling, nerdy Twitter threads paid off spectacularly and reached 9 million people (as I explained to Substack in an interview here). Half of the current audience of my newsletter signed up in 3 days! I still haven't got my head round all this - and everything since then has been a process of trying to learn why it happened, to serve that audience as best I can, and to make sure I'm not treating this opportunity like I treated the WordPress job, as something "I'm sure I'll cobble together in time", only to see it fall apart because I'm just not doing the required work. This is now the most successful thing I've done as a writer, and in the way of these things, the imposter syndrome is LOUD right now...

So: keeping up with the newsletter, and fulfilling a few promises to paid subscribers (mainly launching a non-fiction storytelling course and assembling a short, weird book I've been working on for a while, called "How To Be Rained On"). If Twitter doesn't self-combust due to its new leadership, I'm going to keep writing curiosity-driven Twitter threads (like this one from a few days ago, on how many Classical statues were actually painted) - and I'm going to talk to a lot of people. That's a big thing. I'm an introvert, but I have many friends I haven't seen for years and really miss hanging out with - but also, the newsletter's taught me that there's still so much for me to learn about the world and the people in it, and the best way to bridge that gap is by starting conversations and then doing a lot of listening. You really can't listen hard enough in a job like this.

You should definitely follow Mike on Twitter.