Why Notes remain the most underrated tool for Substack Writers

It's not just about growth, subscribers or virality

From a young age we are all taught to look at writing through the lens of length. From school essays to corporate reports, the measure of seriousness has always been word count. Short form, by contrast, is dismissed as trivial because it is just too short to carry any value. The cultural prejudice is that Notes, tweets or threads don’t really count.

That false belief is costing substack writers more than they realise. Because short form writing is not cheap content. If you allow it short-form can actually become the nervous system of your creative practice.

When you ignore short form, when you pour all of your energy into essays that disappear unread, or books that never escape the drawer, you are denying yourself the very tool that sharpens your voice, accelerates your growth, and keeps your practice alive in the gaps between larger projects.

I’ve had notes that have brought in 100’s of subscribers, in fact the majority of my growth has come from writing notes. The hype is real. Notes are a powerful way to supercharge subscriber growth but here’s the thing: Obsessing over growth, or the next viral note is what actually kills it. You are far more likely to naturally attract the right subscribers by implementing a sustainable system than by obsessing over the next viral note.

Learning itself is iterative. Ideas do not emerge as singular breakthroughs; they form through repetition, through neurons firing in sequence until the circuit is strong enough to hold. I see Notes are those neural sparks. Each fragment you write is not a throwaway. It is a firing pattern, reinforcing your lexicon, clarifying your worldview, and teaching your audience how to recognise you.

And yet most writers overlook this. They underestimate Notes because they were never taught how to use them. Academia rewarded word counts. Employers rewarded polish. Algorithms, until recently, rewarded volume but not necessarily voice. So most writers sit in isolation, writing essays into the void, confused why nobody notices, all the while ignoring the one practice that could change everything: writing short form deliberately.

The Hidden Function of Notes

If long form is the cathedral, then short form is the structure that makes its construction possible. Without scaffolding, the stones never find their place. Without short form, your voice never finds its shape.

What most writers fail to see is that Notes perform functions long form cannot. They do not only distribute ideas; they generate them. They train the nervous system to recognise patterns, they seed the language that becomes your lexicon, and they quietly encode the emotional salience that makes your later arguments land.

Cognitive scaffolding

This is the first function. Pattern recognition precedes reasoning. What I mean by this is that we notice repetitions before we can explain them.

When you write Notes daily, you expose your audience — and yourself — to recurring themes. Over time, the brain begins to connect them, to see coherence, to anticipate the shape of your ideas before they are fully formed. That is the beginning of a worldview.

Lexicon encoding

A writer without a lexicon is like a landscape without landmarks: forgettable. Notes are where your terms are tested, refined and repeated until they become inseparable from your voice. Linguistics tells us that words don’t just describe reality; they shape it. Every time you name something in your Notes, you expand the conceptual world your audience can inhabit.

Resonance testing

You can work for weeks on a 2,000-word essay only to discover it lands flat. Short form exposes resonance instantly. A Note either sparks recognition or it doesn’t. That feedback loop is not about chasing likes, but about listening to the nervous system of your audience as a mirror for your own clarity. What strikes the limbic system matters. What passes unnoticed can be discarded.

Emotional encoding

Finally, Notes perform the quiet work of emotional encoding. Emotions act as highlighters for memory. We don’t remember everything equally; we remember what was charged with feeling.

Notes carry that charge in a way long essays often diffuse. Over time, your Notes etch themselves into the memory of your readers because they trigger recognition not just in the mind, but in the body. If you think about it, it is not whole essays or books that lodge themseleves in your mind it is often just a single sentence or a tiny paragraph.

This is why I no longer see Notes as filler. They are not a distraction from the real work. They are the real work. They are the hidden foundation of voice, resonance, and growth.

How to Use Notes Strategically

If you want Notes to work, you have to stop treating them as fragments and start treating them as architecture. They are not decorations around your essays; they are the framework that gives your writing coherence.

The first step is to see where Notes belong in the system of your work. Long form is depth, it’s where your sharpest thinking crystallises. Products are sovereignty, the structures that allow your work to sustain you financially. Notes are the bridge. They connect depth to sovereignty, giving you visibility, feedback, and rhythm along the way. Ignore them, and the system fractures. Use them intentionally, and the whole structure reinforces itself.

The second step is to master the formats. Random thoughts will not carry you. Notes gain strength through recognisable patterns. I rotate between four anchors:

Personal Story. A glimpse into lived experience, often tied to one of my concepts (discipline spiral, clarity fatigue). These create intimacy.

Key Insight A distilled observation, usually rooted in psychology or philosophy. These sharpen authority.

Contrarian Truth A reframing that pushes back on clichés (just show up, consistency is king etc). These capture attention.

Worldview Builder fragments that stitch my lexicon into a larger narrative (content gymnastics isn’t just tiring; it’s the nervous system of hustle culture). These position the work.

The third step is cadence. Notes compound through rhythm, not perfection. Two or three Notes a day may feel small in the moment, but in a month you have a hundred iterations of your voice in circulation. Each one is a data point. Some fall flat. Some spark response. Together they reveal the edges of your identity far faster than essays alone.

This is why Notes are not just growth hacks. They are scaffolding. They sharpen your lexicon, train your audience to recognise your worldview, and give you daily momentum in a way that prevents collapse into the discipline spiral.

Used strategically, Notes become more than fragments. They become the structure through which your creative identity grows visible and alive.

The Underrated Advantage

The irony of Notes is that they appear small, but they do the heaviest lifting. A single fragment can carry more weight than an essay because it works at the level of repetition, resonance, and recognition. It shapes the nervous system of both writer and reader.

Philosophy has always understood this. Nietzsche wrote of eternal recurrence, the idea that to live well is to live in such a way that you would choose the same actions again and again. Notes are the eternal recurrence of writing. Each fragment is small, but the act of returning daily, testing, refining, repeating, is what gives a voice its coherence over time.

Neuroscience tells us the same. Repetition encodes memory. Emotional salience strengthens recall. Pattern recognition builds trust. Notes work not because they go viral, but because they engrave themselves in the nervous system through consistency.

This is why Notes are the most underrated tool for writers. They are not the decoration around your work, they are the foundation. They give you visibility when you need it most, clarity when you lose yourself in the fog, and scaffolding when you try to build a cathedral of meaning on shifting ground.

In a world addicted to performance, Notes offer sovereignty. They let you step back from content gymnastics and root yourself in identity. They remind you that writing is not just about reach, but about rhythm, not about chasing applause, but about compounding a worldview.

Used strategically, Notes are the architecture of a creative life.

My next resource will go deeper into this, showing you how to design a short-form system that grows your audience, sharpens your voice, and anchors your identity but for now just start testing.

All the best and enjoy the rest of your day.

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