As I’ve gotten close to finishing my book, I’ve noticed something ironic: I probably shouldn’t have finished this book.
If I count the time I spent on a now-unrecognizable book proposal, the Getting Art Done trilogy I’ve almost finished has taken ten years, and I can’t help but think of all the other things I might have done instead.
Yet there’s a Catch-22 here: I don’t think I could have learned there were other things I could have done instead of writing these books, without first writing these books.
When I started working on the series, I had finished things here and there – an entire other book, in fact. But part of the reason I took on the project was merely to prove to myself I could set out to do something, and then do it.
But with all I’ve learned about how to sort through, plant, and nurture ideas, I would approach things differently today. I would make smaller bets with my limited resources and be more careful about which projects I did and did not take on.
Alas, things couldn’t have turned out any different, because early on, less important than what you finish is that you finish – what project you take on isn’t as important as learning to finish any project.
You have to get pretty good at finishing what you start before it’s a better idea to put effort not into that you finish, but deciding what you finish.
Aphorism: “It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.” —André Gide
Cool:Table for Two’ish is Saya Hillman’s interview-ish series (I’ll be a guest in September).
“Pull your shit together,” these days has a kind of toxic tenor.
I’ve in my lifetime witnessed a big cultural shift from emotional and mental struggles being taboo topics, to a part of everyday vocabulary.
People take mental-health days, talk openly about anxiety, depression, addiction etc., and more people are medicated for these than is probably necessary.
On the whole this shift has been good for me. When I moved from Nebraska to California twenty years ago, a source of culture shock was how openly people talked about such struggles. And over the years I discovered just how much severe mental illness was brushed under the rug on both sides of my family, and in milder forms in my relationship with my own psyche.
Throughout my own journey there have certainly been times I’ve felt unmoored, and it’s been liberating to let go of any cultural shame about asking for help, but on the whole I’ve found that the best way to the light at the end of the tunnel is through the darkness.
By now the vocabulary of this “therapy culture” feels as if it’s become its own pathology. Sometimes it feels like a source of identity for in-tribal signaling, other times a replacement for religion, other times a permission-slip to be irresponsible or incompetent.
You’d think the pendulum would swing back in the other direction. That eventually people would say, “Oh, everyone feels this way sometimes. I guess that’s life.”
Because between the extremes of severe issues and no issues is just the state of being human. That inherently will have its ups and downs, and so naturally holding your shit together is just a matter of the apparently dying art of getting a grip.
Book:Beyond Belief (Amazon) is Nir Eyal’s latest, on how to have beliefs that benefit you.
I do not in the least feel that ChatGPT, or any other LLM, is human.
Sure, I tell it please, thank you, and what the f*ck was that? but I don’t think of it as conscious.
I instead see LLMs as magical LEGO-brick organizers: I ask a question, it goes through almost the entire corpus of human knowledge to mix and match “bricks” – that is, words – in the most-average way appropriate for that question.
And as far as I can understand the technical explanations of it, that seems to be exactly what it does.
I also find this an effective mental model for thinking about what questions for which I can and can’t expect good answers. The more that’s been written about a subject, the more bricks there are, the better the chances the answer will make sense and be accurate. (If it matters, I always ask for sources.)
So if I’m looking for advice on how to formulate my next batch of homemade soap, there’s a lot already written about that. If I want it to write one of these emails, forget about it.
This is probably why the most valuable use case I’ve come across is understanding historical information, and stress-testing my own explanations. It’s been an invaluable conversation partner for writing about Leonardo and Raphael. I would probably have had to get a degree to otherwise learn all I have.
An LLM is no more human than a book (if anything, less so).
Aphorism: “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.” —Naval Ravikant
Book:Innovators (Amazon) is David Galenson’s follow-up to Old Masters, Young Geniuses.
Day one of Niklas Luhmann’s professorship, he announced: “My project: theory of society. Duration: thirty years.”
The German sociologist went on to publish a gigantic, two-volume, 1,200-page book. Topic: theory of society. Time to complete: thirty years.
It seems you’d have to be a Raphael to state such a bold plan up-front, then follow it to a T.
But Luhmann actually had a very inductive, Leonardo, approach.
As he read, he took notes. He built those notes into articles. He built those articles into books. He built those books into his magnum opus.
By the time he was done he had published over 500 times, building up a database – aka Zettelkasten – of 90,000 paper notes.
We tend to think we’ll roll out of bed one day to dig into a well of untapped discipline and finish our masterpieces. But it often comes from creating a workflow that balances our curiosity to explore with a commitment to regularly shipping, so the small things build into big ones.
Aphorism: “The liberty of the individual must be thus far limited; he must not make himself a nuisance to other people. But if he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgment in things which concern himself, the same reasons which show that opinion should be free, prove also that he should be allowed, without molestation, to carry his opinions into practice at his own cost.” —John Stuart Mill
Cool: The RØDE NT1 Signature Series (Amazon) is an inexpensive but very high quality condenser mic (for recording in quiet environments).
We all want to do something big, so few of us consider the value of small projects.
It seems pointless to:
Publish a 1,000-word book on Kindle
Vibe-code a simple grocery-list app
Do one 3-minute open-mic comedy set
Nothing big could come from any of those.
The value in small projects isn’t in the projects themselves, but in what they unlock:
Future iterations: When you finish a small thing, you now have something you can expand into a big thing.
New skills: Finishing a small thing takes more skills than you expect. Once you’ve picked those up, you can think bigger.
Belief in yourself: Finishing a small thing is a huge thing if it’s your first thing. Just knowing you’ve done something in the past opens up doors to the future.
If you keep putting off the big thing, take on a small thing, instead.
It goes like this: Imagine you’ve bought tickets to an outdoor concert. The night of the concert, it’s cold and rainy.
You reluctantly go to the concert. But if you hadn’t bought tickets, and your friend offered you one for free, you wouldn’t have gone.
You only went because you had the “sunk costs,” but your preference if you hadn’t bought tickets reveals you didn’t want to go that badly.
I get the sense that the sunk costs fallacy is in itself a fallacy.
I submit: The unlocked gains reality.
The unlocked gains reality applies very well to creative projects. When you’re in the midst of a big project, it’s normal to consider quitting. I considered quitting my current book many times.
Yes, we’re reluctant to quit because we look back on all that work and don’t want it to go to “waste.” But we’re also reluctant to quit because we’ll never see any benefit until we get to an “unlock.”
You can’t sell your novel if you don’t publish. You can’t see if that reel takes off if you don’t post. In any creative project, you must reach some point before you can unlock the benefits.
You might choose to scale your project down to get to that unlock, but just because you have sunk costs doesn’t mean you’re foolish to persevere.
Like many things in economics and even behavioral economics, the theories expect us to know the future. It might not rain so much at the concert or with some preparation you might not be so cold, and you will likely enjoy it more than you imagine from the warmth of your home.
The same applies when you’re in the shit and want to quit. You can’t get the gains until you reach an unlock.
Aphorism: “People are no longer owned by a company but by something worse: the idea that they need to be employable.” —Nassim Taleb
Book:Predictably Irrational (Amazon) is a seminal work on the weird biases that shape our realities.
Best, David P.S. When you’re weighing whether this is “worth it,” you’re vulnerable to shiny object syndrome.
I heavily studied Leonardo da Vinci while researching for my upcoming book, Finish What Matters (tomorrow is the last day to buy the Preview Edition).
Besides the many fascinating anecdotes in the book, what I’ve learned about how Leonardo thought:
Write down anything you think. He was unafraid to write entire arguments with himself, to test what he believed.
Write down what you learn. Much of the dazzling observations in his notes are simply written down from books he had access to. This was out of necessity, but no doubt helped him retain the information.
Make connections. He was constantly making observations of one thing by talking about another thing and how it was or wasn’t related.
Visualize what’s in your head. He was unafraid to draw what he imagined in great detail.
Be okay with being wrong. Importantly, he wrote and drew plenty of things that were wrong (flying machines that wouldn’t work, naive understanding of female reproductive anatomy). But he still thought those things through with what he had.
Make observations, not memorizations. He placed experience and observation above all, so even though he was wrong sometimes, he was also centuries ahead on other things.
Embrace an inductive approach. His notes are thousands of tiny observations that built up to bigger observations. He’d write the same information over and over in different ways, like a true inductive.
Manage your curiosity. He didn’t always go straight down rabbit holes. He’d write a to-do list of what he wanted to look into.
Push the limits. He left a lot unfinished, but often because he was trying ambitious or experimental approaches that would have been innovative had they worked – and sometimes they did.
It’s easy to remain mystified by the illustrations, paintings, and myths, but Leonardo was just a man, and he had real ways of being we can all apply.
Aphorism: “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” —William Arthur Ward
Cool:The President’s Inbox is a non-partisan podcast with deep analysis of global events.
It takes luck to make it as a creative, but not as much luck as it seems.
I think it can be explained by what I call the “Travis in Tokyo” effect. At some point, you may have been traveling, and run into a friend. It’s a shocking experience, and you say, “What are the odds I’d run into my friend Travis in Tokyo?!”
There are a few phenomena that make this less exceptional than it seems.
One is ad-hoc analysis. You didn’t form a hypothesis before going to Tokyo whether you’d run into Travis. A lot of other surprising things could have happened. Scientists run into problems when they look for patterns in large data sets, finding surprising things such as that as cottage cheese sales decline, so do babies named Andrea.
Another is the multiple comparisons problem, which is that when a lot of different things have low odds of happening, at least one of them is likely to happen. You were surprised to run into Travis in Tokyo, but didn’t reflect on the odds you’d run into at least one of the hundreds of people you know.
Finally, there’s the fact that you’re friends with Travis and everyone else because you have things in common – perhaps an interest in Japan or travel, or just that you’re in the socioeconomic profile of people who would travel to Japan.
When we look at the success of a creator, and the chain of events that led to that success, we get tunnel vision as we consider the outrageously-low odds that chain of events could have occurred.
But we don’t consider that out of the many things they tried, this was the one that worked; that when adding up the low probabilities of their many attempts, the probabilities weren’t as low as they seemed; and that as skill and network effects compounded, those odds climbed with each attempt.
There is hope.
Aphorism: “Every artist should be content to do willingly those things towards which he feels a natural inclination.” —Giorgio Vasari
Cool: The HATOKU Stylus Pen (Amazon) is a $20 good-enough alternative to Apple Pencil, for compatible iPads.
Best, David P.S. If you work with the odds, you can have success that seems against the odds, which makes it easier to Finish What Matters – the title of my upcoming book. Read it many months before others in the Preview Edition.
New Year’s resolutions are destined from the start to fail.
How could you possibly decide how many subscribers you’re going to gain, or weight you’re going to lose?
Even if you stick with what you control, how could you go from not doing a behavior at all to doing it regularly? You don’t even know what it’s like and you and the world will change within the year.
It’s like trying to hit a moving target with an arrow made from a wet noodle.
This is why I prefer New Year’s estimates, not resolutions. Such as:
I’m 20% sure I’ll gain 1,000 Substack subscribers
I’m 60% sure I’ll publish an hour of content on YouTube
I’m 70% sure I’ll finish my manuscript
You don’t have the information to say what will happen, or what goals will still be worth striving towards. By making an estimate, you give yourself a chance to respond to reality.
There’s also something about making estimates that makes you think about reality: Resolutions are aspirational. By saying this will definitely happen, you paradoxically shut yourself off from the factors that will affect whether it does.
As you think about whether something is 50%, 70%, or 90% doable, you start to think about what’s actually affecting your ability to make it happen, which often leads to thinking of actions you can take to increase your odds.
Aphorism: “The present of things past is memory; the present of things present is sight; and the present of things future is expectation.” —Saint Augustine
Best, David P.S. Making and reflecting on estimates is a key tactic in my upcoming book, Finish What Matters. There’s still time to start reading the Preview Edition.
A dominant meme of the early internet was that we were freed of the era of “three channels” – when the American television airwaves and thus psyche were controlled by ABC, NBC, and CBS.
But now it feels like we have only one channel.
That’s of course not materially true. We’re free to dig up anything we want, unlike ever before. But “channel” implies passivity, which is what TV was, and what we’ve reverted to.
Another meme about the dawn of the internet was the removal of “gatekeepers.” Finally, the ideas would spread that were the most interesting – about the most obscure topics you could imagine.
But what we’re being offered up feels strangely “smooth.” The topics might be different, but the depth, pacing, and structure falls within a tight range, like all the rough edges have been sanded off.
The smoothness, of course, is from “the algorithm.” We might as individuals appreciate the jagged edges of something, but can the algo mathematically sniff out everyone else who does? It seems not. And now LLMs are mathematically deciding which word would be most likely to come next, and changing it just enough that what comes out is essentially the same thing.
And maybe those gatekeepers made things a little less smooth, a little more jagged. We didn’t like how this person or that got this big break through nepotism or sexual favor, but some of it must have been from the mere whim or strange taste of some executive. In any case at least something that didn’t “deserve” the exposure in the algorithmic sense got it, and there was probably something good about that.
Because we used to have three channels, and now we just have the dopamine channel.
Aphorism: “The minimal level of engagement with the Internet is equal to the maximum level of engagement with old media.” —Andrey Miroshnichenko
Book:Julius Caesar (Amazon) is a Shakespeare play that will make you think of the Roman Empire.
