Civilization is a set of standards around how to limit the base primal desires.
Systems of government and laws help us decide when, where, and by whom violence will be administered.
Constructs and rituals such as marriage and courtship establish norms around who should have sex, when.
Nutrition science, dietary guidelines, and food-safety practices create boundaries around what and how much we eat.
There were times in the distant past when these primal drives ruled the world. They reached their points of diminishing returns. We eschewed barbarism for civility.
The primal drive that never gets talked about is our drive for information. Our appetite for information is the master drive that helps us satisfy and tame all other drives.
Notice that we have words for when our drives become harmful: wrath, greed, lust, gluttony.
Our drive for information is called curiosity. Sure we’ve got “Curiosity killed the cat,” but curiosity is overall considered a good thing.
The most negative word associated with curiosity is gossip. That’s not a surprise because for most of human history, other humans in our vicinity were our only sources of information.
Our sources of information have snowballed into this digital age, where there is more than you could consume in a thousand lifetimes.
We’ve spiraled into informational gluttony. There is more than any one of us can digest. The volume of information has shattered our shared myths, and created conflicting factions subscribing to new myths.
Because we don’t have agreed-upon standards about how much information is enough or what types of information are healthy.
We’re in an age of digital barbarism.
Aphorism: “There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man, the one by his vice, the other by his nature.” —Montaigne
Book:The Invention of News (Amazon) traces the history of staying informed, from the days before printing to the 1800s.
Best, David P.S. Cal Newport was once on my podcast talking about digital minimalism.
A friend told me he went to his first hackathon in years.
With all the new AI assistance, every developer’s setup was more elaborate than ever.
They were cranking out code faster than he had ever seen. They had set up agents to conduct reviews of code written by other agents. They had created dashboards with fancy visualizations, summarizing their massive code output.
But none had any revenue or customers. Many were creating apps they themselves weren’t even using.
It used to be an incredible accomplishment to make something. You couldn’t build a simple app without at least setting aside a weekend. You couldn’t produce a book without sitting down day after day and writing.
The ability to follow through was rare. So you had to be discerning what you would bother to follow through on.
Now that follow-through is headed in the direction of one-and-done, there’s a strong temptation to do more and more things, as a tool to avoid the discomfort of doing what really matters.
The question is less, Can you finish? and more, Should you finish?
Aphorism: “The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of society, and with the projects that are offered to relieve them.” —Henry David Thoreau
Cool: This hexagonal timer (Amazon) quickly sets timers from 3–30 minutes, for setting up focus blocks.
Best, David P.S. 100-Word Writing Habit is a Kindle Deal right now, at $1.99 in the US and Canada.
Recently I lost the fancy lav mic that connects to my phone.
For a moment, I thought, Damn, I can’t record more reels until I buy a new mic.
Then I remembered the finisher’s oath.
It is so easy to do anything but finish a project.
There is no end to the gear, courses, and books you can buy. You can easily convince yourself each purchase will make the final product that tiny amount better. That it will be worth every penny, not to mention all that attention.
But there comes a time in every creative journey when you must recite the finisher’s oath:
I will not buy more gear, courses, or books before I finish this project. I have all I need to do this now.
The moment you tell yourself you have all you need is the moment your energy redirects to The Work. You thought your lack of something stood in the way. Instead of thinking about that, you get creative with how to use what’s in front of you.
After I recited the finisher’s oath, I reminded myself that I did, in fact, have all I needed to keep recording reels. I dug up my old wired white iPhone headphones, and used them as a mic.
And I’ve created some of my most popular reels ever. I currently have no plans to replace my lost mic.
When you tell yourself you have all you need to finish, it becomes true.
Aphorism: “How many incomplete or uncompletable passages there are, in what man calls a finished or complete work.” —Eugène Delacroix
Cool:Olivaia makes small-batch olive oil in California.
It’s demoralizing to see your hard drive piling up with unfinished projects. But that’s only if they are projects you feel you should finish.
Whenever I would tinker with something, I would get caught up merely on deciding where to save it. Creating another folder would present me with a list of dozens of folders for the dead-end projects of my past.
Not a useful reminder.
A simple but major mindset shift for me was creating an R&D department – which really consisted of creating an “R&D” folder.
Any company that makes things is going to have a Research and Development budget. Amazon famously spent all of their would-be profits on R&D, for decades.
Now whenever I start tinkering with something, I save it in a folder within my R&D folder. That does two things.
One, it forces me to recognize that I don’t yet know enough about the project to decide it’s something I should finish.
Two, it keeps my projects folder clean. That way when I’m trying to do something I’ve decided matters, I don’t get slowed down scrolling through dozens of dead or undecided projects.
It’s incredibly simple, but incredibly freeing. Create your R&D department.
Aphorism: “Antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.” —Ted Kaczynski
The final book of the Getting Art Done trilogy, Finish What Matters, debuts today. (On the 15th anniversary of my first book, no less.)
When I began writing this book, I thought it would be easy. I know how to finish things – I’ve written several books and now we’re on 385 consecutive weeks of this newsletter.
But it turned out I’d face more personal demons writing this than any other.
That word, matters really haunted me. I knew how to finish things, but was I finishing the stuff that mattered?
I realized you can be too stubborn about finishing. Your Raphael can smother your Leonardo. I recognized times in the past when I stuck with projects too long or finished when I shouldn’t have.
You only get so many opportunities in this life to create something. They might as well be the things that matter.
I’ve never worked so hard on a book. It’s the product of six years of work, and eighteen months of “devastating focus.” It caps off a trilogy that took a decade.
Best, David P.S. If you have any favorite creators or podcast hosts who would be interested in featuring me and/or Finish What Matters, I’d be grateful if you told them.
This book caps off a trilogy I’ve been working on for ten years (and many of you have been readers that whole time!).
It’s also my biggest bet yet.
This book for me is a test of what happens when I invest every resource I have into clarity. More than any previous book, I’ve aimed to have a clear view of all my options of what I could or should say. To come as close as possible to having total conviction that I’ve said what I want to.
Compared to my previous book, Mind Management, this time around I have:
5 more years writing experience
A Zettelkasten of 50,000 notes from my reading and thinking
The fruits of a research trip to Italy
A cabin in the mountains, where I’ve been separated from distractions
The leverage of LLMs for deeper research and a more thorough revision process
Interviews with dozens of real creatives at all levels
I’m placing this bet because I am optimistic about a world where quality leads to reach, even if the definition of quality is quite different from the status quo.
This will be one data point on the effectiveness of having conviction about what is right in a domain where there is no right answer, making an unreasonable investment in the clarity of that idiosyncratic sense of quality, and daring to choose as heroes those who found their own way of measuring the meaning of the word matters.
I hope you will feel compelled to pre-order on Amazon, and even more that you will enjoy my weird version of right.
Aphorism: “Rationality is wasted if you don’t know when to use it.” —Shane Parrish
AI is solving equations and passing exams. Getting it right is no longer scarce.
But that is in domains where there actually is a right.
After sitting in a room by myself writing books for fifteen years, I have found the “correct” way to write. Often when I read something, in the background I am thinking about how it’s written wrong, and how I would correct it.
It’s only my opinion, of course. There is no correct way to write. But to me, there is. I have my weird version of right.
I have very specific ideas about building and releasing tension, withholding information until the moment of maximum impact, what words with what sounds should be put down in what order.
No matter how much I wrestle with an LLM, explaining why I make the choices I make, it will always write glaringly, embarrassingly, unequivocally wrong (to my eyes). AI will never write like my weird version of right.
That doesn’t guarantee my success as a writer. There’s a whole lot of luck in creative work. But I do believe that gives me a better chance of doing anything worthwhile than a field where there really is a right answer.
As getting it right becomes cheap in domains where there are answers, it becomes more valuable to have your weird version of right in domains where there aren’t.
Book:The Bachman Books (Amazon) is a collection of novels from, and the story behind, Stephen King’s secret pen name.
It almost never seems like a good idea to quit a project. If you never finish, you never unlock the rewards that await.
But in creativity especially, quitting is a gift to your future self.
It’s hard to see that when you’re in the muck of something that’s not working. All you see is what’s in front of you – the many details you could keep trying to salvage.
You can’t see what it’s costing you because the alternative hasn’t had a chance to present itself.
The seed of an idea takes time to sprout and grow roots. It needs to get quite large before you’re bothering to dodge it with the lawnmower. You can’t even see it when your primary goal is still cutting the grass.
Mark Twain had a good approach to this: If a book wasn’t working out, he’d leave it be. That was easier to do because, as he explained,
There has never been a time in the past thirty-five years when my literary shipyard hadn’t two or more half-finished ships on the ways, neglected and baking in the sun…The minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind. Then I examined my unfinished properties to see if among them there might not be one whose interest in itself had revived through a couple of years’ restful idleness.
Maybe the most valuable thing I’ve learned writing Finish What Matters (now available for pre-order) is that a big part of finishing is knowing when to quit.
Quitting is a gift to your future self. You can’t unwrap it until what’s inside has had a chance to grow.
Aphorism: “It’s when you are not doing much of anything that you are accomplishing most.” —Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Cool:Whispr Flow is really, really, really good speech-to-text.
People wonder what will happen to writers and writing now that AI is so “good” at writing.
Since AI can crank out what they think is good writing, many conclude that there’s no longer value in actually sitting down and writing.
I have found that AI actually makes writing much harder, rather than easier.
The paradox is a bit like what happened as labor-saving devices made it “easier” to keep a clean house or clothes. Maybe the first people with a vacuum cleaner had an edge, but eventually everyone expected their house to be that clean. Trace that trend back to the era of dirt floors, or remember that even Kings rarely bathed, while we shower every day.
If you don’t see the point in letting AI write for you – as I don’t – the things it can do for you just increase your standards of quality. That image of perfection is a bit closer. You find yourself striving harder and longer to try to achieve it.
AI makes it much easier to:
Explore more potential examples for illustrating a concept
Find the work of others who have talked about similar ideas
Get multiple rounds of feedback in a single session, instead of waiting weeks for test-readers (if you can find them)
Connect your ideas to more complex fields, in which you can achieve a level of proficiency that wasn’t previously practical
Get a reaction to more nebulous ideas
When you’re striving for the impossible, these create more work, not less. It means you have to:
Consider more examples, finding the one that subtly edges out others in appropriateness and emotional tenor
Read more of others’ work to verify your point-of-view
Mentally slice-and-dice your own writing at multiple levels of abstraction – from the macro-level down to individual words
Read more source material to get a deeper understanding in subjects that would have been too complex to bother with
Follow ideas that were previously too hard to turn into something useful on your own
For my upcoming book, that meant I achieved a level of expertise in the Italian Renaissance that would have been out of reach before. The alternative would have been enrolling in a Masters or PhD program, which would have led me to writing a book on history, not creativity. AI essentially sent me on a self-directed research trip to Italy!
Previously, you were limited by how much mental heavy lifting you could do in a given session. Now AI is there to spot you to get in more reps after you’ve reached your limit. (AI makes Mind Management more important than ever.)
As it becomes more feasible to achieve a higher level of quality, the ways we find writing to consume also increase the importance of that quality. Algorithms are so sophisticated, you no longer need hashtags (thank God). The number of people you can reach is getting bigger – if you can edge out the growing pool of competition. The media environments of recent years rewarded quantity, and now the premium is increasing on quality.
If AI is making writing easier, you are Not Gonna Make It. It should make it harder.
Aphorism: “What is called ‘computer literacy’ does not involve raising questions about the cognitive biases and social effects of the computer, which, I would venture, are the most important questions to address about new technologies.” —Neil Postman (1985)
Every time we make a thing easier, we lose some crucial element that was wrapped up within it.
I remember many mornings in San Francisco being struck by irony on my way to work. As I passed the open windows of a gym, I heard pumping music and the amplified shouts of a spinning instructor. The students were riding bikes, exercising while going nowhere. I was riding my bike, exercising while going somewhere.
As AI and robotics advance, we will stop having to do some things. At the same time, we’ll stop doing some things that are good for us.
I’m finding that with these developing powers I now opt for many things I would have once considered drudgery.
I’m growing food, making soap, cooking new recipes, and doing plumbing.
Now that the informational bottlenecks that prevented me from doing these before have been widened, doing more things in the physical world has changed my perspective on other chores, such as laundry, washing dishes, and cleaning.
So when I see a video of a housekeeper android, my immediate reaction is, Damn, I want one of those!
But then I realize that in some version of the future, it’s not the physical drudgery of keeping a household running that we outsource.
The other day, my water distiller broke. The old me would have just spent $125 to buy a new one. Instead I asked Claude to guide me through troubleshooting.
Instead of sitting in an office chair, clicking a one-click-order button, then sitting in an office chair even more to figure out how to make an extra $125, I went into town.
It was a bad capacitor. I didn’t know what that was but I walked around and asked people because you can’t find many businesses on Google Maps. I found an electronics-repair shop, where they soldered in a new one. Parts and labor: $1.25.
My distiller works like new. I got to move around and use my hands and body, and isn’t that what they’re for? I used my mind, but didn’t have to go through the mental drudgery of learning electrical engineering to know it could be a broken capacitor.
Given the trajectory of the past several decades, we’re biased to believe that automation will next lift us out of physical drudgery, but it’s not done lifting us out of mental drudgery. Maybe it’s actually been heretofore pushing us into it.
Maybe we’re made for moving around and doing things in the physical world and shouldn’t be so eager to outsource it to an android.
Aphorism: “There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue.” —Thomas Jefferson
Book:In This Economy (Amazon) is Kyla Scanlon’s fun introduction to money and markets.
