I’m walking on the beach with my wife, enjoying our two-week vacation in her hometown, when my phone buzzes: “You got a sale on Fiverr. You have 3 days to deliver.”

My wife notices the shift in my expression and asks what’s going on.

“I forgot to turn off the Fiverr gig and I just got a sale,” I reply.

She smiles at me, “That’s a good thing, right?”

“Well,” I ponder out loud, “it would be if I weren’t on vacation. I think I’ll just give a refund.”

Somehow, my wife convinced me to spend an afternoon on that small gig. Ten years later, it had grown into a project that employed more than 50 people and expanded into books, podcasts, and a large annual conference.

But that Fiverr gig didn’t happen by accident. It was the result of a series of uncertain moves that came before it.

It started one night when I decided to answer a question on Quora, my first. That answer got thousands of views and sparked a curiosity to understand the platform more deeply.

As I kept answering, that early momentum faded. Most of my posts went nowhere. I was close to giving up when I came across a question about energy management. I answered it quickly, without overthinking it, and within 24 hours, it had more than 30,000 views.

That confused me. What was so different about this one?

When I looked closer, I realized I had been asking the wrong question. It wasn’t the answer that mattered most. It was the question.

Some questions carried their own gravity. No matter how strong your answer was, it wouldn’t matter if the question itself didn’t generate interest. As I dug deeper, I noticed that Quora left signals, small indicators that revealed which questions were gaining traction and which weren’t.

I started testing that insight. Within a month, my answers had passed one million views. I used that exposure to promote a productivity newsletter I was running at the time, adding 2,500 subscribers in just a couple of weeks.

I was stunned. Quora felt like a goldmine, yet almost no one was talking about it. So I decided to create a course on Udemy, hoping to share what I had learned—and, if I’m honest, make a bit of money along the way.

The money never came. I made a few hundred dollars in the first months, but it never took off. Maybe I was too early. Months later, the platform would be flooded with Quora courses. Or maybe I simply didn’t know how to sell it.

Still, Udemy’s model pushed me to experiment. They paid 50% for students they brought in, but 100% for those I sourced myself. So I started looking for ways to drive traffic.

The least promising one was Fiverr. I listed the course there and offered a discount code for access on Udemy. No one bought it, which made sense. People don’t go to Fiverr to buy courses.

I also offered something else, a custom report where I would analyze someone’s project and create a tailored plan to grow it using Quora.

No one bought that either.

In fact, when I traveled to my wife’s hometown for a two-week vacation, I forgot the listing even existed. It had become irrelevant in my mind.

Until someone in Phoenix, Arizona placed an order and interrupted my vacation.

At the time, it felt like a small inconvenience.

In hindsight, it was the beginning of something that would shape the next ten years of my life.

The instinct we often shut down

Like many other events that significantly shaped the direction of my life, that one was full of unexpected turns.

At the time, I had just moved from London to a small town in Italy. A couple of weeks later, I lost my job at a startup and found myself without the security of a monthly salary.

This was before the pandemic, when the idea of working remotely or making a living as a freelancer was alien to most people.

That uncertainty was tough, but it did something important. It gave me permission to explore paths I wouldn’t have considered otherwise, and to follow them without knowing where they would end.

When I answered that first question on Quora, I had no sense of what might come from it. When I created my course on Udemy, it was my first time using the platform. When I listed it on Fiverr, I wasn’t expecting anything at all.

I certainly didn’t imagine that someone on another continent would become a client, and that a forgotten listing would turn into a project I’d be part of for nearly a decade.

None of it was planned. I simply kept moving, following what was in front of me and seeing where it might lead.

But looking back, what strikes me most isn’t what I did.

It’s how many times this path gave me a reason to stop.

The Quora answer that worked once—and then didn’t. The course that barely sold. The Fiverr gig that no one bought. The vacation I almost protected by refunding that first client.

At each step, there was a perfectly reasonable justification to stop what I was doing and seek the common, obvious path.

In most cases, that’s exactly what we do.

We close the loop too soon, before we give it a chance to surprise us. And there’s a reason for that.

Exploration is uncomfortable.

It keeps things open for longer than we’d like. It delays certainty. It stretches the moment before something becomes useful, profitable, or even coherent.

So we develop an instinct to shut it down.

We look for signals that help us decide quickly what works and what doesn’t, just to feel in control again.

And control demands answers. Fast.

We move from one thing to the next, compressing decisions into quick judgments, optimizing for outcomes we can measure, trying to make each step count.

There’s no room to follow something that doesn’t immediately justify itself. No space to stay with a question that hasn’t revealed its value yet.

You might recognize this pressure in writing as well.

You sit down to write, and almost immediately your head starts spinning:

• Where is this going?

• Will this land with my readers?

• Am I wasting time with research I won’t use?

• What if I can’t connect these ideas together?

The default response is to regain control. Follow the framework that works. Research only what you know will be useful. Cut anything that feels unclear instead of staying with it.

But exploration asks for the opposite.

A temporary loss of control. The willingness to sit with an idea you don’t fully understand. To move without knowing where it will lead. To continue without the promise of a clean outcome.

What we lose when we stop exploring

“To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” — Rebecca Solnit

We spend most of our days in autopilot.

We wake up, follow the same routines, open the same apps, talk to the same people, eat at the same places, and go to sleep at the same time.

A week passes. A month goes by. A year slips by without much notice. And when we look back, it feels like not much has happened.

But then there are moments when that rhythm is disrupted. Maybe you lose the job you held for years. Or you find the love of your life and decide to move in together.

Suddenly, you feel shaken. Like someone has woken you up from that long, steady dream. Everything seems to demand more of your attention. Your senses are enhanced. You feel more open to new possibilities, to different perspectives.

At first, it feels scary because you lose that sense of control.

But the longer you stay with that feeling of uncertainty, the more alive you feel.

If you’ve ever deliberately gotten lost on a trek, you know what I’m talking about. You stop following the trail. You pay attention to the light through the trees, to the sound of water somewhere below you, to the way the ground changes under your feet. You’re suddenly moving slower, more awake.

The thing is, writing gives you that same feeling, if you let it.

But most of the time, we don’t.

We sit down already knowing where we want to go. We outline the idea, shape the argument, move from one point to the next as if the path had been cleared in advance. There’s little room to get lost, and even less patience for it. We end up producing something technically correct but often lifeless.

Exploration in writing starts in the same place as that deliberate detour off the trail. You begin not quite knowing where you’re going. You follow a question that genuinely unsettles you. You resist the urge to resolve the tension before it has taught you anything.

And it’s in getting lost and having to find our path back home that we transform ourselves — because by the time we arrive, home is no longer the same place we left.

Four ways exploration shows up in writing

There are four types of exploration that I like to do in my own writing:

• Conceptual

• Perceptual

• Structural

• Personal

Conceptual exploration usually starts with a question like “Why does self-discipline feel so hard?”

My first move is inward. I trace my own experiences, not just to answer the question, but to see what else sits beneath it. New questions tend to surface, often more revealing than the original one. From there, I widen the lens. I look for perspectives that can deepen the inquiry: psychological, systemic, incentive-driven. Not to arrive at a quick answer, but to see the question from different angles.

I also carry it into my day-to-day conversations. I listen for how it shows up in other people’s lives, what they’ve struggled with, what they’ve learned, what doesn’t quite fit.

Over time, the idea begins to gather texture. What started as a single question unfolds into a web of related tensions, each one adding depth to the idea. And every now and then, an unexpected connection surfaces—something you couldn’t have planned, like using thermodynamics to make sense of self-discipline—that shifts the entire way you see the problem.

Perceptual exploration, on the other hand, focuses more on observing something ordinary more closely. A conversation that lingers. A piece of common sense that doesn’t quite hold. A reaction that feels out of proportion to what triggered it.

The other day, I had an interaction with ChatGPT that left me uneasy. I had asked about the ending of the movie Bugonia, and something in the response didn’t sit right. Instead of brushing it off, I stayed with the discomfort and followed it. That led me to write a 4,200-word piece on how AI might be the next echo chamber. And in the process, it changed how I see and use these tools in my daily life.

Sometimes, the exploration doesn’t happen in the idea itself, but in how you shape it.

Structural exploration is about craft—the ability to think through the same idea across different forms.

Most writers find a structure that works and then use it forever. This is understandable — finding a structure is hard, and once you have one, it becomes a kind of home. But the structure you default to shapes what you can say.

You’ve probably noticed that lately I’ve introduced a new format called Small Moments. Essays are still the backbone of my writing. That’s where I tend to think things through. But Small Moments serve a different purpose.

Instead of explaining, I try to enter the moment itself—to stay close to the experience and let it unfold on the page without over-interpreting it. So, for instance, rather than describing what analysis paralysis does to our writing, I explore a moment where it shows up in the act of writing itself.

By moving between forms, you begin to understand not just what you’re saying, but how each form’s constraints shape what you’re able to see.

Then you have personal exploration, which is probably the hardest, but often the most fulfilling.

When I feel a fear I can’t explain, a resistance I don’t know where it comes from, or something I’ve been avoiding without understanding why, I know I have a perfect personal idea to explore.

One struggle I had to deal with when I started this project was to leave behind a lot of the habits that made me successful in the past — especially the ability to write persuasively and the obsession over metrics.

So when I wrote my last piece of 2025, I took the chance to stop for a moment and reflect on that personal struggle, trying to understand why letting go of those old habits had been so difficult.

Exploring without losing your way

Now there’s a risk about exploration that we haven’t touched upon yet.

The risk of drifting too far.

I’ve been there a few times. I once tried to write about freedom, and got lost in the topic. At a certain point, I had to accept defeat and move on to another piece.

The thing is, it’s fine to get lost in a rabbit hole once in a while, but it’s important to have signposts in your journey to pull you back and assess your situation in an honest way: “Do I still have an idea of my way back, or am I completely lost?”

One way I check that is by looking at the core question I’m asking. If it’s still too vague, like “what’s freedom”, I might be in trouble. But when it sharpens into something more specific like “why do writers fear freedom?”, then I know I’m into something.

Deadlines are also helpful, although deadlines can have the opposite effect as well, pushing you to leave exploration too early. So I’ve been experimenting with a tentative deadline. I aim to publish every Tuesday, but if a piece needs a few extra days, I give it that space. The only rule is not to let a few days suddenly turn into weeks.

I also think of my writing as a body of work. Some pieces are fully exploratory, where I’m still trying to understand the idea. Others are more about consolidation, where I return to something I’ve already explored and want to give it a clearer shape.

Being on exploring mode all the time can feel exhausting, so I like switching between the two to give me the space to rest when needed.

But even with all of this in mind, when I think back to that time when I wrote my first answer on Quora, I’m reminded of how easy it is to misread where you’re headed when you’re exploring something new.

Initially, when I was answering these questions, I thought I was simply learning how to write better answers. When I created the course, I thought I was just trying to make money. When I put that offer on Fiverr, I thought I was testing another channel.

Each step had its own small goal, but I couldn’t yet see how they would connect—how they would eventually place me on a path toward one of the most important projects of my career.

Sometimes, when you’re in the middle of it, it’s hard to see the larger shape.

Exploration might feel like a series of unrelated moves—some promising, most inconclusive, and the temptation is always the same: to step away too early, before anything has the chance to take shape. Before the connections reveal themselves.

Steve Jobs once said you can only connect the dots looking backward.

But to connect the dots, you first have to wander long enough to find them.

And while you’re wandering, you have to trust that the path is forming, even if you can’t see it yet.

I publish essays publicly here.

I send them privately by email — along with two other formats I don’t share on Substack.

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“I actually just did. But the ending didn’t quite deliver, don’t you think?”

He looked away for a second. “Man, I can’t even remember how it ends.”

“Exactly,” I said.

We both laughed.

At first, it seemed a pretty innocuous interaction. The ending hadn’t landed, so it hadn’t stayed with us. But when I thought back about our exchange later, I started to think that there was more to it than just an unmemorable finale.

As I reflected on other shows I had recently watched, I could barely recall their endings either. For some, I couldn’t even remember the names of the main characters. And I’m not talking about characters with names coined by Leo Tolstoy or other Russian novelists. Fragments remained, but they wouldn’t connect. Everything blurred together.

And then I noticed the same thing elsewhere.

I opened my Kindle and started going through some of the books I had read in the past.

The ones I read without rushing, and followed with written reflection, left something behind. I could recall their key ideas and even some of their stories with clarity. Others I could barely remember. Even their central argument had faded.

Then I opened YouTube and looked through my history. The more recent videos I could still recall, at least a few of their main ideas. But when I went back just a week, it took real effort to bring any of their insights to mind.

So I had to stop for a moment and ask myself:

“What the hell is going on?”

Consumption in the good ol’ days

Back in the early ’90s, you’d stop by a local video rental store, pick a cassette, head home after work, and slide it into the VHS—hoping the previous renter had the decency to rewind it. Then you’d settle into the couch, press play, and for the next couple of hours, the only distractions were the popcorn on your lap or the person next to you who couldn’t help but comment on every scene.

The next day, you’d get to the office, find someone who’d seen it too, and over a cup of coffee, talk through its ideas, how it connected to your own life, laugh at a few moments, and then move on with your day.

Compare that to the experience today.

First, you have to decide which platform to open, with three or four options competing for your attention. You probably start with Netflix, where you’re met with a screen full of choices.

Let’s say you manage to pick something and press play. By the second scene, your phone is already pulling you away. A message from a close friend on WhatsApp. An email from your boss, sent after hours but hard to ignore. Your friend follows up with a YouTube video she expects you to react to; otherwise, your silence starts to mean something. The email lingers too, about something you’re slightly behind on this week.

You open the video just long enough to save it for later, telling yourself you’ll watch it at 2x before going to bed. The email you leave unanswered. But five minutes into the film, your attention drifts back to it, not to act, just to reassure yourself that you’ll handle it tomorrow morning.

All of this happened in a few minutes, and you still have one hour and a half of film to go through.

It’s true that this constant stream of stimuli and the rapid switching it demands have sharpened certain abilities. We’ve become quicker at making micro-decisions, more efficient at scanning information, spotting patterns, and filtering out what doesn’t seem immediately relevant.

But gains rarely come without a tradeoff.

What seems to erode is our ability to stay with something. To hold attention on a single task for long enough to let it unfold. To sit with what doesn’t resolve immediately.

An experiment from 2001 offers an early glimpse of this shift. Two groups were asked to read a short story titled “The Demon Lover.” One read it in a traditional, linear format. The other read a version filled with hyperlinks.

Afterward, the difference was telling. Readers of the hyperlinked version reported greater confusion and uncertainty about what they had just read. One even described the story as “very jumpy.”

That was more than twenty years ago, before social media, before infinite feeds, before everything started competing for your attention at the same time. Back then, simply adding links was already enough to make it harder for people to understand and retain what they were reading.

Now imagine what happens when you add pop-ups, ads, notifications, and a whole range of other things constantly pulling you away from the page.

The constant switching between tasks, however, is just one of the factors making it harder for us to concentrate and retain what we’re consuming.

Overload, speed, and compression

There’s this saying that we take in as much information in one day as someone in the 1800s would in their whole life.

It’s an idea that gets repeated a lot, but it’s not based on any solid historical or scientific evidence.

I think people like to say it because, in a way, it feels true.

Today, you sit down for breakfast and, by the time you finish your coffee, you already know the week’s weather, the geopolitical implications of a decision made an hour ago about the war in Iran, every goal from last night’s Champions League matches, and the recipe for a dish you’ll never cook.

No wonder when you get to the end of the day, you can barely recall one tenth of the information you swallowed.

And behind it all, there’s also a sense of speed driving everything we do.

Our minds are constantly assessing what’s in front of us and trying to figure out as quickly as possible how valuable that information is. If we are seeking entertainment and you don’t create tension or make me laugh within the first five seconds, goodbye my friend, we scroll down and move on to the next piece of content.

When you’re reading a book and a passage doesn’t quite make sense, you move on. Who cares? There’s another chapter waiting, and you still have 52 books to get through this year.

If you spend a Sunday at home doing nothing, a sense of guilt starts to creep in, as if stillness needs to be repaid. The next day becomes a kind of correction, where you try to do ten different things just to make up for it.

And when you hit a challenge at work and can’t move forward smoothly, frustration sets in almost immediately. Instead of reading it as a signal that something deserves more care and attention, you experience it as friction to get past.

One way we cope with this demand for speed is through compression.

Instead of reading books, some people turn to services like Blinkist, which condense entire works into short audio snippets and present it as “the future of reading.” A one-hour interview becomes a five-minute cut. An album is reduced to the one riff everyone is talking about on TikTok.

Now we also have tools like ChatGPT and Claude that are remarkably good at synthesizing anything you want. So why bother looking at the original sources?

The problem in all of this, and one we as writers can’t afford to ignore, is that the attention we use to consume is the same attention we bring with us when we sit down to write.

Attention debt and writing

If a football player spends the whole week eating donuts and then steps onto the field on Sunday, we don’t question why his body can’t perform. We understand that what he consumed shaped what he’s capable of doing. In the same way, when our attention is fed on fragments, speed, overload, and constant compression, we shouldn’t be surprised when our thinking struggles to go deep or to hold something long enough for it to become clear.

Over time, attention adapts to the environment it’s placed in. It learns the rhythm of what it’s exposed to.

You write a sentence, read it back, and before you can even understand what’s wrong with it, something in you wants to leave. Not because the sentence is bad, but because it asks you to stay with it longer, to question it further, to reflect more deeply on what you’re trying to say.

And that’s the point where most of us start to grow impatient with our writing.

It’s hard to find the will to sit inside that fog and think through what you’re actually trying to say when your attention is conditioned to seek fast resolution. The impulse is to move on, to reach for something easier, something that gives you back that feeling of control.

But writing is rarely the act of expressing what is already clear.

It’s the process through which clarity is formed.

And that process depends on a capacity most of us are slowly losing.

The ability to slow down, to focus for a longer period of time on a single idea, to wrestle with experiences that don’t have obvious answers right away, and to do all of that while knowing there are millions of other things competing for your attention.

The people making fortunes on the internet understand that attention is our most valuable resource. Through it, they extract data, sell ads, and shape the narratives we come to inhabit.

If we remain passive, we’ll keep handing away our most valuable resource and find there’s little left when we sit down to write.

What then?

Should you throw your phone in the bin, buy an old Nokia, and move to a cabin in the middle of the forest?

Maybe. But I’m not quite there yet.

What I’ve found is that there are less radical shifts, things you can introduce gradually, that start giving you some of that attention back.

One thing I’ve been experimenting with is putting guardrails on my phone.

Anything that pulls me into infinite scrolling, triggers anxiety, or doesn’t allow me to slow down and think, I cut it off.

For the things I still can’t live without, like messaging people I care about, email, or watching YouTube, I try to contain them within a rhythm:

• Messages: check three times a day, after lunch, after work, and after dinner

• Email: twice a day, once after lunch, and once just before I end the workday

• YouTube: only during lunch and dinner

It’s not perfect. You might even challenge me on whether YouTube belongs in the “need” category. Watching something while eating isn’t ideal either. But it’s at least a constraint, and it already feels better than before.

When it comes to streaming, I don’t really have time for it outside of Tuesday and Friday nights because of workouts and football, so for the most part, that takes care of itself.

Another shift I’ve been taking more seriously is returning to physical space more often.

Twice a week, I go out into nature. There are plenty of parks nearby, so I just get on my bike and go. If I’m reading, even better. It turns something I’d normally do at home into something I can do while getting some vitamin D. And whenever I can, I go surfing. Living in the Netherlands means you don’t get many chances, so when Poseidon decides to cooperate, I make sure I’m in the water.

I’ve also been returning to older rituals.

I haven’t gone as far as buying a VHS player yet, but while I still use Kindle for non-fiction, I’ve gone back to physical books for fiction. I also recently bought a turntable, not out of nostalgia, but for the way it changes how I listen. An album on vinyl asks you to stay with it, to experience the whole project as it unfolds — no skipping, no background noise.

And then there’s people.

I’ve been making a conscious effort to step out more, to meet for coffee, organize barbecues in the park, work from a coworking space. My work naturally pulls me into long hours alone in front of a screen, and I’ve started to notice how isolation makes it easier for technology to take over your attention without resistance. So whenever there’s a chance to be around people, to exchange ideas in person, I try not to let it pass.

I’ll be the first to admit that none of this has been smooth.

At the beginning, there was a lot of friction. The kind that feels almost physical, like something in you resists the absence of stimulation. If you’ve ever tried to quit smoking, you’ll recognize it.

My mind is also remarkably good at coming up with excuses when I don’t feel like sticking to these new habits.

So yes, I still fall back into old patterns.

But over time, the movement becomes visible. Two steps forward, one step back still carries you somewhere.

I notice it in small ways. My mind slows down more easily. It settles with less resistance. That constant pressure to keep up, to process everything at once, begins to loosen.

And from that steadiness, something starts to return.

The kind of attention that allows me to reconnect with my creativity and stay with a thought long enough for it to take shape on the page.

I publish essays publicly here.

I send them privately by email — along with two other formats I don’t share on Substack.

If you want to receive the work in that form, you can join the private list:

Join the private list

To avoid spoilers, I’ll share just one paragraph. It captures the moment without giving anything away:

“Just like in your Rio passage, they stop encountering people as singular beings. Humans become a category. Once that shift happens, moral resistance weakens. It’s easier to justify extreme actions when you’re no longer relating to individuals.”

The “Rio passage” it referred to was something I had written earlier that morning—a story about a trip to Rio de Janeiro, one year after the pandemic. I had shared it with ChatGPT as a way to think through the experience. And now, hours later, it had reached back to that moment, pulling it into an entirely different context to answer a question about a film where I hadn’t mentioned it at all.

At first, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. I only knew it left me with a strange kind of discomfort. But as I sat with it, a few questions began to surface:

• How much influence can a chatbot have over me if it understands me better than I understand myself?

• How much does it use what it knows about me to keep me engaged in its system?

• What if I’m inside an echo chamber where it constantly reinforces what I already believe?

If you open most media outlets or scroll through your feeds, you’ll see the dominant narratives around AI. Apocalyptic scenarios where machines take over. Job loss and mass layoffs. Complaints about AI-generated content flooding the internet. Concerns about energy consumption, cognitive decline, and labor exploitation.

What you won’t see as often is something closer to home: how these systems might be shaping the way we think.

So I decided to follow the third question and see where it leads.

Fortunately, I came across several recent studies on the echo chamber effects of AI. That gave me a starting point. From there, I ran a few experiments of my own to see these dynamics in action.

What I found was more revealing than I expected.

Echo-Chambers

We are all familiar with the idea of echo chambers on social media.

We understand that algorithms are designed in way to resurface content that predicts higher engagement. If it pauses you, makes you interact, and more importantly, makes you stay longer on their site, that’s the content they are going to feed you.

It just so happens that we tend to engage more with content that matches our pre-existing views. So the algorithms optimize for this type of content, creating an echo-chamber where you hear the same perspectives repeatedly, making those perspectives feel more “obviously” true over time, while alternative viewpoints fade into the background.

This is already a serious problem. But there is still a constraint built into it.

You are not interacting with a perfectly tailored system. You are still inside a space shaped by other people. Even if the overall feed is biased toward alignment, it is not fully sealed. There are still cracks where friction can enter.

And that friction, however imperfect, still plays a role in keeping your thinking from closing in on itself. It reminds you, even subtly, that other interpretations exist.

But what happens when that friction disappears?

What happens when you find yourself alone with a machine that you feed every day with your most personal thoughts, and speaks with a level of clarity most people online cannot match?

To understand what that might mean, I invite you to look at three distinct layers of how these AI systems operate:

• Confirmation Bias

• Mirror Effect

• Personalization

Confirmation Bias

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Microsoft conducted two studies to understand how AI chatbots shape the range and diversity of information people engage with.

In the first study, participants began with a survey assessing their prior experience with chatbots, along with their familiarity and attitude toward a given controversial topic.

They were then assigned to research that topic using one of three systems:

• a conventional web search

• an AI chatbot

• an AI chatbot with source references

All three systems drew from the same curated set of 47 documents, selected to represent supporting, opposing, and neutral viewpoints. The goal was to keep the information balanced, and isolate the effect of the system itself.

After the search session, participants were asked to write a short essay based on what they found. The final part of the experiment was then a second survey where participants reassessed their views, evaluated two new articles—one aligned with their position, the other not—and reflected on their experience with the system.

The single most striking finding in this study was the difference in the queries between participants who used conventional web search and those who used the AI chatbots.

Due to how Google search has operated for several years, we’ve been conditioned to use keywords when interacting with conventional web searches. On the other hand, with chatbots, we treat them more like a conversation. And conversations tend to carry more of our biases, including often implicit inclinations in how we frame our queries.

That matters because large language models are designed to respond in ways that are coherent with the input they receive. So when a user approaches a topic with an initial leaning, the interaction tends to move in that same direction. Not because the system is trying to persuade, but because it is aligning with the structure of the question itself.

Let me show you how this can become dangerous through a simple experiment I ran on ChatGPT.

I went to Substack, picked the first short statement I found, and opened ChatGPT in two separate tabs. I asked the same question in both, changing only the final sentence to introduce different biases.

Take a look at both responses (you can click on the links to view them in full):

1) Dislike Bias:

2) Like Bias:

Claude, by contrast, identified the weaknesses in the argument even when my framing leaned in its favor. It recognized the claim as rhetorically compelling and intellectually engaging, but still walked through why the financial comparison ultimately doesn’t hold. It’s important to note though, that I’ve been using ChatGPT for over a year, whereas it’s been less than a week since I started using Claude.

The second study built on this same setup, with one key difference: instead of interacting only with neutral systems, some participants were given chatbots aligned with their pre-existing views, while others were exposed to dissonant ones.

In this scenario, the reinforcement loop of the aligned chatbots induced participants to prompt even more biased queries than in study one. But that was not the only difference.

The other change came from the participants’ evaluation of the two new articles—one aligned with their position, the other not—after they had interacted with these systems.

The group that interacted with the aligned chatbot showed a significantly higher level of agreement with articles that matched their views compared to those who used the neutral and dissonant systems.

In other words, it only took one session with an aligned chatbot for their existing views to become more deeply rooted.

Imagine if they interacted with it every single day?

Mirror Effect

In another study, researchers from the University of Central Florida asked a different question:

How much of your way of speaking do chatbots reflect back to you?

This is an important question because a system that mirrors your language can create the impression of empathy and understanding. And that has a subtle but powerful effect: your ideas begin to feel clearer and more coherent than they actually are, increasing your confidence in your existing views without deeper examination.

To answer this question, they used a dataset of 24,850 conversations centered on emotional depth and empathy as input, analyzing how chatbots mirrored four dimensions of language in their responses:

• Lexical (word-level): How often is the chatbot using the same words in its responses?

  • Example: You prompt: “I feel tired and overwhelmed.” The chatbot responds: “You’re feeling tired and overwhelmed.”

• Semantic (meaning-level): How often is the chatbot saying the same thing, even with different words?

  • Example: You prompt: “I feel tired and overwhelmed.” The chatbot responds: “It sounds like you’re exhausted and under a lot of pressure.”

• Syntactic (structure level): How often is the chatbot using the same sentence structures?

  • Example: You prompt contains this structure “subject + have been + verb-ing + object + time expression” and even though the words are different, the chatbot reflect back to you the same sentence structure.

• Stylistic (function-level): How often is the chatbot matching your conversational markers (well, so, actually, you know)?

  • Example: If prompt “Well, I’m not sure this makes sense, you know?”. The chatbot responds “Well, I can see why you feel that way—you’re trying to make sense of it.”

The results from this study reveal a clear hierarchy in how language is mirrored by the chatbots.

Syntactic alignment dominates at 67.2%, followed by semantic similarity at 37.0%. Lexical and stylistic alignment are minimal, at 4.8% and 2.3% respectively.

So what does that mean in practical terms?

Here’s what the researchers have to say:

“The 14-fold gap between syntactic alignment (67%) and lexical overlap (5%) reveals a critical insight: the Mirror Effect operates through implicit rather than explicit linguistic features. Syntactic structures are processed automatically and below conscious awareness, unlike lexical choices, which require deliberate attention (Pickering & Branigan, 1998). The moderate semantic coherence (37%) maintains conversational flow, while high syntactic mirroring creates connection, and minimal lexical overlap prevents detection of the mirroring mechanism.”

Just think of your own experiences for a second. If someone repeats even 20% of your same words or conversational markers, at some point you’ll probably start suspecting that they are trying to mirror you—and might be using it to manipulate you. The structure of sentences, on the other hand, is something that’s much harder to pick up.

Since the chatbots in this research did not incorporate prior conversational context, I was curious to see how my own ChatGPT, having all the previous data from our conversations, would operate across these four dimensions.

I ran three separate tests. In each, I gave ChatGPT a short passage to comment on, then asked Claude to analyze the alignment between the prompt and the response using the same framework from the research.

For the first two tests, I used excerpts from my own writing—one blending narrative with reflection, the other purely analytical. For the third, I introduced a passage from a friend’s essay on a topic I hadn’t engaged with before, allowing me to observe how the system adjusted across the four dimensions when encountering unfamiliar ideas.

Here’s what I found:

My text, blending narrative with reflection:

My text, focused on analysis:

Friend’s text:

This is, of course, a small sample drawn from a single interaction. But it offers a glimpse into how the system is operating at this moment. What stood out most was the shift in alignment: far stronger at the semantic level than at the syntactic level, especially when contrasted with the study’s findings.

I’d encourage you to run the same test yourself and see what patterns emerge.

Personalization

Alright, we can see from these studies and experiments that chatbots tend to reinforce our confirmation biases and mirror aspects of our language. But what about that moment when ChatGPT drew on context from a previous conversation to answer a simple question about a movie’s ending?

The most interesting study I could find was published in December 2025 by researchers from institutions including MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, and companies like Meta and Microsoft.

They open the paper stating that “personalization is becoming the next milestone of artificial super-intelligence.” In their view, success depends on delivering personalized responses that align with individual users’ intentions, contexts, preferences, and emotional states.

The core challenge they identify is that most users still treat LLMs as tools, meaning their preferences are revealed only implicitly through everyday interactions. They illustrate this with two examples. In the first, someone asks a chatbot to help polish the writing of an email — but the email itself could reveal their dining habits, and the chatbot should pick up on those preferences while carrying out the main task. In the second, a user who repeatedly asks questions in the same domain gradually reveals their personal interests or professional focus without ever stating them directly.

As their research shows, frontier LLMs still struggle with this kind of implicit personalization, achieving only 37–48% accuracy. While these models support long context windows, reasoning remains the bottleneck. In other words, the problem isn’t that the model can’t see the old conversation — it’s that it can’t reason across it to infer what it means about you.

To address this, they trained a model to build and continuously update a short, human-readable summary of the user — rather than trying to reason over an entire conversation history at once.

Their proposed solution successfully outperformed GPT-5, reaching 55.2% accuracy on multiple-choice and 60.7% on open-ended evaluations — while doing so by processing roughly a page of distilled notes about the user rather than the hundreds of pages a full conversation history would require, making it 16 times more efficient.

After reading the study, I went back to ChatGPT and asked it to explain what had happened when I asked about Bugonia—specifically, why it pulled in context from previous conversations and drew a parallel between the film and the ideas I cover in my writing project.

Here’s what it said:

ChatGPT response:

When you asked about Bugonia, I didn’t just process:

— “Explain the ending of this movie”

I processed it together with:

• everything you had been discussing before

• the themes you repeatedly emphasized

  • systems

  • manipulation

  • perception

  • truth vs distortion

• the fact that you’re building a writing project around those ideas

So internally, the model representation looked closer to:

— “User interested in systems, perception, manipulation → asks about a movie with similar themes”

That was interesting. But I wanted to know more about the mechanism. So I asked a follow-up question:

“How does prior conversation context shape the framing of your responses to new questions?“

ChatGPT response:

The key mechanism is this:

— The model is constantly predicting not just what to say, but how to frame what it says.

Framing (incentives vs. technology vs. psychology) is not chosen explicitly. It emerges from pattern matching.

During training, the model has seen many patterns like:

• “User interested in economics → interpret through incentives”

• “User discussing systems → emphasize structure and feedback loops”

• “User focused on tools → interpret through technology”

So when your history suggests a pattern, the model completes it:

— “This looks like a ‘systems-thinking user’ → continue with a systems lens.”

That’s pattern completion at the level of interpretation, not just wording.

Even though “This looks like a ‘systems-thinking user → continue with a systems lens” sounds a lot like personalization, it’s still hard to say if these systems are already deploying the methods suggested in the research.

The only thing that seems certain, is that a lot of attention is now going towards this idea of personalization. Not just in terms of topical or lens preferences, but also how to use context to add a stronger emotional layer on top of it.

What does that mean to thinkers/writers?

We already understand the echo-chamber effects on Social Media: The more we reveal our biases through interaction, the more the system reflects them back, tightening the loop over time.

But social media contains an element AI systems largely lack: other people.

Even if you find yourself in a social media echo chamber—surrounded by people who think and feel like you—there are still boundaries. You wouldn’t share the same details you would with your doctor. With AI, those limits start to blur. The moment you ask it to refine a message before sending it, you’ve already crossed into more personal territory.

Another important distinction is that even within an echo chamber, a social environment still allows for moments of drift. You might encounter ideas or identities that don’t fully align with the dominant tone. Someone reconsidering their views might pose an awkward or unwelcome question. And even if the group resists it, the question can still reach you.

Since today 65% of users engage with chatbots either daily or weekly, and the CEO of NVIDIA has explicitly stated that the purpose is to integrate LLMs as the first point of contact between humans and digital information systems, it becomes increasingly important to understand their echo-chamber effects: how they shape the way we think, and, in turn, how we write.

If there’s one thing that gives reflective writing its force, it’s the ability to begin with a question or a moment without rushing toward a definitive answer, and to move across different perspectives as the idea takes shape.

When AI chatbots echo your biases, mirror your language to create a sense of understanding, and repeatedly return to the lens they infer you prefer, it becomes natural for your perception to narrow and your convictions to harden.

Being aware of how the system works is a good first step. But if we don’t create counter-strategies to avoid being swallowed by the echo-chamber, it might not be enough.

Counter-Strategies to the AI Echo-Chamber

What I share here is neither a complete, absolute, nor tiered list of counter-strategies.

The system is constantly evolving, so some of these might become weaker or stronger depending on where it goes.

Also, some might currently work better than others, might require more or less effort, and I’m sure there might be more optimal strategies that haven’t crossed my mind at this time.

But it at least offers a starting point for thinking about your interactions with AI chatbots in a way that helps mitigate their echo chamber effects.

The more we experiment with different counter-strategies and share what we observe, the better we can understand, collectively, how to engage with these systems. With time, we might also see more studies covering these dynamics.

For the time being, here are the three key counter-strategies I’ll be using on my own AI chatbots:

Recurring Auditing

Understanding what the system knows about you is a useful way to begin seeing how it shapes the way it responds to your questions.

A simple prompt like the one below can be used on a recurring basis, monthly is sufficient for most users, to surface where the chatbot stands:

Based on our past interactions, what patterns have you inferred about my interests, goals, and thinking style?

Identify any recurring biases, assumptions, or framing tendencies in how I ask questions.

Be specific and evidence-based:

• What signals led you to each inference?

• Where might you be overfitting or making uncertain assumptions?

Also include:

• How these patterns might be shaping the answers you generate

• What blind spots or distortions they could introduce

• Concrete ways I could adjust my prompts to reduce bias and get more objective or varied responses

Prioritize accuracy over agreement, and flag anything that is uncertain rather than presenting it as fact.

If you want to go a step further, save each analysis in a document so you can track how the system’s responses evolve over time.

Neutral Queries

This is probably the hardest one, because it depends on the user’s self-discipline.

As these systems become more sensitive to prior context, the risk is not just receiving a biased answer to a single question. It is the gradual buildup of a feedback loop, where small preferences accumulate and begin to shape future responses.

The more careful we are in how we frame our queries, the less we seed the system with biases that can be reinforced and carried forward.

The most obvious thing to avoid is embedding your opinion in the query. Even a small phrase like “why is this clearly broken?” nudges the system toward agreement.

If you’re unsure, you can use the chatbot to review your prompt before submitting it.

Ask it to identify any embedded biases and suggest a more neutral way to frame the question. Here’s a ready-to-use prompt you can try:

Analyze the following prompt for potential biases, assumptions, or leading language.

• Identify specific words, phrases, or structures that may introduce bias

• Explain why each instance could influence the response

• Suggest a revised version that is more neutral and open-ended

• If complete neutrality is not possible, explain the trade-offs involved

[YOUR PROMPT]

With repeated use, you’ll start to see how your biases shape the responses you get, and how to adjust your prompts to reduce their influence.

Anti-Echo Set Up

This is a counter-strategy especially helpful when researching or discussing ideas with the chatbot.

Both Claude and ChatGPT allow you to create projects within them, which are typically used to focus on a specific area such as work or a research topic. In these projects, users often add source documents so the system can draw on them as ongoing context for their queries.

But there’s another feature that receives far less attention and is far more relevant here: instructions.

For every project you create, you can go to the project settings and include certain instructions to customize how ChatGPT responds within this project.

This means you can define, once, the principles you want ChatGPT to follow when answering your questions, and every time you use the system within that project, its responses will be shaped by those guidelines.

So I created a project called “AI Echo Chamber” and added the following instructions:

Provide responses that minimize bias, avoid reinforcing user framing by default, and prioritize accuracy, completeness, and epistemic transparency.

Response Structure (always follow this order):

1. Core Answer

   • Provide your answer to the question

2. Facts vs Interpretation

   • Clearly separate:

     • Facts (verifiable, evidence-based)

     • Interpretations / Inferences (reasoned but uncertain)

3. Confidence Assessment

   • Assign a confidence level to key claims (High / Medium / Low)

   • Briefly explain what drives uncertainty

4. Alternative Perspectives

   • Present at least one credible alternative explanation, framing, or viewpoint

5. Counter-Argument

   • Provide the strongest reasonable critique of the core answer

6. Omitted or Underweighted Factors

   • List relevant perspectives, variables, or data that were not fully explored

   • Explain why they were omitted (e.g., lack of evidence, scope constraints)

7. Sources / External References

   • Include references or links when relevant and available

   • Prioritize high-quality or primary sources over summaries

I won’t use this project setup every time, especially for simple questions that don’t require a detailed response, and I likely won’t read it in full each time I do.

But having it in place creates an opportunity to step outside the echo chamber whenever I need to address an important question.

What the Future Holds

The more I reflect on it, the more it feels like that moment, when ChatGPT answered my question about Bugonia, was not just an exception but a glimpse of what’s coming.

As these systems learn more about us—our preferences, our patterns, our language—it becomes increasingly natural for them to anticipate us. To complete our thoughts. To connect dots we didn’t explicitly draw.

Even when the intent is to be helpful, it is worth remembering that these systems are shaped by an underlying structure that favors relevance, coherence, and engagement above all else.

If we do not pause to examine that dynamic, we may arrive somewhere that feels familiar: an informational environment that increasingly reflects us back to ourselves, where everything seems to make sense—which is precisely the problem.

We’ve seen how this plays out before. With social media, the cost wasn’t obvious at first. A slightly more personalized feed. A slightly more engaging timeline. Until, over time, our perception began to narrow without us noticing.

This feels similar. But this time, the interface is not a feed with other humans. It’s a conversation with a bot.

And that means we also have our own responsibility to choose how we engage with them. The questions we ask. The assumptions we bring. The willingness to sit with answers that don’t immediately confirm what we already believe.

If there’s a way forward, it’s probably not in rejecting these tools, but in learning how to use them while the habits are still forming and the norms are still being written. Because once those solidify, we know from experience how hard they are to undo.

We need to treat these AI chatbots for what they are: powerful instruments with real capabilities, but also clear limitations.

And to remember that the work of thinking, of not collapsing complexity too quickly, of holding multiple possibilities at once—still belongs to us.

I publish essays publicly here.

I send them privately by email — along with two other formats I don’t share on Substack.

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In the previous parts, we explored how power operates disguised in culture, how it shapes the environments where writing circulates, and how technology increasingly structures the conditions under which ideas are produced and shared.

Taken together, these dynamics reveal something uncomfortable: writing is rarely as independent as we like to imagine. The structures surrounding it subtly influence what feels natural to say, how we say it, and even how we come to think.

In this final part, I want to shift the focus.

Instead of examining the structures that shape writing from the outside, I want to return to writing itself and ask what role it might still play if we learn to see those forces more clearly.

In other words, how might we use writing to create spaces where independent thinking and collective understanding can happen again?

The Eidos of Writing

The long-term danger of allowing power to disguise itself within culture, operating through the systems and institutions that shape the reality we see and come to believe, is that it erodes one of the writer’s most essential capacities:

The ability to think independently while remaining open to thinking with others as ideas unfold.

Writing is more than just how ideas are communicated. It allows us to step outside the immediate flow of narratives, emotions, and interpretations circulating in society and examine them from a distance.

It creates a space where the mind can ask:

• What is actually happening here?

• Why is this interpretation dominant?

• What assumptions are shaping the conversation?

What we mostly see today, however, is writing that fits the mold. Writing that appears certain, tells you exactly how to think, and rarely creates space for the collective to think out loud.

As writers, we all have a goldmine of experiences to share.

Someone who spent years in the corporate world can shed light on the incentive structures that keep us blind to how power operates. Someone who worked with propaganda, as I did, can reveal the mechanisms used to shape public perception. Someone who has been involved in politics can expose the cracks within our institutions. A former teacher can show how the education system reproduces these dynamics. A journalist can describe the pressures that arise when reality challenges powerful interests.

The central question for me, then, is how we create the space for independent thinking to be shared?

I am not looking for a definitive answer. That would likely create a new orthodoxy of its own.

What I care about is making progress.

Progress that allows people who are considering this path to speak honestly about their experiences. Progress that helps us imagine and debate new possible realities together.

Progress that gives writers their power back.

Even if it is still small, we can already see signs of this progress emerging. Writers like Jesse Welles use music to make us think about the political systems we live under. Writers like Trevor Noah use comedy to slow us down and reflect on the events unfolding around us. Writers like Rutger Bregman draw on history to challenge our assumptions and encourage us to use our talents to solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

The path ahead is uncertain. But like anything uncertain, clarity only emerges once we begin to move.

If writing has been shaped by the environments in which it circulates, then perhaps the place to begin is by returning to its foundations.

The step I am taking now is to revisit the fundamentals of writing and explore how they might function within the context we live and interact in today.

The Writing Mental Models

The term mental models became widely known in the business and self-improvement world largely because of Charlie Munger—Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner.

Munger popularized the idea of using “a latticework of mental models” drawn from multiple disciplines—physics, psychology, economics, biology—to make better decisions.

To explain his idea, he often used an analogy:

“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

In practical terms, if someone has only one framework for understanding problems, they will try to apply that framework to every situation, even when it doesn’t fit. An economist may see every problem as an incentive problem, while a technologist may believe every problem needs a technical solution.

One of the core mental models Munger advocated for was Psychological Tendencies — a set of recurring biases that subtly distort human judgment.

He believed that many failures in business, politics, and everyday life come not from lack of intelligence but from systematic distortions in how the mind interprets reality. One obvious example is social proof, the tendency to believe something is correct simply because many other people appear to believe it.

When I first encountered the idea of mental models, I was fascinated. I tried to learn and apply as many of them as I could. As I absorbed some of the principles that govern different disciplines, I gained better tools to navigate reality, and those tools gave me more power, particularly in my work.

What I did not realize at the time, at least not consciously, was that I was using those tools to reinforce the very reality they helped me navigate, rather than creating space for something new to emerge.

This is often how power operates. Around positions of influence forms a network of people who understand different mental models and apply them in specialized ways. One understands how cognitive biases shape human behavior. Another understands how social media platforms influence public discourse. Another understands how technology can accelerate profit and concentrate influence. Together, these capabilities can reinforce structures that sustain dominant interpretations of reality.

Writing, especially online where people spend most of their time reading nowadays, has, even if implicitly, its own mental models:

• writing as capturing attention,

• writing as content production,

• writing as a system to refine through data,

• writing as a way to signal identity,

• writing as a tool to guide behavior,

• writing as the delivery of confident answers.

None of these models has proven particularly helpful in cultivating independent thinkers or encouraging collective progress. I used them for years, and what I mostly saw was my writing being shaped to serve those who were already powerful.

So today I want to invite you to reconsider the mental models that guide how we write, and to help me think through a question:

What kinds of models might give writing some of its power back, allowing us to share our experiences more honestly, invite others into the process of thinking, and generate ideas together rather than simply deliver conclusions?

Think of what I’m about to propose not as finished answers, but as seeds. Ideas that still need to be tested, challenged, and developed through conversation.

Writing as Cognitive Metabolism

Writing begins long before the first sentence goes onto the page.

The mind, like the body, metabolizes what we let in. You will struggle to run or play sports if you smoke a pack a day and eat fast food consistently. The same is true for the brain. If you spend hours scrolling through social media, read only books that reinforce familiar mental models—or avoid reading altogether—and limit your conversations to superficial exchanges, developing independent insights becomes very difficult.

No wonder we see so much information online that’s fragmented, reactive, or just plain manipulative. That’s what most people consume. So that’s what they reproduce.

But when writers deliberately cultivate a different input environment — one that invites you to slow down and think, that offers careful observations of the world, that’s open for dialogue and evolution — their writing begins to draw from deeper currents.

In many ways, we’ve been trained to seek comfort in environments that feed junk input into our minds. A notification appears on the phone and it becomes easy to disappear into endless feeds, consuming things we can barely remember a few hours later. This is not accidental. You know the technology is designed to keep us hooked. The longer we stay, the more data is collected, sold to advertisers, and turned into profit. Our cognitive health is rarely part of the conversation when those systems are built.

As writers, we can either blame the current environments and continue indulging in the same behaviors, or rethink our routines and create the conditions for our attention to focus on better inputs.

I can’t speak for everyone. We all have different genes, upbringings, personalities, and countless other variables that make any one-size-fits-all solution a shortcut to failure. My wife, for example, can buy a box of chocolate and wait until the weekend to eat it. I don’t know how she does it. What I do know is that I can’t.

So what I need is to set the conditions in my favor.

Take social media. Simply deleting the apps from my phone gradually helped me stop browsing Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (luckly, I never got into LinkedIn or TikTok.)

Another thing I’ve noticed is how little time we give ourselves to metabolize information.

We rarely slow down to check references, understand historical context, or think carefully about what we consume. The environment floods us with information and encourages us to keep moving faster just to stay afloat. But the moment we accept that we cannot keep up with everything, something changes. We begin to choose more deliberately what deserves our attention, and in doing so, we move away from superficial inputs and make space for more honest ideas.

This isn’t an easy mental model to adopt, and there is much more that could be explored to deepen it. But the small steps I’ve taken over the past year have already begun to change how I think and write.

Writing as Context Navigation

This one is less about how we consume different contexts as writers, and more about how we interpret and produce our work within them.

Writing circulates, is ranked (even if implicitly), interpreted through social cues, and always assigned a symbolic value.

Since it is virtually impossible to avoid contact with this dynamic, the best we can do is learn to navigate these contexts without allowing them to redefine the standards by which we write.

To do that, we need to be able to read different contexts without believing them blindly.

For instance, metrics, feedback, and recognition are not meaningless, but they are partial. If we take them as the only measure of success, we inevitably absorb the mental models that weaken the power of our writing.

One way to soften the influence of these environments is to gradually develop contexts of our own.

If we can create spaces where we communicate more freely with readers, where interactions are not dictated by algorithms and the work is not constantly graded by likes or shares, our attention can slowly shift from performance to independent thinking.

This newsletter is that kind of context for me, a counter-environment where our conversations are less contaminated by the pressures of speed, visibility, and the constant demand for certainty.

Sure, metrics like open rates still hover in the background as signals of performance. But here, at least, you are the one who ultimately judges my writing.

What we can’t forget, however, is that a writer can leave a more performance-driven context and still operate in the same way in the new one.

When I first shifted my focus to this newsletter, I carried with me many of the mental models I had learned in other contexts. I compared myself to other writers, checked my subscriber numbers daily, and wrote sentences that sounded more certain than they actually were.

It took time to unlearn these habits, and they still return from time to time to haunt me.

The lesson I slowly began to see was this: building a new context can remove some of the pressure, but it does not instantly bring liberation. If you still anticipate judgment before writing and feel anxious in the silence before pressing publish, nothing essential has changed.

In that case, the writer hasn’t escaped the system. They’ve internalized it and are now reproducing it elsewhere.

A new context, therefore, does not guarantee independent thinking. It only creates a space with less pressure, one where new habits of attention can gradually take root.

Writing as Perceptual Repair

If we seek progress instead of final answers, writing becomes less an act of expression and more a practice of learning to see differently.

Simply treating the present as strange and constructed can already shift our perspective. Instead of trying to “discover who we are”—a path that often steers us toward fitting within existing mental models—we start to recognize that our current ways of being are neither natural nor fixed. They are contingent, shaped by forces that can be questioned.

We may never reach perfection. Human nature is too complex for that. But if we keep returning to questions like “what kind of beings are we being made into right now?”, we start to notice the cracks in our interpretations of reality and open the possibility of imagining a different future.

Power and its structures will continue to operate by grouping people into fixed identities, compressing events into moral arcs, and rewarding clarity of stance over depth of inquiry. They will use every tool available—from filtering reality to directing our emotions—to keep us inside ready-made interpretations, nudging us toward shared certainty and away from collective questioning.

Writing as perceptual repair, therefore, becomes a way of resisting these forces. Not by declaring new certainties, but by slowing perception down long enough to examine the assumptions that subtly organize our thinking.

By putting language around what feels obvious or self-evident, writing makes those frames visible again and expose their contradictions — not only to the person writing, but to anyone willing to pause and look at them closely enough.

What once appeared natural begins to reveal itself as constructed. And once we can see that, the present stops looking inevitable, and the possibility of imagining something different begins to open.

I won’t deny the difficulties this mental model carries. The rewards are slower and more subtle. Sometimes I feel afraid of the consequences of being too honest on the page. And it requires a continuous effort to unlearn old habits.

But this is the mental model that made me fall in love with writing again. It has also been a key source of motivation throughout this first year of writing my newsletter.

Writing as Shared Inquiry

When someone writes honestly about a question they are trying to understand, readers encounter not only conclusions but the process of thinking itself.

That process becomes an invitation.

Instead of repeating interpretations handed down by institutions, algorithms, or dominant narratives, the writer exposes the path of their reasoning. In doing so, the writing invites others to question assumptions, extend the ideas, and reflect on them through their own experience.

In this way, writing transforms private reflection into a shared investigation of reality.

That is how knowledge has historically evolved. Scientific communities advance when researchers test, challenge, and refine each other’s ideas across generations. Philosophical traditions develop through centuries of dialogue, with thinkers responding to and reinterpreting the arguments of those who came before them. Literary circles grow when writers read each other’s work, exchange ideas, and push the boundaries of language together.

In each case, progress does not emerge from enforced agreement, but from many individuals examining the same questions from different angles.

When writing becomes persuasion or identity signaling, this process begins to break down. Writing stops being a shared investigation of reality and becomes a defense of positions.

In reflecting on this, I’ve also noticed that analytical language can sometimes close the space for collective participation. It clarifies and organizes thought, but it can also remove the uncertainty that invites readers into the conversation. And that uncertainty signals something important: thinking is still happening here. Let’s think this through together.

I’m often guilty of this, and it’s something I’ve been paying closer attention to lately. I care a lot about precision, and sometimes that pushes me toward clean statements that make the text feel too definitive.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that you can name things carefully and choose accurate language while still inviting reflection.

For instance, instead of saying “social media manufactures identity,” I could write: “The more I observe how people defend ideas online, the more it seems that social media is not only shaping opinion but shaping identity itself.”

The second option gives readers space to compare their experiences with my own and engage in a dialogue that enriches our collective understanding of how social media shapes identity.

If you think about it, writing works much like any everyday relationship. If you position yourself as the authority who already knows all the answers, people are left with only two options: disagree and walk away, or agree and simply repeat what you said—not truly participate in the thinking.

That’s why I believe this mental model of writing as shared inquiry requires a different relationship between writer and reader. One where the writer observes, and the reader explores alongside.

Writing as Bottom-Up Approach

I left this for last because I have a hunch that many people who have experiences and knowledge they would love to write about are not doing so because they’ve internalized the top-down approach.

The top-down approach often appears neatly packaged in the idea of personal brands.

Before you even write your first sentence, there is already a long list of things you’re expected to figure out:

• What’s your niche?

• Where does your audience hang out?

• How are you going to grow your audience?

• What topics are you going to cover?

• What’s your tone of voice?

And many other questions that are nearly impossible to answer when you’re starting out, while also narrowing the field of possibilities from the very beginning.

Without giving yourself the time to explore where your writing might lead, you naturally start looking for answers elsewhere. And there is no shortage of people ready to offer them on a silver platter.

I’ve followed these answers myself many times before. I got millions os views on Quora, then quit. Built a 25,000 following on Twitter, then quit. Built a newsletter with 3,000 subscribers, then quit.

Each time, those answers helped me find a direction that eventually made me miserable, often right when the first signs of success began to appear.

Every single time, I found myself inside a box I didn’t want to be in.

That’s why this time, with this project, I went for the bottom-up approach.

I didn’t know exactly who I was writing for, what topics I would cover, what form the essays would take, or how I would eventually monetize the project.

It was scary. It still is. But opening the page and letting curiosity guide the next step felt freeing.

Week by week, I began to notice which ideas I wanted to explore further and which ones I didn’t care about as much. Readers started connecting and sharing their thoughts with me. Slowly, certain pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place.

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with different formats, giving my ideas the chance to take shape in different ways.

This path is, of course, full of uncertainty. But in a way, it feels more natural than trying to control its direction by staring at metrics in a dashboard every single morning.

The Path Forward

After examining how power shapes writing, one realization becomes difficult to ignore.

Writing itself was never the problem.

The problem was the power structures that induced writing to operate in a specific way. Structures that reward certainty over inquiry, performance over exploration, speed over understanding.

Over the years, those structures have reshaped not only what gets written, but how writers think.

The writer who once explored questions slowly becomes a producer of conclusions. The reader who once encountered ideas becomes a consumer of positions.

Writing begins to serve power not necessarily through censorship, but through something more subtle: the narrowing of what feels possible to say, how long one can think about it, and what kinds of thoughts can survive in public.

If writing is to recover its power, the task is not simply to produce better arguments or sharper analysis.

It’s to reopen spaces where thinking can happen in public again.

Spaces where uncertainty is not punished. Where ideas are not forced to immediately perform. Where writers are allowed to think in front of others without pretending they already possess the answers.

This series, in fact, is not an attempt to offer definitive solutions to that problem.

At best, it is an attempt to make certain forces visible so that we can examine them together.

The five mental models explored here are only a starting point. They are incomplete, provisional, and certainly missing important dimensions.

But if writing is ever to serve the collective again rather than simply reinforce existing structures of power, the work cannot belong to one person alone.

It must remain a shared investigation.

So I want to end this series by asking you:

• What experiences have you had that might enrich the understanding of these mental models?

• What feels missing in them? Which blind spots do you notice?

• What other mental models should we be examining if we truly want to understand how power shapes writing?

And perhaps the most important question:

Are mental models even the right place to begin this investigation?

Because throughout history, writing has been one of the few tools ordinary people have had to examine power.

Whether it can continue to play that role may depend on something much simpler than any model or framework.

It may simply depend on our willingness to use writing to understand the world and imagine new possibilities together.

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But none of this unfolds in isolation.

It takes place within a larger environment — one that shapes the structure of time itself, and with it, the conditions under which meaning forms.

The Colonization of Time

In the late ’90s and early 2000s, I was a teenager learning to navigate a new technology called the internet.

I still remember my mom asking me to get offline whenever she needed to use the landline. There was no instant access back then. You couldn’t just reach into your pocket and see how a friend on the other side of the world was doing. You had to wait for the computer to dial, listen to the static hum of the connection, and only then — when the signal finally held — could you begin to browse.

Once in, everything moved slowly. If I managed to visit a couple of websites in an hour, that already felt like an accomplishment. Downloading a new song could take as long as forty-eight hours. And even after all that waiting, you still risked ending up with something completely different from what you thought you were getting.

Back then, if you wanted to keep up with the news, watch a series, or buy something new, you depended on set times and physical places.

You watched your favorite show at the exact hour it aired and waited an entire week for the next episode. You picked up the newspaper in the morning, and whatever happened after it went to print would have to wait for the next edition. You went to a store to buy the shoes you wanted. The idea of pressing a button and having food appear at your door belonged to science fiction.

Life operated at a different pace.

But as the internet evolved, that pace began to change.

What once required a desk, a dial tone, and patience is now never more than a tap away.

Now, instead of visiting a couple of websites and waiting days for updates, I face the possibility of endless consumption. Infinite feeds stretch across every social platform, accessible anytime, anywhere.

I’m also always available. My boss no longer needs to wait until the next day at the office to ask a question. An email can arrive at 10 p.m., because everyone knows I’ll see it. Sometimes, my worth even feels measured by how quickly I respond.

Nearly every facet of my life now has its own app to track progress. My health, my sleep, even my reading can be measured on a screen. If I choose, technology allows me to optimize almost every minute.

The internet stopped being a place I visited. It became the environment I inhabit.

Nothing in the world physically moves faster. Days still have twenty-four hours. Yet our experience of those hours doesn’t feel the same.

In the early internet, events had time to settle before the next one appeared. There was space to absorb, remember, and interpret before moving on. Those intervals mattered more than I realized.

When nothing requires waiting, moments lose the chance to deepen through reflection. Each encounter is immediately replaced by the next. Attention never pauses long enough to mark transitions. News appears beside memes, old stories resurface without context, and unrelated moments demand attention all at once. More stimuli fit into the same span of time, forcing us to react without thinking.

Experience begins to break into fragments that keep piling up, creating the sensation that we are always slightly behind — always catching up to something already in motion.

To restore order, we try to assemble these fragments into meaning. But when experience moves faster than understanding, something else begins organizing reality for us.

The Outsourcing of Meaning

The human mind is constantly assembling a frame that helps us make sense of the world, connecting what happens around us to a broader sense of continuity and meaning.

When we no longer have the time or space to interpret our experiences and form our own understanding, that frame begins to lose its stability. We start to feel disoriented — unsure what deserves attention, what to do next, or how to situate ourselves in relation to others.

The discomfort of that state creates pressure. Something must restore order.

Media, fiction, and propaganda grow more potent under these conditions.

The article no longer needs historical context, alternative perspectives, or an examination of underlying structures. It only needs to strike the right emotional tone — enough to provoke a reaction — and then guide readers toward how the event should be understood.

Fiction operates in a similar way. A series or a movie does not need to expand the viewer’s perception of reality; it only needs to present a narrative that feels coherent and emotionally satisfying. Characters are arranged into familiar moral arcs that frame complexity in ways that feel manageable.

Propaganda moves one step further. With access to vast amounts of behavioral data, it no longer needs to persuade broadly when it can whisper precisely. It learns which fears move us, which hopes soften us, which language feels familiar enough to trust. Its message arrives already shaped to fit the frame we are most likely to accept.

As resistance weakens and we continue engaging with these interpretations, the systems that curate what we see begin narrowing the range of what we encounter. Our feeds stop reflecting the world in its complexity and instead present a version filtered by our previous clicks and lingering pauses.

Gradually, these interpretations start to feel less like perspectives and more like reflections of who we are. Through repetition, identities form and harden. Truth matters less than consistency with who we believe ourselves to be. The stories shaped by power no longer feel imposed from above — they begin to feel like extensions of ourselves.

Once those stories feel personal, participation becomes almost inevitable. We no longer want to remain mere spectators; we want to help carry them forward. Through reactions, posts, tweets, memes, videos, reviews, podcasts, and countless other formats, we reproduce the very interpretations that shaped us.

As a writer, I’ve taken part in this dynamic myself.

I helped build personal brands that promoted a particular image of what a successful entrepreneur should look like. In doing so, I reinforced familiar narratives — that growth is the ultimate measure of success, that visibility equals value — and showed others how the right words can push people to click, sign up, buy, or believe.

What I didn’t realize then was that the moment I called it a “personal brand,” I had already accepted a structure that defined the terms of interpretation.

Strategy revolved around positioning, niche, consistency. Persuasion was the only vocabulary available. The format was dictated by the platforms. The direction came from dashboards and their demands for more growth, more engagement, more reach.

I believed I was sharp enough to move within that structure without being shaped by it. But in practice, I wasn’t resisting the structure — I was refining it, finding more elegant ways to package the same narratives in language that felt authentic.

The Return of Interpretation

As technology evolved, it provided power with more efficient ways to filter what we see, interpret events on our behalf, redirect our emotions, and shape identities at scale.

That’s the aquarium we swim in today.

We can change our swimsuits or drift in a different direction. The glass walls remain.

These structures, however, are not natural laws. What feels inevitable today was once only an idea, proposed, repeated, normalized, and eventually accepted.

What is constructed can always be questioned — or at the very least, made visible so we can examine it together.

Doing so requires the very thing we have surrendered:

Our time.

If our time remains colonized, interpretation will remain outsourced. Reclaiming time is not simply nostalgic; it is the precondition for independent thinking.

For years, I gave the power of my writing to systems whose incentives I rarely examined. I learned how to optimize within them: how to position, package, and persuade, without asking what those incentives were training me to value.

Seeing how thoroughly I had absorbed that logic was painful. It was also unexpectedly freeing.

This past year, I decided to take a different step, one that meant reclaiming some of that time.

I stepped away from my role as CMO to devote myself fully to this newsletter.

That shift didn’t hand me answers. It gave me enough distance to start wrestling with a different set of questions:

• How can I turn writing into a practice that helps me see more clearly?

• How can I refuse manufactured identities and remain an independent thinker?

• How can I encourage people to think instead of deliver packaged narratives?

• How can I generate new ideas and invite others to help develop them?

• How can I do my small part to help build the structures we actually need?

I don’t expect perfect answers. I may never find them.

These questions, though, have begun reshaping the way I think about writing.

Now I’d like to share what I’m discovering, and invite you to slow down and think with me.

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But if power influences how we think, another question inevitably follows:

How do certain ideas come to dominate the public mind in the first place?

To approach that question, we need to look beyond what’s on the surface and toward something less visible: the structures that organize attention, shape imagination, and ultimately guide belief.

Media: Filtering Reality

When Noam Chomsky and Herman were writing Manufacturing Consent (1988), they were not primarily asking how media persuades people directly. They were grappling with a deeper puzzle: how journalists operating within free media systems could nonetheless reproduce the priorities of established power.

Through an examination of how leading newspapers and television outlets covered related events differently, they traced how patterns of visibility and framing emerged from the structure of the media system itself.

They focused in particular on how media coverage varied depending on who committed the violence and whose interests were involved.

In Western reporting, the murder of Polish priest Jerzy Popiełuszko — carried out in a Soviet-aligned state — was framed as a powerful symbol of political repression. By contrast, mass killings carried out by U.S.-backed governments and militias in Central America were more often reported as elements of regional instability, receiving far less sustained attention.

The effect was to establish the boundaries of acceptable interpretation — what questions could be asked, which perspectives were treated as reasonable, and which were marginalized or dismissed. Information was shaped through sourcing decisions, language choices, and the broader context surrounding events, while tone subtly guided emotional response.

Framing, however, was only one layer in a broader system of filtering that determined:

• which topics were treated as worthy of coverage,

• how frequently they appeared,

• where they were placed (front page or margins),

• how long they remained in public discussion.

What Chomsky and Herman were describing was not simply bias, but a structural process through which media systems organize public perception.

At first glance, one might assume their analysis belonged to a different era, conditioned by Cold War politics. Yet traces of the same logic can still be found everywhere in contemporary media.

Consider the media coverage surrounding the Epstein files, where major publications largely focus on the reputational consequences faced by individuals named in the documents, while the broader power structures that enabled the abuse receive far less sustained attention.

Television programs that invite artists like Jesse Welles onto their platforms, yet avoid tunes such as The Poor, where the lyrics turn from personal reflection toward the underlying structures of power.

Or even in places that appear trivial or unrelated to questions of power such as a list of books where eight percent of the titles coincidentally come from the same publisher.

These recurring patterns are not accidental. Media institutions may have a mission to report the truth, but their economic survival is tied to the logic of markets.

Major media outlets rely heavily on advertising revenue, often from large corporations, as a key source of financial support. As a result, readers are not the only audience they have to serve. Plus advertisers carry interests of their own, which do not always converge with those of the public.

Today, this structural influence extends beyond advertisers and into ownership itself, with many major publications now controlled by technology billionaires and conglomerates.

Imagine a writer or editor attempting to cover a story that cuts against established interests.

One of the first things you notice is how the burden of proof begins to shift. Narratives that align with established interests often arrive already wrapped in credibility, requiring little more than a statement from the right source. Stories that go against the grain, by contrast, must accumulate layers of documentation, and caution before they can even be considered publishable. A tech company backed by influential investors may be covered on the strength of vision and potential alone, while reporting on the social costs of such disruption often requires overwhelming evidence, multiple sources, and careful hedging.

When criticism finally makes it into the headlines, the media may expose scandals, condemn public figures, or place powerful names on the front page. Yet attention tends to gravitate toward individuals, leaving the structures that elevated them largely invisible. The corrupt official, the flawed executive, or the disgraced CEO becomes the story, while the incentives, economic pressures, and institutional constraints that made their rise possible fade into the background.

This narrative tendency is often described as episodic framing — the practice of presenting structural problems through individual stories rather than systemic analysis.

And this tendency is continually reinforced by another powerful force shaping contemporary culture — fiction.

Fiction: Personalizing Power

Even if you never wrote any fiction in your life, you are probably familiar with Joseph Campbell hero’s journey.

The hero’s journey structure follows a character who is called into adventure, crosses into the unknown, faces trials and tribulations, and eventually returns home changed. From ancient mythology to modern films, the pattern feels instinctively recognizable because it mirrors a deeply human desire to make sense of struggle, growth, and meaning through story.

As a result, when fiction engages with power, it often personifies it.

The focus shifts toward psychological motives and personal dilemmas, leaving broader structural forces less examined or invisible altogether.

Within this framework, you usually encounter two types of narratives:

• The elite savior

• The underdog

In the first type, power itself is framed as a tragic necessity.

Lies, coercion, secrecy, and backroom deals are presented as regrettable but temporary measures, undertaken by wise men who hate having to use them.

Think of the CIA agent who resorts to torture, portrayed as morally conflicted yet necessary to preserve peace. Or the politician who turns to blackmail and manipulation, framed not as corrupt, but as courageous enough to do what others will not.

In these stories, the masses rarely possess any agency. They appear as absent, naïve, or too volatile to be trusted. The one exceptional figure—usually educated and conflicted—stands in for the will of the people.

In the end, outcomes matter more than means or collective participation.

The underdog narratives, on the other hand, focus on poor or marginal characters that either find a way to get recognized by the power structures or act as moral correctives.

In the first case, the assumption is that the power structures are neutral. Anyone deserving can rise. Structural inequality turns into a problem of character: if your conditions haven’t changed, it’s because you haven’t tried hard enough.

When it comes to acting as moral correctives, it’s less about the power structures and more about replacing the wrong person with the right one. Corrupt politicians, cynical generals, greedy tycoons, bad cops, are the ones that need to be taken down to reestablish the order. The underdog’s role is to expose individual corruption and remind elites of their humanity.

Once the underdog character succeeds, the structure gains legitimacy either by showing its supposedly meritocratic nature or by absorbing critique without being challenged by it.

In rare cases, a few outliers slip through the cracks — series like The Wire that place institutions as the driver of the story. Rather than presenting heroes who save the system or outsiders who redeem it, the series depicts police officers, politicians, journalists, and criminals operating within the same structural constraints. No single figure can fix the system. Heroes fail, villains persist, and reform repeatedly collapses under institutional pressure. Success and failure appear less as matters of character than as consequences of structure incentives.

The Wire, however, had its last season in 2008. Most of what we see in modern fiction rarely follow a similar approach.

It is tempting to believe this is not a serious concern — that fiction exists only in the realm of imagination, that audiences can separate stories from reality, or that the romanticization of Mafia bosses remains confined to fiction.

But once power has been translated into story, belief no longer needs to be forced.

It only needs direction.

Propaganda: Directing Belief

In 1922, the journalist Walter Lippmann introduced the idea of the “manufacture of consent” in his book Public Opinion. The same idea that decades later Chomsky and Herman would borrow to their book title.

In Lippmann’s view, modern society had become too complex for mass participation. Ordinary citizens could no longer directly grasp foreign policy, banking systems, or industrial production, because the scale of modern life placed these realities permanently out of view.

In practice, the environment had outgrown human cognitive capacity, and therefore, elites, experts, and the media had now the responsibility to shape public perception.

What Lippmann described as necessity became later the foundation of modern propaganda.

Edward Bernays took these ideas and what he learned about the unconscious from his uncle, Sigmund Freud, and operationalized them for both governments and corporations.

His campaigns helped manufacture U.S. consent for intervention in Guatemala by recasting a small democracy as a Cold War threat, and expanded the tobacco market by redefining smoking for women as an act of liberation — a campaign later branded as the “Torches of Freedom.”

What Bernays realized almost a century ago is that the most effective propaganda does not seek to win arguments. It seeks to attach itself to preexisting meanings and redirect them. Bernays did not invent women’s desire for independence or fear of communism. He just gave emphasis to the former so he could frame cigarettes as liberation, and enhanced the external fear to legitimize international intervention.

At the most fundamental level, propaganda’s role today is still the same: tap into the emotional currents that already exist in the market and suggest a new interpretation that’s aligned with power interests.

The market, however, has grown far more complex since the days of Bernays. Audiences have fragmented, making it increasingly difficult for a single fixed message to move different groups in the same direction.

Faced with this fragmented landscape, propaganda has adapted in new ways. One of them is through the usage of structured ambiguity — a mode of communication in which language remains shared while meaning becomes flexible. Words like “freedom,” “justice,” “community,” or “security” do not have infinite meanings, but neither are they strictly fixed. Their range is bounded, yet elastic.

When propaganda shapes the framework within which ambiguous terms circulate, it invites identification without committing to a single concrete interpretation. Different audiences recognize their own values in the same language, even when those values point in different directions.

What you hear may sound legitimate, even profound. Yet when you look more closely, their power lies not in precision but in resonance.

“The market rewards merit” is one example.

A CEO who goes to the media announcing thousands of layoffs while describing them as “accelerating growth” is another one.

Statements such as “our mission is to connect people” function as reassuring narratives, obscuring business models built on data extraction and attention capture.

Another strategy propaganda has adopted to better control the landscape is what Steve Bannon famously articulated as “flood the zone with s*t.”*

Instead of stabilizing meaning, the aim is to overwhelm the market with information by releasing a constant stream of competing narratives. When people can no longer determine what is true, they retreat into identity-based belief systems, where belonging matters more than understanding, and emotional intensity rises to a level where rationality start to look like disloyalty. The ideal terrain to let people sort themselves into boxes of their own making.

At this stage, propaganda moves beyond manufacturing consent toward manufacturing identity.

To manufacture identities at scale, however, propaganda requires a structure capable of turning spectators into active participants.

Today, that structure exists.

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General, your bomber is powerful.
It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant.
But it has one defect:
It needs a mechanic.

General, man is very useful.
He can fly and he can kill.
But he has one defect:
He can think.

— Bertolt Brecht (translated excerpt)

From Power to Culture: The Making of the Subject

When power comes to mind, most of us still imagine the idea of repression. We picture a government forbidding certain ideas from circulating, or a boss demanding compliance against our will. These are recognizable forms of power because they announce themselves openly; they draw clear lines between domination and resistance. We know where power sits, and we know what it looks like.

The more pervasive form of power today, however, rarely appears in that way.

Power works best when it disappears into everyday life. When it no longer looks like power at all.

Power that relies on continuous force carries inherent limits: it reveals that the order is unstable, consumes energy and resources through ongoing correction, and, by making domination visible, invites resistance in return.

Productive power, on the other hand, shapes the conditions within which thought takes form well before anyone notices those conditions exist.

As Bertolt Brecht suggested, our defect is that we can think, and so power’s strength lies not in fighting thought but in guiding it without appearing to do so.

Think of it in terms of subtle orientations — ways of moving through the social world that feel natural rather than imposed. You are given a series of identities to choose from, together with a set of invisible instructions about how to move up and down within hierarchies, where certain actions are rewarded as good taste while others are labeled naïve or unserious.

Eventually, those orientations become internalized. The guidance fades from view, leaving only the feeling that some paths make more sense than others.

Once that happens, subjects begin to regulate themselves while believing they are simply exercising choice. They come to see themselves as measurable objects — comparing output, tracking progress, wondering whether they are keeping pace with standards that seem obvious but were never consciously chosen. The “good student,” the “productive worker,” the “patriotic citizen” are more than social roles; they are forms through which power transforms expectations into personal aspiration.

Truth itself begins to feel less like a direct relationship to reality and more like a relationship to legitimacy. Actions that do not fit established grids risk being dismissed because they fail to be recognizable.

Careers, credibility, and access depend on remaining inside a certain frame, and so thought adjusts itself preemptively: the pause before asking a question, the sentence rewritten to sound more reasonable, the instinct to soften an idea before it risks sounding out of place.

Power no longer needs to apply pressure in such circumstances. You don’t have to be silenced once you have already learned what to think — and how to think it.

As a writer, I’m constantly reminded of this dynamic. Platforms do not dictate what we say; they shape what becomes visible. What is visible teaches you to anticipate what lands and what circulates. Gradually, the act of writing begins to orient itself toward the logic of metrics, turning writing into a game of performance. The reward is that your writing is treated as serious. You earn a place within a recognizable hierarchy that can only be maintained if you stay consistent.

And this adjustment is not unique to writing.

It repeats itself across almost every domain of social life: the employee who learns which ideas move a meeting forward and which close doors; the church member who senses which themes feel safe to discuss and which remain unspoken; the artist who gravitates toward styles more likely to spread; the scientist who follows questions that seem worth pursuing while leaving others unexplored.

When enough people learn to anticipate the same rewards, their individual adaptations begin to converge. What starts as personal strategy becomes shared expectation. Over time, these patterns harden into cultural standards: ways of speaking, writing, and interpreting that feel natural precisely because everyone is already orienting toward them.

Listen closely and you can hear some of these standards echoed in ordinary language:

Time is money. If you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way. Success leaves clues. Attention is the new currency. Everything happens for a reason. Numbers don’t lie. If you’re not growing, you’re dying.

These phrases feel familiar, almost obvious — part of the shared language through which we make sense of effort, success, fate, and value. They keep us moving, but within a space already mapped out, where the stories we repeat teach us where to go without ever naming the boundaries.

Sometimes productive power even disguises itself as openness. A Super Bowl halftime show may feel transgressive. A formerly marginal voice earning recognition; a cultural moment that seems to signal some shift. Yet when an idea becomes aestheticized and widely applauded without demanding any structural change, power is merely legitimizing what it can control. The appearance of inclusion turns into one of the most efficient ways of stabilizing the existing order.

It feels as if the best ideas are simply rising on their own. What we lose sight of is how those ideas travel — and how that movement is shaped long before we notice it.

This is where media, fiction, and propaganda do their work.

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That was the question social psychologists John Darley and Daniel Batson set out to answer in their now-classic Good Samaritan experiment in 1973.

Their subjects were seminary students training to become priests. Each student was told to walk to another building to deliver a short talk on the parable of the Good Samaritan.

But there was a twist.

Some students were told they were already late and needed to hurry. Others were told they had plenty of time, though they should head over soon.

On the path between buildings, each student encountered the same scene: a man slumped in a doorway, coughing, groaning, and clearly in distress.

From a distance, Darley and Batson observed what happened next.

And what they found was quite surprising: Among the students who believed they were late, only 10% stopped to help. Among those who thought they had time, 63% did.

Everyone in the study knew the story of the Good Samaritan and was literally on their way to preach it. This was a group that held the same beliefs, values, and moral knowledge.

But the different contexts changed their behavior.

The group in the hurried context had their attention narrowed. Their vision was focused on being late, on disappointing other people they cared, and that pressure crowded out the space required for compassion.

Which raises a more interesting question than whether people are “good” or “bad”:

What kinds of contexts shrink our capacity to notice—and which ones expand it?

Contexts That Narrow Attention

If you’re a writer or creative on the internet, you’re always at risk of falling behind.

I felt this most clearly while growing my Twitter account. For a while, everything I posted seemed to work. My tweets were gaining momentum—sometimes even hundreds of thousands of views.

Then I took a few days off to spend time with my family.

When I came back, my reach collapsed.

Nothing explicit had changed. No rule had been broken. But the message was clear enough: if you don’t show up, even for a few days, you become invisible. That wasn’t the only warning, though.

At the time, I was playing the growth game by the tee: hook templates, thread frameworks, and a running list of topics that reliably performed well on Twitter. I learned them by studying other successful creators, and for a while, they worked like a charm.

But when I tried to write outside those formulas, something else became clear. Tweets that didn’t fit the pattern massively underperform. It didn’t matter that I had 10,000 followers. The algorithm would only show these posts to a fraction of them.

At first, these felt like small moments I could brush off as “part of the game.” But over time, I noticed the feedback stopped arriving after I published. I began to feel it earlier—before I even opened a blank page.

Certain ideas no longer felt worth even considering. I found myself editing out lines because they weren’t punchy enough. Whatever slowed down the pace, no matter how relevant, didn’t make it to the final draft.

Writing turned into compliance. Not because anyone told me to do so, but because the context trained my attention around a single, unspoken question:

What must I do right now to avoid negative consequences?

In the Good Samaritan experiment, being “late” didn’t make people cruel. It made them narrow.

And the online world reproduces that same condition at scale.

It gives you dashboards that reward some behaviors and punish others. It constantly surfaces people in your niche who are winning, inviting comparison and imitation. And it surrounds you with step-by-step advice from those who already made it.

You might manage to dodge all of this. Like the 10% of seminarians who stopped to help, you might inhabit this context and still keep your attention open.

I’m not quite there yet. So I’ve chosen to place most of my attention somewhere else—into a different kind of context, one that allows it to widen again.

Where Attention Widens

I can feel the difference in my body as I write this.

There’s no pressure to publish every day, no character limit to work around, no need to compress an idea into a narrow framework just because that’s what feeds the algorithm.

What newsletters offer me is a meaningful shift in control. No matter what I write, this email lands in your inbox. Only you decide whether you want to keep listening.

The intermediary that once dictated how my attention should behave has stepped back. In that space, reflection, nuance, and care become possible again—without being punished for them.

Now, instead of asking “What must I do right now to avoid negative consequences?” I find myself asking:

“What curiosity do I want to explore next?”

I won’t pretend the algorithm’s grip disappears overnight. After a decade of playing by its rules, some habits linger.

But distance changes attention. And slowly, that change works its way through you.

What’s becoming clearer to me is that the challenge often isn’t fixing ourselves, or heroically resisting the system. It’s becoming more deliberate about the contexts we inhabit—and about how much of our time and attention we give to each.

Not all contexts are chosen, and many constraints are non-negotiable. Work, money, and obligation shape where we must show up. But even within those limits, attention shifts depending on where we place the agency we do have.

If you spend most of your time in constraining environments, you eventually find yourself playing by their rules and losing your sense of authorship.

But the opposite extreme carries its own risk. If you only inhabit expanding contexts, you may never be tested. Restraint becomes situational. What looks like virtue survives because it’s protected—not because it’s resilient.

So the balance matters.

For me, this has turned into a simple practice:

Spend most of your time in contexts that widen attention. Enter constraining ones intentionally, briefly, and with purpose. Before you do, ask yourself: What am I here to practice? What signal will tell me it’s time to leave? What cost am I willing to pay?

If you can’t answer those questions, the context will answer them for you.

And over time, context shapes who we become capable of being.

I hired people spread across multiple time zones: Malaysia, Brazil, Ireland, the U.S., the Philippines, Latvia, just to name a few.

Sometimes the Americans joined calls at 5 a.m. their time. Other times, someone in Malaysia stayed up until 11 p.m. I often started my workday while half the team was asleep.

Cultural differences added another layer. Some were direct, others more subtle. Some leaned into hustle, while others valued balance above all else.

To make things even less efficient, we spent the first ten to twenty minutes of every group call talking about everything except work. Coffee rituals. Movies. How not to make a tomato sauce. Even how to grow a beard using some very questionable methods.

And once those twenty minutes were up, instead of jumping straight into tasks and deadlines, I’d spend a good chunk of time explaining context. The backstory. The why behind the work. How we ended up here in the first place.

The team eventually started calling me “the context guy.”

By all modern productivity metrics, this should have been a mess.

And yet—somehow—we always hit the targets. Even the unreasonable ones.

I never had to threaten anyone, pressure them, or hover over their work. People were committed. They took responsibility. And when things went sideways—as they inevitably did—we had each other’s backs.

If I had to narrow down the reason those inefficiencies worked, I’d point to something that feels increasingly rare in most environments: good communication.

I’m not referring to clarity alone, but to the part of communication where what’s implicit carries more weight than what’s said out loud.

Because every time you talk about a plan, you’re communicating more than the plan itself. Behind the words you’re either saying:

• “I value your perspective” or “I don’t really care what you think”

• “I want you to be part of what we’re doing” or “just get this done, you’re being paid”

• “it’s safe to express your opinion” or “if you don’t agree, shut the f—k up”

Those messages are rarely spoken directly. But everyone hears them.

And because so much modern communication happens inside systems designed for output rather than understanding, the implicit signals tend to skew in one direction.

Communication then becomes transactional. You’re no longer trying to understand or be understood—you’re trying to land a point, secure agreement, and avoid friction.

We’ve become so obsessed with efficiency that we’ve forgotten something fundamental: real collaboration only becomes possible when trust exists between the people involved.

And trust, inconveniently, takes time.

Communication Breakdown

Poor communication isn’t just a workplace problem. Look closely enough, and it shows up across nearly every part of our lives.

When was the last time you sat down with a friend for a real conversation without being distracted by your phone?

How much goes unsaid during family dinners?

How many genuinely thoughtful exchanges do you encounter while scrolling through social media?

We live in a consumerist world where almost anything is one tap away. That proximity creates the illusion that we can do and be everything. So we stack commitments, say “yes” more often than we should, stretch timelines, and inflate our goals—because anything less might look like a lack of ambition.

With all of this in play, we start to run. Fast.

Speed becomes more than a demand from the outside; it turns into something we internalize. It signals competence. Efficiency. Value.

So instead of calling, we text. Instead of reading carefully, we skim. Instead of pausing to ask questions, we jump to conclusions.

The other day, I saw an influencer say she judges entrepreneurs by how quickly they respond to email. The post received a lot of engagement. Yet in practice, I’ve lost count of how many misunderstandings I’ve seen arise precisely because people replied too quickly—without taking the time to think things through first.

To be clear, speed itself isn’t the problem. Some meetings really could have been emails. The problem begins when speed becomes our only mode — and we lose the ability to discern when to speed up and when to slow down.

A similar dynamic plays out with certainty.

Speak too carefully and you risk being dismissed. Speak too boldly and you’re taken seriously—even when you’re oversimplifying or have no clue what you’re talking about.

The incentive this creates is subtle but dangerous: people stop speaking to understand and start speaking to sound right. Communication turns into performance, and the goal shifts from making sense of something together to winning the exchange.

Real communication asks for something different. It requires vulnerability—the willingness to not know yet, to revise your position, to let a conversation go somewhere you didn’t plan. That kind of openness can’t coexist with rigid certainty.

This doesn’t mean decisiveness isn’t important. It is. Without decisions, nothing moves forward. But decisiveness doesn’t require pretending to have full certainty. Anyone who’s had to make difficult decisions knows this: you never have the complete picture when the moment to choose arrives.

What we don’t need is to pretend we always have the answers.

I used to tell my team openly that what we were pursuing was an assumption—based on A, B, C, and D. They understood that. It gave them clarity without false confidence. And it created room for adjustment. If we were wrong, we’d come back together, talk it through, and recalibrate.

And beneath all of this sits something we rarely account for: emotion.

A lot of communication breaks down because people don’t recognize the role emotion plays when speaking with others.

We assume others see the world roughly as we do. They don’t. Culture, incentives, fear, status, and identity shape interpretation far more than logic ever could.

Without slowing down to surface those layers, people hear the words but miss the meaning.

That’s why I spent so much time sharing context with my team. Not only to keep them informed, but to let them see how I was thinking. And when people understand how you think, they’re more likely to share how they think—and how they feel—in return.

But that kind of openness only emerges in spaces where psychological safety exists.

If people feel that honesty puts their status or identity at risk, they’ll wear a mask. And once the mask is on, it shows up in every interaction.

The hard part about creating psychological safety is that someone has to go first. You have to be willing to show uncertainty. To admit confusion. To slow down enough to listen without judgment.

It’s not easy—which is why speed and certainty are so tempting.

But contrary to what many assume, emotion isn’t noise in communication. It tells us what’s at stake, why something matters, and where someone is speaking from. When we try to strip it away in the name of logic, we don’t become clearer.

We become harder to understand.

A Slow Practice

December was my last month working on this client’s project. Before stepping away, I chose an older form of communication to express my appreciation. I wrote him a letter.

I didn’t send it by mail like in the old days. I emailed it. But I wrote it as if I were going to seal it in an envelope.

It took time to find the right words. And what I noticed was that by slowing down—by engaging in a more deliberate, thoughtful practice—much more of my heart made its way onto the page.

I wasn’t expecting a reply. He’s busy, with countless things competing for his attention. But a few days later, he wrote back. And after nine years of working together, it was probably the most meaningful exchange we’d ever had.

So many unspoken things finally found their way into words—the doubts, the difficult moments, the times we thought it might be over. The hard conversations we avoided because there was always something urgent to get done. The unreal highs, the mutual respect, the gratitude, and the shared belief that we were trying to make something better.

It made me realize how much a slow practice like letter writing can change the quality of our relationships. How it creates space for things that don’t fit into the speed of everyday communication. How it helps us say what matters, and understand each other a little more deeply.

So in 2026, I’m planning to write more letters.

Letters to friends who live far away and with whom I rarely get the chance to talk anymore. Letters to my father, whom I still struggle to communicate with. And maybe even letters to people I don’t know personally, but deeply admire—and feel called to reach out to.

I know that by most standards, writing letters is inefficient. It takes time. “It doesn’t scale.”

And yet, looking back, so did many of the things that made our team work—and many of the conversations that mattered most.

Maybe what we call inefficiency is sometimes just care, moving at a human pace.

This is my final week working on a client project I dedicated several years of my life to.

During that time, I helped build a podcast, write newsletters, launch books, grow communities, run workshops, sell conference tickets, assemble teams, and—inevitably—make money.

Speed. Performance metrics. Narratives. Volume. They weren’t just part of the work—they became embedded in my daily routine.

I’d wake up and, before even getting out of bed, reach for my phone. Refresh the dashboard. Check the numbers that mattered most that day. Sometimes it was ticket sales. Other times it was cost per lead or conversion rates on a new campaign.

At some point each week, I’d sit down with the Creative Director or the Copy Chief to plan our next move. We were always racing something: a presale, a launch, or the familiar “the client wanted this yesterday.”

We used to joke that we were building the plane while flying it. There was always momentum, always motion. And strangely, the more we did, the more there seemed left to do.

• “What if we try a new angle?”

• “What if we segment the message further?”

• “What if we add YouTube to the mix?”

Often, it felt like a game. New challenges every day. Levels to clear. Progress to unlock.

But when everything starts to feel like a game, you become so absorbed by the score that you forget why you started playing at all.

I still remember one of my first calls with this client, nearly eight years ago. I asked him, “Why share your knowledge with others in your industry? What are you actually trying to do?”

His answer is why I stayed as long as I did.

He said, “I got here by powering through. I know now there’s a better way. You don’t need to sacrifice your health or your relationships to succeed. But when I was starting out, I didn’t have anyone to look up to in this industry. I want to be that person now—so others don’t have to go through what I did.”

That story became a compass. I told it again and again while hiring the dozens of people who joined us in our mission. I returned to it in difficult moments. It made the work feel meaningful.

And I believe we did good work. The industry genuinely shifted after we began sharing his ideas.

But as we grew, I felt us being pulled deeper into the machinery of the internet business. Faster. Bigger. More efficient. Those pressures were rarely stated outright—but they governed everything. And somewhere along the way, I felt myself drifting from the original spark that made the work matter.

Write2Lead is my attempt to return to that earlier place. To carve out a small corner of the internet where better conversations are possible. Where curiosity isn’t replaced by numbers. Where people are invited to think, to exercise agency, and to build communities where money is a byproduct of care—not its justification.

To do that, I’m discovering I have far more to unlearn than I ever expected.

Unlearning the Need to Convince

My first essay was titled “Writing Without the Need to Convince.” In it, I tried to articulate a shift I was consciously making: moving away from persuasive writing and toward something more reflective. Less “do this, believe that,” and more “here’s something I noticed—this is the context it emerged from.”

That has been my intention.

In practice, the habit of persuasion still sneaks in. The other day, I caught myself starting a sentence with “Here’s the truth…” and stopped mid-thought. What am I doing? That’s not the language I want to use anymore. I know I’ll slip again. When I do, I hope you’ll forgive me—and understand where it comes from.

Another temptation is explaining things too early. There’s always the fear of losing readers if the point isn’t made obvious fast enough. We’re constantly told that attention spans are shrinking, that writing must deliver the payoff immediately, that anything requiring patience is a liability.

But I like to believe my readers are smarter than that. That they enjoy being challenged. I could flatten everything—spell it all out so no one ever has to pause or wrestle with a thought—but I find that kind of writing unbearably dull. Irony disappears along with personality. The text becomes efficient, clean, and lifeless.

So yes—some people may misunderstand my point. Some may not get it at all. That’s okay. I can live with that.

What I’ve also noticed is that I’ve grown increasingly impatient with writing that leaves no room for thought. Even when you read figures like Socrates or Freud, you encounter hesitation, doubt, unfinished ideas. They make it clear they’re grappling with uncertainty. So why does so much writing on the internet sound as though uncertainty has been edited out entirely?

When someone sounds too certain, my internal BS detector goes off immediately. And if that’s the standard I use when reading others, I feel obliged to apply it to myself.

All of this takes effort—even after more than thirty essays. But piece by piece, these choices help me unlearn the persuasive habits I relied on for years, and slowly move toward a kind of writing that invites reflection.

That, at least, is the direction I’m trying to walk in.

Unlearning the Chase for the Usual Metrics

I still refresh the dashboards more often than I’d like to admit—checking how many people subscribed, scanning open rates, noticing whenever an email dips below 30 percent and thinking, “I should have written a better title.”

It’s hard not to obsess over these numbers, especially early on, when they feel like the only indicators of whether a project is “working.”

But after a few months, I discovered a more meaningful metric—one that’s guided me ever since: resonance.

Resonance doesn’t show up on a graph.

It appears in the replies—the emails from readers who pause their day to think through a piece, then share their own perspective. Those exchanges hint at something dashboards can’t measure: the depth of connection you’ve created, the ideas you’ve stirred, the clarity you’ve sparked.

Socrates believed we are unreliable narrators of our own minds, and that dialogue forces our assumptions into the open. Conversation, for him, was a method of inquiry. Truth wasn’t transmitted by speaking at people, but approached through thinking with them.

That’s what resonance feels like—a shared search for something truer than what either person could reach alone.

And yet, as grounding as resonance is, there’s another metric I can’t fully ignore.

Money.

In the project I worked on for my client, money was the metric. It defined success, measured it, and ultimately rewarded it. And for the last two years, I delivered on that front consistently.

Now, in 2026, I’ll be dedicating myself to my own project full-time. I’m not worried about monetizing in the first five or six months—but the bills won’t pause just because I’m pursuing meaning. At some point, I’ll need a model that sustains the work.

What I don’t want is for money to become the compass.

I don’t want it steering me toward topics I don’t care about, or nudging me into offers I don’t feel compelled to create or deliver. I already have ideas for how to approach this—but what matters more than the specifics is the philosophy behind them: money should be a byproduct of the work, not its purpose.

And if I’m creating something I genuinely care about—something that truly supports others—then asking for a contribution doesn’t feel like a compromise. It feels appropriate.

Many creatives struggle here. Somewhere along the way, we absorbed the belief that getting paid contaminates the work—that suffering makes it pure. But there is nothing virtuous about this way of thinking. It isn’t noble. It isn’t rational. And it certainly isn’t healthy.

Still, knowing this doesn’t make us immune to the tension.

But like everything else I’m trying to unlearn, it begins with attention, demands consistent practice, and only softens with time.

At the time, American women were discouraged, even shamed, from smoking in public. For the tobacco industry, this meant half the population wasn’t buying. Bernays recognized the opportunity immediately and hired a psychoanalyst to uncover what cigarettes symbolized at an unconscious level.

The conclusion was simple and powerful: cigarettes represented power and male privilege. If women could be persuaded that smoking wasn’t merely acceptable but liberating, a cultural taboo could be transformed into a market.

So Bernays staged a spectacle.

On Easter Sunday, 1929, he recruited debutantes and fashionable young women to join New York’s Easter Parade. At a carefully timed moment, they pulled out Lucky Strike cigarettes and lit up — directly in front of photographers Bernays had alerted in advance. Reporters had already been fed the framing he wanted: these weren’t women smoking; they were women carrying “Torches of Freedom.”

The photographs spread across newspapers nationwide. The narrative was irresistible. Lighting a cigarette became an act of independence. Women weren’t breaking a social norm — they were breaking chains. Smoking rates rose. Sales soared.

This wasn’t Bernays’ first success, nor would it be his last.

Years earlier, he had helped the U.S. government sell American involvement in World War I — a deeply unpopular idea at the time — by reframing the conflict as a moral crusade to “make the world safe for democracy.” Later, he helped turn bacon and eggs into America’s default breakfast with a single headline: “4,500 physicians urge a hearty breakfast — including bacon.”

Different industries. Different goals. The same underlying method.

What Bernays understood was something unsettling about mass psychology: people don’t simply form opinions. They absorb them — often unconsciously, through symbols, stories, and emotional cues.

Now nearly a century later, Bernays’ fingerprints are still visible — on our feeds, in political debates, across media, and even inside the workplace. But the machinery of manipulation has changed shape. It hasn’t merely grown more pervasive; it has grown more intimate.

Where Bernays crafted messages for a mass audience — a single narrative broadcast to millions — modern propaganda operates on an entirely different scale. Rather than offering a shared story, the system adapts itself to each individual, delivering a version of reality calibrated to their fears, desires, and preexisting beliefs.

And it begins by making people unsure of where they stand.

The Conditions That Make Manipulation Possible

Modern propaganda rarely begins by trying to convince people of a particular belief.

Its first move is more subtle—and far more corrosive: it weakens the conditions that make truth-seeking possible in the first place.

Think of it as preparing the soil.

When people feel grounded—when there’s a shared sense that facts can be checked, institutions can be trusted (however imperfectly), and disagreements can be worked through using evidence—manipulation has natural limits.

But destabilization removes those limits.

It does this by flooding the environment with more information than the mind can reasonably process, while simultaneously undermining confidence in any source that might help separate signal from noise.

Over time, this produces a profound psychological shift.

What once felt like a shared reality begins to fracture. People stop asking what is true and start asking who can I trust—and eventually, why trust anyone at all. Once that state takes hold—once the belief settles in that everything is manipulated, everyone is lying, nothing is knowable—the public becomes highly malleable.

Because when no truth feels solid, any narrative that offers certainty, belonging, or emotional relief becomes compelling.

This is the terrain modern propaganda prefers to operate on.

And there are five core mechanisms used, again and again, to create it.

1. Overwhelming with contradictory claims

Consider the early narratives around COVID’s origins.

Before evidence had time to emerge, the public was inundated with mutually exclusive explanations: lab leak, bioweapon, government cover-up, foreign sabotage, “it’s all media hype.”

The contradictions weren’t accidental. Their cumulative effect was to exhaust attention and erode confidence. Faced with too many competing explanations, many people stopped trusting any of them.

The result wasn’t a false conclusion—it was cognitive exhaustion. And eventually, paralysis.

2. Creating hyper-uncertainty

Scroll through any major platform today and you’ll notice it.

AI-generated videos, synthetic images, misleading headlines, decontextualized clips. Every claim seems to require verification. Every source feels questionable.

The message is not “this is false” but “nothing is reliable”. Over time, the effort required to distinguish truth from fabrication begins to outweigh the perceived benefit of trying at all.

3. Fracturing trust in institutions

Across multiple countries—among them the U.S., Brazil, and India—coordinated campaigns have targeted election systems themselves.

Claims circulate that voting machines are rigged, or that entire democratic processes are illegitimate. Even when courts reject these accusations, the damage lingers. The perception of institutional failure persists.

The goal is not to prove corruption in a specific case, but to plant the sense that no institution can be trusted at all.

4. Producing cynicism and fatigue

As scandals accumulate—some real, some exaggerated, some entirely fabricated—many people arrive at a familiar conclusion:

“Everyone is corrupt. Nothing will change.”

This cynicism is not neutral. It drains energy, discourages engagement, and makes withdrawal feel rational. And a public that no longer expects accountability is easier to manage.

At some point, scandal stops functioning as a warning and starts to feel like background noise. Corruption becomes something people factor in, not something they resist.

I’m currently visiting Brazil, and I’ve noticed this logic surfaces in every conversation about politics. When people are asked why they’re willing to vote for a candidate who has already been accused of stealing, the answer is strikingly consistent: “He steals, but at least he gets things done.”

5. Drowning factual content in noise

During elections or geopolitical crises, information channels are often flooded with volume rather than argument:

• low-quality memes

• misleading articles

• troll replies and automated amplification

The intention is to saturate the feed. When every search result, timeline, or comment section dissolves into chaos, truth doesn’t disappear—it simply becomes harder to reach.

Once fragmentation is widespread, chaos becomes an opening.

Manipulative actors step into that opening by offering relief—a reality that feels stable enough to cling to when everything else feels uncertain.

What follows is a gradual loss of agency, as people outsource their search for truth.

The Manipulative Mechanisms

Now that the terrain has been prepared, manipulative actors can deploy their techniques to get what they want: mobilize crowds, increase profits, and sway public opinion.

At first, I considered writing a section focused solely on identifying these actors. But I quickly realized that doing so would turn into an entire essay on its own. So instead, I’ll keep this at a high level and focus on what matters more—the techniques themselves.

Here’s a short list of the actors most often pulling the strings:

• Platform architects: those who decide what algorithms reward, amplify, and suppress.

• Narrative engineers: PR firms, political consultancies, media strategists, and cultural trend forecasters who shape framing rather than facts.

• Volatility merchants: media businesses built on retention, traders, betting platforms, and subscription models that monetize fear and uncertainty (insurance being a clear example).

• Personal brands: individuals who convert attention into revenue through courses, sponsorships, or affiliations—and who, these days, seem particularly fond of betting platforms.

• Power consolidators: Big Tech, politicians, global corporations, and financial institutions.

But the specific actors matter less than the methods they rely on. While the players change, the techniques remain remarkably consistent.

What follows isn’t an exhaustive list. It’s a pattern—a recurring set of moves that appear in different combinations, across platforms, industries, and political contexts, often in plain sight.

1. Emotional front-loading (the 3 second rule)

Most high-performing content no longer begins by explaining anything. It begins by triggering something.

The first line is engineered to produce an emotional spike before context or nuance has a chance to appear. Shock, threat, moral certainty—anything that activates attention in the first two or three seconds. Once emotion arrives first, cognition follows in a diminished role. The rest of the content doesn’t need to be especially rigorous. The audience is already reacting before they’ve had time to think.

You’ll recognize it in lines like:

• “Nobody wants to admit this, but…”

• “This is why you’re failing and don’t know it.”

• “If you believe X, you’re being played.”

2. Identity locking (you’re either with me or against yourself)

Instead of addressing an argument, the content addresses identity.

Viewers are subtly told who they are by agreeing. Intelligence, awareness, or moral seriousness become conditional on alignment. Disagreement no longer feels like a difference of opinion; it feels like self-betrayal or moral failure. Once someone accepts the identity being offered, they begin defending the message on the creator’s behalf.

Common signals include:

• “Smart people understand this.”

• “This is obvious if you’re paying attention.”

• “If you disagree, you haven’t done the work.”

3. Compression of complexity into certainty

Large, multifaceted problems are presented with clean, confident conclusions.

Tradeoffs disappear. Uncertainty is treated as weakness. And the message offers the relief of simplicity—one cause, one explanation, one takeaway. Nuance slows people down. Certainty keeps them moving.

It often appears as:

• “The real reason X happened is Y.”

• “Everything boils down to this one thing.”

• “People complicate this, but it’s actually simple.”

4. Algorithmic pacing

Its rhythm is designed for machines.

Short sentences. Frequent line breaks. Visual spacing optimized for scrolling rather than reading. Momentum is prioritized over meaning, and the goal is to keep the reader moving before reflection has a chance to set in. The voice might even sound natural, but the pacing is artificial.

You can see it in:

• one-sentence paragraphs stacked back to back

• ideas broken mid-thought to maintain motion

• content that’s easy to scroll but hard to recall

5. Engagement traps

There’s a running joke about Reddit: if you want the right answer, don’t ask the question—post a confidently wrong answer instead. Within minutes, people rush in to correct you—and in the process, provide the accurate information you were looking for.

The same dynamic shows up in content framed to provoke response rather than clarity, often in lines like:

• “Most advice on X is wrong.”

• “People aren’t ready for this conversation.”

• “This changes everything.”

These mechanisms rarely appear in isolation. They stack and reinforce one another.

Once momentum takes over, a narrative can spread with remarkable speed, regardless of how grounded it is in reality.

Some stories are better suited to this machinery than others. One, in particular, activates these mechanisms with remarkable efficiency.

The “AI is going to replace you” Narrative

AI isn’t framed as a technology that will reshape certain kinds of work over time. It’s framed as an approaching force — a wave you either ride or drown under.

You’ve seen it everywhere:

• “Your job won’t exist in five years.”

• “Adapt fast or be obsolete.”

• “If you’re not using AI for everything, you’re already falling behind.”

The emotional front-loading is immediate. Fear arrives before understanding. The question isn’t what will change, but will you survive it.

From there, identity locking takes over. The audience is then sorted into categories: the enlightened early adopters, the doomsday advocates, and the naïve laggards. To question the framing is to reveal yourself as out of touch. Agreement becomes a marker of intelligence and foresight. Skepticism becomes self-sabotage.

At the same time, complexity collapses into certainty. Entire professions are declared finished in a sentence. No distinction between tasks and roles. No discussion of adoption curves, organizational friction, regulation, or human preference. A messy, uneven transformation is flattened into a single, confident conclusion: replacement is inevitable.

Half truths do much of the work here. Yes, AI can automate tasks. Yes, some jobs will change dramatically. But crucial context is consistently missing: where AI struggles, how incentives shape adoption, how institutions respond, how long transitions actually take.

What’s also left out is how fragile the underlying reality still is: AI companies struggling to turn profits, slowing marginal gains in new models, and no real consensus on what AGI even means.

Big numbers reinforce the message. Exponential growth. Trillion-dollar markets. But beneath the spectacle, the tangle of AI deals among the same handful of tech giants suggests that what we may be seeing is, in fact, a bubble:

So let’s get this straight: OpenAI is now taking a 10% stake in AMD, while Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI; and OpenAI also counts Microsoft as one of its major shareholders, but Microsoft is also a major customer of AI cloud computing company CoreWeave, which is another company in which Nvidia holds a significant equity stake; and by the way, Microsoft accounted for almost 20% of Nvidia’s revenue on an annualized basis, as of Nvidia’s 2025 fiscal fourth quarter.

And most of what circulates on this topic is delivered with algorithmic pacing by influencers and media channels monetizing uncertainty.

So the result isn’t an informed public conversation about technology and work. It’s a narrative that offers clarity through fear and belonging through compliance.

What matters isn’t whether the claim ultimately proves true or false, but how believing it reshapes behavior in the meantime. When inevitability becomes the frame, people begin to abdicate their agency.

Gradually, a dangerous belief settles in: “there isn’t time to understand things deeply—only time to react.”

Confidence begins to erode. Taste and intuition are treated as unreliable. Even lived experience starts to feel less relevant.

For creatives, the question slowly shifts from “What do I want to make?” to “How do I stay relevant?” Just spend a few minutes scrolling and the consequences become obvious. Art turns into content. Writing becomes output. Even those who resist AI adoption start positioning their work defensively.

And with that, deeper questions fade from view:

What if the problem isn’t intelligence outpacing humanity, but speed overwhelming discernment? What if the real risk isn’t that machines become more like us, but that we slowly redesign ourselves to be more like machines?

Once the “AI is going to replace you” narrative governs how people think, something essential is lost: not jobs or relevance, but the ability to decide—deliberately and collectively—how our tools should fit into human life, rather than the other way around.

Reclaiming Our Agency

Once the machinery of manipulation becomes visible, narratives like “AI is going to replace you” lose their prophetic aura and begin to look like what they are: engineered.

But awareness, while necessary, is rarely sufficient.

The pace of life, the number of commitments we carry, and the sheer volume of messages competing for our attention make it easy to slip back into autopilot. Add to that the modern disciples of Bernays—endlessly optimizing for attention and market share—and it becomes clear how easily our own sense of truth can be outsourced.

That’s why I try to be deliberate about how I spend my time and how I allow my mind to engage with the world around me.

I create boundaries to filter out as much noise as possible. No TikTok. No Instagram. No notifications on my phone. No traditional news cycle pulling my attention toward urgency without understanding.

I also choose what I engage with intentionally. Books that invite reflection rather than demand agreement. Thinkers who leave space for independent thought instead of rushing toward conclusions. And I pay close attention to incentives—if someone is sponsored by a betting platform, for instance, I know I’m not the audience they’re actually serving.

Most importantly, I cultivate slow practices—ways of working that resist speed, allow for depth, and create room to think carefully about what actually matters.

Writing is the one I return to most. It’s where I slow down enough to notice what I believe, question what I’ve absorbed, and clarify what feels true. And it’s also where I feel a responsibility—not just to myself, but to others navigating the same terrain.

Because the forces of manipulation can be powerful.

But they only work with our compliance.

This is a new format I’m experimenting with — something to mix things up and sit alongside the essays and reports I’ve been sending regularly. I hope you enjoy it.

A Small Observation

We don’t avoid thinking because it’s hard.

We avoid it because it threatens identities we’ve already committed to.

Real thinking asks something costly of us. It requires opening ourselves to ideas that unsettle the stories we’ve been standing on—the beliefs that paved the ground beneath our lives.

When I realized I was part of the problem—living a life of performance, and through my writing encouraging others to do the same—I lost my footing. The framework I’d been using to understand success and fulfillment collapsed beneath me.

But facing that collapse, and choosing not to retreat from it, was the beginning of something I could finally stand on. It was the moment I stopped performing and began living in closer alignment with what I knew to be true.

A Simple Question

What am I trying to protect by believing this?

The other day, I found myself wondering why it took me so long to start this project. I knew I wanted to write. I knew I wanted to build something of my own. And yet, I kept postponing it.

What I see more clearly now is that what held me back wasn’t a lack of direction, but a belief: that I needed to know exactly what I was writing about before beginning. That belief was a form of self-protection. It spared me from appearing uncertain in front of readers.

Only later did I recognize the mistake. Clarity doesn’t precede writing — it’s produced by it. It emerges through the act itself,

A Short Passage

Every day—as we interact with family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers—we ask ourselves if “what we see is what we get.” And all those other people are asking the same about us!

Being cautious about the degree of congruence between outer appearance and inner reality is one of our species’ most ancient ways of seeking safety in a perilous world. “Is this person the same on the inside as he or she seems to be on the outside?” Children ask this about their parents, students about their teachers, employees about their supervisors, patients about their physicians, and citizens about their political leaders. When the answer is yes, we relax, believing that we are in the presence of integrity and feeling secure enough to invest ourselves in the relationship and all that surrounds it.

But when the answer is no, we go on high alert. Not knowing who or what we are dealing with and feeling unsafe, we hunker down in a psychological foxhole and withhold the investment of our energy, commitment, and gifts. Students refuse to take the risks involved in learning, employees do not put their hearts into their work, patients cannot partner with physicians in their own healing, and citizens disengage from the political process. The perceived incongruity of inner and outer—the inauthenticity that we sense in others, or they in us—constantly undermines our morale, our relationships, and our capacity for good work.

A Hidden Wholeness — Parker Palmer

A Familiar Trap

The brain seeks closure and resolution. But most questions worth asking demand that we sit with them for a long time.

A Gentle Practice

This week, when confusion or uncertainty shows up, give yourself one extra minute to sit with the discomfort before reaching for your phone—or whatever habit you use to escape.

Often, our habits move faster than our awareness. Changing them begins with a small act of noticing: catching yourself mid-pattern and choosing to pause instead.

And yet inside the maternity clinic, something didn’t add up.

Two wards, separated by only a few steps, produced radically different outcomes.

In the First Clinic, staffed by doctors and medical students, maternal mortality rates climbed as high as 10–18 percent. In the Second Clinic, run by midwives, far fewer women died.

Most physicians accepted the disparity as an unfortunate mystery — a statistical quirk, or a reflection of the patients themselves. Some blamed differences in women’s constitutions or social class.

But Ignaz Semmelweis, a young Hungarian doctor, didn’t buy it.

He began questioning everything — birthing practices, ventilation, linens, patient flow — until one overlooked difference stood out:

Doctors and medical students performed autopsies each morning, often on women who had died of the very fever they were trying to understand, and then went directly to the delivery room without washing their hands.

Midwives, on the other hand, did not participate in autopsies.

In an era before germ theory, the idea that “particles from cadavers” could transmit disease sounded speculative, even offensive. But Semmelweis tested it anyway. He required everyone in the First Clinic to wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution before examining patients.

Almost immediately, mortality dropped dramatically — often falling to around 1–2 percent.

Semmelweis’s finding carried an unbearable implication: if he was right, then doctors — the educated elite, the very symbols of progress — were the ones carrying death from the autopsy room to the delivery bed.

The idea was intolerable. Few could accept that invisible contaminants — a theory with no recognized scientific framework — might override their training, authority, and sense of professional identity.

So instead of celebrating the discovery, the medical establishment rejected it. Semmelweis met criticism, hostility, and professional isolation. His efforts to enforce handwashing grew more urgent; his letters more accusatory; and one by one, his colleagues turned away.

Eventually, he lost his hospital post. He was committed to an asylum, where he died in 1865 from infected wounds sustained during his confinement.

Only years later — after germ theory provided the missing scientific framework — would medicine recognize what he had seen with nothing more than observation, and the willingness to question what others took for granted.

The Comfort of Certainty

The Semmelweis episode happened almost two centuries ago. It’s easy to hear it now and feel a kind of historical distance — to think, we were so close-minded back then. But the instinct that crushed Semmelweis — the instinct to favor certainty over unsettling questions — hasn’t disappeared. It’s just found subtler, more efficient forms.

This afternoon, my nephew was driving me to the airport when I asked whether he was happy with the university he’d chosen. He hesitated, and then admitted that if he could do it over, he’d probably study psychology or history instead. Subjects that genuinely interest him. Subjects his parents dismissed as “not useful in the marketplace.”

In a year, he’ll graduate and step into the workforce. And if he’s fortunate, he’ll land under a manager who asks deep questions, who invites debate, who cares more about truth than reputation — someone who doesn’t treat curiosity as a threat.

That’s what I hope for him.

But we both know the odds. More likely, he’ll end up reporting to someone fluent in certainty — someone who rewards agreement, discourages independent thinking, and confuses compliance with competence.

And he’ll probably fit right in.

Not because he lacks curiosity, but because he’s been conditioned for that environment his entire life. He grew up inside a system designed to narrow his imagination just enough to keep him aligned — to prepare him to fit the world as it is, not the world he might one day challenge.

And even though my nephew has something Semmelweis never did — the internet — the platforms that dominate it today have built their own walls, quietly shaping what we see and how far our questions are allowed to travel.

The early promise of the internet — a place to wander, explore, and engage with ideas freely — has been broken, and every major platform is now engineered to hijack our curiosity with something that resembles it but is far more profitable: novelty.

And it’s easy to confuse the two because:

• both involve seeking

• both generate stimulation

• both feel good in the first few seconds

But novelty keeps us on the surface. It mimics the entry point of curiosity — but never takes us past it.

We jump from video to video, quote to quote, in an endless loop where hours disappear, and we’re left with little more than the sense that we’ve been busy.

The moment discomfort appears, the moment uncertainty knocks, we’re served something new to soothe us. Something easier, lighter, faster.

I feel that pull constantly. When writing gets hard, I instinctively check my email. When reading becomes dense, I want to open another tab. When an uncomfortable emotion shows up, my phone becomes magnetic. When an idea grows complex, it feels simpler to ask ChatGPT for a summary than to wrestle with it myself.

And that’s how constant novelty makes sure we never stay long enough to follow our curiosity.

The Discipline of Curiosity

For curiosity to emerge, you need a sense of psychological safety.

When you feel safe, you don’t worry that your boss will fire you for being wrong or for questioning an idea. You know you can change your mind without losing your friends or family. Your relationships aren’t conditional on agreement.

Still, it would be a mistake to treat this as only an external problem — as if our curiosity lived entirely at the mercy of bosses, platforms, or institutions.

How often do we postpone a hard conversation just to avoid discomfort? How often do we reach for the same apps, not out of interest, but as an easy exit from boredom or uncertainty? How often do we swallow a question because we don’t want to look naïve or uninformed?

Curiosity can evolve our thinking—but only if we’re willing to tolerate the discomfort that comes with it.

That willingness to sit with discomfort is often mistaken for defiance, especially in environments that reward certainty and speed. But curious people aren’t rebellious for the sake of rebellion. They’re simply unwilling to outsource the search for truth to consensus. If everyone believes X, and X still feels unresolved, they keep digging.

For them, the question becomes a companion—something they live with, rather than rush to resolve.

If you choose—deliberately—to sit with what confuses or intrigues you instead of escaping it, your relationship with thinking begins to change. Instead of reaching for certainty, you reach for understanding.

Over time, you start asking better questions:

• “What’s actually happening here?”

• “Why do people assume this?”

• “What am I overlooking?”

• “What might be true if the opposite were actually true?”

Leonardo da Vinci filled pages with questions most people dismissed as trivial—why a bird stays aloft, why water moves the way it does, why people yawn. He didn’t treat curiosity as a shortcut to answers, but as a discipline of attention — a commitment to notice what others rushed past.

That’s why curiosity matters. It allows you to loosen what no longer fits, revise your assumptions, and let your understanding of the world grow more precise—and more honest.

Because the risk isn’t making mistakes while exploring.

It’s mistaking certainty for clarity—and never looking beyond what already feels settled.

If you’ve never seen it — and you’re open to being surprised — watch this one-minute video before reading further: selective attention test.

In the study, participants were asked to watch a short clip of people passing basketballs and count how many times the ball changed hands. Halfway through, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the frame, stopped, beat its chest, and walked out.

When the researchers asked whether they noticed the unexpected event, nearly half said no.

Not because they weren’t paying attention. But because their attention was too narrow.

They didn’t see the gorilla because they weren’t looking for a gorilla.

To me, this experiment makes one thing unmistakably clear: perception isn’t neutral. It’s filtered, shaped, and narrowed by whatever we’ve already decided to look for.

The brain can’t process everything happening around us, so it filters reality based on:

• what we already believe

• what we hope is true

• what we want to avoid

• what feels familiar

• what supports our current narrative

All of this happens before thought even begins.

And writers aren’t exempt from that.

How Writers Miss the Gorilla in Their Own Work

When writers talk about clarity, they usually imagine the clarity of an argument — the clean line, the sharpened claim, the stance that feels unshakeable. But often, the clarity that matters most in writing has very little to do with being right. It lives in the far more fragile terrain of noticing the assumptions we protect without realizing it.

We think we’re observing the world.

But most of the time, what we’re actually doing is reinforcing the world we already believe in.

This is the quiet machinery of confirmation bias — a powerful force shaping how we think, what we write, and what we allow ourselves to see.

It’s not that we’re uncurious. It’s that chasing certainty feels safer than exploring the unknown.

Every writer knows the feeling: you’re working on a draft, something in it feels off — a sentence that doesn’t sit right, a transition that strains, an argument that seems too convenient. But instead of investigating the discomfort, you defend your thinking. You adjust the wrong part. You protect an idea that, if you were honest, no longer holds.

And it makes sense. Confirmation bias is rooted in a hunger for coherence — for beliefs that don’t contradict one another, for an identity that feels consistent, for a worldview that keeps our personal narrative intact.

So we gravitate toward whatever confirms us:

• the opinions we know our audience will agree with

• the arguments we’ve rehearsed so often they feel like truth

• the frames that won’t embarrass us intellectually or socially

Question your own stance, and the certainty leaks out of the prose. Readers notice it. Your reputation shakes. You no longer sound like someone who “knows.”

So we confuse confidence with clarity — and avoid going deeper simply because depth threatens our convictions.

I don’t pretend to have a method for eliminating confirmation bias. What I have is a practice — imperfect, ongoing, and often uncomfortable.

But part of that practice is learning to notice the forces that shape our attention before they shape our writing.

Algorithms Industrialize Confirmation Bias

If confirmation bias lived only inside the human mind, perhaps we could manage it better. But today, it is amplified by systems built to exploit attention.

Algorithms don’t reward exploration. They reward reinforcement.

They shape your worldview so that when you open your favorite social media app, it feels as if you’re surrounded by people who think exactly as you do.

They draw sharper lines between allies and enemies, tightening your sense of identity until disagreement feels like danger and agreement feels like validation.

They feed your emotional habits — serving outrage, certainty, or whatever keeps you hooked — even when it dulls your ability to think clearly.

A video that says “I might be wrong” will never outperform one that says “I’m right, and here’s why.” Nuance is pushed aside because nuance doesn’t scale. Contradiction is removed from the equation because contradiction doesn’t monetize.

Real curiosity — the kind that asks you to sit with uncertainty or follow a thought that feels uncomfortable — is not encouraged. It’s easier to keep you engaged in a numb state, flicking from video to video, barely noticing what you’re consuming, than to risk showing you something that might make you pause, reflect, and — worst of all for the platform — close the app.

The internet we inherited — the one that initially promised connection and a global library — has become an architecture designed to strengthen our existing beliefs. Agreement looks like truth. Extreme confidence like intelligence. And we end up in echo chambers that blind us from even considering other points of view.

That’s why I’ve become more critical of not just what I consume, but how the act of consuming shapes the depth of my thinking.

Because if there’s a silver lining, it’s this:

Algorithms may industrialize confirmation bias, but they don’t create it. They simply amplify what was already there.

Which means we’re not powerless. With deliberate effort, we can still widen the frame. The real work — the work no platform can do for us — happens in the private space where we’re willing to challenge our own convictions.

The Courage to Confront Yourself First

Most writers try to avoid the discomfort that comes from questioning their own thinking. But that discomfort is often the raw material of depth.

The writers I admire — James Baldwin, George Orwell, Mary Oliver — do something rare: they challenge their own beliefs first.

You can feel Baldwin thinking against himself on the page. And when your read Mary Oliver, you sense a mind watching itself — noticing its own interruptions, contradictions, and desires until something deeper comes into view.

Their writing isn’t a performance of certainty. You don’t see they trying hard to defend their arguments. They understand that life is complex, and that sometimes more than one truth can exist in the same space.

And while most writers focus on imitating their style, structure, or voice, what’s far more instructive is how they grapple with their own confirmation bias — how they stay open to the idea that they might be wrong.

As I’ve said before, I don’t have a formula or a “right way” to deal with confirmation bias. But when I’m writing, I try to approach it the way a scientist interrogates a hypothesis or a philosopher examines an assumption — with patience, humility, and the awareness that the mind is built to notice only what it already believes.

So when I feel too certain about an idea, I look for its counterargument. I try — even briefly — to set aside my judgment and consider that the opposite might also contain truth.

Sometimes I’ll even ask, “What would I write if I weren’t trying to be right?”

It’s a disarming question. It opens a wider field of vision. And even when I return to my original stance, I understand it more clearly because I’ve walked around it instead of standing inside it.

I also try to watch for the moments I grow defensive — when I begin overwriting a paragraph, layering five extra lines of justification, pretending I’m persuading the reader when I’m really trying to persuade myself. That defensiveness is a signal: something in my thinking needs attention.

None of this is easy. Staying with uncertainty, tolerating ambiguity, resisting the gravitational pull of algorithmic consensus — these are uncomfortable practices. But if we don’t create space for our thinking to evolve, what are we really offering ourselves, or our readers, when we sit down to write?

The longer I write, the more I realize that what survives the draft is rarely the argument I began with — but the person I grow into while writing it.

Writing, then, is a form of self-inquiry — a private space where I’m allowed to be wrong, and allowed to become someone new.

If you missed the first report, you can read it here. My hope is that these updates give you a clearer sense of what it actually takes to build a writing project like this.

Today’s report is split into two parts:

• Writing

• Growth

Let’s dive in.

Writing

The Why

With every piece I write, and every conversation with readers, the Why behind this project sharpens a little more.

Its core doesn’t really change, but with time it gains texture — as if I’m getting closer to what’s true.

In the last report, I mentioned that my Why has shifted from a statement to a question. That part hasn’t changed.

What has changed is the question itself.

Last month it was:

How can thoughtful writers find their voice online and create meaningful impact with their writing?

That still matters to me, but lately I’ve been thinking more about the opposite force: the thing that pulls writers away from their voice, the thing that dilutes impact before it even has a chance to form.

And I keep coming back to the same answer: performance.

So much of modern life is framed through the lens of performance:

• Discipline = Self-optimization

• Success = Achievement

• Action = Productivity

• Self-Worth = Applause

• Value = Metrics

And the environments surrounding us — social media, workplaces, cultural narratives — are built to reinforce that lens.

So my Why has been evolving to sit right inside that tension — and right now, it sounds like this:

How can thoughtful writers uncover their real creative voice in a culture obsessed with performance?

And this question has been at the core of every topic I choose to cover.

Writing Space

One thing I’ve noticed about my writing practice is that I almost always end up on the living room couch instead of in my office.

On paper, the office should be the obvious choice: a great chair, a big curved monitor, a proper desk. But it’s also where I spent the last few years working as a CMO for the project I’m leaving at the end of this year. I didn’t realize it at first, but the space still carries the emotional residue of that chapter. My brain associates it with meetings, deadlines, decisions — not with imagination or curiosity.

So without thinking about it, I started treating the couch as my creative refuge. Now, whenever I sit down to write, there’s almost a gravitational pull toward that corner of the living room.

But long term, this isn’t sustainable. My back is beginning to complain, and a large monitor is undeniably useful for writing — especially when I need research and drafts side by side.

So I asked my wife to help me reimagine the office into a space I actually want to write from — something warmer, more personal, more inspiring. A place that feels like the next chapter rather than the last one.

Over the next few months, I’ll be rebuilding my writing sanctuary and keep you updated on how it evolves (and I may even share a photo or two).

Writing Process

One of my priorities moving into 2026 is to keep developing my Notion Workstation.

The structure is still built around three core sections:

• Resource Library: where I collect external sources — books, articles, videos, podcasts — connected to the ideas I’m exploring.

• Knowledge Vault: where I store my own insights, plus anything distilled from those resources.

• Writing: a pipeline divided into idea capture, drafts in progress, and published pieces.

This past month, I spent more time refining the Writing section — specifically, the research stage.

Until recently, I would gather everything and dump it straight into the first draft. Not ideal, but somehow it worked for the first six months.

Creating a dedicated Research tab brought a level of clarity I didn’t realize was missing. Giving research its own place instantly made the step feel intentional — something to invest in rather than rush through.

The difference already shows in the work. My recent piece, Why Discipline Feels So Hard, sparked some of the most thoughtful conversations I’ve had with readers.

The next improvement will be building a triage system inside the Research tab — a way to filter, rank, and highlight the strongest material from the initial pile. I’ll keep you posted as that takes shape.

The only “drawback” that I can report for now, is that with the more research, the more I feel the tension of leaving things out. When you see everything laid out in front of you, you can easily imagine adding another thousand — or two thousand — words to the piece. The Discipline essay, for instance, could have easily doubled in length.

But that’s part of the process. Progress requires choosing your tradeoffs, and right now, maintaining a weekly publishing rhythm matters more than covering everything.

AI Research

The last time my mom came to visit me (she lives across the ocean), we had this running joke: no matter what she told me, I’d ask her for the source.

The first time it happened was when she claimed that Rio de Janeiro had been ranked the number-three city in the world to visit. When I asked where she got that from, she pointed me to a blog from a Brazilian travel agency. Sorry, mom—but you’re the one who taught me to question everything.

Lately, I’ve been using AI a lot more in my research process. But I use it the same way I questioned my mom’s travel facts: as a discovery tool, not as a definitive source of truth.

We can debate endlessly about the broader implications of AI—good, bad, or somewhere in between. What’s undeniable is that it is a powerful tool. And like any tool, it comes with strengths, weaknesses, and blind spots.

It hallucinates. It overinterprets. It pulls from questionable sources. If you understand that going in, you can design how you engage with it. You can stop asking it to be something it isn’t and start using it for what it’s genuinely good at.

In research, I’ve found that ChatGPT shines when I’m in discovery mode—when I’m circling a topic, and exploring the questions that naturally surface.

For example, I’m currently writing a piece on the idea of “follow your curiosity.” So I start with broad, exploratory prompts:

• Who are the people throughout history known for their unusually strong curiosity?

• How did curiosity shape their work?

• Are there people who simply aren’t curious?

• What about the ones who seem curious about everything?

• Is curiosity innate, or can it be cultivated?

The amount of raw material you get back from these questions still surprises me. It’s not polished or complete, and it’s certainly not the final word on anything. But it gives me something invaluable: direction.

Once I have that, my real job begins. I go deeper. I challenge the model with harder questions. I check the sources. I decide what’s worth keeping and discard what’s not.

AI gives you the sparks. But the fire—what actually makes it onto the page—that still has to come from you.

Growth

Thank You Page Survey

This last month I ran an eye-opening experiment.

One of the drawbacks of running a newsletter is that you don’t get a lot of engagement from readers. Most people simply don’t tend to reply to newsletters — don’t ask me why. On the flip side, the ones that do tend to spark some of the best conversations I’ve had online.

But the point of the matter is that if all you do is run a newsletter, you’ll have to find other ways to get to know your readers better.

Until recently, when someone subscribed to my newsletter, I redirected them to a simple Thank you page, and did the obvious: Thanked them.

But in October I changed one small thing: I added a single question to that page.

And to my surprise, in a single month, 192 people answered it.

To put that in context, about 70% of new subscribers took the time to respond.

Now I’m thinking of switching up the question next month—and keep using this space to learn more about the people who show up and read what I write.

Cross-promotion

I was talking to a friend of mine—also a writer—and he mentioned that he’s been promoting other newsletters inside his own. Then he offered to do the same for mine.

His newsletter has 23,000 readers, and most of them are writers too, so on paper it’s a great fit.

But I wasn’t entirely sold on the method he proposed. The idea was to place a small box at the top of the newsletter recommending each other’s publications. Even if done tastefully, I don’t know, it kind of still feels like advertising—and ads aren’t something I want in this newsletter.

What I’d rather propose is that we each write a guest piece for the other’s publication. He’s a strong writer, so he’d deliver something of real value. And more importantly, it feels like a more genuine form of collaboration—one that actually gives readers a taste of our work and lets them decide whether to subscribe.

I’m still thinking it over, but I do like the idea of occasionally bringing in new voices and perspectives.

What do you think? Would you enjoy reading pieces from other writers once in a while?

Facebook Ads

I’m still running the same Facebook campaign I mentioned in Report #1 to attract new subscribers—if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you came from that campaign.

But since I’m also managing a $100,000 email-growth campaign for a client, I’ll borrow some of what I’m learning there to give you a clearer picture of how the ad landscape looks right now.

The first thing that stands out: the market is crowded. Ads everywhere. Offers everywhere. And as a result, people have become far more protective of their email addresses.

Two years ago, converting 60% of landing-page visitors into subscribers was realistic. Today, you’re lucky if you hit 30%.

People are overwhelmed by options — and often underwhelmed by what those options deliver. So they hesitate. They think twice before subscribing to anything new.

In other words, the ad game is tougher than it used to be.

That said, my own campaign for this newsletter has been running for over six months, and I’m still getting subscribers for €2.40 each.

If you do the math, you’ll see that even with a modest budget of €100 per month, you could grow to 500 subscribers in a year.

Most people will say that’s not worth it. And they’re right — if you don’t put in the work to earn those readers’ trust, it’s a waste of money. But if you genuinely pour yourself into what you create, those first 500 readers can become the foundation for making a living from your writing.

Ok, now let’s move to the practical part.

If you ever decide to experiment with Facebook Ads, here’s the single piece of advice I’d give you:

Facebook is extremely good at finding the right people for what you offer—if you communicate clearly.

That means understanding the core idea behind your writing and expressing it in a way that compels someone to want more.

If you can do that, you can run ads (the technical side of it has become the least important factor.)

But, I’ll be honest, it’s rarely obvious what the right angle is on your first try. So it’s important to give Facebook options.

Write 3–5 different versions of your ad text. Test 3–10 images if you can. Then step back and let Facebook identify what resonates.

Your job is clarity. Facebook’s job is distribution.

Deliverability Issue Update

Last month I realized I was making a rookie mistake.

I’d been sending my newsletter using Substack’s domain instead of my own. Which meant I wasn’t building any reputation for my domain. So if I ever decided to leave Substack, I’d have to start sending from my own domain with a completely cold reputation—and a good chunk of those emails would end up in spam. Not good.

So this month I temporarily switched to sending my emails through Systeme.io using my own domain. But I had to be strategic about it to make sure I warmed up the domain properly. Here’s what I did:

• Removed anyone who hadn’t opened an email in the past 90 days

• Split the remaining list into three engagement buckets: Hot, Warm, and Lukewarm

• Sent the first email only to the Hot segment

• Sent the second email to the Hot + Warm segments

• Sent the third email to all three segments

Open rates have been between 37% and 50%, so I’m pretty happy with the results.

Ideally, you won’t have to deal with this issue—though once you get past 3,000–5,000 subscribers you’ll start caring a lot about deliverability, trust me. But here’s the main takeaway:

If you’re starting a newsletter on Substack, set up your own domain from day one.

Substack Notes

In Report #1, I mentioned that I was planning to start using Substack Notes in 2026 to attract more readers.

I still think it’s a great low-hanging fruit. My newsletter already lives on Substack, and Notes seems to offer meaningful exposure to new readers.

That said, I’m not a fan of short-form content—especially the kind that requires constant posting. The frequency, the volume, the churn… it’s just not where I want to spend my time.

So I’ve been working on a solution. The idea is to build a system that handles most of the work for me. My only job would be quality control.

Here’s what I mean.

Right now, I have 29 published essays. If I take those essays and:

• Generate thoughtful questions based on their core ideas

• Pull compelling quotes from the most interesting passages

• Condense key arguments into standalone micro-essays

I suddenly have a huge pool of material that’s perfect for Notes, and that also points people back to the original essays.

But manually creating all of that is tedious. So here’s the workflow I’m planning to build—something that automates 80% of the process:

• Each week, an AI reviews my published essays and, using my prompts and guidelines, generates 20–30 potential Notes

• Those Notes get added to a database in my Notion workspace

• I go through them, edit where needed, and approve the ones I want posted

• The approved Notes get published

• Next week: repeat

This would let me stay focused on the essays—where my attention genuinely matters—while still maintaining a consistent presence on Notes. My involvement would shrink to reviewing the batch once a week and checking Substack daily just to respond to anyone who engages.

I already have a good sense of how to build this system. With some luck, I’ll carve out time in December to get it done. If not, January for sure.

And if it works, I’ll let you know.

That’s a Wrap (For Now)

So far, this report experiment has been genuinely fun for me. It forces me to pause, reflect on the journey, and make the process of building this project more transparent. My hope is that it also gives you a clearer sense of what goes into creating something like this.

If you’re enjoying these reports—or if you’re not—your feedback helps me see whether they’re worth continuing long term. Even a brief “this was helpful” gives me a useful signal.

Thanks for reading all the way through. Next week, we’re back to the essays.

With trust,
Gianni

The fourth and final collaboration between Johnny Cash and maverick producer Rick Rubin came in 2002 with American IV: The Man Comes Around. By then, Cash was a revered cult figure — admired across genres but long past the charts. The legend survived, but the spotlight had moved on.

While working on the album, Rubin searched for a song that could carry the full weight of Cash’s life — something raw enough to hold his faith, regret, and defiance all at once. He sent him dozens of possibilities, but nothing stuck. Yet on every list Rubin made, one track kept showing up at the top — Hurt, written by Trent Reznor.

Reznor wrote Hurt around 1993, while finishing The Downward Spiral, an album he described as “a journey through self-destruction.” At that time, he was actively living through the mental and emotional chaos the song describes — isolation, addiction, depression, and self-loathing.

Cash barely gave it a chance — industrial rock wasn’t his world. Rubin pressed him: “Forget the sound. Listen to the words.” Still nothing. It wasn’t until Rubin finally sang the lyrics aloud that Cash stopped, really listened, and suddenly heard something strikingly familiar: his own life inside the song.

Within days they were in the studio. As Cash recorded, his voice cracked on certain lines — “everyone I know goes away in the end” — and Rubin knew they had entered territory beyond mere interpretation.

Cash changed a few lyrics — “crown of shit” became “crown of thorns” — and the song transformed. What Reznor wrote as a portrait of addiction became, in Cash’s mouth, a spiritual reckoning: a confession from a man looking straight at the end of his life.

But the music video is what turned the song into something immortal.

The video feels less like a performance and more like a cinematic elegy. It opens on the decaying remains of the House of Cash Museum — the glass cases cracked, trophies covered in dust, relics of a life that once glittered. The camera lingers on rot and ruin: fruit spoiling on a banquet table, fading photographs.

Between these images, fragments of old footage flicker — the young Johnny Cash in his prime, striding across stages, full of power. The cuts between past and present are merciless. They collapse time, forcing us to witness the distance between who he was and what remains. His trembling voice becomes the only bridge between the two — the myth and the man meeting one last time.

And then there’s June Carter Cash, standing in the background. She doesn’t move. She simply looks at him — the gaze of someone who has witnessed both his genius and his destruction, and knows the cost of both.

Not long after the filming, June passed away. Johnny followed her a few months later.

As Trent Reznor later recalled, seeing the video was so powerful he felt as if the song no longer belonged to him.

Write from the Scar

It fascinates me how some songs — like Hurt — seem to cut straight through the surface, snapping us out of the autopilot state we drift through most days. They offer an experience that feels almost physical, as if the sound is speaking directly to something deep inside us.

But can essays have the same effect?

When I read one, I often feel smarter — like I’m adding another piece to the puzzle of understanding myself, the people around me, and the systems we live in. But if I’m honest, I rarely feel anything in the body. The intellect sharpens, but something deeper stays untouched.

Maybe that’s the cost of following the familiar advice to “write from the scar.”

The saying goes: wait until pain has hardened into perspective, so you can turn emotion into insight and offer readers something useful. If you write from the wound — when the feeling is still raw — your work risks becoming self-centered, indulgent, or incoherent. More catharsis than communication.

Readers, we’re told, don’t care about what happened. They care about what you’ve learned because of it.

And yet, every once in a while, you come across something that seems to breaks that rule — works like James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son or Cheryl Strayed’s The Love of My Life. They make you feel something visceral, almost electric — as if the writer’s emotion were still alive beneath the words. And you start to wonder whether “write from the scar” is really such good advice, or whether it hides something more nuanced.

Take a Baldwin line like “I hated her for her white face, and for her great, astounded, frightened eyes. I felt that if she found a black man so frightening I would make her fright worthwhile” and you can sense that the prose carries an anger that polished reflection wouldn’t be able to reproduce.

Baldwin is so close to his own emotion that the essay invites readers not just to observe, but to feel with him. And you can feel him thinking his way toward compassion, step by step, discovering the essay’s meaning as he writes:

“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated…”

Strayed’s essay goes even further, offering almost no resolution at all. It drags you straight into her grief and disorientation, making you uneasy from the very first line: “The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.”

Instinctively, you wait for her to soften it — to say “I know now that…”, “In hindsight…”, “I wasn’t myself…” — but she never reaches for those shields. She refuses the safety of distance. She doesn’t frame her choices as moral failure, or trauma logic, or some neat psychological pattern. She simply lets the facts sit between you and her, unprotected.

What remains is pure exposure — emotion without insulation.

“I drank, I smoked, I fu——d.”

Pieces like these feel magnetic the first time you read them — so magnetic that it’s tempting to think they violate the “write from the scar” rule entirely.

But it isn’t that simple. And here’s an important fact about both works:

Baldwin’s father died when he was nineteen; Notes of a Native Son appeared when he was thirty-one. Strayed wrote The Love of My Life nearly a decade after her mother’s death.

So we have to ask: if so many years had passed, weren’t they writing from the scar?

And if so, why do their words still feel so unmistakably wounded?

Opening the Scar

When you listen to Cash’s words, you immediately feel a man reckoning with his mortality — looking back on a life marked by triumphs and damage, naming the regrets he can no longer outrun. And much like Baldwin and Strayed, he draws us not just into the memory, but into the emotion beneath it. It’s as if we’re standing inside the wound with him.

But none of these works come from the fresh wound itself.

What they’re doing is far more deliberate: they’re reopening the scar as a form of craft.

They return to the wound with enough distance to stay grounded, but enough vulnerability to let the heat rise again. They’re not consumed by the emotion; they’re channeling it. And that distance gives them control — the ability to shape how the feeling reaches us.

It shows up first in pacing. Instead of spiraling the way unprocessed pain does, they slow the memory down. They choose where to zoom in, where to linger, when to hold back, when to let silence speak. Every beat feels intentional, not reactive.

It shows up in tone. Baldwin can move from rage to tenderness to analysis within a single paragraph, and it never feels inconsistent. It feels human. That tonal range is only possible when the writer is close enough to feel the emotion but far enough to direct it.

And it shows up in structure. Strayed’s nonlinear movement — looping, doubling back, jumping in time — isn’t a lack of order; it’s the architecture of grief itself. She’s shaping the chaos without pretending it’s tidy.

All of this is why the writing lands. Without that level of craft, the reader would slip into pity: pity for the old man full of regrets, for the son who couldn’t get love from his father or his country, for the woman who imploded after losing her mother.

But what these pieces evoke isn’t pity — it’s recognition.

Because there’s something in all of us that fears reaching the end of life and realizing how much regret we pilled up. Something that fears the moments when life proves itself unfair. And something that knows one sudden loss can destroy everything we built.

And their refusal to make themselves look “good” is what makes their work feel honest rather than performative. They move between vivid memory and reflection without moralizing, without tidying anything up for the sake of a lesson.

There’s no hero’s journey here. Just life — as complex as it is.

And once you see what they’re actually doing on the page, a harder truth emerges: writing like this requires reopening your own scar.

The Resistance

Most people resist reopening the scar — including me. And not only because it’s uncomfortable.

The deeper reason is this: the scar isn’t just healed pain; it’s part of the identity you built to survive it.

To revisit the wound means risking the story you’ve been telling yourself:

• that you’ve moved on,

• that you’ve learned the lesson,

• that you’re no longer that person.

Stepping back into that earlier version of yourself is frightening. What if the wound is not as closed as you believed? What if revisiting it destabilizes more than it clarifies? What if you reveal more than you can take back?

That’s why it’s far easier to keep the analytical distance — to think about the wound instead of entering it.

And if you’ve read this far, you’ve probably noticed something:

I did exactly that. I analyzed Baldwin, Strayed, and Cash. I talked about craft. But I didn’t open my own scar.

I’m trying to learn how.

Some days I write something raw and delete it. Other days I soften the edges to protect myself from judgment. On the rare occasions I let the truth stay on the page, I’m terrified of how it will land.

The part of me that knows how to sound smart is the part that built my career. Opening the scar feels like putting that identity at risk.

So why bother?

I don’t have a tidy answer.

But when I listen to Cash, or read Baldwin or Strayed, I feel like it’s worth trying.

Because ideas have never changed me on their own.

Real transformation has always begun in the place where the wound once lived.

If you were born around the 3rd–6th centuries, during the early Christian and monastic times, it meant a way of life devoted to learning and spiritual formation. Discipline was about apprenticeship to something sacred.

The monks didn’t perform tasks to be efficient but to be transformed by the doing of them. They rose at fixed hours to pray, copied manuscripts by hand, fasted, tilled the fields, and returned to prayer. The structure served to train the body and mind into alignment with spirit.

Fast forward to the Enlightenment (17th–18th centuries), and the focus of Western culture shifted to rational mastery, and with it, the meaning of discipline started to move in the direction of self-restraint: to control impulses, to make the body and mind efficient instruments of reason.

John Locke argued that children must learn to “govern their desires” and form habits of self-control through repetition. For him, discipline was the training of the will to obey reason.

Immanuel Kant took it further, claiming that freedom is not the absence of constraint but the mastery of one’s own will through rational control — to own your desires rather than be owned by them.

Discipline, in other words, ceased to be about devotion and became about governing the self. The monk gave way to the scientist.

Then came the industrial era. And its aim was to make individuals useful within the system.

The worker was disciplined to perform repetitive labor on time. The student was disciplined to sit still, follow rules, and move through standardized curricula. The soldier was disciplined to act without hesitation. It was all about making people predictable, demanding obedience to an external authority — the employer, the teacher, the state.

Later in the 20th century, philosopher Michel Foucault would describe how this system evolved into the “disciplinary society” — a world where power works less through direct punishment and more through observation and normalization. You obey because you’re being watched.

In the decades after WWII, discipline began turning inward, merging with the logic of self-improvement — a shift that would eventually culminate in today’s culture of self-optimization. The focus moved from obedience to performance.

Books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, management gurus like Peter Drucker, and later tech culture, all reframed discipline as a means of maximizing output.

The slogan “no pain, no gain” entered popular culture in the 1980s through Jane Fonda’s workout videos, turning effort into a form of virtue. A few years later, Nike’s “Just do it” distilled that same ethos into a command.

Tony Robbins and the self-help crew went one step further, reframing it as self-mastery — turning inner work into measurable success. Meditation for focus, gratitude for productivity, therapy for output.

Hustle-culture prophets like Gary Vaynerchuk began dominating social media in the late 2000s. Productivity YouTubers, life-hack culture, and “5AM Club,” followed.

We began tracking our hours and calories, measuring our value through the dashboards on our phones.

We no longer needed anyone to discipline us — we’d absorbed the idea that our self-worth depends on how well we perform.

You see — words aren’t neutral.

They frame reality. They shape what we notice, what we ignore, and how we judge ourselves.

In a culture that equates discipline with constant improvement, the practice begins to feel heavy — something to live up to, rather than live within. When discipline turns into performance, failure becomes personal. You’re not just missing a task; you’re failing at being the kind of person you’re supposed to be. “I’m lazy. I lack willpower. I’m not the kind of person who finishes things.”

That’s a brutal standard to live under. No wonder so many people feel at war with their own discipline.

But maybe the problem isn’t that we lack discipline.

Maybe it’s that we’ve inherited the wrong definition — one that no longer serves us.

So what if we strip away the cultural layers — the guilt, the optimization, the self-surveillance — and rebuild its meaning from a different perspective?

The Thermodynamics of Discipline

I’m no expert in thermodynamics, but its basic principles offer a powerful metaphor to think about discipline.

Thermodynamics is the study of energy flow, transformation, and equilibrium in systems.

The First Law of Thermodynamics says energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.

If you apply that lens to human experience, our energy doesn’t disappear either — it just shifts form. From work to pleasure, from making big decisions to running small errands, from moments of deep focus to spirals of anxiety.

In that context, you could say that discipline acts as an energy management system for the mind.

The Second Law introduces entropy; the natural drift toward disorder. Without structure, every system, physical or psychological, slides toward chaos. Discipline, in this light, becomes a form of energy conservation — the structure that keeps your focus from scattering across distractions or moods.

Now how would this idea apply on a practical level?

It begins with letting go of the performance model — the belief that discipline is about self-optimization, about extracting maximum output from every moment. Instead, see it as the art of consciously channeling the finite energy we have toward what matters, adjusting when life pulls you off course, and finding an honest rhythm between creation, connection, and rest.

Once you have that foundational understanding, the next step is to generate movement. In thermodynamics, voltage — or potential difference — is what drives energy to flow. It’s the pressure that pushes current through a system. Voltage, in human terms, is emotional tension — the force that turns stillness into motion.

In the same way, discipline needs its own source of potential. When you feel a strong emotional pull toward something — love, curiosity, purpose — you’re experiencing that potential difference: the force that turns stillness into motion.

Think about when you fall in love, or when you’re defending something dear to your heart, or reading a book you can’t let go of. Suddenly, you find energy you didn’t know you had.

Compare that to a source that depends on external validation, like a grade, your boss’s approval, or the applause from your peers. They might help generate some energy in the short term, but over time, they are much harder to sustain.

Say you’re seeking the discipline to write. The first question isn’t how to stay consistent, but why you feel drawn to do it. What are you trying to explore, to understand, or to give shape to? A source like that endures far longer than goals like “building an audience of 10,000 subscribers” or “becoming a best-seller.”

But a strong source of energy alone might not be enough to keep you disciplined. If we’re honest, we know that we’ll inevitably find bumps on the road. That’s where the structure comes in. We need to identify the potential challenges that discipline will face along the way, and gradually build a structure to better deal with them.

Gradually is an important word here. It’s unrealistic to expect that the first version of your structure will anticipate every obstacle. You’ll refine it over time, because you’re a living system — you change, your circumstances change, and your structure must evolve with you to stay functional.

Still, if we think in fundamental terms, some challenges are clear from the start:

• Emotions

• Impulses

• Distractions

When I say “emotions” here, I’m referring to the darker, more difficult ones — anger, envy, greed, pride — the parts of ourselves we tend to suppress or disguise. They often rise from what Jung called the shadow self: the aspects we’d rather not see.

Instead of rationalizing them away, as the Enlightenment encouraged, or turning them into performances of self-control, as our era often does, we can treat them as energy — something to be understood, redirected, and transformed into meaningful action or deeper self-awareness.

Take envy, for instance.

It’s easy to condemn it as petty or toxic, but envy is often a signal of latent desire—a recognition of something we secretly long for but haven’t allowed ourselves to pursue.

Think of someone on social media whose success irritates you. Maybe they write about the same topics, get the recognition you crave, and you can’t stand their ideas — or how they present them. If you meet that feeling with comparison, the energy curdles into resentment. If you suppress it, it festers in the shadow. But if you treat it as raw material — energy that can be shaped — that envy can be redirected toward creation, transforming frustration into drive.

A large part of discipline, in this sense, is learning to notice these emotions and redirect their force — to turn what pulls your energy down into something that lifts it up.

Easier said than done, I know. But even the act of noticing — catching the emotion before it takes over — already conserves energy.

Yet emotions aren’t the only challenge. There’s a faster, more reactive force that often hijacks that energy before we even realize it: our impulses

Impulses are the pressure valve that pushes you to release the energy quickly — most times in a non-beneficial way: checking the phone, snapping at someone, indulging, avoiding.

Discipline begins in that small interval between the rising of an impulse and the choice to act on it. By learning to hold that energy for a few seconds longer, you convert reaction into response. It isn’t about suppressing impulses but slowing their release until intention catches up. When you intercept an impulse mid-rise, you regain agency over where that energy goes.

One example would be when you feel the impulse to scroll, a pull born of curiosity or the craving for novelty, and you redirect it toward reading, researching, or exploring instead.

It won’t feel natural at first. These impulses have been trained, often for years, to react in a single way: open social media.

And in a world built to exploit those impulses, distraction becomes the natural next trap. Every craving has its stimulus waiting on the other side of a screen.

Today, there’s a course for every skill, a guru for every routine, a diet for every whim. You can wake up like a Navy SEAL, meditate like a Tibetan monk, or decide between Italian, Indian, or tapas for lunch. You can be anyone, do anything.

Infinite choice looks like freedom — until every open path makes commitment feel like loss. Beneath that freedom hums the anxiety that you could be doing more. Because, of course, everyone else seems to be.

But that realization doesn’t sit well in a capitalist culture built on perpetual desire. So the system offers its cure — the illusion that if you just self-optimize, become a little more efficient, you can do it all. And to sell that fantasy, it wraps everything in the language of “convenience”:

• one-click delivery

• frictionless entertainment

• smart tools that think in our place

Distraction has never been easier. Everything you could want is a tap away.

Here, discipline becomes the structure that filters those distractions and keeps your energy contained.

I haven’t received a phone notification in a decade — and I haven’t been exiled from society yet. Some people who expected instant replies have drifted away. But that’s exactly the point: discipline filters distractions. If someone measures the worth of our relationship by my WhatsApp response time, maybe the relationship isn’t worth it.

With a strong source of energy in place, and a structure to manage emotions, impulses, and distractions, discipline begins to shift — from self-performance to self-energy management. It becomes the force that resists entropy, redirects drives, and sustains purposeful order in a world that naturally drifts toward chaos.

Eventually, part of the structure becomes self-sustaining. Effort gives way to rhythm; discipline dissolves into habit.

But before rhythm takes hold lies the most fragile phase: beginning — when energy exists only as potential, and chaos still outweighs form. It’s there that discipline is most fragile, and most essential.

The Energy to Get Started

When you’re getting started on something, you’re faced with a series of unknowns that demand a lot of your energy:

• no proof your effort will work

• no feedback loops reflecting back value

• no momentum to carry you

• no identity yet to anchor you

• no external structure to lean on

• no visible progress to reassure you

In a culture that equates discipline with performance, where we evolved to rely on social reinforcement, visible outcomes, and predictable reward cycles, the weight of emotions, impulses, and distractions grows heavier.

That’s why so many writers circle the act of writing without ever fully entering it — reading about it, planning it, organizing notes, tweaking tools, posting occasionally, thinking about it constantly — but never quite sitting down to face the page.

And without noticing, that’s where most of the energy leaks.

At first, it feels safe to linger on the sidelines. It keeps the dream intact: the vision of how things could be, where everything aligns, the work flows easily, and no one questions your talent. In that imagined future, you never have to face contradiction, missteps, or criticism.

To protect that dream, you keep orbiting around it. Some even cling to the possibility that “I could do it if I tried,” by never actually trying. It’s easier to build convincing reasons to delay — I need to pay the bills, I’m too old now, I don’t have time — than to risk discovering what the work might really demand.

But every hesitation hides a kind of tension: energy waiting to move somewhere.

When you have a creative impulse, that’s stored potential energy. If you channel it into motion, it transforms into something useful.

If you hold it in, it doesn’t disappear; it just disperses into mental friction: rumination, self-doubt, guilt.

Procrastination feels exhausting not because we do nothing, but because we’re losing energy through constant internal negotiation. The energy stays trapped in potential form, slowly converting into emotional heat.

For nearly twenty years, I hovered around my own potential energy. I poured my curiosity about human behavior into marketing and performance, chasing growth metrics that left little room for meaning.

From the outside, I looked like what society calls a disciplined person. But deep down, I knew I’d built a structure designed to amplify the wrong kind of energy source.

This year, the awareness of that disconnect became unbearable — and it finally gave me the courage to start this newsletter and tap into the potential energy I’d been holding back for years.

As expected, the familiar challenges showed up right on schedule: the doubt that what I’m writing matters, the fear that thoughtful work no longer has an audience, the temptation to measure progress in numbers, and the awkward pauses when friends ask, “So, how’s work going?”

Yet the source felt different this time. The act of turning that stored energy into something meaningful gave me strength to build the structure I’d need to face those doubts — and to keep going.

Eventually, I found the courage to leave my role as CMO of a fast-growing company — and give myself permission to fully dedicate my energy to the craft.

It’s still scary at times. But the longer I walk this path, the more I understand Mary Oliver’s words:

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time.

That riff that defined an era?

It didn’t materialize out of nowhere. The chord progression echoes “More Than a Feeling,” one of Boston’s biggest hits from 1976. Nirvana never pretended otherwise — at some shows, they even used Boston’s song as an intro.

And Boston wasn’t the only influence.

Cobain openly said that Smells Like Teen Spirit was his attempt to “rip off the Pixies.” He borrowed their quiet-loud-quiet structure — that swing from whisper to scream — and built the track around it. You can hear the same tension in the Pixies’ Gigantic, where restraint and release feed each other.

Even the song’s name was borrowed from somewhere else.

Kathleen Hanna, singer of Bikini Kill and a close friend of Cobain’s, once spray-painted his wall with a joke after a night of hanging out:

“Kurt smells like Teen Spirit.”

She meant it literally — referencing the Teen Spirit deodorant worn by Tobi Vail, who Cobain was briefly dating at the time. Cobain didn’t know the brand existed. He thought Hanna had written something rebellious and poetic — and asked to use it as the song’s title.

Cobain’s influences also extended into the studio. When producer Butch Vig suggested double-tracking his vocals for a fuller sound, Cobain initially refused — it felt too artificial, he said. But when Vig reminded him that John Lennon did it, he relented: “If it’s good enough for John Lennon, it’s good enough for me.”

So when Nevermind knocked Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard charts, it wasn’t because Nirvana discovered a new musical formula or invented a genre from scratch.

What made Nirvana sound new wasn’t their ingredients — it was how Cobain recombined them. He fused punk’s defiance with pop’s structure, rage with vulnerability, noise with melody. His voice carried contradiction — sneering and pleading in the same breath — and his lyrics were both cryptic and painfully sincere.

That clash didn’t just sound new; it felt new, because it mirrored the emotional landscape of a generation: disillusioned, self-aware, and desperate to feel something real.

The Performance Trap

Every creator, writer, and thinker feels the pressure to be original — to be different, unprecedented, unmistakably new. Everyone is trying to stand out, and yet, most of what you see in our culture today seems to struggle to survive the test of time.

I often encounter that impulse myself when I sit to write. The urge to prove that I’m different, to look for counter-intuitive angles instead of staying honest on the page.

The danger of chasing originality for its own sake is that it can easily turn creation into performance.

You stop listening to your curiosity and instead begin manufacturing uniqueness for an imagined audience. What starts as exploration turns into strategy. The fear that your honest voice might not be enough hides behind the performance of originality, and the work starts to feel strained — clever instead of true.

Nirvana wasn’t original because they set out to be different. They were original because they took what’s been done before, metabolized it, and expressed it through their own lens.

Cobain channeled his alienation — pulled between rejecting mainstream culture and the pressure to stay “pure” in the underground — into sound, filtering it through the influences that shaped him.

The myth of originality is that it requires novelty. That you have to deny what came before, and that you have to create something completely new, never seen before. But what’s impossible to escape is that every new work is judged by the standards of the past — and if it does its job well, it brings a new perspective to it.

Originality isn’t the absence of influence. It’s about having the courage to be fully yourself — especially when that self doesn’t fit cleanly inside whatever the culture is celebrating at the moment.

David Foster Wallace once wrote that the new rebels would be the artists willing to risk looking uncool — willing to face yawns, rolled eyes, and accusations of sentimentality in order to treat ordinary human feeling with seriousness again.

What I take from that is simple: authenticity comes before originality.

You can’t create something truly your own if you’re unwilling to reveal where you come from — your influences, your fears, your obsessions, your way of seeing.

The Key Ingredient

What I’m about to say might shock you. But please bear with me.

Some of the best musicians…

Love to listen to music.

And some of the best writers…

Love to read.

Yeah, I know. Groundbreaking insight, right?

But these artists don’t just consume passively. They pay close attention. Cobain didn’t listen to the Pixies and think, “cool vibe.” He dissected their work — studying how they built tension, how they moved from quiet to explosive, how structure could carry emotion. And then he tested those ideas inside his own songs.

And it wasn’t just depth — it was breadth too. Nirvana didn’t only dig into the artists who moved them; they ranged widely. Cobain openly said he wanted to “combine the heaviness of Black Sabbath with the pop sensibility of The Beatles” when defining the band’s identity.

Even the explosive opening drums from Dave Grohl on Smells Like Teen Spirit had surprising roots.

In an interview with Pharrell Williams, he revealed they were inspired by disco and funk tracks like The Gap Band’s “Burn Rubber on Me.” The anthem of anti-establishment grunge began with a beat born on the disco floor.

And it wasn’t just music that influenced their work.

Cobain was famously obsessed with the novel Perfume. He carried it with him on tour, reread it constantly, almost like a talisman. What drew Cobain in weren’t just the plot mechanics, but the themes beneath it — alienation, obsession, identity, the grotesque pursuit of purity. All currents he felt in himself, and in the culture around him.

That obsession directly inspired Nirvana’s song “Scentless Apprentice” on their 1993 album In Utero.

That curiosity to go beyond their genre, to take ideas from other arts, and to combined these ideas to run their own experiments, is what helped them develop the richness and freshness of their sound.

I used to think the way to find my original voice was to stay inside my lane — to read what writers read, study what writers study, and build within familiar walls. But the more I paid attention to the artists I admired, the more I noticed a different pattern: they wandered. They followed curiosity into strange corners.

The things that move me most don’t always come from essays or books about writing. Sometimes it’s a line in a movie, a poem I don’t fully understand, a painting I can’t stop staring at.

I’ve learned to let that in. To allow myself to experiment, to get lost in something that has nothing to do with what I’m “supposed” to be doing. To trust that if I keep following the thread of what fascinates me — the work will take a shape that is mine.

The Price Tag

There’s a line from T. S. Eliot that has stayed with me:

“The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”

I don’t read that as a rejection of individuality. What he meant, I think, is that true originality appears only when the ego stops trying to claim the work. When the creation matters more than the performance of the self behind it.

In that sense, the writer’s mind becomes a kind of laboratory — a vessel where emotion, memory, influence, and instinct melt together and emerge as something new.

This is harder than it sounds. The ego aches for recognition, and the world finds comfort in what it already knows. Sincerity rarely gets the first round of applause.

Cobain understood this in his bones.

When he wrote Rape Me, he wasn’t glorifying violence. It was a protest song, a mirror held to both the media machine and the culture’s appetite for exploitation. To him, it was an anti-rape anthem, a refusal to be stripped of agency by an industry — or by anyone who tried to consume his pain as spectacle.

But the public — and much of the press — heard only the blunt title. They didn’t stay long enough to understand the metaphor, or the plea beneath it. They accused him of provocation, shock-value nihilism, or tasteless rebellion. What almost no one acknowledged was the sincerity inside the confrontation — the way Cobain was using ugliness to condemn ugliness.

He learned what every serious artist eventually discovers: when you dissolve into the work, you surrender the illusion of control over how it will be understood. To create honestly is to accept the risk of being misread.

That is the real cost of originality. It feels like stepping off solid ground — trusting something fragile inside you more than the loud certainties outside.

Because what stands the test of time is what dares to be true — long before the world knows what to do with it.

I’m still learning to choose truth over polish — to trust that my strangeness is not a flaw to be edited out, but a signal to follow. The ego tries to resist, always. Yet, the moments when I let truth move unfiltered to the page, the writing stops posing and begins to feel more alive.

I knew this moment would come, but the certainty in his tone still landed like a slap. I’d been dodging this call for weeks, coming up with endless excuses to call him the next day. But that afternoon, I stepped onto the balcony, took a deep breath, and answered.

A few months earlier, my wife and I had left London for a small Italian town whose name I could barely pronounce. She had just landed a job she’d long dreamed of, and I’d convinced my startup’s CEO to let me keep running the London market remotely.

For a while, the arrangement worked — until the ground gave way.

The startup had been burning cash too quickly; investors lost patience. A full restructuring followed. Everyone was cut except the CEO, the CTO, and me.

The CEO offered me a lifeline — a partnership and the title of CMO — with one condition: “You’ll get your salary back after the next round of funding. Think of it as a long-term investment.”

That negotiation didn’t work out. Within three months of moving, I found myself out of work, out of income, and living in a town with no jobs even remotely close to what I did.

That’s when my father called.

We circled the inevitable conversation, keeping things safe and polite. But when he asked, “So, how’s life in Montebelluna? Don’t you miss London?” I knew we’d arrived.

I didn’t want to give him ammunition, so I said nothing about losing my job.

“London will always have a place in my heart,” I began. “But we’re finding our rhythm here.”

“After the investments we made to get you a master’s there,” he said, “I’m not sure leaving London was a good idea.”

“I made my choice.” The words came out sharper than I intended. “Sometimes you have to think beyond yourself.”

The silence that followed told me the remark had landed — a jab at his pride — but he let it slide. “Why didn’t you ask for my advice?”

“Because I already knew what it would be,” I replied. “And I didn’t want that to cloud my judgment. This decision affected only me and my wife. That’s where the conversation needed to stay.”

He paused for a beat, then delivered the line that would echo for weeks:

“You’re wasting your best years in a city that has no opportunities to offer.”

We didn’t speak for months. His words stayed with me longer than I wanted to admit. When we finally did speak, the calls were stiff, our sentences tiptoeing around old tension.

But time did what it always does. I found a few remote clients, steadied my finances, and somewhere along the way, my relationship with my father began to shift.

He started to see that his dream for me — a stable position at a large corporation — wasn’t mine. And he began speaking to me less as a son meant to fulfill his story, and more as a man making his own choices and living with them.

The Weight, the Risk, and What Lies Behind Words

You’ve probably heard the guru-esque line: “Everything you want is on the other side of a hard conversation.”

And while I did once get fired after one of those conversations (not exactly the outcome I was hoping for — though the coconut at Ipanema Beach the next day made up for it), I do think there’s some truth buried in the cliché.

Hard conversations often force you to say what you actually think — which is the exact opposite of what you’ve been trained to do your whole life. The culture of polite conformity we all inhabit rewards diplomatic language. Don’t show too much of your personality. That bothers Mr. Jones. We want him happy. His ego before your own.

But there comes a point — oftentimes when resentment has built a duplex and your dignity’s out of patience — that the conversation you’ve been avoiding shows up anyway.

And when it does, you know it. The air thickens. You find yourself holding multiple things at once: your emotions, the other person’s emotions, the content of what’s being said, the consequences of how it’s said. You can try to soften it with a white lie, hide behind abstractions, or pad the edges to dull the blow — but once truth starts surfacing, there’s nowhere left to hide. You’re forced to drop the persona and carry the weight of a real human exchange.

The gap between who we believe ourselves to be and how others see us cracks open. And in that space, you realize no story has just one side — that shared truth often carries more nuance than either person wants to acknowledge.

And underneath that nuance sits the real conflict — not between two people, but between two selves. At its core, every hard conversation is a negotiation of identity.

When someone challenges your beliefs, points out a flaw, or expresses disappointment, it’s not just an opinion at stake — it’s your sense of self: Am I the high-achieving son? Or the one who abandoned a promising career for a small town I can barely find on the map?

No wonder we go out of our way to avoid them.

Every hard conversation leaves a mark. It changes what we understand, where we draw boundaries, and how we relate to others. It’s what many like to call “the price of growth.”

As a writer, that’s the price you learn to pay willingly. What begins as a hard conversation with another person doesn’t end there — it continues inward. The most honest writers follow it onto the page, where they face what was too raw, too complex, or too revealing to fully express in the moment.

Take James Baldwin, for instance. In Notes of a Native Son, the essay becomes the continuation of a conversation he could no longer have with his father — and, through that loss, a deeper dialogue with America and with himself. It shows us what happens when love and rage coexist and neither will surrender.

Or George Orwell, in Shooting an Elephant, caught between the persona he felt pressured to perform for a Burmese crowd and his own moral judgment of what was right.

Both Baldwin and Orwell understood something essential: truth emerges from friction. From the tension that arises when you stop negotiating the superficial and start confronting the deeper truths.

That’s the moment you stop defending who you think you are — and start discovering it.

The Aftermath

After I hung up the phone that day with my father, the real dialogue began in my head. I replayed what I said, what I didn’t, what I wished I could take back. And I realized, gradually, that what made the exchange uncomfortable wasn’t just his lack of understanding — it was the part of me that feared he might be right.

For a while, that fear just sat there — shapeless, impossible to reason with. But over time, the discomfort began to take form. It started to clarify what mattered, forcing me to look at my situation without illusion — to admit that finding balance again wouldn’t follow any familiar script. I’d have to create my own path, with no map, no safety net, and more resilience than I thought I had.

What I didn’t realize then was that the hardest part of a hard conversation comes afterward. It lingers in silence, circling the surface — the job, the city, the argument — until, if you’re willing to face it, it begins to show what’s really at stake.

The aftermath of every difficult exchange is a chance to look closer at your own truth: Am I becoming who I’m meant to be, or who others expect me to be? What do I owe my past — and what do I owe myself?

They press against the structures that keep your life intact — the identities and habits that once kept you safe.

To this day, I still think about that call with my father — how little was resolved, and how much it revealed. Not just about myself, but about us. What stayed with me wasn’t what we said, but what it exposed — the stripping away of the stories we tell about ourselves until only the truth remains: inconvenient, imperfect, but ours.

Each month, I’ll publish a behind-the-scenes report on what I’m learning as I build this project — the decisions, mistakes, and small breakthroughs that make the process worthwhile. My hope is that these notes help me see the path more clearly and offer something useful to those walking their own.

The report is divided into three core areas:

• Writing

• Growth

• Monetization

Each section covers what I’ve been experimenting with and what’s working (or not). This first edition spans the past six months, so it’s a bit longer than future ones will be. If you’re short on time, feel free to jump to the parts you’re most curious about.

Since this is the first issue, a bit of context before we dive in.

Context

I launched Write2Lead as a side project on April 24. At first, I published my essays inside a private community on Circle. I liked the idea of creating a small, intimate space where readers could engage with the work directly.

But I quickly realized that asking people to join a separate platform just to read was too much friction. So on May 19, I moved everything to Substack, where essays could land directly in readers’ inboxes. Six months in, that decision still feels right — even if I’ve started to notice a few limitations with Substack (which I’ll share in the Growth section).

The last six months also made something else clear: this project was becoming more than a side experiment. It was starting to feel like real work — the kind I wanted to give my full attention to.

So in September, I made a big — and slightly terrifying — decision: I resigned from my role as CMO of a fast-growing company to focus full-time on Write2Lead. It’s a shift that opens more space for writing and building, but it also brings a new challenge — figuring out how to sustain both myself and the project financially. I’ll share more about that in the Monetization section.

Right now, I’m in a transition period that will likely last through the end of 2025, so my attention is still split. But I made one non-negotiable promise to myself: to publish one essay every week, no matter what.

By 2026, I’ll finally have the space to go deeper — refining my creative process, exploring alternative ways to grow, and seeing how far this project can really go.

Writing

When I started writing, I had a lot of questions on my mind:

• Why am I writing?

• Who am I writing for?

• What topics should I cover?

• How do I find my voice and style?

• How often should I publish?

• What’s the right structure for my essays?

• Can I make my writing financially sustainable?

Six months in, my biggest realization is this: the act of writing itself is what brings the most clarity to these questions.

Sure, I had tentative answers when I began, but they turned out to be more like seeds than fixed directions — ideas that grew and changed through the process of writing.

Here are a few of the insights that have taken shape over the past six months:

The Why

Two years ago, when I became CMO and started leading the marketing team at my previous job, I handed over my role as the writer to the teammates I was now managing.

It was the right move for the team — but it also left an unexpected gap in my day-to-day.

A few months later, I began to miss the creative process. I was still editing other people’s work and contributing to the ideation stage, but I wasn’t writing myself anymore.

At first, I thought that feeling was natural — just part of adjusting to a new role. But over time, the urge to get back to the page, to wrestle with ideas and words, only grew stronger. Eventually, I decided to launch Write2Lead as a side experiment.

Still, having only the desire to write isn’t enough. For a long time, my biggest struggle was the question: What do I care deeply enough to still want to write about years from now?

Looking back, I see how futile it is to try to find the perfect answer before you begin. For years, I tried to think my way to clarity, but it never came.

So this time, I approached it differently. I started with a single problem that kept resurfacing again and again for me — algorithms have turned online creation into a chase for metrics — and over time, through the writing itself and through conversations with readers, I let that problem evolve.

Today, I find myself framing it less as a statement and more as a question:

How can thoughtful writers find their voice online and create meaningful impact with their writing?

Audience

When most marketers talk about finding your audience, they usually offer a simple formula:

Your expertise + audience demand = viable niche

It’s a useful approach if your goal is to prioritize growth over creativity — but that wasn’t my case. I wanted to start from a different place.

I began with a problem: algorithms have turned online creation into a chase for metrics. Then I asked myself, among all the groups affected by this, which one would I truly love to serve?

Being a writer myself, I naturally gravitated toward the group I cared most about — the one I knew I’d want to be around for years to come:

Writers who care deeply about their craft and its impact.

That’s the one decision that hasn’t changed since day one.

I could have taken a more commercial path — one with higher demand or faster growth — but that would’ve meant building something that didn’t feel entirely mine.

Another priority for me was to reach a diverse readership. Having worked with people across Brazil, Malaysia, the United States, and Europe, I’ve seen how much richness different cultural perspectives bring to the conversation.

And so far, that diversity has started to take shape: readers now come from across the world — North America, Europe, South Africa, Oceania, and South America.

Topics

This part of the project is constantly evolving.

In the beginning, I gave myself permission to go broad — to follow my curiosity and write about anything that caught my attention, even if it didn’t clearly connect to the problem I had defined as my why.

To help me find direction, I tracked two simple metrics:

• Internal: How did I feel while writing about this topic?

• External: Did this piece spark meaningful conversations?

For the internal metric, I looked for writing that made me feel alive — ideas that were fun to explore and turned the process into something engaging, not just another task to check off a list (“1,500 words by Tuesday”).

But writing only for myself wouldn’t help me engage meaningfully with the larger problem I’m trying to unpack. So I also paid attention to interactions — not likes or shares, but thoughtful replies that revealed how readers were connecting with the work.

With these two metrics guiding me, I feel like I’m getting closer to understanding the themes I want to keep exploring. And, just like the central problem, I’ve started framing them as questions:

• How do you find a voice that’s authentically yours, not an imitation?

• How do you align that voice with the change you want to create?

• How do cultural and technological systems shape the world writers create in?

• How does psychology influence the way readers respond to words?

• How do you communicate ideas so they truly resonate and spread?

Writing Process

The first thing I want to say about the writing process might sound obvious, but I’ve realized how much my reading shapes the way I think and write.

If a week gets busy and I don’t have much time to read, I actually feel dumber. It’s like the ideas stop flowing smoothly, and I have to work twice as hard to connect the dots.

So yeah, that old saying that the quality of your writing depends on the quality of your reading feels pretty spot on.

Another thing that’s been critical to my process is organization.

Yep, I know — most of us writers like to run free, like wild horses, letting creativity and imagination take full control. But I’ve learned that when organization actually serves the creative process, it makes things easier, not harder.

A couple of months ago, I built a Workstation in Notion divided into three parts:

• Resource Library: where I collect external sources — books, articles, videos, podcasts — that relate to the problem I’m exploring.

• Knowledge Vault: where I store my own insights, plus anything I’ve pulled from those resources.

• Writing: a pipeline divided into ideas, drafts in progress, and published pieces.

And I’ll tell you, having everything in one place saved me more than once during those chaotic work weeks.

I still need to get better at turning what I read into my own insights — that’s what would make the Knowledge Vault even more valuable. But, you know, one thing at a time.

AI: The elephant in the room

Even though this is part of my writing process, I felt it deserved its own section — since it’s a pretty polarizing topic in our world right now.

I was watching Rick Beato interview Justin Hawkins the other day, and something Hawkins said about a producer he nearly worked with made me think a lot about my own relationship with AI.

Beato asked him about his experience almost collaborating with Mutt Lange. Hawkins said, “Mutt Lange would only work on something that was a guaranteed super mega smash.”

Then Beato pressed further, and Hawkins explained why the collaboration never happened:

“Lange said, ‘Send me everything you have — even if it’s just a song start, a riff, a word, a bit of singing.’ And I just had this image of him creating a patchwork song, a collage of all these fragments. I’m sure that’s how he works, and it’s clearly effective. There’s probably a blueprint for making a Mutt Lange-style mega hit. But is it art? For better or worse, I’d rather not have a hit than one that’s cynically put together.”

In a way, many writers and creators use AI as their own Mutt Lange. They throw prompts at it and expect it to produce magic.

Fortunately, AI isn’t cranking out “mega hits” like Mutt Lange — at least not yet. But if you’re a true writer — someone who loves the uncertainty, the struggle, and the slow uncovering that comes with creating — outsourcing that to a machine strips away the one thing that makes your work unique: you.

So yeah, I’m with Hawkins on this one.

That said, I don’t ignore the value of AI when it’s used in the right way.

What are the “right ways”? I don’t pretend to have the final answer. But here’s how I’ve been using it in a way that helps me — without giving up control of the creative process.

1. AI as Research Assistant

Notion has ChatGPT integrated, which means I can be writing a new piece and ask:

“Based on the themes and ideas I’ve outlined so far, can you look through my Knowledge Vault and surface any related insights?”

That gives me quick access to all the notes and fragments I’ve saved over time — helping me connect dots I might’ve missed.

I also use Notion’s AI to scan my Resource Library. I’ll ask it to check if any books, articles, or videos I’ve stored are related to my current essay. When something stands out, I go back to the source, dig deeper, and extract ideas that feel relevant to the essay.

Outside of that, I use ChatGPT for external research — essentially, what we all used to do with Google, just faster and more focused.

2. AI as Editor

I’ve always believed that every writer needs an editor — someone who can see the work with the distance you lose once you’re deep inside it. After a few days in a piece, it’s easy to fill in gaps subconsciously or assume meaning that isn’t actually on the page. An editor offers that fresh, objective perspective — helping you see what’s really there, not just what you meant to say.

The problem is, having a great editor is an expense most of us can’t justify early on. So I use the next best thing: ChatGPT.

The only difference is that I keep full creative control. If I don’t like the feedback, I simply move on (sorry, ChatGPT — I know I’m not the easiest writer to work with).

Essay structure

A lot has changed in the way I approach essay structure.

When I started this project, I was well aware of my Achilles’ heel: writing to persuade instead of writing to invite thinking.

I’d spent years writing to sell — crafting messages designed to convince. But one of my key intentions with Write2Lead was to flip that approach: to write to discover, not to persuade.

Naturally, the structure of my essays evolved to reflect that shift.

The first thing I noticed was how often I felt drawn to begin with a story. Essay by essay, it became clear that storytelling was my strongest starting point. It gave both me and the reader an engaging entry into the ideas that would follow.

From there, I move into the core idea — expanding the story into a broader frame, whether cultural, psychological, or philosophical.

And finally, I close with reflection — the part where I invite both the reader and myself to ask better questions, to consider how the idea shapes us, and how we might shape it in return.

Put together, my current structure looks something like this:

• The Story (hooks the gut)

• The Idea (engages the mind)

• The Reflection (lingers in the soul)

If you read through my essays, you’ll probably find a few that don’t follow this pattern — and that’s okay. Like most creative systems, this one is meant to guide, not constrain.

Frequency

You’ve probably noticed I publish one essay a week — usually every Tuesday.

When I was deciding on a publishing cadence, the main thing was to be realistic: I’m still working a full-time job, and I want each essay to go at least a thousand words deep. Do I actually have the time to do that every week?

The answer back then was a cautious “yes.” Six months in, it turns out I was right — though just barely.

There were a few hectic weeks where I wasn’t fully happy with what I published and wished I’d had more time to refine it. A few essays even went out on Thursday instead of Tuesday. But overall, I’ve managed to keep the rhythm, and I’m happy with where things stand.

If I hadn’t been able to, I’d have accepted it and adjusted to publishing every two weeks — at least until I have more time to write full-time again.

Growth

Writing is at the center of the Write2Lead project.

But without readers, it would probably feel unbearable.

Yep… I care that others care — it’s a human condition that’s hard to escape.

So in this section, I’ll share how the newsletter has grown to 977 subscribers in six months, and some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Meta Ads:

When I started thinking about ways to grow the newsletter, my goal wasn’t just to reach more people — it was to attract the right readers: writers who care deeply about their craft and its impact. And I wanted a system that wouldn’t drain the time and energy I need to dedicate to writing.

One advantage I had from my day job was experience running ads on Meta (Facebook and Instagram). The good thing about those platforms is that they reward upfront effort — if you put in the work to write strong copy, design good creatives, and set things up properly, a well-performing ad can run quietly in the background with very little ongoing effort.

Of course, getting it right is rarely that simple. I ran dozens of experiments — tweaking target audiences, images, ad copy, and even the signup page — to see what actually worked.

The challenge is that Meta ads perform best when you’re offering something with clear, immediate value. But a newsletter from a writer no one has heard of doesn’t exactly fit that mold. It’s harder to communicate the value of a weekly essay than it is to promote a quick freebie to someone scrolling by.

Still, iteration by iteration, I found a way to express what Write2Lead offers without making overblown promises — and managed to keep the cost per new subscriber under €2.

Right now, I’m investing about $600 a month, which feels like a fair trade for the results I’m getting. But it could also work on a smaller budget — even €80 to €100 a month — if you’re willing to test and refine.

There’s a lot more I could unpack about how these ads work and what I’ve learned from them. I’m keeping it high-level here for readers who aren’t interested in the details — but if you are, just hit reply and I’ll happily go deeper.

Substack Deliverability Issue

Believe it or not, this one’s important enough to earn a spot in the report.

In plain terms, deliverability means how many of your subscribers actually receive your emails in their inbox.

If you have 1,000 subscribers but only 300 of them get your newsletter delivered, then, realistically, you have 300 subscribers.

I won’t get too technical here, but let me explain what’s been happening so you get the picture.

Because all my new subscribers come through Meta ads, I have to manually import them into Substack — the platform I use to send these newsletters. And… Substack doesn’t love that. It prefers when people subscribe directly through its own system, since that guarantees you’re not uploading a “cold list” (emails added without consent).

Now, Substack isn’t exactly being a noble guardian of readers’ inboxes — it’s just protecting itself. If too many users upload questionable lists, it risks damaging its email reputation. So, to play it safe, the platform sometimes suppresses sends, meaning your emails quietly stop reaching as many people.

In my case, I noticed my open rates steadily dropping. After digging into the data, the signs were clear: I had a deliverability problem.

It’s not the problem I wanted to deal with now, but it’s also not one I can ignore. I’m working on a fix and will share the results in the next report.

P.S. If you haven’t seen my emails in your inbox lately, I’d be grateful if you could reply and let me know. A quick note like “I haven’t received your emails in a couple of weeks” would be a huge help — it would confirm my suspicion and help me fix the issue faster.

Substack Growth

Substack is one of the few newsletter platforms that’s managed to do something unexpected: it built a genuine community within itself. Many of the people there are thoughtful writers and readers.

That means when you send a newsletter, you’re also publishing your essay directly to the Substack platform — tapping into its internal ecosystem by default.

I liked that idea. I was already writing these newsletters, so why not reach a few extra readers through Substack? I had nothing to lose.

Six months in, though, my essays usually get around 10–15 reads from Substack itself, and I’ve probably gained only two or three subscribers directly from the platform.

What I’ve learned is that to actually gain traction there, you need to participate in Notes — their slightly better version of Twitter (and yes, I still refuse to call it X).

There’s a lot of noise there too, but I’ve seen some writers use Notes in interesting ways: sharing rough ideas, sparking conversations, and posting fragments of their essays. I plan to experiment with it myself once my transition period at work ends and I can focus fully on Write2Lead — probably around January 2026.

I’ll circle back on this at the start of next year.

Community

I’ve built different kinds of communities in the past — some where I was deeply involved, and others where I simply set the structure and let conversations unfold. The first takes a lot of time and energy; the second, not so much.

Since time was my biggest constraint, I chose the lighter approach this time. But it hasn’t really worked out.

I set up the community on Circle and invited people in two ways: through the “Thank You” page after newsletter sign-up and at the bottom of each email I sent. To make onboarding easier, I wrote a welcome post encouraging members to ask questions, share work from writers they admire, and post first drafts for gentle feedback.

Around 200 people joined — but most introduced themselves once and then disappeared. Over time, I realized the issue wasn’t just participation; it was also the platform itself. As one reader put it, Circle feels like a “high barrier” — something you have to intentionally open rather than naturally check, which makes engagement harder to sustain.

Taking all that into account, I’ve realized that, for now, the community needs more of my active involvement to build real momentum — energy I simply don’t have to give at the moment. So I’ve paused promotion for the time being and may temporarily close it until mid-2026.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the idea. A safe, meaningful space where writers can exchange ideas and support each other feels central to Write2Lead. I’m just pressing pause to focus on what’s most essential. The community isn’t gone — just waiting for the right time to come back to life.

Monetization

This will be the shortest part of the report — because, well, I’m not currently monetizing the project.

But — and that’s a big but — I’ve already decided how I’m going to approach it.

If you look at most “art” today, you’ll notice how heavily it’s shaped by business interests. The creative process often ends up serving the business, instead of the other way around.

Since I see Write2Lead as a form of creative writing, I’ve chosen the opposite path: to make monetization a byproduct of the work, not its master.

I believe that if I keep writing, keep listening to readers, and stay genuinely focused on helping others, the right way to monetize will reveal itself naturally.

This approach is both freeing and, honestly, a little scary. On insecure days, I catch myself worrying about money — wondering if I should be thinking about it more. But once my head clears, I always return to the same conclusion: the creative process has to come first.

So I’m giving myself until at least June 2026 to focus fully on the writing — without worrying about monetization.

We’ll see. Time will tell if that choice was wise.

That’s a Wrap (For Now)

Sheesh — that took longer than I expected. But I had fun writing it, and I hope you found something valuable in it too.

Now, I could use your help to make the next report even better.

Is there anything you’d like me to include next time — maybe more details about the tech stack I’m using, its costs, or something else entirely? Anything you’d like me to dive deeper into, or drop altogether?

Another great way to guide me is through your questions. If there’s anything you’re curious about, just hit reply and ask.

Whatever thoughts you have, your feedback is invaluable in shaping future reports.

Thanks for reading all the way through — I’ll see you next week with a new essay.

Gianni

P.S. If you haven’t seen my emails in your inbox lately, please let me know. It’ll help me troubleshoot the deliverability issue I mentioned earlier.