You know what I mean. The well-curated LinkedIn post, the vacation photo with the perfect sunset, the career update that sounds like everything is falling into place. We scroll and scroll and see people announcing promotions, side hustles, new houses, and somehow always looking fresh while doing it.

And even when we know it’s just the highlight reel, it still gets to us. Because if everyone else seems to be thriving, then what does that say about me, sitting here in sweatpants eating Trader Joe’s frozen gnocchi for the third night in a row?

The truth is, nobody has it all together. Not really.

Behind every “exciting update” is usually a mess of stress, doubts, and late-night Google searches about whether or not you’re ruining your life. That friend who looks like they’re crushing it at work? They’re secretly debating if they should quit and move somewhere quieter. That couple who always posts cute photos? They fought in the car right before taking it. The person who seems effortlessly productive? They probably have three unanswered texts from their mom sitting on read.

I’m not saying this to be cynical. I’m saying it because it’s comforting to remember. The myth of having it all together is just that: a myth. Nobody is doing it as perfectly as they look online.

We’re all playing catch up

I used to think I was the only one dropping the ball. I’d see friends running marathons or announcing a new certification, and meanwhile, my big accomplishment for the week was finally sending an email that had been sitting in my drafts for three days.

But when you actually talk to people, you start to realize almost everyone feels behind. Almost everyone is quietly comparing themselves. Almost everyone has that one part of their life that feels like it’s barely holding on.

It’s just that nobody posts about this.

The whole idea of having it all together is flawed

Sometimes I think about what “having it all together” even means. Is it about money? Career? A spotless home? A thriving social life? Because honestly, I’ve never met anyone who has all of those things at once. If you’re crushing it in your career, maybe your personal life is stretched thin. If you’ve got a full social calendar, maybe your bank account feels a little tight.

Maybe the whole idea is flawed from the start. Life isn’t about checking every box at the same time. It’s more like juggling, and you’re always dropping one ball while catching another.

And maybe that’s okay.

Being real >

The older I get, the more I realize the real win is just showing up for your life as it is. Eating the leftovers. Letting the texts wait a day. Admitting you don’t have all the answers.

Because honestly? The people who matter don’t need you to have it all together. They just need you to be real with them. To say, “hey, today was a lot” or “no, I didn’t get that thing done.” That’s the kind of honesty that makes other people exhale and say, “me too.”

And I think we could all use more of that.

So if you’ve been feeling like you’re the only one fumbling while everyone else is thriving, here’s your reminder: you’re not. We’re all just doing our best, in our own messy, imperfect ways.

Some days, that looks like a promotion or a big win. Other days, it looks like surviving on coffee and leftover pasta.

Nobody has it all together. And maybe that’s the point.

Thank you for reading,
Max

As I’ve previously written, I don’t believe in giving advice. None of what follows is advice. It is simply a slice-of-life of how I personally use LLMs. Many people out there likely have different opinions and other ways they use LLMs. Great! Please let me know in the comments. 🙂

What works

This year I’ve successfully used LLMs:

1. To build and follow a diet - exactly what to buy and eat, and when?

2. To auto-title my Bluesky posts for my personal website (à la POSSE)

3. Any task I’m looking to do which is in-distribution. ie. any task that has a single correct answer and a common way of completion (eg. coding) is a prime candidate for LLMs. How to implement drag-and-drop? How to write REST endpoints that write and read payloads to and from a markdown files on disk? etc.

4. Additionally, LLMs have helped tremendously in helping me learn new technologies. eg. The old way I used to code: hunt around on Stack Overflow or Google until I found a good quick start example. I’d then adopt and appropriate the relevant parts of the example toward my own ends until I could Frankenstein something together that achieved my goals. The end result wasn’t always pretty, but it worked. This is how I’d learned Flash ActionScript, MySQL, and PHP back in the day. Countless hours sunk using this learning pattern.
   
   Now instead of spending hours scouring the internet for a kind soul’s random “how to guide” I simply turn to Copilot and ask it to generate a quick start for me. I then learn whatever I’m trying to learn in a throw-away sandbox apart from my main project. Then once I have a bare minimum understanding, I’ll cherry pick the salient parts I want over back to my main project.
   
   (As a side note: this way of learning does have issues because though my learning velocity is much faster now, I’m often working at the very edge —and sometimes, even beyond— my actual understanding of what I’m doing. So the moment I hit a bug that the LLM can’t solve, I’m screwed, because I don’t actually know what I’m doing. Eg. This past summer I was using Gemini to write some Chrome Dev Protocol scripts and everything was working great… until I got this memory leak error:

1. I’d tried to get multiple LLMs to fix it but they were all clueless so eventually I just wrote logic that restarted the instance every time this memory leak happened. Luckily, I was just working on a quick and dirty script so the stakes were low. But it does make me shudder when I wonder if people are releasing LLM-generated code they don’t understand that’s held together with duct tape into PROD? 🤔 That’d be insane if people are doing that; hopefully no one’s doing that.)

What sucks

One big challenge is LLMs are epistemologically unsound. Meaning, the kind of answers they give you are both non-deterministic and will also differ based on all of the previous conversations you’ve already had with it. (At least, that’s been my experience with ChatGPT.)

So for example: back in September after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, given the sudden spate of nationwide violence, I was wondering if people who’d recently perpetrated political violence in the US were young compared to historical norms. Thomas Matthew Crooks was 20, Luigi Mangione was 27, and Tyler Robinson was 22. These ages felt young to me and in my head, I had begun to hypothesize that thanks to the internet —which lionizes “literally just do things” and valorizes being “high-agency”— that young people were increasingly internalizing these messages in a destructive way. This is another common way I use LLMs: to sanity-check certain nascent worldviews or theories I am developing in my head about the world we live in.

As good epistemic hygiene, I will also often text my queries to my best friend who’ll then also run the same query through his ChatGPT instance. We both subscribe to ChatGPT Plus but he’s much more liberal than I am so he has a significantly different conversation history. Well, it’s a good thing I checked!

His ChatGPT response gave him a “maybe” while I got a straight-up “yes” response. We dug into the answers and found that in my response, my ChatGPT had included a specific study from Maryland that his had not and that’s why we’d received different answers:

This sucks because it means the answers that ChatGPT currently gives for something you’d think is singularly objective like trend analysis —even though may possess the veneer of accuracy and well-researched legitimacy— are basically just potentially made-up. 😠 I’d thought a simple analysis question like this was unequivocally objective with a single correct answer. But it turns out ChatGPT just cherry pick facts and gives different answers to different people, thus further fracturing reality and destroying any common semblance of shared truth that we as a populace have left.

What I wish existed

So I luckily have a best friend but it’d be nice to not have to bother him whenever I wanted to verify whether the great super-intelligence in the sky trained on all of humanity’s collective knowledge is lying to me. Thus, it’d be nice if someone put a layer on top of all the LLMs so they verified their answers with each other before I get the final output. Specifically, I’ve noticed that American and Chinese LLMs like to give different answers too, which makes sense, since LLMs essentially encode a nation’s culture and values into it. eg:

LLMs are amazing but there are still a few rough edges we need to solve to prevent them from unnecessarily fragmenting reality for all of humanity. I have no doubt we’ll figure it out though! 🥳

Transforming an idea into a reality unlocked something powerful for me the first time it happened; I realized I could do it again and again and again. And the only difference after the first attempt would be money and experience, not my ability to believe in myself or whatever is trending on social media. If you’re reading this, you’re probably curious about when the journey of building gets sweeter. When the challenges start to feel like champagne problems instead of huge obstacles. So this article is for you.

The creator getting it out of the mud. The one who didn’t inherit a LinkedIn network or a trust fund. The one who sees and hears the seemingly endless symphony of: “There has to be a better way.” There is. And it starts with throwing out the hustle bro playbook entirely. You can’t trade just one aspect of your life for one aspect of someone else’s, you must commit to completely redefining what success looks like for you and your journey. Your concept of success will likely change over time, so let’s focus on what the rest of the year looks like.

I’m not under any illusions about what I’m asking you to do. The “Great Lock In” sounds cool in a social media post, but may require us to practice a version of productivity that is much less pretty and polished (Slow Productivity) in the process of dealing with the very real emotional toll many of us may be feeling in this very moment (myself included). It won’t be sexy, it won’t be flashy, but the progress will be real.

Career confusion is a luxury problem. People from less privileged backgrounds don’t always have the option to be confused; they need a job immediately. The ability to seek meaning in work is itself a privilege. It’s worth using wisely.

— Alex McCann

Creativity, duct tape, and dreams

What if—and hear me out—you created less but better? What if you stopped trying to be everywhere and focused on being somewhere that matters? The hustle culture industrial complex (I just made that name up, and I’m standing by it) wants you chronically online, perpetually productive, and permanently exhausted. The algorithm rewards quantity, but life rewards quality.

In order to achieve one of my big goals by the end of the year, I had to be honest with myself about what my capacity was. I’ve been deeply inspired by Simon O’s book, Energize, where he talks about understanding your natural energy cycles. I’m taking my own advice here. I’m pulling back on my podcast production to focus on writing, growing, and monetizing my newsletters. Any videos and films created in pursuit of that goal are secondary. It hurts; but I know that streamlining my focus doesn’t equate to accomplishing less.

When it comes to productivity, energy really is everything. You will notice that those who have high energy can get more done in days or weeks than many will get accomplished in months or even years.

— Simon Alexander Ong

Notice when your energy peaks and protect those hours like they’re made of gold—because creatively, they are. For some, it’s the quiet pre-dawn. For others like me, it’s the midnight witching hour when the world sleeps and ideas come to life. Track your natural creative cycles for two weeks. When do ideas flow? When does editing feel effortless? When do you solve problems that stumped you for days? Build your creation schedule around these patterns, not someone else’s “morning routine” gospel. Normalize rest periods. Fields need to rest to produce crops. So do brains. Nature doesn’t bloom year-round, and neither should you. The pressure to produce constantly isn’t just unrealistic—it’s unnatural.

In the economy of attention, mediocrity is bankruptcy. Social media algorithms change weekly. Quality endures for decades. While everyone else is focused on hacking algorithms, build craftsmanship instead. Quality isn’t just about the final product—it’s about quality thinking, quality research, quality relationships, and quality execution. It’s a practice, not just an outcome.

Make one thing so good people can’t stop thinking about it. Then make another. Repeat until you’ve built a body of work that speaks for itself.

— Shaan Puri

The world doesn’t need more content for content’s sake. It needs more creators who care deeply about what they make (that rhymed, you’re welcome). It needs you, operating at your highest level, not spread thin across platforms and purposes. So the secret sauce you’ve been looking for that makes everything easier? Doing less better, working at your natural rhythm, and obsessing over quality. Your creativity is the duct tape that holds your dreams together.

Writing is an art.

To me, thereʼs no denying that.

But in the past few years, with the explosion of short-form writing on Twitter, LinkedIn, and even newsletters, writing has become something else entirely: a growth lever to be hacked.

So let me plead with you: stop writing everything like a growth marketer.

Write like an artist.

Iʼm Pete, a 28-year-old “artistˮ living in New York. I put artist in quotes because for a long time I wasnʼt sure if I fit the label.

Three years ago I quit my cushy consulting job to explore the idea of turning personal data into artwork. Think: a piece of art on your wall that changes with the weather or every time you go for a run.

Along the way, Iʼve called myself a founder, a consumer app developer, an engineer. None of those quite fit. Over the past year, Iʼve finally settled into the identity of an artist.

A little over a year ago, I started publishing a short piece of writing every Monday. Iʼve written and published to Substack for 63 weeks straight. I thought it would grow my audience and help me make the jump into short-form content.

Spoilers: it didnʼt. Well, not in the way I hoped, anyway.

But what it did do was show me something important: I hated writing for growth, and I loved writing to write.

Choose Curiosity Over Consumption

So what does writing like an artist actually mean?

For me, it means treating writing the same way I treat my art: not as content to be consumed, but as an idea to be explored. It means following my curiosities, even when they donʼt fit into a neat growth framework or some trending topic.

Every time I chased a trend, the writing was flat. I tried writing about the influence of AI during peak “did A.I. write this?ˮ discourse, and no one cared at all. It was just another take on the take wheel. Hereʼs that garbage piece.

But when I dug into something I was genuinely obsessed with, people connected with it. My dad would send me an email, a friend would shoot me a text, a stranger would reach out and say a piece inspired them. My most engaged piece? How I canʼt talk to my girlfriendʼs grandma.

Itʼs worth remembering that art, whether on a canvas or on the page, is ultimately about conversation.

From Content to Conversation

Too often, creators treat their work as something to be consumed. Write a post, hit publish, watch the clicks roll in. But the most powerful moments donʼt come from passive consumption. They come when you create space for people to gather around the work, connect with it, and start a dialogue. Thatʼs what feeds both you and your audience.

I learned that lesson most viscerally last month, when I held my first gallery after years of tinkering and sharing only on the internet. For the first time, people could actually see my work. They touched it. They asked questions. They lingered in front of it and heard me give my spiel.

And what struck me most wasnʼt just that I was energized by them. It was that they were energized by each other. The room filled with curiosity. People brought their own ideas and perspectives Iʼd never considered. The work became bigger than me.

Thatʼs the part writers often forget. Live events, gatherings, workshops, they donʼt just grow your audience. They turn your work into a shared conversation. And in that space, everybody walks away with more energy than they came in with.

My Invitation to You

Of course, all writing has its place. Growth tactics, promotional posts, SEO-friendly pieces — they serve their purpose. But theyʼre not strictly necessary. And if thatʼs all you do, you risk missing the point and, most importantly, the magic of writing.

Because the most enduring writing doesnʼt just fill some arbitrary content calendar. It sparks conversation and curiosity.

So if you want to grow as a writer, hereʼs my advice: stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like an artist.

Choose curiosity over growth. Treat writing as conversation, not content. Donʼt just publish into the void, put yourself in the room. Start the dialogue. Let people bump into your work.

Stop asking how to grow faster, and start asking whatʼs genuinely worth exploring.

Thatʼs the work people want to gather around. Make the space for them to gather, and the conversation will take care of itself.

At 6AM, I’d put on my school uniform while CNN anchors broke news about global markets and political scandals.

It was a strange contrast: the world felt like it was always on fire on the TV, while I was buttoning my shirt and packing my books. My mom would glance at the screen and say, “Imagine you being like that one day. This is Becky Isjwara, reporting live from Jakarta.” In that moment, it seemed like the future was secure: CNN would always be there, and maybe one day I would too. The irony, of course, is that by the time I entered journalism, that industry was already collapsing.

Like Robin from How I Met Your Mother, I started with the not-so-glam roles in reporting: interviewing knowledge workers in finance, typing out words behind a screen instead of having a glam team prep me for a 5AM broadcast. But somewhere between my nth scoop and pretending to care about compliance messaging software (as thrilling as it sounds), I realized a disconnect. The content I produced at work wasn’t the content I consumed after hours. Instead of CNN or The Wall Street Journal, I got my news fix from podcasts—Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway’s Pivot basically became my newspaper for half a decade.

(This mirrored reality. Many TV producers go home to binge Netflix instead of their own network.)

So like any confused sophomore, I dropped out. Instead of sticking it out in a newsroom, I launched a Substack. And oddly enough, I think I’m economically better off for it.

The Shift in Media

I wasn’t blazing trails. I was just following the journalists who were entrepreneurial before me. Kara Swisher, in particular, has always been my north star.

There is no denying that media consumption has shifted dramatically. Very few of us log into news sites anymore. We learn about politics on podcasts, get travel tips from TikTok, and watch explainers on YouTube. Fifty years ago, newspapers were the platform du jour. Today, content creators fill that role.

And when attention shifts, money follows. The average CNN show gets about 92,000 viewers, versus 400,000 for each Pivot episode. Advertisers have been redirecting dollars from newsrooms to creators. Meanwhile, traditional newsrooms are wilting to a slow death. I had been spared from a few layoffs while I was still a journalist, but I had always wanted to leave before I got on the chopping block.

Journalists Who Jumped Ship

In case you need more convincing, plenty of journalists have already made the leap, risking their probably pretty paychecks for a more adventurous income stream:

• Derek Thompson runs a Substack alongside his Atlantic work.

• Becca Farsace does YouTube tech reviews the way Walt Mossberg once did for The Wall Street Journal.

• Johnny Harris makes investigative YouTube videos for millions.

• Casey Newton runs Platformer, a lean, independent newsletter.

• Even non-traditional voices like Kyla Scanlon have built credibility from scratch—TikTok first, then Substack—without the need to be invited to a TV segment.

They’re proof you don’t need a masthead to make money, impact, or both.

The Newsroom Advantage

Of course, this isn’t a simple story of triumph. Traditional newsrooms still offer real advantages: editorial oversight, fact-checking teams, legal protection (very important!!), and the institutional credibility that freelancers can struggle to match. Independent creators, meanwhile, face risks of income instability, algorithmic dependence, and the temptation to trade rigour for virality. Going solo also means bearing the full weight of production, distribution, and monetization—jobs that used to be spread across entire departments.

And there’s the question of investigative journalism—the part of the profession that made traditional reporting so compelling in the first place. Think of war correspondents or the Pulitzer-winning exposés like Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein. That kind of work is expensive, slow, and hard to balance with the day-to-day grind of algorithm-driven posting. For decades, newsrooms could fund these long investigations with bread-and-butter beats like sports, business, or entertainment. Without a diverse newsroom to cross-subsidise, stories that deserve to be told often struggle to find oxygen. One risk of a creator-led future is the slow death of local reporting and public-interest investigations. Unless a story has the potential to go viral, it risks being invisible.

These risks are worth naming, because they keep the playing field uneven. But the gravitational pull of money, audience trust, and autonomy has shifted too strongly to ignore. Even with the safety nets of legacy media, more and more journalists are concluding that the rewards of independence outweigh the comforts of the corporations.

Why the Creator Path Wins

The most obvious advantage for journalists to treat themselves like content creators is economic. When you own your distribution, the money follows you instead of your employer. Sponsorships, partnerships, and subscriptions are far easier to land when the audience is attached to your name rather than a masthead. Platforms like Substack now have 5 million paid subscriptions globally.

There’s also the relationship factor. People swipe away banner ads or fast-forward through TV spots, but I’ll lean in when a podcaster or YouTuber I trust recommends a protein supplement. That intimacy creates a deeper connection between journalist-creators and their audiences, one that advertisers are willing to pay a premium to access.

The gatekeepers that once controlled who could publish are largely gone too. Platforms like Substack, YouTube, and LinkedIn make publishing free and direct. The people who subscribe, watch, or read are loyal to you, not the newsroom that used to employ you.

On top of that, there’s ownership. Everything you create belongs to you, which means you can repurpose it across formats, re-use it for future projects, or monetise it in ways a traditional newsroom contract would never allow.

And perhaps the biggest shift of all is leverage. When you control both your content and your audience, you’re no longer dependent on the whims of an editor-in-chief or a shrinking newsroom budget. Instead, you hold the bargaining chips—whether that’s for advertising, sponsorships, or entirely new ventures down the line.

The old aspiration was to work for a newsroom. Today, the smarter play might be to think like a content creator. Because when you own your content and your audience, you effectively own your future.

And sorry Mom, I never did make it to CNN. But I’ve got myself a job in the creator space earning a multiple of my reporter salary. And this time, there’s no editor killing my stories.

My favorite quote from the piece

All you have to do is just be 5% better than everyone else who's really bad at it. You don't have to get everything perfect… you just have to be a little bit better so you can survive the war of attrition.

It’s a critical reminder that consistency and small improvements over a long period of time are key to the success you crave.

Hope you enjoy.

— Daniel

When I started blogging about music in 2001, it was just for my little corner of the world. I was playing in bands, going to shows around PA and NJ, and noticing that the bigger music sites weren’t covering any of it. So I bought a domain name and started writing about my friends every day. That’s how this all started. I knew what I was talking about, I knew who might read it, and that’s how I’ve worked ever since.

At first, I wrote very plainly—“just the facts, ma’am,” I’d tell myself. It kept me out of “trouble,” but wow, was it boring.

Over time, I got good at digging through small-market newspaper sites, pulling quotes from band interviews, and building posts around them.

Bands told all kinds of wild stories, but this was pre-social media, so those soundbites didn’t travel the way they do now.

In 2006, I added the blog to my resume on Monster.com and landed a three-month contract at AOL Music, writing blurbs for the homepage that millions of people saw every day. I remember making a typo in one of those blurbs and getting a stern talking-to from the editor-in-chief. After he walked away, a coworker leaned over and said, “Geez, we’re not saving lives.” I’ve carried that wisdom with me ever since.

Two years later, I launched a metal blog for AOL Music called Noisecreep. I got to hire a staff, do bigger features—like following Bring Me the Horizon around Times Square—and meet my metal heroes (Rob Halford is as nice as you’d hope).

Unfortunately, that was when SEO and social media collided. Growth at all costs. Suddenly we were publishing 20+ posts a day with half the budget. I burned out hard and never went back.

When I left, I knew I wanted to get back to making readers feel something or learn something. If you feel something, it sticks. If you learn something, you walk away smarter. Everyone wins.

So I started Skull Toaster in 2011, writing metal trivia questions on Twitter. I’d phrase each question to spark curiosity. Like this one from Friday, August 17, 2018:

Happy Birthday to guitarist Gilby Clarke.

In the early ’90s he replaced ____ in Guns N’ Roses.

Even if you didn’t know the answer, you at least learned that Gilby Clarke’s birthday is August 17 (answer: Izzy Stradlin).

I posted over 2,000 questions and sent more than 1,000 nightly email newsletters with the answers, Monday through Friday. Each one was like a mini blog post, breaking down the band, the era, the album. That project kept me afloat—spiritually, at least—during some lean years.

It gave me purpose. Kept me learning. Kept me writing.

My buddy Sean Cannon—who came on board to help with my blog back in 2005 and later worked with me on Noisecreep—once said, “All you have to do is just be 5% better than everyone else who’s really bad at it. You don’t have to get everything perfect… you just have to be a little bit better so you can survive the war of attrition.” Sean went on to win a Peabody for developing The Pope’s Long Con with Louisville Public Media. He never stopped. He just kept surviving.

You don’t have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun your friends.

I got my blog up and running again in 2018 (sethw.xyz) and started backfilling it with photos and other odds and ends dating back to 2004. I launched my newsletter in 2021 on Substack, and now I update my Social Media Escape Club site almost every day with something.

I write 500 words and sometimes delete them, just re-write it from scratch. I keep quotes and ideas and tuck them away into WordPress drafts and come back to them later. I write in spurts, between YouTube videos or playing with my cat. I dictate thoughts and ideas and never go back to them, knowing full well its still effective because I had those thoughts and said those ideas out loud - they don’t disappear.

For me, staying in the game is winning, and winning just means I get to play again tomorrow. I just never stopped writing for my little corner of the world.

However, the path to being successful at something is not as exclusive as it might appear. All of us are capable of being great at something and defining success on our own terms. The key ingredient here is intrinsic motivation.

Understanding Intrinsic Motivation

When we look around and observe people who have achieved something meaningful that we also strive towards, the classic iceberg principle applies. What we see on the surface hides something larger and deeper that we don’t see:

What we don’t see is the grind, the hard work, consistency, persistence, and the 10,000-ish hours of deliberate practice - which, for those of us keeping score, is around 417 days of non-stop focused work without any time devoted to sleeping, eating, life-ing, and other essential downtimes:

Intrinsic motivation is the unlimited fuel for this grind.

Unlike extrinsic motivation, which relies on external factors that we often can’t control like rewards or recognition, intrinsic motivation is fueled by personal passion, curiosity, and the sheer joy of the task itself. It's the desire to do something because it's deeply satisfying and meaningful.

Recalibrating Success

What intrinsic motivation generates is a love for the process involved in making progress toward a goal:

When you start to love the process, external validation doesn’t matter anymore. You have your reasons for doing something. If you also happen to see external success, that is a side effect. It isn’t your destination.

This is why many successful people never stop after reaching what seems like a great destination. Their inner momentum keeps them going.

To look at this play out in a few notable examples...

MrBeast started making videos over a decade ago when he was 13. Many of his earliest videos hardly had any views. He never gave up, especially in the early years. He kept making videos and improving one small thing with each new posting - a different narrative style, a new thumbnail design, etc.

A decade later, this persistence (unsurprisingly) paid off:

Joe Rogan may be a household name today, but he started podcasting in 2009. Few people listened to him for the first few years. He was just having fun chatting with his friends in a public forum and tweaking his formula.

The much-talked-about Spotify deal didn’t happen until 2015, well after thousands of episodes had already been aired. If Joe had started out with the singular goal of signing a major distribution deal, the chances of him persisting for years with little outward validation would be low.

Mike Winkelmann, more commonly known as beeple, is very well known today as a successful artist and for selling one of the most expensive NFTs. Prior to that, he was known for publishing a work of art online every day for over 14 years. Yes, 14 years...every single day.

He didn’t do this to get instant fame. He did this to get better at using various design tools. His consistency over this long period of time helped him be at the right place at the right time to capitalize on the growing crypto-influenced art movement.

The list of people to cover here is endless, and they all don’t have to be famous household names. Successful people who have achieved greatness in a particular domain are all around us.

If we dig deeper into what helped them be successful, there is something we’ll see in common with all of them: they all shared a desire to be better today than they were yesterday. This desire is fueled by an intrinsic motivation that isn’t deterred by what does or doesn’t happen externally.

Cheers,

—

— Daniel

AI is here, but most people have been talking about it and not experimenting with it enough. I'll deploy my favorite quote: "Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody want to lift no heavy ass weights".

These tools are amazing and worth talking about, but you won't be able to understand what they mean for your business, your productivity, and the productivity of your employees until you start doing some heavy lifting yourself.

First, relax. AI is Not Inherently Evil or Dangerous

Drawing parallels to Sci-Fi renditions is tempting but largely inaccurate. A machine doesn't have motivations, desires, or intent; it reflects what we teach it. AI is a tool—like a hammer or a pencil—and its function depends on its user.

For a more detailed analysis, consider delving into Turing Award Winner Yann LeCun's perspective if you need to hear more on this.

What Mamma Don't Know Don't Hurt Her.

Reliably Detecting AI is Currently Impossible, And Likely to Stay That Way

There is no reliable AI detector, and there probably will never be one.

Read more:

• Detecting the Secret Cyborgs

• Arxiv

• LinkedIn Article

• Stefan Bauschard's Analysis

Blanket AI Bans are Impractical and Stifle Innovation

If there is no reliable AI detector, any attempt at regulating or banning it is futile.

• AI has a myriad of benevolent applications.

• Your competitors might harness its power—officially or not.

• The same goes for your customers and employees. Banning a tool doesn't negate its existence or potential usage outside your purview.

Focus on Your Core Competencies, Not Just Tools

Consider LegalZoom. At a glance, they seem centered on contract templates. But AI, given its prowess, can efficiently draft contracts.

For LegalZoom to remain relevant, they must pivot.

Thus, they're evolving into an attorney referral platform—akin to an Upwork for legal professionals. This seems to be exactly what they are doing.

Run Experiments to Find AI's Best Applications

Your life and business are probably not impacted as straightforwardly by AI as LegalZoom's. You need to experiment and approach AI adoption methodically and incrementally to find out where you are impacted most:

• Scrutinize tasks: Which of them can AI do more efficiently?

• Turn the lens inward: What's on your desk that AI could handle better?

• Foster a culture of innovation. Incentivize employees and friends to explore and experiment.

Everyone can do R&D

Reflect for a moment on some sage advice from my Wharton professor:

People keep asking me which companies they should emulate in adopting LLMs. No large organization has figured this out - ChatGPT is less than a year old!

I believe that the best approach is to make as much of your company a R&D lab as possible. Use will be discovered through use.

That means HR now does R&D. Learning and development does R&D.

Sales and marketing does R&D.

Don’t leave this to traditional research groups or IT departments alone.

—

Fin

If AI can be a tool for good, if it cannot be detected and therefore regulated, you have to be using it. It's like using contacts to improve your vision, no one will notice, and you are only hurting yourself by not putting them in.

Many people I talk to seem to have moral hangups about using it, but they haven't even spent time with the tools to better understand them. I beg of you to allow yourself, your employees, and your friends to become unstoppable yourself.

AI isn't magic but it feels like it when we use it well, just like any technology does. Embrace it and try and understand it. You'll be happy you did.

—

I hope you enjoy this piece.

— DKH

I’ve loved many times in my life.

Deeply, exquisitely, painfully.

My first love was sound.

It bloomed through the vibrations of my mother’s laughter, the colors of a symphony, and the soft and hard contours of language.

I knew the different pitches in the barks of the neighbor’s dog, the snap of sizzling oil when my mother made my favorite meal, the alarming slam of the car door when my father came home.  

I understood life through sound and learned terror through its absence.

The first lesson my parents taught me was the absoluteness of silence.

I was never to speak of what happened within our walls. Uttering aloud what was solely meant for family would bring dishonor and shame to our name.

I felt it. Always.

The silence of the unspoken rattling against my chest, asking for release. 

But fear kept it firmly in check. Instead, I retreated deeper within and found solace at the piano.

Music became my voice. I uncovered it in the tender yearning of a cadence and the shimmer of harmonies.

My father’s fingers, curled tight into meaty fists, pounded out his own kind of music, a terrifying dissonance that produced nightmares, kept my mother pale and distant, and made my brother cry in dark corners.

Each time I played, I reminded myself that my hands were different.

My fingers stroked and leaped across the keys, cajoling the instrument to breathe life into sound, to create not destroy.

What emerged from the piano was both me and not me.

Who I was filtered through another’s language: the purity of Bach, the restlessness of Schumann, the poetic melancholy of Chopin, the torrential passion of Liszt and Rachmaninoff. 

Home became the piano bench, hiding behind the keys, cocooned in the safety of being alone on stage. Untouchable.

Music gently accepted me, enveloping me in unconditional love even as the internal silence threatened to drown me.

—-----------

I fell in love with ideas.

It awakened in the differing perspectives challenging me in new ways, the eager student-led discussions on how to create impact, the unrelenting promise of a city overflowing with the clashing exhilaration of life. 

I met him that first year in college. 

Charismatic and elegant, he possessed a commanding energy - an electrifying way of focusing and connecting to others - that immediately drew me in.

An engineering major and the lead singer of an up-and-coming band, he came from a well-known family in upstate New York and embodied the image of the perfect Ivy Leaguer: good-looking, confident, promising, wealthy, and popular. 

At the beginning, we often joked about the intersection of our worlds: classical musician and rocker, artist and logician. I’d practice Tchaikovsky at the piano while he wrote a song on his guitar. 

We both did and did not make sense, a reverie glittering on centerstage under the thrilling bright lights of the city.

There were signs and actions that drew the concern of those around me. 

But I had fallen in love with the idea of us - on performing the expected image of us - and it hadn’t occurred to me that his charisma served to manipulate or that his charm deceptively masked a bottomless, violent rage.  

That was the year I clung to the delusion of perceived independence and the kernel of awakening adult sexual power even as it came at the expense of my identity. 

Each time he lost control, each time cruelty suffocated me in its grip, I tried to speak, to move my mouth and articulate my pain and need, to ask for help in the same way I spoke about ideas in academic discussions and media interviews, in professional arenas and for causes I believed in.

But the words stuck in my chest. My throat closed, blocking off the pathway, unwilling to give birth.

Bringing those words to life was more terrifying than his outbursts, a beast I could not release.

Instead, I disconnected from the tangled clamor inside and sealed my emotions within a cage of numb composure. 

I used my voice to soothe and placate, to apologize and excuse and cheerfully feign ignorance.

At least, I thought it was my voice. 

Maybe it was the voice of my mother, softly speaking to my father with quivering lips.

Or that of my brother, desperate for affection and pretending nothing was wrong.

All I knew was that the disembodied voice floating out of my mouth had the power to calm him, assuage his anger, ensure my physical safety, and keep the idea of who we were supposed to be in order.

And that was enough. 

Enough to almost believe the dark disquiet I pushed down within me would still.

—--------------

I fell in love with words.

It deepened with the satisfaction of form and structure, the broad shades of meaning, and the sheer pleasure unearthed in the richly imbued worlds of Poe, Marquez, Morrison, Mann, and Kundera.

Unlike my marriage to music, writing was a guilty pleasure, a secret, torrid love affair freeing me to explore my fantasies without judgment.

I hid behind a pen name and my words on the page, reveling in the fluid nuances of a phrase, delving into the depths of curiosity from the sanctuary of my laptop. 

I obsessively wrote novels, novellas, and short creative works, the ideas pouring out of me as if a dam had cracked open somewhere in my mind.

Strong, bold, deeply flawed women protagonists led every story, their identities shaping the world rather than the world shaping them.

Nothing constrained me in this realm. I was both creator and audience, building narratives that pushed boundaries and satisfied my needs.

Here, I could examine fear, love, neglect, and yearning through the distance of an intellectual lens. 

Here, I could take risks without fear of retribution. Here, I could vanquish the villain.

Here, my characters said what I could not, their worlds rippling, breaking apart, and healing back together in ways I could not control in my own life.

After publication, I delighted in the voices of readers, the boisterous noise as they added insights and new layers to my constructed, imagined worlds. 

I remained everywhere and nowhere - an anonymous, guarded being ensconced behind words and the voices of others. 

After all, it was the story, not me.

That mirage of creative freedom provided escape from the deafening silence now carefully tucked away and locked up tight.

—-------------------

I fell in love with the sword of justice. 

It burned within the adrenaline of battle and in the hopeful promise of change.  

In 4th grade, a group of three 6th graders mercilessly bullied a classmate.

It suddenly started one day for no other reason than out of boredom. 

Charlie had an air of fragility around him, a sad sensitivity reflected in dark eyes set within a sharp, angular face. 

Every day, the bullies delighted in chasing him after school, taunting him for his physical frailty and unkempt appearance. 

The rest of our class watched from a distance while the unspoken rattled against my chest.

Charlie ran fast and always escaped the hands of his tormentors, his gangly limbs dancing across the playground. 

I wondered how he’d learned to move with such swift nimbleness and if he also had secrets at home he couldn’t tell.

But one day, Charlie wasn’t fast enough.

The boys grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him to the ground. They managed a few kicks before Charlie rolled, leaped up, and darted out of their way. 

He raced to the tall fence bordering the field and shimmied up the post, arms wrapped tight around metal, angular face pale in the bright sunlight.

His skinny frame became my brother’s tiny form curled in fetal position, arms protecting his head from my father’s blows. 

His hands became my mother’s thin hands, clawing at the door, desperate to flee my father’s fury.

The unspoken roared, its screams hammering against my ears and drowning the world in helpless grief until it ripped three words from my throat.

“Leave Charlie alone!”

The silence had finally spoken. Not for me, but for another.

And for one perfect moment, the rattling within settled.

The boys pushed my scrawny nine-year-old self to the ground, leaving behind bruises and scrapes but there was no pain.

There is no fear with what you already know.

The next week, I stood in front of my mother and brother before my father’s fists, daring him to strike, knowing he couldn’t because I had upcoming concerts and too many eyes on me.

An unexpressed promise formed between us that day.

I would keep his secrets, the silence that bound all of us in that house. 

And he could no longer hide from himself or from me. 

I had discovered a new kind of power, one that allowed me to speak without speaking.

Over the years, that raw nine-year-old voice strengthened, every repressed emotion transmuting and bursting through in the form of protective avenger.

I learned how to hone my blade, sharpening its edge to eviscerate with razor-sharp precision. 

From navigating the cutthroat ambitions of the music industry, to the calculated politics of the boardroom, to stages in front of the judgment of thousands, I turned my affinity for words into a symbolic weapon, using it to both rally others together and ruthlessly draw blood from perceived threats.

I wielded my sword against anyone who seized the voices of others: the men undermining women, the bigots preying upon the marginalized, those hurting and harming the people I love, those abusing power to oppress the powerless.

Armored like a tank and invulnerable within the realm of abstract principles and ideals, I said everything others could not or would not, willingly taking any hits that came my way.

As long as I shielded the pain for others, I could deny the reality of my own.

As long as I used my voice for advocacy, I could distract myself from speaking my own truth, fueled by the conviction that what I did for others was of greater importance and significance.

Yet, the caged silence still trembled.

And I often wondered when someone would notice and deem it worthy enough to unsheath their own blade to protect and free it.

—----

As I write this, I am in my New York apartment. A grey drizzle has blanketed the city in a fine mist and the chill reminds me that it’ll soon be time for coat weather.

Change is upon us again.

I look back on those periods of my life and consider how much of my art, language, and choices were mine and how much of it belonged or were in reaction to others.

Perhaps it is all and none at the same time.

An individual voice is easily heard in isolated silence, but can only be shaped and forged within the context of other voices.

The how and why of our expression could not exist without those who tried to suppress, influence, or control it, without refracting through the prism of our experiences. 

Self-understanding ultimately emerges through this paradox, the contradictory tension erupting from the push-pull of who we were and who we have yet to be.

I’ve loved many times in my life.

Deeply, exquisitely, painfully.

And yet, I hadn’t dared to risk falling for the one person whom I had never been able to accept, forgive, or acknowledge as worthy enough.

Because this love requires shedding costumes and armor, relinquishing control and fear, and leaving the refuge of invulnerability to surrender to our humanity.

To be human means to be scarred memory and untouched imagination, bounded mortality and ceaseless possibility, bleeding disbelief and renewed longing. 

The deepest connection we seek and yearn for is not with another.

It is with who we are.

It may have taken a lifetime of loves to love myself.

But when I did, I unlocked the cage and the silence finally soared free.

—