*Typing*

People get addicted to going viral. Before they know it, they turn into clowns dancing for the algorithm.

I’ve witnessed dozens of incredibly talented writers, artists, entrepreneurs and creators sacrifice originality for virality.

They try and rationalize their decision by claiming they're growing an audience they can later put deep, meaningful work in front of.

But, this rarely happens.

These creatives take one step into the limelight and transform into clowns, selling their souls to feel its warmth.

It never ends. They jump from trend to trend to trend like a bullfrog who can’t swim. The moment their previous party trick runs out of claps, off they go to hijack another. Before they know it, they’re no longer capable of doing purposeful work because it doesn’t receive the same attention.

That’s the cold, hard truth of the matter. Deep work will never receive the same applause as shallow work.

Not to mention, the audience they’ve built isn’t interested in deep, meaningful work. They didn’t follow the artist. They followed the clown. I can speak candidly on the matter because I’ve been the clown. I’ve been the moron dancing in the limelight. We all have.

It’s fun.
It’s fun until it’s not.
It’s fun until nobody takes you seriously.

You are far better off doing work you believe in for people who believe in it too. You won’t experience the same growth as “the guy with the sign”.

But, you will build a career for yourself that has the legs to run the distance.

Never make a decision out of fear. Wait for the fear to pass. With time, the fear will be replaced with conviction. Make the decision then.

Stop trying so hard to get it all right.

I’m obsessed with biographies. I read them all the time. Something I’ve found that all great men and women have in common is they’re deeply flawed.

They’re idealistic.
They’re impulsive.
They’re impatient.
They’re idiosyncratic.

Steve Jobs wouldn’t bathe. He’d wear the same thing most days. He’d sit with his nose pressed up against a wall for hours at a time. He’d go on diets where he would eat only apples.

Virginia Woolf was hyper sensitive to noise. She’s get horribly paranoid about others reading her drafts. She’d hear voices of birds singing in Greek. She’d only eat bread and milk during long writing binges.

While the pursuit of mastery in a craft isn’t an excuse to be cruel, it requires and ongoing practice in letting perfection go in other pursuits.

It’s not possible for somebody to be great at a thing while simultaneously being great at many other things. And so choosing greatness is at the same time choosing incompetence.

This is liberating. Once you decide the things you’re willing to fail at, life gets so much easier.

And if you ever become famous enough to have a biography written about you—which will likely only happen after you’re dead—it will be the failures, flaws and imperfections that readers most hang onto.

I adore Virginia Wolf’s gorgeous prose but what I’m most fascinated by are those birds who spoke to her in the tongue of Aphrodite.

What did they say to you, Virginia?

People often think of self-awareness as self-improvement. It’s not.

Self-awareness is simply seeing yourself exactly as you are. It’s seeing the good, the bad and the ugly. It’s what inspires you, what scares you and what pisses you off. Once you’ve seen yourself exactly as you are, you can then decide what you want to change. But, this change can only happen after you’ve fully accepted yourself as you are, today, in this moment.

What I don’t like about traditional self-improvement is that it often stems from a place of shame, inadequacy and disappointment. You will put all this effort into changing who you are only to find that once you have changed you aren’t happy with the person you’ve become. When I was in my early twenties, I was always talking about moving.

Somebody much wiser than me said… “Try to be accept where you live now because otherwise you won’t accept where you live tomorrow.” I took it to heart then. I take it to heart now. Try to figure out a way to be happy where you are in life, in work and in self.

If you want to be a writer, read this. 

Start scrolling. It will take you some time to hit the bottom. Most become bored of scrolling and quit. I’ve found the same to be true for writing. 

I write every day. No. I might not publish every day. But, in some form or fashion, I write every day. 

This daily discipline has amounted to thousands and thousands of blog posts (only a fraction of which exist on the blog as you see it today). I delete more writing in a year than most people create over the course of a lifetime. This might sound like gloating—I suppose it is—but please hear me out. 

Something extraordinary happens when you choose to show up each day and commit to your craft. Over time, forces collect around you that are beyond your understanding. Good things happen. You feel stronger physically, sharper mentally and lighter emotionally. You gain a greater respect for yourself (for respect is something you earn by keeping the promises you’ve made to yourself). You find that luck moistens life’s rails, that your creativity becomes a biosphere teeming with ideas and that your work takes on a life of its own. 

Eventually, your daily writings distill themselves down into greater, deeper works. But, you will only make this connection after the fact. And, once you do, it will not matter because you will have come to realize that your time spent writing each day is as natural and necessary as breathing. 

Please just trust me when I say: Write every day.