write whatever you want
don’t get stuck in grand schemes and glorious architectures
write obvious things
start with what’s obvious to you. To some it will be obvious, to others it won’t. News doesn’t stop sharing news even if millions have heard it already, schools are kept open despite every subject already being taught before, you talk to friends about things they already discussed.
generally, people benefit from hearing things that everyone knows. Also, it’s not your responsibility to quantify obviousness, it all falls on the reader.
did you know that American Express is way more accessible than people think? The Gold and the Green cards are free for the first year, then 20€/month or 6,50/€ month. To apply for the Gold, you need a 25K€ salary, an entry-level salary in Italy. The Platinum requires a 45K€ income. Did you know you can easily swap across cards (Green to Gold, Gold to Platinum, Platinum to Gold) and have a sign-up bonus every time? I have been a customer since 2019 and made thousands in bonuses and travel vouchers. Sales agents are paid on sign-up, so it’s a win-win for both. Did you know that you can attach your Amex to PayPal, send money through it to friends, receive it back, withdraw it, make points, and have free cash flow? You could theoretically withdraw 6K€ every month, put it on Trade Republic, and earn 150€ per year on that cash. Did you know that the previous month's statement and the current month's statement overlap? You can fully finance the previous payment with the current one, effectively borrowing at a 0% interest rate, not that I do it…
this is so obvious among my friends, but perhaps it wasn’t for you.
write questions
if you’re not into obvious things, maybe you’re into things you don’t have an answer for. Expand on those doubts and optionally show how you have thought about them, it’s fine if you haven’t. Be very direct with it, like here:
here are some of mine:
the trolley problem (there's a runaway trolley heading toward five people who are tied to the tracks and unable to move. You are standing next to a lever that can divert the trolley to a different track. However, there is one person tied to that other track. Would you pull the lever, actively choosing to kill one person to save five?). Is intentionally causing harm different from causing harm as a side effect, knowing that you will indeed cause the side harm anyway? Is failing to act morally different from taking action? What’s the model that governs our ethical actions?
where does individual sanity break with political leaders? How is it that individually everybody is against war, but then actually war happens anyway? What are the specific social and political dynamics at play? Is there a scenario where soldiers collectively refuse to go to war?
what’s the morning of billionaires? Where do famous people go for breakfast? With so many famous people around the world, why is it that I never bump into them? What’s the day to day of life of amazing artists? Did David Bowie have a private chef?
how is it possible to have a good representation of society in our heads when each of us is in its bubble? How knowledgeable can you be outside of those two, or three bubbles? Are truly many of our organizations operating based on large-sample surveys?
what do animals think when they bump into humans? Do they recognize that there is something different between a beaver building a dam and us building a 100-meter-tall cement structure? Do they conceptually discern?
is there a way to systematically create a good dictatorship (Singapore) across centuries without it going very badly? Could we use AI to enforce such systems, both online and most importantly offline, to prevent bad dictatorships from taking power?
what happens at the singularity inside a black hole?
once we reach energy abundance (fully efficient solar energy), which will then turn into resource abundance (fully efficient synthetic biology), what will be the parameters at play that will still cause humans to go to war with each other?
write how you’ve accomplished something
it can be grand, it can be simple. It can be long, it can be short. It can be serious, it can be trivial. Don’t hold back.
the founder of Loyal wrote how she raised a $11M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech moonshot. My friend Alberto wrote about building his startup and I love it because you can see the nitty details with no glamour around it.
share how you organized an event, how you managed to graduate while working, how you landed your first full-time job, or maybe how you got your first internship. For God’s sake, write something outside the career topic, there is enough of that. Share how you traveled 50 days by taking off only 15 days of holiday, how you haven’t paid a train ticket in the last three years, or about that time you worked for a week or a summer in a restaurant, or about that time you helped a friend building a cabin, or about that time you cooked for 20 people and somehow pulled it off nicely.
just in case you feel you haven’t done anything (which is impossible), write how you’re accomplishing something. Maybe you’re looking for a job and you can write how you’re doing it, maybe you’re trying to become vegan and you can write the tricks you’re using, maybe you’re trying to work on your emotional availability and share what has been helpful. People will respond by saying hey this actually worked for me. Maybe you’re organizing a wedding. Maybe you’re organizing a free walking tour. Maybe you’re putting together a midnight saloon. Maybe you’re making your home more cozy.
there are so many things people do and there are so many people looking for other people doing the same things. Open the silo.
write lists
there is no limit, they are so easy to make. Don’t expand, just list: things you wished you did at universities, ways you earned money while studying, food everybody likes but you dislike, reasons why you don’t like traveling, list of your best friends and why they are awesome, best mountains you have been to, list of your worst teachers and why they were awful, list of things you want to do if you had 1M€, your favorite books, your favorite movies, your favorite podcasts, your favorite villains, your favorite articles.
write how you feel
or instead do expand, go deep, write how you truly feel about something. I previously wrote how I feel about my last eight years together with my dad, how I felt about my career break, how I felt about me liking too many things, and how I feel about flying.
people love to read how other people feel because humans yearn for closeness and it’s hard to find somebody who feels what we do. It’s harder when you think that someone also needs to be proactively public about, and truthfully transparent. I felt like shit in my first year of university and thought I was the only one going through an existential crisis day in and day out, but then I found out years later that half of the class was in the same boat!
writing how you feel is pure self-expression. Maybe you realize that you should care less and do more of what you love, but that is more hardly said than done. And so you explore how you simply feel about it, without having to have or give a solution. This essay is a great example. Or maybe you feel stuck, and you notice all the things your mind is doing and all the places your mind is going instead of focusing on the real work you have to do. This other essay is a great example. Maybe you just love to swim in July and the sensations around it. Maybe you want to move out of town and you quite don’t know how to feel about that. Maybe a part of you has fomo for everything that city has to give. But the rational side tells you that honestly of all the things you have fomo for, you did five of them in three years, so truly maybe it’s only fomo. But then a part of you says that going back to a city you lived in before feels like going backward instead of forward. But the rational side tells you that honestly you just need a base, given you’re traveling anyway 6 months a year. Whatever you feel about moving out, just write it. This other essay is another great example.
write flows of consciousness
if not, you can simply go with the flow. Yeah right like a subconscious flow. Like, what else could I write here? What else I could tell people they could write about? Maybe they can write about how they manage their personal finances and their challenges with it. Or what if they wrote about that time they finally solved that big topic with their partners? How about their university experience? Maybe they have some sort of controversial opinion? I have controversial opinions about universities, but this is not the right place to write about them. Back to giving tips on what to write. Ah yes, what are your favorite books? Maybe you know what, what are your favorite books nobody knows about? Why them? How did you discover them in the first place? Can you please share how you read? Do you take notes? I feel bad cause I never take notes cause I read on Kindle. Maybe I am wasting my time by not properly writing notes? I’ll think about this another time. Candles, I have read today that scent candles are somehow bad for your health. Is that even true? Intuitively it makes sense. But how much bad? Can you write an article about things we use every day that are technically bad but not so bad that if you still use them it’s fine? Maybe you can post a link to better alternatives.
write advice, guides, and how you do things
write advice you wish you had before. I constantly do this with Brightdale, what is so obvious to me at 27 is not obvious at all to someone who is 19 yo. Student life is such a high growth phase that many things I did know at 23 would have completely mindblown me at 19. For instance, assuming you are a high-achiever / startup / generalist: grades don’t count, you can learn how to code yourself, you can apply to an accelerator and get 500K€ even if you think are not the most legitimate person, cold email people, follow up, use twitter, ask help to people on LinkedIn, write, publish, start something small even if it seems very trivial.
you can give unique advice you never heard before, like these barbell strategies. You can write your mental health guide (just put a huge disclaimer that this is your guide alone and you’re sharing because it worked for you, which could mean nothing to others). If you like to use AI share what are the things that worked for you best, and share your best prompts on Midjourney or RunwayML. Advise on how to get cheap flights, and tell the world the chrome extension you use to find the best events or the cheapest clothes. Write how to take compliments, how to have good conversations, how to skip small talks.
the inner critic in you will surely feel like you need to be top-notch in the world to write something about something. There are multiple workarounds for this. Don’t write guides, write how you do something. Don’t write “how to cook vegetables”, write “this is I how cook vegetable and why I love it”. Another one is to write about things that worked precisely for you “how I learned to have better conversations, introvert POV”.
it doesn’t need to be unique, humans need to listen to different variations of the same concepts until something finally clicks.
there is also a part of the internet that is all about how people do things. I love it. The founder of Luma wrote this article about how he does things at his 6-people company. He also has another article on what he puts inside his backpack when traveling. Write about what you use every day. Maybe it’s Notion, maybe it’s superhuman, maybe it’s riverside.
an article that cracks me up is this: how to make video calls almost as good as face-to-face. What is very funny to me is that this guy was the CTO of a great fintech company in Africa and is now one of the members of the technical staff at Anthropic, but also shares stuff like this:
to give a good example, I’ll share here how I prepare my chai latte (I am a big fan of Indian cuisine). This is not the original, this is not the best, this is just how I do it.
technically you’re supposed to do it with whole spices, but I don’t cause they are not practical for other recipes, except for the cloves, which I only use for the chai.
i boil cardamom, nutmeg, cloves, grounded pepper, curcuma, cinnamon, sliced ginger, honey, and black tea. I don’t use for God’s sake tea bags, but if that’s what I have at home I usually open the bags and put directly the leaves into the water. Once boiling, I add the vegetable milk (the oatly barista version is the best you can get). I then let it boil on and off for some extra minutes. Then I filter and serve.
funny thing: in Italian cuisine boiling the milk would be considered outrageous, but we don’t know anything about tea!
don’t write proper blog articles
it’s not that you necessarily have to write proper articles (proper as in, what you think an article should look like!). Some people love poetry, others love songs. You could write your songs, and if you’re embarrassed, you can just publish them but tell nobody. Or you don’t have to write proper songs either, maybe just some verses you thought of this week. These are some lines I wrote the other day:
I don’t need an extra reading, an extra book
an extra podcast or an extra hook
I don’t need an extra video, an extra thought
I only want, I only need to be not lost
So I start, so I begin, so I face
all the fears sent to me as grace
I am incapacitated, blocked, caged in
what if I postpone and fuck it, give in
So I start, so I begin, so I face
all the fears sent to me as grace
if you like music, but you’re not into writing lyrics but still wanna write something, you can simply write facts or thoughts about existing music and lyrics. As an example, how insane is it that History by the Verve is so similar to a poem by William Blake? I love the song, it’s like an epic ballad, particularly the live version in Glastonbury. I also love Echoes, which contains some of my favorite verses from all of time:
Strangers passing in the street
By chance, two separate glances meet
And I am you and what I see is me
…
And no one sings me lullabies
And no one makes me close my eyes
So I throw the windows wide
And call to you across the sky
the first is about the most visceral human need to be connected, and that every human wants to be seen and understood (And I am you and what I see is me). It also touches upon the fact that this starts from strangers and the fact we’re able to create communities out of thin air, after all, there was a time when your best friend or partner was totally a stranger.
the second is of harder interpretation, but what I see is the final awakening of someone’s spiritual journey, the journey of finding oneself. So you call to you (God) across the sky, which is simply and obviously the true part of yourself: who you really are.
write proper essays
but if you like them, write essays. Just don’t feel like you have to write essays in the way it has been taught to you in high school, follow whatever structure you want, and make your point. Don’t worry if it’s gonna be long, if you like long-form content, you will attract long-form people. This essay by Paul Graham takes 50 minutes to read. This one by Sam Altman takes less. Write an essay on how to meet people, and go even deeper into it.
write an essay on how you think cities should be. write about geopolitics.
write what you think is important.
write whatever you want
put together in one place everything that you like. Vincent Weisser’s blog is vastly a huge collection of everything he is interested in. This one starts too in the same way. The how-to-setup-your-lights guy has a page with his fav blogs.
tell something crazy that happened to you, like that time he got back his Instagram account by sending Facebook a letter. Write what you feel when you do something that you like, like playing drums.
transform your daily life in a movie. Write about the old guy managing the Chinese shop close to home, and the fact he never smiled at you in two years and always tries to speak to you in German even if he perfectly knows you don’t. Write about the Italian barista who works in your fav coffee shop part-time and is a musician the other half-time, and how you think it’s cool he was able to find such a balance.
take a famous topic and comment on it.
you can write things that you like weirdly more than other people like. Maybe you are obsessed with coffee culture (and secretly know that Italian coffee is definitely not the best). Maybe you like urbanism (and secretly saving tons of videos on YouTube on how we can start rebuilding beautifully). Maybe you like how the Netherlands did something (and secretly read about their bike-friendly cities’ transformation).
if you’re hyper-specific on things, go hyper-specific and deep into technical things. Elliot loves biology. Packy loves fusion. Niko loves synbio. Tomas loves geography. Nick is fully on coffee. There are no weird corners of the internet unexplored, but if there is by any chance, explore it yourself.
how about this guy writing about angels?
how about Celine writing 9.000-word articles on poetry / culture / design?
find your thing(s), write whatever you want, don’t get stuck in grand schemes and glorious architectures.
Loooove it! Thanks🤍