Lane Drugs

I spend a lot of time on creative decisions, which tend to create mental exhaustion. The reality is that most of the creative decisions being made in my own dumb head don’t make an impact and end up distracting from the actual work to be done…in this case…writing.

The very best people I’ve worked with sweat over fonts, graphics packages, assets, elements, design…and they’re incredible at it, but in this forum of writing…I don’t think it matters what font I use on this wordpress site. Or if its pretty.

When I was looking to write more I thought about using Substack, but couldn’t move past the idea that Substack is also a platform that at some point will be algorithmic, or might already be algorithmic and the daily visitors on the site will be looking at a feed, like Twitter or any other social media platform, recommending content.

I’ve spent a lot of time understanding platforms and what works in and out of their algorithms. It’s exhausting, and it constantly changes. What works today, won’t work tomorrow, success built on the past will not create success in the future and predicting the when and where of which platform will cultivate the biggest audience piles on top of an already tired overstimulated brain.

I just don’t want to compete in that forum. Hence the old-head attempt. A website. And hopefully an email list (which I have yet to figure out, but I imagine is not that difficult). I think a website is safer, as I’m entirely sure that every social platform has to become for-profit and so Substack will eventually run ads or something capitalistic which will in turn destroy the platform and leave those who built a following on there to go somewhere else. That’s all these platforms ever are – build audience – drag them elsewhere when those in charge make the site unusable – lose a percentage of your audience – built again. Not an empirical cycle or data driven workflow there, but annoying nonetheless.

“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

I came across that poem while reading Oliver Burkman’s “Time Management for Mortals” which came as a recommendation from Ryan Holiday’s newsletters. I approach a lot of self-help and personal growth books with skepticism, often joking about how some of the dumbest people on the planet profit off of making rules of life, like “make your bed every morning” or “always do the dishes”. This is not a stoic or positive approach to learning, mental health or inviting a challenging opinion in to shape a world view.

Speaking of Ryan Holiday, his research assistant Billy Oppenheimer had recently mentioned that some advice he got from Holiday was to stop looking at the complete 9 innings and to just..start. I want to be a writer. I don’t necessarily enjoy the act of writing, in fact, I don’t even know most authors who do love the actual act of writing. But to become a writer, one has to write.

I am currently reading through Atomic Habits and one of the main early takeaways is to change your habits you have to change your identity. The author decided to publish something, anything, every Monday and Thursday. And in that we have a goal…which is what the book precisely says to not do…