At the front sat our guru. He had recently grown a thick beard, rebranded himself as some sort of spiritual sage, and now sat in total silence while his team worked the room, pitching us dubious backend services.

Everyone was taking notes.

I wasn’t. I had a blank page in front of me and after a while I started to feel weird about it. But there was nothing to write down. I had already sold my company months earlier. I didn’t care about e-commerce. I never really had.

So why was I even here?

Because I desperately needed the whole thing to be real. Otherwise I would have had to ask what I was actually doing with my life. And I would have to explain what I did the last four years.

Back then I couldn’t see it. It turns out procrastination can get so sophisticated that you actually build something.

You might even build a business.

The Expensive Stepping Stone

Well, this is what happened to me when I built my e-commerce business. I knew from the beginning that it was only going to be a stepping stone. My idea was to scale it to a couple of million in two years, make an exit and then do the thing I actually wanted to do… Yeah, I can see the delusional thinking now.

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I didn’t know what I actually wanted to do, so I tricked myself into building an e-commerce business with perfectly rational arguments. Even though I knew it was just a stepping stone, the moment I thought about the success my brain was flooded with dopamine. I got high on my own potential.

Add to that the fact that building my business involved risk and novelty and you have a powerful emotional cocktail on a regular basis. I was hooked. And suddenly I had a warehouse with hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock, which makes changing direction look pretty stupid.

But was it really true that I didn’t know what I wanted to do?

Procrastination is really just a form of avoidance.
And what we are trying to avoid is fear.

I remember that I had some sort of clue what I really wanted to do back then but I was afraid to dig deeper.

And I don’t think my case is very unique.

What could be so frightening that we go to such lengths to avoid it? The answer is so dark that we try everything to not talk or think about it: death.

Why We Create Anything at All

The fear of death sends chills down our spine. Which is why the drawer stays closed and the lid gets sealed with biohazard signs.

Ernest Becker opened the drawer in his book The Denial of Death. I’m not exaggerating when I say it literally changed my whole life.

Art, society, politics, economy… everything is an attempt to make us immortal and deny death. Becker calls this the immortality project. The fear of death gives us an immense drive to build something that leaves a footprint of us.

It led me to a pretty uncomfortable conclusion: building my business was my immortality project. I was trying to give my life significance on a cosmic scale.

It feels weird to say that. In my head I didn’t need the approval of everyone. I was doing it for myself. That‘s what I told myself, anyway. What I was actually afraid of was what it would mean if I never built anything at all.

Some people manage to keep the drawer closed seemingly forever. After reading Becker I couldn’t. My drawer didn’t close again and thus it became obvious what I was trying to do.

The fear of death explains why I built my business, but it doesn’t explain why I used the e-commerce business as a stepping stone. I wanted to be significant, yes. The question is significant to whom?

Nobody Survives Alone

Humans are highly dependent on other humans. Just look at a newborn baby. Without support it won’t survive. This dependency is deeply ingrained into us. It is part of the human condition. Naturally it creates a second kind of primal fear: the fear of separation.

It’s for that reason that loneliness feels so painful.

While the fear of death seems abstract and distant, the fear of separation is something much more immediate. There was probably at least one day in the last couple of weeks when you have felt it.

Or think about a heartbreak. Some people say it’s like an ice pick that’s slowly pushed through their heart. I don’t know about you, but I would rather work eight hours a day for a boss than having to go through that experience.

Being alone makes you vulnerable to death. That’s where the two primal fears connect. One puts you to work. The other one decides what you work on.

Why I Built the Wrong Thing

I already had a hunch that the e-commerce thing wasn’t really my ultimate destination. There was something lingering in the background, but I couldn’t explain it or put words to it back then. So I went for it anyways.

The arguments for building an e-commerce business were… perfectly rational. Looking back at it now, it’s clear to me what happened.

Building an e-commerce business was a pre-approved script. I followed the guru because he already “made it.” He was legitimized to teach how he did it because it led to a definition of success that gets rewarded by society (money and fame).

You look at how other people did it and of course you see only those who survived. That’s how I stumbled onto the guru and bought his blueprint for $8k. I was looking for reassurance that this is a viable path.

By following the script you get the safety of the crowd. You follow the script, just slightly different. So it even seems like you are doing your own thing.

Looked at it from this angle, though, it’s not much different from a 9 to 5. You are running a script of what you are supposed to be.

Building a business, accumulating wealth, or climbing a corporate ladder are all ready-made, pre-approved paths provided by society. Society has already agreed that if you succeed at this, you will get recognition.

That gives us the significance that we are seeking.

For years I was immersed in the fictional games and success metrics set up by society. It took me a long time to see it, because by those metrics my business was doing “good.” Supposedly I was doing everything right.

It was during corona that I realized that I was just running a script. And the reason I entered entrepreneurship in the first place was because I wanted to run my own script.

It took me another two years before I could really see my own path.

Smart People Are Not Afraid

Really doing your own thing feels risky… because well it is. Most of you reading this are driven to do your own thing. And you know there comes a certain fear with it. But it doesn’t feel exactly like fear. At least not the way it feels when your bank account shows zero.

That’s the sneaky part. The fear is lingering somewhere in the background.

Smart people hate fear. So they try to use their rational mind to overcome it. That’s where the procrastination gets really sophisticated.

“I better build a strategy before I start.” → Makes sense.

“I better use an advanced stochastic model to cluster my audience into socio-economic segments to improve the resonance of my messaging.” → Also makes sense (kind of).

“I want to help poor people in Africa… but how am I going to make money?”

That’s a rational question to ask. But it’s probably the wrong one. Because now you started a sequence of “But first I have to…“

“I want to help poor people in Africa, but first I have to make a lot of money.”

“I want to launch my product, but first I have to build a strategy.”

“I want to write that article, but first I have to go to the toilet.”

You are smart, of course you are not afraid. You are just making a rational choice. The smarter you are, the better your excuses can get.

I catch myself doing this all the time. I come up with some complex theories. They totally make sense. The funny thing is that right in the moment other people start agreeing with me, I realize I just made up an excellent excuse to hide from my fear. Most of the time my intellectual excuses help others hide from their fears too. So they happily agree with me.

So we end up looking for a safe path calling it a rational choice. It makes sense logically, but not psycho-logically.

That’s exactly why I ended up ignoring my voice. The reason I couldn‘t explain what I actually wanted to do isn‘t that it was irrational. The thing didn’t exist yet, so there were no arguments for it. Nobody could agree on it. Its justification can only be built afterward, out of the finished work.

Giving Birth Is Painful

Just because you found a path yourself doesn’t mean it is your path.

The fear you feel for walking your own path is your compass. You might not (yet) be able to explain to others what you are doing. Good. It means the path has not been approved by society.

Sophisticated procrastination really means running away from your own path. You are using your potential as a way to hide. It feels comfortable because it gives you a womb-like feeling of oneness. It protects you from messy and harsh reality of nature.

You are refusing to be born.

And by refusing to be born you deprive yourself and the world of the gift that is inside of you. For you to be born your old identity first has to die. Letting one version of you die is painful. And it’s painful exactly because so much has to die.

For me, the definition of success I imported from society had to die. After letting it die, I couldn’t help but do my work. I didn’t need motivation, discipline, or an elusive purpose. I was just doing what I was born to do.

You have to create yourself, not your business.

P.S. You can’t create yourself out of nothing. You start with the material you already have. Archetypes are one way to see what that material actually is.

Discover Your Creator Archetype

I built the Archetype Navigator as a free tool to uncover your natural psychological patterns. It won't tell you what to build. That’s your part.

There are notes, there is a feed, there are engagement metrics, there are algorithms. And it’s not an accident.

We shouldn’t be surprised. But we often are, because we’re clouded by nostalgia for a past that’s gone, or delusional about a future that Substack simply wasn’t built to deliver. We want the quiet purity of a direct email connection, but we also want the viral growth of a billion-people network.

We want to believe that if we complain loud enough, we can change things for the better. But getting angry at Substack is like getting angry at the rain.

The weather isn’t trying to do anything to you. It simply is. It doesn’t matter what you want it to do. To see what’s happening to Substack, we have to look at the system.

A Few Words About Systems

When a company takes hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital firms, it enters a system.

Over the last fifty years, venture capital has perfected a very specific system trap: fund an innovation, acquire the early adopters, provide the scaffolding for a habit change, and then aggressively subsidize it until you achieve a network effect.

That venture capital system doesn’t want a quiet sanctuary that helps a few thousand writers make a moderate living.

Substack has to play by the rules of the system it’s part of. If you want to scale, you have to build an arena for people to play a game. You create a feedback loop. You reward the people who bring you more attention with more status. And once that feedback loop begins, it turns insatiable.

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The early adopters loved Substack because it offered an escape from the noisy feeds of Twitter and Facebook. But as Substack grew, it hit a wall. The logical thing became to play it safe and do what has worked before. So they built the very tools of distraction and short-term dopamine that power every other big social network, because that is what the masses have been trained to click on.

None of this is evil. The system wants what the system wants.

Substack is Not Your Best Friend

The mistake we make is believing that a tech platform is our partner, caring about our success and sharing our goals. This leads to the first myth about systems: believing we have unlimited power. We believe we can endlessly outsmart the system. We become the manic growth-hacker, convinced that if we just post enough Notes, optimize enough headlines, and hack the algorithm, we will be successful.

When you spend four hours a day building your presence on Substack, posting Notes for the algorithm, hoping to capture a fraction of the “free” traffic it creates, you are feeding the system. You are generating the content that keeps users scrolling, hoping you will get paid for it (or go viral).

Substack will gladly take your generous work and use it to increase its valuation. That leads straight to the second myth: we have no power at all.

Cynicism Is a Comfortable Chair

Say you don't care about growth often enough, in a comment section full of people saying the identical thing, and you can almost believe it. Almost… But nobody who has stopped wanting something needs to announce it this many times.

It’s tempting to cross our arms, declare that Substack is succumbing to the same race to the bottom as every other social network, and paint the picture of the defeated idealist.

Cynicism is incredibly comforting.

When we decide the game is rigged, it lets us off the hook. The algorithm decides if our work gets seen. It’s not our fault. We can blame the venture capitalists, the platform updates, the attention economy, politics, the weather…

We play the cynic, but we still check the dashboard. We still quietly hope that maybe, our authentic post will accidentally trigger the algorithm and go viral. We resent the hustle, but we leave the door cracked open secretly hoping we win the lottery by being a good person.

Resenting the system while hoping to be picked by it is exhausting. It leads to burnout. And worse, it deprives us of our agency.

Culture Creates Change

It is easy to conclude you don’t have any agency because you are not one of Substack’s shareholders.

When looking at how systems work, it’s hard to see that there is a hidden driver underneath it. Systems are driven by culture. And culture is the results of interactions between people. Which is to say:

Culture is the defining mechanism of any community. The system only amplifies what the nodes inside the system choose to feed it. When we reward the growth hackers with our attention, we teach the system that growth hacking is our culture. When we complain about the noise but refuse to do the emotional labor of building deep relationships, we hand the power to the loudest shouters.

Our job as creators is to create the culture for change.

If we want to preserve the core ethos of this space we cannot wait for the executives in San Francisco to do it for us. We have to take responsibility for it.

What Are You Going To Build?

Complaining surrenders the very power we need to make things better.

We have the agency to decide how we want to shape the future we want to live in. We can choose resonance over reach. We can replace performing with creating art. We can choose to be the person who writes something real instead of optimizing it for the algorithm.

You don’t have to build a funnel. Instead of waiting for the platform to remain a sanctuary, it’s on us to act like we belong in one. The system will respond to the culture. What kind of culture are we going to build today?

Use Your Agency

The future of Substack is predictable. It will continue to look more like the rest of the internet, because the system of the internet demands it. The noise will increase. The temptation to sprint for short-term engagement will grow. The pressure to conform will feel overwhelming.

You have a choice. You can surrender your agency to the system and complain when the rules change. Or you can start creating the future you want to live in.

People accuse me of complaining too much. Listen, I have German roots. Complaining is part of German culture. But what these people usually miss is the deeper core of what I’m actually saying. Because it’s not what they want to hear. It’s neither complaining nor delusional optimism.

Life sucks. But it’s our responsibility to make the best out of it. Taking responsibility is hard. Making a change is hard. But creating something meaningful is never easy.

Use the system, but don’t let the system use you. Are you feeding the algorithm? Or are you feeding the culture?

P.S. Changing the culture starts with you. To create something real, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and person underneath it.

Discover Your Creator Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. Take it or don't, but build from who you are, not from what the algorithm rewards.

It’s a closed system where creators sell “how to be a creator” to other creators. It’s loud, it lacks nuance, and the algorithm loves it.

But you came here to escape that.

You read deep philosophy. You take advanced cohorts. You understand the complex market dynamics that the 20-year-old course-sellers couldn’t even begin to grasp.

Watching the circus makes you sick. Why?

Because the “clown creators” are shipping garbage and pulling in $50k a month. Meanwhile, you are agonizing over the perfect sentence that no one will ever read.

You are not lazy. You are disciplined, curious, and probably more self-aware than anyone else in your circle. And that’s exactly the problem.

The Dopamine Hell of the Intelligent Creator

I see this pattern all the time. You take the courses, read the books and fill Moleskine notebooks with game-changing strategies. It feels like you are making progress.

But your brain is tricking you. It has convinced you that learning about building your business is the same as actually building the business. Welcome to the dopamine hell of the intelligent creator.

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Every time you think about your future success your brain releases dopamine. This is where it gets sneaky. Because it uses the same biochemical mechanism as actually achieving your goal. In neuroscience, this is called premature reward activation.

Your brain rewards anticipation almost the same way it rewards achievement. So planning can feel like progress, even when nothing moves.

You’re literally getting high on your own potential.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. Over time, you have built an identity around being a learner. It’s doubly rewarding because you have become “the guy who knows everything.“

Your ego loves getting rewarded with that kind of attention. All this creates a powerful emotional cocktail. You crave new knowledge like Dan Janssen a slice of pizza.

It’s tragic, because you have conditioned yourself for the feeling of progress rather than actually making progress. That’s really a very sophisticated form of procrastination. Let’s call it Sophisticated Procrastination.1 And it is an epidemic haunting the creator economy.

The Curse of Being Average

You are ambitious and there is one thing that you hate more than anything: being average. You call it high standards. You might even take pride in being a perfectionist.

If you look closer, you’ll see it is actually Sophisticated Procrastination underneath it.

It keeps you safe in the world of ideas (where you are perfect) and stops you from entering the world of execution (where you might look average).

Your ego is protecting you from the risk of judgment by more studying, planning, and analyzing. If you don’t ship you can’t be average. If you stay in your head, you remain perfect. You never have to confront the gap between who you are and who you think you are. And so, you fill your graveyard of good intentions with another course.

Why Discipline Fails

The standard advice is simple: just take action. Write one sentence. Start small. But what happens if you take action and the only thing you hear are crickets?

This is where it gets tricky because if your audience is small there is little to no feedback. You get stuck because you think the problem is discipline. You beat yourself up that you don’t get the desired results.

This makes you vulnerable for blueprints, formulas and productivity advice.

To really understand what’s going on, we have to go somewhere the gurus can’t go. Beneath the bad habits and the dopamine loops. We are dealing with something existential. The gurus hate that because it is the kind of problem that you don’t solve with a course, dopamine detox or AI app.

The God Complex of the Procrastinator

As long as you are planning, learning, or strategizing, your potential remains infinite. In your mind, the book you plan to write is perfect. The business you intend to build is revolutionary. The version of yourself you’re becoming is exactly who you always knew you could be.

When you keep your ideas in your head, you are a god. You control the outcome. You imagine the success and it almost feels real. This keeps your ego protected and safe.

But the moment you take action by posting the article or launching the product, you crash into reality. Action kills your divine fantasy. Every time you create something, you’re choosing not to make every other version of that thing you could have made. You’re killing infinite possibility and replacing it with one specific piece of work that gets judged or worse gets ignored.

You procrastinate because you cannot bear the grief of seeing your god-like potential reduced to a mediocre reality. You would rather dream about being a great writer than actually be a writer who got 12 views on their last post.

You Have a Preparation Fetish

Humans cannot stand the overwhelming chaos of reality. It is too big, too unpredictable, too terrifying. So, we narrow the world down to survive. We find a small area we can control and treat it as if it were the whole world. This is where Sophisticated Procrastination becomes a fetish. It sounds dirty because it is.

You reorganize your Notion workspace for the third time this month, color-coding the tags and aligning the columns until everything clicks into place. For a moment, the chaos vanishes. You are doing something and you feel like are in control.

The problem is that you start chasing that feeling. The fetish becomes more important than the writing. So you avoid doing the actual work because it feels too uncomfortable and you can’t control the outcome.

Inside the closed system of the course, everything makes sense. Step A leads to Step B. It creates a seductive illusion of certainty. That gives you hope and protects you from the fact you are ultimately powerless against reality.

It is a superstition. You are like a primitive man performing a rain dance to control the weather. You study frameworks and highlight books to control your destiny. The longer it didn’t rain, the more desperate the tribe became with their superstitions.

The more you feel like you nobody is reading your Substack, the deeper you retreat into the safety of Sophisticated Procrastination. Because at least there, you’re still making progress.

Overloading of the Immortality Project

Every human needs to feel that their life matters, that they will leave a mark that outlasts death. Ernest Becker called this the Immortality Project. Usually, society provides pre-packaged projects: “Be a good Christian,” “Climb the corporate ladder,” or “Raise a family.“

The problem is that you have rejected those defaults. You stepped off the ladder. You may have stepped away from traditional religion. You decided to build something of your own.

But this creates a dangerous vacuum. Without the structure of a company or a church, the entire weight of justifying your existence falls on your creative work.

If you hear crickets after the launch, it doesn’t mean the offer was bad. It means you do not matter. Imagine the stress that creates. No one can move freely under that kind of crushing spiritual pressure.

When every sentence is a referendum on your right to exist, of course you can’t type. You are paralyzed by the stakes. You are treating a blog post like a tombstone. You want it to be heavy and permanent. But to get moving, you need to treat it like what it actually is: Just another brick.

The Bricklayer Mindset

The way out starts with creation. The cure is to take the chaos of your life and turn it into a body of work.

If you’re not creating you’re drowning in your own potential. You keep it inside where it is safe and infinite. But if you keep it inside, you are turning your potential against you. That will make you go crazy. The trick is to turn the internal energy into external value.

The whole process is almost like a form of exorcism. You have to get it out before it poisons you. Give it a concrete shape in the form of an article, podcast or product.

The act of creation is hard work. To make it bearable is to change what the work means to you. Adopt a bricklayer mindset. Currently you are paralyzed because you treat every post like a cathedral (a statement of your soul).

Treat your posts like bricks. A brick is small, imperfect, and replaceable. But if you lay one brick every day, you have a wall. Eventually the bricks turn into a cathedral.

Shift from Self-Expansion to Self-Surrender

You are currently driven by a desire to stand out, to be special, to be “successful.” This puts a lot of pressure on you. You act like a god trying to control the world. Spoiler alert: You can’t.

This is the Atlas complex. You are paralyzed because you are trying to hold up the sky. It is too heavy for one pair of shoulders.

When you create to prove yourself, the audience is a judge (terrifying). When you create to help the audience, the audience is a partner (reassuring). If you are trying to impress “The Internet” it triggers grandiosity and fear. You cannot impress a billion people. But you can help one person.

When you’re writing to help someone, you think about the person reading this who is stuck in the exact place you were last year. The question becomes simpler: Does this actually help them or not?

It bypasses your ego because it’s not about you. It allows you to merge with something larger by losing yourself in the work for others.

You Are Not the Source

Your ideas do not originate inside your head. They come from what you read, the conversations you have, the patterns you notice in the market, the problems you see others struggling with. You are synthesizing inputs from the world and giving them a new form through your particular lens.

You are the filter, not the source. Your value is in your particular way of noticing, your ability to connect ideas that others missed, the clarity you bring to problems people are struggling with but cannot name.

Your role is to pay attention, to synthesize what you notice, to give it clear expression, and then release it. What happens after that is not yours to control. The views, the growth, the feedback is in not in your hands. Realizing you are a participant in an ongoing conversation grants you the psychological safety to act.

The Courage to be Human

You want to be sovereign, autonomous, and perfect. That is a destructive fantasy. We are all humans and humans are fragmented, dependent, and imperfect. The ability to see past the ordinary and mundane and get to what might otherwise be invisible is the root of creativity, but it requires accepting your own limitations

Embrace being a human. You are small. You are afraid. You need money. You want validation. And eventually you will die (sorry for being a downer).

The business you’re building will not save you from any of this. It won’t protect you from rejection. It will not eliminate your need for others. It will not prove you are special enough to transcend ordinary human experience.

And that is okay. Flaws are human, and they attract other humans. If we were machinelike, our work wouldn’t resonate. It would be soulless.

By admitting your weakness, you gain the only power you really have: the power of reality. People will trust you not because you are above them (which they know is a lie), but because you are with them, struggling with the same problems they are.

You can’t transcend your insecurities. And you shouldn’t. It is part of what makes the work worth reading.

You create pieces reflective of who you are. You are building a body of work that reflects an actual human trying to figure things out. That is enough.

Truth is more useful than perfection, and a hell of a lot easier to maintain

Just lay one brick. Then another.

P.S. The only thing remembered is the people who create something real. To create something real, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Usually, it happens in a Zoom call. My team brings in a strong, creative concept. It’s beautiful. But then the clients get their hands on it. They start questioning if the colors are right for the audience. Is this even increasing the conversion rate? The logo has to be bigger. And then they want to cram in the legal disclaimer and those three irrelevant product features.

By the time it gets to the public, the beautiful idea is dead, buried under a gazillion pounds of corporate logistics.

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I bring this up because right now, I see the same thing happening to the creator economy. Here the murder happens

If you spend any time online today, you are completely surrounded by grifters and hustle-bros practically screaming at you through your screen to monetize your passion.

You post a picture of a delicious, crusty loaf of sourdough you baked. Maybe you knit a scarf… or you show your mother-in-law a rosary bracelet they made from broken jewelry.

It doesn’t take long until someone says: “You should monetize this.”

The gurus of the internet (aka. the 23 year old in matching t-shirts showing up in your YouTube ads) have convinced an entire generation that you are leaving money on the table, if you don’t monetizing everything you are remotely talented at. Otherwise you must be a fool or a failure who doesn’t possess the mindset necessary to win.

It is officially time to tell these people to go to hell.

The Only Grinding I Care About

I have a slight obsession with specialty coffee. It’s my favorite morning ritual. I love the sound of the grinder and the moment the water touches the grounds. Even before the freshly brewed coffee hit my tongue, I feel alive.

But I am also an entrepreneur with a terminal case of builder’s brain. At some point the thought of turning it into a business came to my mind. I started coming up with all kinds of ideas. I created packaging designs and logos, researched the sourcing, and imagined even having a small café.

After a few days, I had an epiphany. A coffee business would completely bury my love for coffee under logistics and overhead issues. Most of the time I wouldn’t spend on the parts I actually love. Instead I would be managing inventory and desperately trying to game the Instagram algorithm so people would buy 12-ounce bags of dark roast.

I decided right then to keep it as my unproductive guilty pleasure that keeps consuming time and money.

It exists simply because doing it makes you feel alive. When you slap a $5/month subscription fee on your hobby, you introduce commerce. And where commerce goes, clients follow. Suddenly you have a boss. You are dealing with “The Algorithm.”

The Algorithm is the worst, most sociopathic client in history. It doesn’t have a worldview. Or empathy. Or taste really.

Making something beautiful gets replaced by open rates and click-through performance (not to mention dropping emojis in comments). Everything has to be optimized to get the metrics growing. The presence and joy that once filled you with passion are gone.

You guys know this pain better than anyone. Many of you left corporate meat-grinders, burned-out agency jobs, and restrictive niches because you felt like a parasite. You came to the creator space seeking authenticity. But if you drag the very metrics and pressure you were trying to escape into the spaces you use to heal, you are slowly dying another death.

Leave the Money on the Table

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of making money from creativity. Branding has been very good to me, and getting paid to sit in a room with your feet on a desk coming up with ideas is arguably the best job on the planet. But there is a radioactive strain of hustle-culture BS going around today that tells us that every single creative act we perform must be thrown onto the great conveyor belt of capitalism.

We’ve swallowed this cultural lie that if a hobby isn’t making you money, or building your personal brand, or expanding your content ecosystem, then it is somehow a waste of your time.

There will always be people out there who look at you with genuine pity when they find out you aren’t cashing in on your talents. To the hyper-transactional minds of the internet, you are just a weirdo leaving money on the table.

I’ve sat at that table. It is crowded, the coffee is mediocre, and the people sitting there are only speaking in marketing hieroglyphics about MRR and churn rates. The whole gig sucks down infinite reserves of brain juice without giving one real satisfying moment holding any gravity or substance.

If walking away from that table makes you a weirdo, then I highly suggest you buy a weirdo hat, put it on your weirdo head, and happily walk out the door. Let them have the table. You get to keep your soul.

Let Your Job Pay the Damn Bills

Most people in the creator space will tell you to hate your 9-to-5. They will tell you to escape the matrix and be your own boss. I want to offer you a different view on this.

Your day job is your patron.
It’s the Medici family of your own private Renaissance.

Because your job carries the burden of paying the mortgage and buying the groceries, your creativity is fully free. It doesn’t have to appease an algorithm. No pressure to use fake timers to trick strangers into buying your ebook just to keep the lights on. You don’t have to water down your voice or put a click-bait title on it.

Dopamine fades, but that kind of depth compounds.

By removing the financial pressure from your art, you create a space where you can actually be authentic.

You're Allowed to Just Do Things

Every good story runs on conflict, and the bad guy in this story is the belief that every minute of your existence must have a return on investment.

We live in a system where human attention is mined, processed, and sold to the highest bidder. In that kind of world, holding onto a piece of your heart simply because you enjoy it beats is a rebellion. Maybe it’t a form of beautiful vandalism that we most need right now.

Great work, whether in business or in art, never comes from conforming to the perfectly curated status quo. You have to step outside the madness. Greatness requires the sudden cessation of stupidity. And trying to monetize every moment of your life is incredibly stupid.

So here's your creative brief, since they are still haunting me.

Shut the laptop. Turn off the phone. Forget your personal brand for five fucking minutes. Go outside, or into your kitchen, or down into your basement, and do something so unproductive that the internet wouldn’t know what to do with you.

P.S. We are drowning in content creators. We need more artists who are beautifully alive. To be real, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save your sanity.

You’re thirsty. You have three dollars. You say, “I would like some lemonade.”

The kid behind the counter looks at you, pushes up his glasses, and says, “We don’t actually sell lemonade. We sell a $49 course on how to synergize neighborhood thirst dynamics, leverage unused lumber to build a stand, and scale your lemonade enterprise to 10k MRR.”

You look behind you. There is a line of 5,000 people desperately waiting to buy the kid’s course so they, too, can build stands that sell courses about stands. Meanwhile, everybody is still dying of thirst.

Welcome to the status quo of the creator economy.

If you spend enough time scrolling these days, you realize the “How to Get Rich” virus has officially jumped from Twitter and LinkedIn over to Substack. The symptoms are always the same. The humble-brag (“How I made $10k while sleeping”). The empty platitude (“Clarity is key”). The engagement bait (“Drop your link below”).

It is a closed system where creators sell “how to be a creator” to other creators who want to be creators. It is a feedback loop that feels like there is a community of people, but it is actually just noise. It’s a Hall of Mirrors.

The algorithm loves it. Content about “growth” gets obsessively clicked by people who are anxious about growth. The platforms amplify the signal, implying that this is what success looks like.

But a Hall of Mirrors has no exit. Everyone is agreeing with each other about how to write, but nobody is actually writing about anything.

Substack used to feel like a quiet cathedral for writers. Now, it starts to feels just like any other social media. And that sucks.

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It’s time to throw a rock through the glass.

We don’t need another post about how to get 1,000 subscribers. We don’t need another breakdown of a viral note.

We need you.

We need the you that existed before you started worrying about your open rates. We need the you that has a craft, a struggle, and a life in the real world.

You won’t build a resilient strategy by studying the platform. You have to leave it.

Go do something interesting in the real world.

Learn to bake sourdough. Train for a marathon. Fail at a garden. Struggle with a philosophy that creates tension. Have an adventure that cannot be summarized in a six-second video.

Then, and only then, come back and write about that.

We are drowning in advice and starving actual for wisdom.

Advice is cheap. “Post at 9 AM.” “Use this subject line.” That is a commodity.
Wisdom is expensive. Wisdom comes from doing something hard and failing at it, and then figuring out why.

When you bring your wisdom into the Hall of Mirrors, you break the glass. You stop being a reflection of a reflection. You become a source.

This is scary. It is scary because “How to Get Rich” is a proven commodity. It feels safe to sell shovels to gold diggers.

Writing about your specific, idiosyncratic, real-world journey feels risky. It is terrifying to write a nuanced essay knowing it might only get six likes, while the grifter next door gets five thousand for a listicle. The algorithm might not recognize you immediately.

Good.

If the algorithm doesn’t know what to do with you, it means you aren’t a commodity. You have crossed the line from content into art.

You are the immune system of this platform.

We have a sickness right now where we believe the ultimate goal is a million dollars and a massive personal brand. It's a trap. The actual dream? Make a decent living, do work you are proud of, 1,000 readers who truly care, and shut your laptop at 5:00 PM to go eat dinner with your family.

The people who built this platform didn’t start writing to get famous. They started writing because they had a gift. They didn’t set out to create content. Their gift was a perspective on a life actually lived.

Don’t trade your unique perspective for a listicle that ChatGPT could have written.

If you are a writers quietly showing up, sharing your art, and building slowly: Please don’t stop. You are the immune system of this platform. And we need you more than ever.

P.S. The only thing remembered is the people who made this platform real. To be real, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

But then you are sitting in front of a blank page.

So you do what any highly intelligent creator does when faced with the task of writing. Staring out the window, checking emails, brewing that fourth cup of coffee, cleaning a desk that is already spotless… and yes, even taking phantom trips to the bathroom just to avoid staring at a blank screen.

But if you are like the creators I work with, there is a darker pattern that repeats itself over and over. You dabble in a sinister little addiction called sophisticated procrastination. You spend hours reading articles on Substack, falling down research rabbit holes, optimizing your systems, or building the "perfect strategy" for your business.

You can spend weeks procrastinating in this sophisticated manner. It feels like you are making progress. But at the end of the day, the page is as empty as a politician’s promise. Your actual work hasn’t moved an inch.

In the meantime, something tragic happens. You have had so many new ideas while actively avoiding the old ones that the original concepts lost their spark. They feel stale or "not good enough" now. So you abandon them, leaving behind a graveyard of half-baked projects. And then the cycle starts all over again.

The Paradox of the Blocked Artist

This is a classic picture I see all the time. Not just in the creators I work with, but in myself as well. Because this sophisticated procrastination looks so much like work, it is very difficult to see it for what it truly is: a defense mechanism distracting you from the actual act of creation.

Why do we do this? It’s not just a matter of poor time management or a lack of discipline. We distract ourselves because the act of creation is terrifying.

Humans possess a deep desire to create. We want to leave our mark on the world. We want to have an impact, or just feel that our lives matter in some permanent way. This drive to immortalize ourselves is how the pyramids were built, and it’s at the root of all human art.

But to actually put your ideas into the world you have to embrace your unique path. This means you have to stand apart from the crowd. Psychologically, that is a highly vulnerable and terrifying leap. So, we hesitate. We brew more coffee. Or refine our strategy… for the third time this month.

When you don’t get your ideas out of your head and make them real, they turn on you. They end up blocking you. And that is what happens to artists all the time.

We say we are "creatively blocked," which implies an emptiness, a lack of inspiration or skill. But you are not empty. You are dangerously full. What you are feeling is actually your own will to create. It is easy to confuse this for being blocked, because your fear turns that energy in the opposite direction. Instead of putting it into a creation, you direct it inward against yourself.

This is the paradox of the blocked artist. Because you are blocked, you feel like you can’t create. But the only way to release the block is to create.

Art is Exorcism

I like to think of art as a form of exorcism. Keeping your ideas all to yourself, hoarding them within your own mind, is literally making you sick. It can cause all kinds of mental problems like self-sabotage, imposter syndrome, or depressive crashes. I believe that if you are holding this unexpressed creative tension for too long, it will eventually manifest as physical symptoms.

Burnout is a great example of this phenomenon. It seems like a contradiction, but burnout is not caused by working too much (although that certainly happens). Most of what we call burnout is actually a creative sickness. It is caused by not creating what wants to be created through you.

Instead, you build what you think others want you to build. In the old days, artists sacrificed their true inner voice to please the church, the state, or a wealthy patron. Today, we do it to please the audience, the market, or the algorithm.

In doing so, you submit your unique creative energy to a collective ideology. When you betray your own inner voice to please the algorithm, you get so blocked up with your own ideas, to the point that they begin to haunt you, attack your nervous system, and make you sick. I have seen many creators being cured of physical and mental exhaustion simply by finally letting their own ideas out.

When you are blocked, you are trapped in a cycle of only taking things in (reading, researching, consuming) and giving nothing out. This happens because giving a piece of yourself away feels like a profound loss to the ego. To the deeply creative mind, this act of creation is perceived not only as a birth, but also as a kind of dying.

We want to put our entire being, our absolute perfection, into a single project. Achieving perfection is impossible. But more importantly if you are trying to pour your entire being into one piece of work, it will feel as final and terrifying as death. So it’s no wonder you freeze. Faced with this “All or Nothing” mentality you instinctively choose the “nothing” of the blank page to avoid the pain.

You have to accept that your creation will only ever be a piece of you. It can’t represent your whole being. At best it’s an expression of your whole being at a given moment of time. Let it be imperfect. Your only job is to get it out.

The Price of Standing Out

An exorcism is painful. It requires a tremendous expenditure of emotional and intellectual energy. It forces you to look at your own imperfections in the uncomfortable light of reality. But that is the whole point.

By taking your abstract ideas and forcing them into a concrete medium, you separate them from your ego. You look at the work and say, “This idea is no longer me. It is now part of the world out there.” You have placed the “demon” outside of the self.

When you are finally done, you will feel a profound sense of satisfaction. Note that it arrives when your work is finished, not when you get likes, sales, or praise for it. Creativity is independent of external validation. You may not feel this relief right away, as the exhaustion of the process might cloud it. You must force yourself to keep getting your ideas out, over and over, until you reach a psychic equilibrium.

But alongside that satisfaction, you might feel a strange heaviness. By putting your mark on the world, you are separating yourself from the herd. You are asserting your individuality, and the human mind always feels a sense of guilt for having the audacity to stand apart and say, “Look at what I have made.” Embrace this feeling. It is simply the emotional tax you pay for being fully realized and alive. It means the exorcism worked.

Get the demon out so that you can finally breathe. You owe it to yourself.

P. S. If you are trying to figure out which idea to pull out first, you need to know what kind of art you were actually built to make. To align your ideas with your natural patterns, I created The Archetype Navigator. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save your sanity.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

You’ll find a dozen of posts on how to go viral, blueprints on how to make your first 10k online, and AI created slop. The creator economy has become a sea of sameness.

But we both know the truth. The blueprint is a lie.

If business was a science, everyone would be rich. But business isn’t a science. Business is an art. Interestingly not many creators talk about art.

We call it the creator economy. This strikes me as funny because most people are anything but creative. In art there are no strict rules and you have to be willing to do something different. You have to take a risk.

Today, I’m launching a new podcast to explore what creativity and art really means. It’s called The Becoming of Art.

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After months of thinking about the idea, I finally recorded the first episode. I am not very comfortable being on camera. I am not a native speaker, so if you hear a weird accent, think of it as part of my branding.

I haven’t cut any of it. I’m doing it this way because if I’m going to ask you to embrace the vulnerability of becoming an artist, I need to go first. I want this show to be a proof-of-concept.

If you are looking for step-by-step plan on how to make money online, you better skip this one.

This podcast is for people who want to become an artist and express their authentic self instead of just building a business.

P.S. Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to start with the most important piece of art you will ever create: yourself.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help with that. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually an expression of who you really are.

You wake up. You commute. You rent out your mind to a corporation for a fraction of its true value.

You were born with infinite potential, a multidimensional being forced to play a one-dimensional game. You trade your rapidly fleeting time to build someone else’s dream, hoping that one day, a broken system will finally reward you.

It won’t. The traditional path is a slow, quiet death of the soul.

But there is an escape route. The greatest wealth transfer in human history is happening right now, quietly, behind the screens of your devices.

You don’t need a groundbreaking product. You don’t need venture capital. You already have a million dollars locked in your head. When you synthesize your curiosities and monetize your mind, you don’t have any competition. Writing online is the ultimate meta-skill. By packaging your authentic self into a digital product and building an audience, you decouple your income from your time.

It is the most reliable vehicle for financial freedom and the highest form of human self-actualization. Just document your journey online. Speak your truth, hit publish, and create with absolute autonomy.

Before you bet your family's future on your ability to combine quantum physics and amateur pottery into a booming personal brand, we need to talk.

The Creator Economy’s Dirty Secret

Behind this intoxicating, pseudo-philosophical pitch lies a small detail that the gurus love to ignore. Their advice only works because they have a structural advantage. Their target audience is literally everyone else on Substack. This is a rare situation you only get when you are selling shovels during a gold rush.

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The gurus tell you to avoid picking a niche by simply combining your random interests (e.g., philosophy, coding, fitness). They promise that “you are the niche.“ But if you actually do this, your potential audience is so small that the business model collapses.

The danger is how sophisticated these gurus have become. Their gospels liberate you from having to pick a niche. And they appear to be practicing what they preach. But look closely at their business model. They really just niched down on the “how to make money online” niche. That is probably one of the most lucrative niches on the internet. They just rebranded it with minimalist aesthetics and philosophy.

Most creators will never operate in a market sustained by constant influx of hopeful newcomers. As a beginner it’s hard to see what’s really going on. The gurus tell you exactly what you would like to believe. They do it in an almost seductive way. You might subconsciously sense there is something wrong but their vision sounds too appealing.

You look at their audience size and rationalize to yourself that there is proof that what they are talking about is true. Logically it makes perfect sense. The creator economy loves a post-rationalized case study.

The guru looks back down the mountain and describes the clear, logical path they took to the top. They talk about business, but forget to highlight the role of lucky accidents, random experimentation, and trial and error.

It’s like saying “I drove drunk with no seatbelt for 30 years and I’m fine!”

We see their success, but we don’t see the hundreds of creators who failed trying to do the exact same thing. Their formulas are full of hindsight bias that only work if you decide to pivot into teaching other creators how to be a creator.

The result is a graveyard.

People are failing and throwing in the towel, not because they are incapable, but because the advice of the gurus is misleading.

The Hope-Despair Cycle

There is a psychological mechanism that makes this machine run beautifully. Many creators get stuck in what I call The Hope-Despair Cycle. It works like this:

1. A guru creates a profound sense of hope.

2. Fueled by hope, you consume more of their content.

3. You look for the blueprint and end up buying the course.

4. The course makes you feel like an insider with secret knowledge creating even more hope.

5. The promised results fail to manifest.

6. Your self-trust erodes.

7. You give up OR you search for a new infusion of hope and the cycle begins again.

At this point you see the problem either as personal (I’m not good enough) or as systemic (The system is rigged). It’s easy to overlook that no matter how good their blueprint is, it was never made to be replicated.

Business Is Not Rocket Science

There is no universally applicable formula. Anyone who is trying to convince you that there is a step-by-step plan to success is either delusional or just wants to get into your wallet.

That doesn’t mean all business advice is wrong. There are some principles that actually work. But they are boring and haven’t changed in a hundred years. They don’t make for a sexy course you can sell for $997.

Most of the creator economy depends on the illusion that business is highly complicated and you simply lack the right information.

Science seeks to uncover universal, repeatable truths. If you follow the formula, you get the same result. Every time. Water boils at 100°C at sea level. This is a scientific fact. In business there is no equivalent for that.

The “7 Steps to a Million Followers” tries to pretend it’s a repeatable formula. But it’s not. It’s a weather report from last Tuesday. Interesting, perhaps, but not a reliable guide for today’s journey.

The creator economy is desperate for a safe path to financial success and there is no shortage of people who desperately trying to provide it.

Creators follow the gurus because they are looking for an insurance policy. A strictly logical, metric-driven approach to problem-solving gives the reassuring impression that you are making an objective choice.

That’s how we end up with a whole industry of palmistry disguised as business advice, pretending business is a predictable science rather than an art.

The Great Paradox of the Creator Economy

Why do so many smart, ambitious people fall for the illusion of the blueprint? Putting yourself out in the internet to build a business is terrifying. It leads to a profound psychological conflict.

We are driven by two fundamental energies. The Greeks called them Eros and Agape. Eros is the drive to individuate. It is the need to be special, to stand out, and to leave a legacy. Eros is the spark that makes you want to become a creator in the first place. It is the voice telling you to step out of the comfort of the herd and build something of your own.

And stepping out of the herd triggers our deepest evolutionary fear: isolation. Standing out puts you in direct conflict with Agape. Agape is the desire to be part of a group and to merge with something bigger. It is the survival instinct that warns you not to wander into the dark woods alone.

Right at your moment of maximum self-doubt, the gurus appear with a “guaranteed blueprint” and a “community of like-minded creators.” They offer you a borrowed ideology so you don’t have to carry the terrifying burden of your own greatness. They tell you that you can have the rewards of standing out without the risk of standing alone.

And it works. Driven by fear, we buy the course. You get to feel like a rebel while acting like a sheep. Because of this, the creator economy doesn’t build Artists. It mass-produces Artisans. An Artisan just learns a technical skill to produce what is popular. An Artist asserts their inner drive onto the world.

The Courage to be an Artist

In art there is no right way. The only thing that ever works is your path.

The artist naturally challenges the status quo. And this involves the risk of failure and rejection. This means the artist is in a constant battle with self-doubt. Most creators can’t deal with that, so they seek safety in a blueprint. They retreat to the certainty sold by the creator economy. But complete certainty is dangerous and often masks a dogmatic closed-mindedness.

Your capacity to tolerate self-doubt is the greatest predictor of your success.

The artist creates not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. To fully believe in one’s work while simultaneously harboring doubts shows a profound respect for the ever-evolving nature of your own truth.

The moment your own path becomes clear it doesn’t feel like confidence. It feels scary because everything seems to click. It’s almost spooky. And that’s a sign that you hit on something deeply meaningful. Carl Jung called this is an encounter with the Self. That’s who you truly are. Awe is the only proper response to such an encounter.

Ironically, we spend most of our lives running from these encounters. Standing face-to-face with your own potential is a deeply personal experience. We are standing there all by ourselves. That is terrifying so we shrink from our own greatness. We fear our highest possibilities just as much as our lowest ones.

Eros drives us to individuate and realize our unique potential. If we only follow Eros without Agape, it triggers fear and isolation. The magic happens when we surrender to the encounter of the Self. By leaning fully into your potential (Eros), you paradoxically tap into a universally shared human experience (Agape).

It sounds simple, but it requires a lot of courage. The gurus don’t talk about it because you can’t teach courage.

However you can find courage by walking your own path.

To do that you have to be able to hear your inner voice clearly. You must step away from the noise of the world and actively direct your focus. Artists must maintain the peace of mind necessary for listening to their deeper selves.

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In our highly distracted society, it’s up to us to make constructive use of solitude. You must be able to be quiet and let solitude work within you so that unconscious insights have the space to break through.

You can’t simply will yourself to have a creative breakthrough. However, you can choose to show up for the work.

The artist builds momentum by devoting themselves to the creative encounter with intense dedication and commitment.

Every time you face the page you re-enter the tension between Eros and Agape. You are not writing to publish on Substack. You are writing to become an artist. This practice strengthens your willingness to keep doing it. Overt time you build a habit of resilience rather than just a fleeting sense of clarity.

Don’t wait for clarity to arrive before you create. You have to create in spite of your fears, and the act of doing so becomes your foundation.

Take Money Off the Table

I know many of you plan to make money with your Substack. There is nothing wrong with that. But we have romanticized the idea of starting a business. Just because it has never been easier to start a business doesn’t change the fact that entrepreneurship is incredibly risky.

If you start a business with the intention to monetize in the next 6 months, please don’t. Most people will be crushed by the financial pressure of having to make money. It squeezes the art out of the business and you are left with soulless shell.

As long as survival/money is on the line, you will default to conformity. The pressure to make money turns people into people (or algorithm) pleasers. By taking monetization off the table initially, you remove the fear of survival. You make it purely an act of self-creation.

Dare to Write a Terrible Sentence

Writing is the cheapest, purest way to extract your internal thoughts and create something permanent in the real world. Writing forces you to sit in an empty room with nothing but your own inner drive.

The blank page is paralyzing precisely because it represents unlimited possibilities. But without limits, there is no creativity. Write a terrible sentence you know you will delete.

Embrace the fact that your first draft is supposed to suck.

Through the act of self-creation and a daily practice you build a personal philosophy instead of a hollow personal brand. Think of it as a lens through which you see the world that is shaped by your passions, interests, and lived experiences. I call it personal because it’s not a framework you study, it’s a reality you actually live.

Clarity comes from acting, not thinking. As you write what you really care about, your Personal Philosophy becomes a form of self-expression. At some point you will want to turn this into a business. That's a legitimate ambition. But the path begins with you, not the market.

Write a terrible first sentence. And then do it again tomorrow.

Go make art.

P.S. Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison built from someone else's blueprint. To do that, you have need the courage to build what only you can build.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It’s a mirror to help you trust your own path.

On May 15th, exactly 12 months after I went all in on Substack, I woke up to 10,000 subscribers. You might be wondering how I did this. In today’s article, I’m giving away my exact blueprint for free.

If I were playing the same game as everyone else, that is exactly how I would open this essay. We have all seen these posts. They clog our feeds and dominate the trending tabs.

They all look the same. And if you click on the profiles of the people writing them, you notice something fascinating. They are teaching you how to build a massive audience, yet their own posts struggle to get 25 likes. The math doesn’t add up.

Inflating numbers is easy. You can import a dead email list from a failed crypto project, run paid ads to cheap giveaways… or simply lie.

But their scammy practices aren’t the biggest problem here. The tragedy is that honest creators believe that this crap actually works.

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You sit there, trying to write beautiful essays about philosophy, or art, or human resilience, and you see the “10k in 12 months” post. You look at your dashboard sitting at 49 subscribers. You conclude your writing sucks and start doubting yourself.

You aren’t doing anything wrong. You’re just not a grifter.

Selling Shovels in a Gold Rush

The problem is when you see this type of content and start to read it, it logically seems to make sense. Since it worked for them, you would assume it must be true.

The people shouting the loudest right now are selling shovels in a gold rush. Their aggressive, hyper-optimized frameworks only “work” because they are selling an anxiety-driven product: status, fast money, and vanity metrics.

People will practically throw their wallets at the screen if you poke at their financial insecurities hard enough.

Yes, their advice works… assuming you lack any moral compass and your goal is to build the same “business” as them.

If you write a thoughtful publication about Roman history, modern poetry, or navigating motherhood, and you apply their high-pressure sales tactics... you will look like a lunatic.

It’s not just wrong, but horribly wrong.

The growth hacker playbook prioritizes immediate extraction over long-term trust. It is at best a short-term strategy, because they need a constant influx of new hopeless victims they can burn through.

The most depressing part of the grifter advice is to turn every aspect of a profile, bio, and about page into a highly optimized sales funnel. If every writer on Substack follows this advice, the platform will overflow with aggressive sales pitches.

By optimizing all the friction out of your profile, you destroy the very magic that made your audience fall in love with your writing in the first place.

When you optimize away all your friction, you remove all the reasons someone might actually care about you. If your work is frictionless, it’s a commodity. And commodities only compete on one thing: who is cheapest and who is loudest. That’s a race to the bottom you cannot win.

The result is what we are seeing across the entire creator economy right now: an ocean of identical, soulless copycats. Everyone sounds the same, and nobody trusts anyone. Worst of all, the promised success is nothing but an illusion.

Everyone Is Authentic Now

We are in the midst of a crisis.

I talk to talented creators every week. They have a profound philosophy and unique worldview. But when it comes to promoting their work they panic. They retreat to the standard marketing practices they themselves despise, and as a result, nobody reads their work. Not because their ideas aren’t good, but because their packaging sounds exactly like everyone else.

They despise the crappy marketing tactics for a good reason. Most of it is deeply inauthentic.

It’s not a brand strategy you can slap onto a Substack post. Authenticity is something you are. It is really a byproduct of doing the actual work. Nobody who is actually authentic has to convince others that they are authentic.

Jesus didn’t wander around the desert wearing a backwards trucker hat saying, “Guys, welcome to my channel. Today I’m just showing up, unscripted, trying to be super authentic with my loaves and fishes.”

No. He just lived his philosophy. And that’s what made him such a magnetic person… I mean, he has more followers than every creator on social media. Combined.

The Starving Artist Lie

I know why you still use the marketing tactics you despise. You are doing it because you are terrified. The system has handed you a paralyzing, false choice: Either become a shameless marketer, or accept your fate as a starving artist.

So, pure survival instinct tells you to hold your nose, swallow your pride, and hit publish on content that makes your skin crawl. You think to yourself: “If I just play the game a little longer, maybe I’ll make enough money to finally do my real work.”

It is a lie. The grifters need you to believe this lie so you keep buying their templates. They tell you that ignoring the algorithm is career suicide. Good.

Commit career suicide on their terms, so you can build a business on yours.

Break their rules.

Embrace the Vandalism

We have become a society of skeptics and eye-rollers. We know when we are being sold to, and we know when someone is trying to manipulate us.1

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If you want to build a sustainable body of work that pays you for your depth, you cannot rely on logic. Trust is the foundation of any sustainable business. And to build trust, you need to be authentic.

You can’t get there with logic. It’s something people have to feel.

Human nature hasn’t changed for a million years, and it won't change in the next million. We are emotional beings. Nature cares a great deal about feelings, and feelings drive what we do. And right now, what people feel when they encounter the creator economy is — nothing. Or worse, suspicion.

To create a business that resonates with people we must:

1. Tell a story that honestly reflects the truth of who we are.

2. Express this truth in a way that doesn’t come across as bullshit to the audience.

It sounds simple. But 90% of creators fail because they let fear dictate their strategy. They want to stand out, but they are too terrified to do something different. They retreat to the safety of templates and best practices, serving up a lukewarm sandwich of average ideas.

We need more creators who possess the courage to commit Beautiful Vandalism.

By that, I do not mean you should break things. On the contrary. You should fix the broken thing by making it more beautiful. You take the walls covered in corporate graffiti and you paint a mural.

You are a writer trying to make another human being feel something. If you do that consistently, generously, and unapologetically, you will not need to trick them into paying you. People will trust you, and as a natural consequence, they will happily pay you to help them get where they are going.

Go build something beautiful.

P. S. Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you find that clarity. It’s free and uncovers your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

It won't give you 10,000 subscribers overnight. But it might just save you a decade of climbing the wrong ladder.

You spend hours staring at a blinking cursor, doing the hard work of dragging an idea out of your head. You edit, you polish, and finally, you hit publish.

Exactly 1.4 seconds later, you get a notification. A comment! Already?! It’s from someone named ThoughtfulCreator_88 and it reads:

That comment was written by a piece of code operating out of a damp server farm in New Jersey. It has all the emotional authenticity of a guy hiring a raccoon wearing a trench coat to go on a first date for him. (”Hello human woman, I am enjoying this spaghetti. Do you have any garbage I could rifle through later?”)

It’s exhausting. We came to Substack because it represents the last great neighborhood on the internet. It’s a sanctuary from traditional social media optimized for constant dopamine hits. The promise here was real community.

And that community still exists. I have followed since I started out. Last year he posted a picture of a coffee. Turns out we both go to the same coffee shop. I reached out, and we met up.

Substack is not very big in Germany, so the chances of this happening were incredibly small. Meeting people in real life through an online community reminded me that Substack is really a special place. But right now Substack is under attack.

Last week we went for a nice walk through a park and exchanged some ideas. We realized we were both dealing with the exact same frustrating experience: our comment sections and feeds are getting hijacked by bots and engagement farmers. Funnily enough, the exact same guys spamming my section were spamming his.

If you look at your feed you might conclude that this is normal. But if you talk to other creators you realize that everyone is just annoyed by it.

There’s a word for this now: Subslop.

The saddest part is that this slop is destroying the culture of Substack. It makes it hard to see who is actually real. I don’t want to interact with a bot. If I need 10 minutes just sifting through the comment section to find out who is real, I might stop replying altogether.

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We are slowly being conditioned to accept this epidemic of fake engagement as the cost of doing business online. But that’s just the visible part. The same logic is quietly working its way into your drafts. Because suddenly we are writing paragraphs we didn’t think… or believe in.

The Multi-Billion-Dollar Lie

I talked to several Substack creators in the last couple of weeks. There is a weird pattern I recognized: as AI supposedly becomes better, I see more and more creators using AI less.

Contrast that with the most popular narrative on the internet right now. It seems like AI can do anything. Just think your thoughts and AI will create it for you.

Look at the most valuable companies in the world. Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta committed $650 billion to AI this year. Yes, billions with a B. OpenAI is still far from being profitable, so it would be an understatement to say they have a massive financial interest in making you believe you need AI. They also have the marketing budget to pull it off. So it’s no surprise that you feel like you are falling behind if you aren’t using the latest model.

Big Tech is pushing for AI adoption. But as more people use AI it actually puts you at a disadvantage.

Objectively AI is not as smart as it seems. It’s just very good at pretending. At the core, an LLM learns patterns from huge data sets and estimates what the most probable next word should be given the context.

But here is the danger of “probable.” In writing, the most probable next word is also the most predictable next word. It is a cliché.

AI is non-deterministic which means you can run the same prompt several times and always get a different result. But look closely. After doing this for a dozen or so times you will see pattern emerge. The model will revolve around a certain idea. That means anyone using a similar prompt will get a similar result.1

The models tend to reproduce the most common patterns rather than invent an original, unusual point of view. Many users ask for the same things: “make this better,” “write a post,” “give me 10 ideas,” which pushes outputs toward the average of the internet.2

But it gets worse…

It’s not a… It’s a… Sea of Sameness

We are consuming so much AI-generated text that we are subconsciously adopting its empty, corporate style in our own writing, muddying the waters even further.

It’s not that AI sounds like humans. It’s humans sounding like AI.

Damn it. The use of the ”It’s not… it’s…” is so pervasive that I started using it myself. I can feel how I adopted some of the AI patterns… and it’s really hard to become aware of that.

That’s why we are drowning in a sea of sameness. As more people use AI, content becomes uniform in structure, tone, and visuals. Research suggests that while AI can raise collective diversity in some settings, it does not increase individual creativity.3

The ease of creating content with one click further intensifies competition and the struggle for visibility. Standing out becomes incredibly difficult. This will create a premium for human judgement and creativity.

The Death of the Creator

We call ourselves creators. This strikes me as funny. Most people in the creator economy are anything but creative. The word “Creator” used to imply divinity. Now it’s a job title on LinkedIn.

The creator economy is not devoid of creativity. The incentives are just set wrong. So, instead of creating something meaningful, most creators end up spamming the ecosystem just to inflate our subscriber counts.

And here is the uncomfortable part. I have done this. You have probably done this. It's not a moral failing. The temptation to produce something that performs rather than something that matters is a rational response to a system that rewards performance over truth.

The truth is, creativity is hard. It means you have to sit down and you might stare out of the window for an hour. Thinking deeply looks like doing nothing, but it requires intense mental effort. Because humans are naturally lazy, we retreat to using AI. You throw some half-baked ideas into a prompt, and boom, a couple of seconds later you have a flawless article.

Don’t get me wrong. AI is not the problem. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t use AI4.

The real problem is that we have become so obsessed with “providing value” and optimizing for the algorithm that we forgot what it actually means to be creative. We trade our unique perspectives for bulleted lists and actionable takeaways because they perform better. We use AI as a crutch.

“Providing value” is transactional. It’s giving someone 5 steps to fix their morning routine or 10 templates for better emails. And if your only goal is to provide transactional value, you will eventually be replaced by AI, because AI can regurgitate value all day long.

The whole process for original thinking is gone. The work loses its soul.

The Alchemy of Lived Experience

AI can create but it can’t do the noticing. It can’t walk through the park, smell some flowers or jump into a cold lake on a sunny day. Going through a regular day, you feel hundreds of emotions. AI can’t feel any of it. It has no lived experience. And the lived experience is what makes us unique. It’s the foundation of creating art.

AI doesn’t get that.

Every time I use AI to edit an article, it wants to throw out my personal stories or the parts that make the article different (especially the weird phrasing that comes from me not being a native speaker).

When we do the hard work of creativity and sit down to stare at a blank page for an hour you apply pressure. It takes your ideas, emotions and lived experiences and transmutes them into a unique point of view. That’s alchemy.

It takes the mundane lead of everyday life and puts it under enough internal pressure to turn it into gold.

Don’t confuse this internal pressure with the external pressure to create more and be more productive. This hurts the creative process because it doesn’t allow you to look deeply enough. That’s what philosophers and artists of the past did. They spent hours just thinking. Imagine that for a moment. Hours of undistracted thinking.

Do the Hard Work

We have a romantic idea that creativity strikes like lightning. That the right idea will arrive fully formed and we just have to capture it.

It doesn't work like that. Ask anyone who has actually made something.

The Renaissance painters didn't wait for inspiration. Michelangelo spent four years on his back painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Da Vinci spent three years on the Mona Lisa. He stepped away from the canvas to live, to observe, and to let his experiences refine his technique. That is devotion. They committed to the work regardless of how they felt.

The difference between a hobby and a life’s work is what you do when you feel absolutely nothing.

If you want to build a creative business, devotion is essential. When the page is blank and you have nothing to say, you sit down anyway, because the work is really about who you are becoming.

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So, just start. Don’t lean back waiting for the muse (or ChatGPT) to save you. Lean into the page. Write as many ideas as fast and aggressively as you can. Just get a really crappy draft out of your head.

Commit to writing for three hours. You know you’re gonna blow the first 20 minutes (or more) staring at the wall or thinking about the series you saw on Netflix. But those remaining hours are where the magic happens.

You will hit a wall. You will feel the overwhelming, modern temptation to open a new tab, take a half-baked idea and throw it into an AI, and let a machine finish your thought.

Don’t do it.

That friction is where your creativity lies. Wrestling with the right word, pacing the room, and deleting a paragraph three times because it doesn't sound quite like you. Every time you choose to push through that block instead of outsourcing it to a LLM or template, you are finding out what you actually think.

Last week Benjamin and I walked through a park for two hours with no agenda. That conversation became this article. I didn't plan to write this article. It just wanted to be created through me.

P. S. Everything in this article comes back to the same problem. We have forgotten who we actually are in the pursuit of performing for an algorithm. Before you can write in your own voice, you have to know what your voice actually is.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so your business becomes a vessel for your life’s work. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Discover Your Creator Archetype

You could spend an hour in the feed and come away with three ideas you hadn’t considered before. Writers writing about things they actually cared about. Readers who actually read. A quiet corner of the internet that hadn’t been colonized yet.

Now it feels increasingly like LinkedIn. Substack is becoming a place where creators sell “how to be a creator” to other creators who want to be creators. It’s an endless loop of productivity hacks, growth tactics, and audience building.

At some point, we moved from creating things to teaching people how to create things. Most of the wealth comes from recruiting other people and teaching them how to sell the dream to even more people.

Some would call this a pyramid scheme. In the creator economy, we call it personal branding.

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Don’t get me wrong. Substack is still the best platform I have found. But the air is getting thinner. The noise is drowning out the signal. And if you’re a creator actually trying to build something meaningful, this shift isn’t just annoying. It changes how you think.

How I Became a Substack Bestseller

Maybe you have experienced it yourself. You are about to write a new article. There are hundreds of great ideas in your head. You know what you want to say.

But before you start, you take a quick look at what’s getting attention. You see that your favorite creator posted something a couple of days ago that went viral. The topic is great and there is validation that people like it.

Maybe you could write about that? You pause. This could be your breakthrough. So instead of writing what you actually wanted to write, you write something you think people will read.

After spending some time on Substack you start to notice other creators. People who arrived on the platform five minutes ago are suddenly growing faster than you and showing up everywhere. It’s frustrating, even if you tell yourself it shouldn’t matter.

So you take a look at their profile. Research purposes, obviously. Lucky for you, they have a post pinned at the top titled “How I Became a Substack Bestseller.“

You read it. And just like every other growth article you “accidentally“ read, they all seem to point to the same obvious best practices. You must post one to two long-form pieces per week and supplement this by posting on Notes four times a day. Your titles have to be “click-worthy.“

None of it is particularly surprising. In fact, it makes perfect sense once you see it. And that’s exactly why it’s dangerous.

Because you don’t make a dramatic decision to change what you’re doing. You don’t abandon your work or suddenly decide to chase attention. You just adjust. Slightly.

But over time those small adjustments start to compound. And bit by bit your art turns into content.

The $100 Million Sanctuary

Let’s not forget that Substack is a business after all. Last year they raised $100 million in funding. It may have started as a sanctuary for writing, but once you raise that kind of money, you don’t get to stay a sanctuary forever.

The obvious move is to copy what already works. The more time people spend on the platform, the more valuable it becomes. So it starts behaving like every other social platform: Keep people on the platform and give them reasons to come back.

This has an impact on the creators as well. Once attention becomes the currency, the whole game changes. It increases the pressure to create more content.

Since Substack hasn’t introduced ads yet, the quality of content is critically important to them. More creators competing for reader attention is good for their business because it means higher quality content.

Except that’s not what’s happening.

The Placebo Dashboard

By introducing new metrics, Substack supposedly helps you make better decisions. You are told to analyze the numbers to write a piece that’s more likely to capture attention. Because these numbers are plastered across your dashboard and dominate your feed, you’re actively encouraged to analyze data before you even think about your next idea.

The problem is that the numbers you see are misleading.

Let’s take A/B testing your title as an example. Unless you are in the top 1% of creators, your audience size is simply too small to yield statistically significant data.

Substack has essentially given you a placebo button. It’s like the “close door“ button in many elevators. It is there simply to make impatient people feel better by giving them something to do. The only function is to soothe the mammalian brain’s preference for control and certainty. And this function keeps you engaged on their platform.

This data gives us false confidence, functioning as a feedback loop of confirmation bias. You end up changing your writing style or your headlines based on what is effectively the same as flipping a coin.

The biggest problem I see with metrics is that they destroy diversity because they force everybody to pursue the same narrow goal, often in the same narrow way, or to make choices using the exact same criteria.

By gamifying writing with leaderboards, “rising” tags, and subscriber counts, Substack shifts the creator’s focus from a “wide context” problem (how do I write something meaningful and interesting?) to a “narrow context” problem (how do I get this number to go up?). When every creator optimizes for the same narrow metrics, we end up in a sea of sameness.

The funny thing is that logic always gets you to exactly the same place as your competitors. If you study the trending tabs and optimize your work based purely on Substack’s dashboard, you will inevitably end up sounding exactly like everyone else who is trying to game the algorithm.

The real magic of independent writing comes from instinct, imagination, and sometimes just daring to be different or weird.

And here is where it gets sneaky. Through these metric-driven nudges, your behavior starts to change. Do this long enough and you’re slowly becoming someone you didn’t intend to be.

When metrics define who you are, you get stuck. Because metrics are inconsistent. And so your identity becomes inconsistent too.

That’s the part most people miss. They think they’re optimizing their strategy. But what they’re actually doing is destabilizing their identity.

Identity Drift

I call this identity drift. Here is how it works:

1. You start writing what matters

2. You notice what performs

3. You adjust slightly

4. You repeat

5. You drift

None of these are big decisions. They are just small compromises. But over time you go from expressing something to producing something.

The real problem is that you’re trying to build something without knowing who you are as a creator. Before you ask how to grow, you need to decide who you are.

If you don’t define your identity, the platform will define it for you. And as we have seen that’s not necessarily in your best interest.

Most people never really define who they are as a creator. Not clearly, at least. So when the environment changes, they don’t have anything stable to anchor to. They try to be a writer, but also a teacher. They want to express something real, but they also want to grow. They experiment with different formats, different tones, different strategies, hoping something will click.

In isolation, none of that is wrong. But taken together, it creates a kind of internal fragmentation. You’re no longer operating from a clear center. You’re reacting, adjusting, adapting, trying to reconcile different roles that don’t fully align.

The specific loss here is not just voice or quality. It’s the relationship with the work itself. The artist makes something because it demands to exist. The content creator makes something because the calendar demands it. Those are completely different orientations, and the distance between them is measured in identity not just output.

The Horror of Success

Identity drift doesn’t just change what you create. It changes how creating feels.

Sitting down and writing feels heavier. I mean, not that it ever was easy, but now you feel exhausted even before sitting down to write. You second-guess ideas and start to procrastinate by reading another how to grow article.

The writing is not really the problem. The problem is hitting publish. For all the changes Substack made, the editor makes it really easy to hit publish. So why does it feel so hard?

It’s the pain of shouting into the void. You pour your heart into an article and nobody reads it. You start to take it personally and think it’s the content. So you think you can escape the pain by writing about something that’s supposed to get attention.

I know it sucks. But you know what sucks even more? Actually getting a lot of likes on an article you didn’t create because you wanted it to exist but because you thought people will read it.

One day you wake up to 30,000 subscribers. It seems like you made it. But then you have to write about stuff you are not passionate about for an audience you don’t care about. The audience came for a performance, not for who you really are.

This is where things get slightly masochistic. You spent so much time building your audience that you can’t just walk away. Maybe even your mortgage payment depends on it.

This is no longer identity drift. It’s an identity prison.

You Are the Work

If this feels uncomfortable, it should. Because at some point, you handed over authorship.

Before you can create art, you have to appoint yourself an artist. You don’t wait for the feedback of the creator economy. You decide (internally) that you are one. Your first step is simply giving yourself permission to occupy that identity. It seems trivial but it means you take the responsibility to shape your own life.

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You cannot create compelling content if you spend your entire life locked in a room staring at analytics and editing software. You must have the courage to go out, experience the world, suffer, love, fail, and live vigorously. That messy life experience is the raw fuel for your creative engine.

Don’t overthink your content strategy. Focus on pursuing your own curiosities, developing your own skills, and figuring out your own life.

The writing, videos, podcast or whatever you create are really just a byproduct of becoming who you really are.

If you just follow the metrics, you are handing the chisel over to the algorithm. You are letting a piece of code determine who you get to be. And let me tell you, the algorithm has terrible taste.

The Quiet Rebellion

Awareness is the first step. The second step is harder. It requires courage. Because it means you will have to go against the default path of the creator economy.

Some people accuse me of being a contrarian just for the sake of being a contrarian. I get where it is coming from, but I disagree. Obviously. Being a contrarian is part of my DNA (I was born C-section, btw).

I’m throwing rocks at the creator economy because the machine is broken, and we have to smash some windows to let the fresh air in. We have to make some beautiful vandalism called art.

It takes a lot of bravery to ignore the dashboard and accept that the numbers don’t define your value. That is a quiet rebellion for creative freedom.

You must have the courage to declare yourself a creator, to stand out, to disappoint your audience when it’s time to evolve, and the courage to live a life worth writing about.

The shift toward the attention economy is also an opportunity to find out who you really are and to take responsibility for shaping Substack in what it was intended to be.

The identity drift is already happening. The question is who will you be?

P.S. Everything in this article points to the same problem. You are trying to build something that looks like you without knowing what you actually look like.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of building for the wrong audience.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

(Names have been changed to protect the not so innocent)

Todd is staring straight through your screen. He looks profound. Or deeply serious. Or maybe he just hasn’t slept because he’s on day 42 of monk mode. He presses his hands together under his chin, fingertips resting gently on the neckline of a $300 unbranded beige t-shirt. On the minimalist oak desk beside him, purposefully placed just out of focus, sits a ceramic mug of ceremonial-grade matcha.

Todd leans into the microphone, drops his voice into a calm, authoritative, low-BPM rhythm, and begins to speak.

It sounds intoxicating.

You watch this while eating a lukewarm sandwich at your desk, and you are hooked. Because Todd isn’t screaming at you to trade crypto. He’s looking directly into your soul and telling you that your ability to focus is a superpower. He’s telling you that your random obsession with stoicism, analog photography, and gut health is the foundation of a media empire.

Todd claims that thanks to his philosophy, he now works exactly two hours a day. (We will temporarily ignore the fact that feeding his newsletter funnels, managing his Discord, and filming high-contrast reels actually takes him 11 hours a day and a minor caffeine addiction.)

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There is nothing really special about Todd. He is just very articulate. The promise is that everyone can do this. He makes you believe the only thing you have to do is be yourself on the internet. And if you buy his $997 course, you too can exit the matrix, transcend the 9-to-5, and build a successful creator business.

Todd is the hero of the modern creator economy. He is also a symptom of why the creator economy is currently broken.

The Creator Economy is Run by Delusional Optimists

Here is the thing about Todd. Todd isn’t lying to you.

He actually believes in his course. You aren’t buying a scam. He gives you an impeccably designed blueprint. It’s the equivalent of a NASA-grade, titanium water-purification filter. It works perfectly. Todd uses it every day to turn his thoughts into pure, liquid gold.

But what Todd forgets to mention is that a water filter only works if you have water. He already had a half-million Twitter followers when he used his blueprint in 2019.

He sold you the water filter. But you live in the desert.

You hook Todd’s system up to your Substack of 42 subscribers, turn the crank, and absolutely nothing comes out.

This is where the psychological violence of the creator economy begins. Because when you buy a high-end system from a very smart guy and it fails... you don’t blame the system. You blame yourself.

You think you didn’t synthesize your curiosities well enough or you haven’t used the correct writing framework.

You never stop to look at the unromantic math:

Todd doesn’t like the math because it would mean he has to admit that it was more luck than his pure genius. So Todd calls these people low-agency.

Nobody is in charge of this whole thing. That’s what makes it so hard to see. The creator economy is not a pyramid scheme run by malicious elite. It’s a virus. A self-replicating idea that feeds on our need for status, freedom, and meaning, and rewards the people at the top for keeping the dream alive.

The system is designed to flow the water directly to the top. And Todd is working to keep the water flowing.

The whole industry only works if there are enough delusional optimists buying water filters and don't realize they are standing in a dessert.

By now there is a natural urge to call everyone a grifter and decide that building a Substack doesn’t make sense. It feels like defending oil cartels in a class-action lawsuit. Or dealing fentanyl.

Before you start deleting your Substack, let’s look at the alternative.

The Myth of the Million Dollars

The reason we fall for the Todds of the creator economy is simpler than we'd like to admit. Todd didn't invent a dream. He just packaged one we already had.

That sounds great. But who says I want to become a millionaire? When we think about having a million, we are really fantasizing about the freedom from problems and autonomy. What we don’t see is that there is no life without problems. No matter how many zeros your bank statement shows.

I guarantee you that 99% of people do not actually want to be millionaires. They just like the idea of the money, but not what it requires to get there.

What you actually want is the ability to stop working at 3:00 PM on a Tuesday, close your laptop, and go for a walk in the sun. Or to meet with your friends… or just to enjoy your life.

You don’t need a million dollars for that kind of life.

With a hundred thousand a year you can eat well, travel, drink the fancy coffee, invest the rest, and leave your desk when the weather is good without asking anyone's permission. Most people who've actually made a million dollars are still at their desks at nine in the evening trying to figure out how to make two million. The number grows. The Tuesday afternoon walk keeps getting postponed.

You want to become a Sovereign Creator. Most people hear “sovereign” and think of yachts and financial freedom. But psychological sovereignty is infinitely more important. You have to define what success looks like for you. How much is enough?

If you don’t define it, you will accidentally adopt the definition set by people who do not care if you are happy.

The Strategy of Art

There is another point that stinks for Todd. The sobering statistics mean you are better off keeping your day job or freelance work. Savings would do the trick as well. Keep whatever is paying your rent. At least for now. The biggest mistake you can make is putting the pressure of survival on the thing you love.

Even shooting for $100k requires uncomfortable work and patience. So how do we ensure that even if you miss the financial target, you haven’t wasted two years of your life?

If you are reading this, you probably want to help people with your work. But you don’t help people by producing content. Nobody ever woke up saying “Man, I could really use some content right now.” Instead of creating content and becoming a slave to the algorithm, we are going to make art.

When I say art I don't mean you have to become DaVinci and paint the next Mona Lisa. Art is simply a way of being in the world.

The act of creation forces you to get to the core of who you are, because you cannot make great art while pretending to be someone else. Art is an expression of who you are. You are constantly confronted with the question of why you are here.

That’s why art is really an existential response, a deep longing to transcends yourself. You don't just make the work. The work makes you. I like to think of art as way of sharing your gift with the world and in the process become a better person.

This can have a therapeutic effect where both the creator and the audience have an opportunity to heal. You share what you see in a way that makes someone else feel less alone. That leaves something real behind.

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In the process of creating art you lose yourself and participate in a communion with the work. Instead of submitting to consistency you submit to devotion. You are answering something that comes from inside you and needs to exist regardless of whether anyone reads it.

With this mindset you can’t lose. Even if you don’t make single dollar you have developed a point of view that cannot be copied, a voice that is yours, and a relationship with your own creative capacity that no algorithm can take away.

Content decays. Art accumulates.

How To Actually Make a Living

Philosophy is beautiful. But philosophy does not pay the rent.

Forget the traditional metrics that Todd obsesses over. For the first six to twelve months your only job is to find ten people who genuinely care about what you’re making.

Not ten thousand. Ten.

Find ten people who trust you, respect you, and need what you have to say. Ten people who read everything you write. Who send it to one person because it changed their life. Who would genuinely miss you if you disappeared

Ten people who trust you are worth more than ten thousand who follow you for the dopamine.

From those ten, you will eventually learn what problem you actually solve, how your voice sounds, and what you have to offer that nobody else does. But you can only learn that from people who care, and you can only find people who care by shipping the work.

Right now, a familiar voice in your head is probably asking: Okay, but what is the exact acquisition strategy for the ten? How do I actually get them? What’s my niche?

Let me stop you right there.

You are looking for another blueprint. You are trying to overcomplicate the mechanics so you have an excuse to avoid doing the actual work. Asking “how” is the best friend of the sophisticated procrastinator.

You want the step-by-step plan to get your ten? Here it is:

Open a blank document (or one of the thirty in your drafts folder) and write something so uncomfortably honest that it makes your stomach hurt. Hit publish. And then you do it again next week.

Do that consistently for six months, and you will be ahead of 99% of the people on this platform. If you really did this for six months straight and you still feel completely lost, hit reply. I will personally refund you every single penny you paid to read this free email.

Somewhere in this process, whether or not the business works, you become someone who has done the hardest thing a creative person can do: You stopped planning and started becoming.

You didn't build a personal brand. You built a person.

Now, stop procrastinating and close this tab. Your blank page is waiting.

P.S. Everything in this article points to the same problem. You are trying to build something that looks like you without knowing what you actually look like.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of trying to find your niche.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

Deliver your value quickly. Cut out the pauses. Edit out the dead space. Distill your complex humanity into a six-minute, highly optimized YouTube video so the algorithm knows exactly which consumer demographic to feed it to.

We completely ignored the rule.

A couple of weeks ago, and I went live on Substack. We spent a lot of time coming up with an agenda. And then, we threw the outline out the window. We just wanted to have an honest conversation about the underlying rot of the “personal branding” and why 97% of creators are miserable.

We didn’t hit stop.

We kept talking. We talked until my contact lenses dried out and Taylin’s local time hit 2:00 AM. We stripped away the safe, practiced answers we give on regular podcasts, and eventually hit the bedrock of actual, existential fear.

Seven hours later, we logged off.

I did not edit this video. I didn’t cut out the silence, the glitches, or the moments we lost our train of thought. To edit it down into “bite-sized takeaways” would have been an act of vandalism against the very philosophy we were discussing.

Art requires devotion. And sometimes, devotion is deeply inefficient.

In this unpolished tape, you will find:

• Why “Monetize Your Passions” is a psychological trap disguised as a business plan.

• What a VR rollercoaster in a rural Mexican village taught me about privilege, pain, and the refusal to scale a business.

• The terrifying freedom of admitting you are never going to be the next Steve Jobs.

• The difference between a creator fighting for a $1 million exit, and an artist who just wants a Tuesday afternoon.

I do not expect you to watch the whole thing. It is seven hours long. You have a life, and I respect your time.

But I also respect your intelligence. If you are exhausted by the tightly choreographed, heavily manicured guru content on your timeline, you can pull up a chair in here. Pick a random timestamp. Drop in anywhere you want. Listen for twenty minutes while you wash your dishes.

The door is open, the tape is raw, and there isn’t a pitch waiting for you at the end.

See you inside.

Best,
Philipp

This is an absolute marathon of a conversation! Here is a comprehensive timeline to help your listeners navigate through nearly seven hours of deep dives into philosophy, the creative process, and the creator economy:

Podcast Timeline

00:00:00 - 00:31:00 | Writing Styles, Strange Loops, and The Concept of a Calling

• 00:00:00: Introduction to Philipp’s writing style, which Taylin describes as having “moral elevation”. Philipp explains his best ideas often come from brain dumps when he feels annoyed or edgy.

• 00:06:00: Taylin discusses his ADHD tendencies, his fascination with strange loops, and how exploring these concepts eases his existential curiosity and death anxiety.

• 00:13:00: A discussion on existential questions and finding one’s purpose. Philipp shares a story about witnessing kids in a rural Mexican village marveling at a VR headset, which deeply shaped his sense of privilege and his calling.

• 00:24:00: Differentiating between a genuine “calling” from life and an intellectualized, ego-driven ambition.

00:31:00 - 01:00:00 | Psychedelics, Surrender, and The Denial of Death

• 00:31:00: Taylin shares how his first Ayahuasca experience instantly shifted him from a strict rationalist mindset to a spiritual one.

• 00:38:00: The pain of peeling back layers of inherited social conditioning to find out what you truly believe.

• 00:46:00: Confronting human limitations and death. Philipp talks about his struggles with chronic fatigue, how it forced him to give up control, and the impact of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.

• 00:56:00: The difference between simply surrendering to life and acting as an active “vessel” for a higher purpose.

01:00:00 - 01:40:00 | The Meaning Crisis, Redefining Art, and The Ambition Loop

• 01:00:00: How the decline of religion and the rise of a statistics-driven, rationalist society has led to a modern meaning crisis.

• 01:12:00: Redefining art. They discuss Naval Ravikant’s definition of art as “anything done for its own sake” and Philipp proposes that art is fundamentally a “way of being in the world” rather than just a final product.

• 01:23:00: The tension between being a starving artist and a soulless entrepreneur, and using personal philosophy to bridge the gap.

• 01:34:00: Getting trapped in the “ambition loop” and the psychological drive to build “immortality projects” (like trying to become the next Steve Jobs) to justify existence.

01:40:00 - 02:36:00 | Niching, Multi-Passionate Creators, and Market Reality

• 01:40:00: Finding meaning through chosen suffering and the immense satisfaction that comes from saying “no” to cut off infinite options.

• 02:03:00: Why traditional “niching” often fails multi-passionate creators. They discuss how building a unified personal worldview is a superior approach to forcing yourself into a box.

• 02:18:00: The slow reality of monetization and building a business. Why keeping a day job is often a much saner approach to protect your art from financial pressure.

02:36:00 - 03:44:00 | Audience Q&A: Substack Growth, Trolls, and Therapy

• 02:36:00: Transitioning to audience questions. They discuss the strategic use of Substack Notes for experimenting with ideas and driving growth without spamming.

• 03:10:00: Handling trolls and the inherent difficulty of writing with nuanced perspectives in short-form content.

• 03:37:00: Deep dive into personal therapy experiences, touching on CBT, parts therapy, internal family systems, and Carl Jung’s approach to dream analysis.

• 03:42:00: Exploring the benefits and practical limitations of Wim Hof breathwork.

03:44:00 - 04:28:00 | Biohacking, Obsession, and Faith vs. Creed

• 03:44:00: Thoughts on the biohacking space, cutting down on supplements, and microdosing LSD and Ketamine for writing and rest.

• 03:59:00: The destructive vs. productive sides of obsession, and pondering the difference between being obsessed and being “possessed”.

• 04:10:00: Why looking up to extreme outliers (like Elon Musk) is often a terrible model for a fulfilling life.

• 04:16:00: A philosophical look at Jesus as a role model for living authentically, and the critical difference between having direct spiritual faith versus merely following a religious creed.

04:28:00 - 05:21:00 | AI in the Creative Process and The Value of Deep Reading

• 04:28:00: Critiquing current Substack features and discussing the desire for community tools and on-platform product sales.

• 04:56:00: A polarizing debate on AI in writing. They agree that prompting AI to generate drafts is “crap,” but utilizing it as a brainstorming partner, an editor, or a tool to have interactive conversations with books is highly valuable.

• 05:34:00: The danger of mindlessly consuming social media to harvest ideas versus diving deep into structured books, courses, or one’s own subconscious.

05:21:00 - 06:04:00 | Taylin’s Value Framework and The Messy Creative Process

• 05:21:00: Taylin breaks down his “Hierarchy of Value Creation”—moving from commoditized information up to identity-shifting intellectual property.

• 05:52:00: Exploring the fundamental difference between an “idea” (which changes the contents of the mind) and a “big idea” (which changes the structure of the mind).

• 05:55:00: Balancing structure and intuition. They compare their opposing approaches to the messy creative process.

06:04:00 - 06:53:26 | Art as Exorcism, Otto Rank, and Trusting the Spooky Calling

• 06:04:00: Viewing the creation of art as a form of therapy and an “exorcism” of ideas that demand to be let out.

• 06:07:00: Philipp details the profound influence of psychoanalyst Otto Rank (Art and Artist), discussing the trauma of birth and the human struggle between the fear of life and the fear of death.

• 06:20:00: The “spooky” nature of finally accepting your purpose. Philipp shares a wild, synchronistic dream about the ancient ruins of Teotihuacan that confirmed his path.

• 06:38:00: Wrapping up an incredible, unscripted, nearly 7-hour marathon of devotion to conversation.

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1. Step one: Buy my $997 course on how to become a six-figure creator.

2. Step two: Create your own course teaching other people how to become six-figure creators.

3. Step three: Sell it to the people who couldn’t afford my course.

If anyone from the FTC asks, we are a “multi-tiered dimensional personal branding ecosystem.” (That’s code for running a literal Ponzi scheme out of a rented Boca Raton strip mall.)

But assuming you have a fragile conscience and don’t look good in an orange jumpsuit, you are forced to do it the hard way. You have to build a “personal brand.”

And currently, trying to build a personal brand feels like receiving an official decree from the Ministry of Internet Money:

MEMO TO ALL CREATORS
SUBJECT: Algorithm Optimization & You

To better serve the platform, we ask that you immediately select just ONE of your hobbies to talk about until the end of time. Please neatly amputate all other passions, personality traits, and spontaneous thoughts, and place them in the provided bio-hazard bins.

Failure to comply will result in us hiding your posts behind a viral video of a golden retriever eating a head of cabbage.

Thank you,
Management.

Naturally, you don’t want to do that. It is spiritual amputation. So you look for a loophole. And waiting for you with open arms is the creator economy’s favorite piece of modern advice:

“Bro. Stop overthinking. YOU are the niche. Just talk about your life, combine your unique interests, and the market will reward you!”

Oh, thank God. Finally. I can just be my authentic self. I’ll launch a personal brand at the unique intersection of "Jungian shadow work," "artisanal sourdough," and "passive income through Notion templates."

Where the hell do I park my Lamborghini?

I’ll tell you where: right next to the tooth fairy’s minivan, because "You are the niche" is the biggest fairy tale on the internet.

You look at the creators with massive audiences. Sure, today they can post a single quote about the cosmos, attach a picture of their espresso, and get ten thousand likes. But if you scroll back through the internet archives to 2019, you know what you’ll find?

They were the single-topic Facebook Ads specialist grinding out 4,000-word technical tutorials just to get five people to notice them.

Taking audience-building advice from a growth guru with 500,000 followers is exactly like taking financial advice from a guy who just successfully robbed a casino. “Just walk in and take the money, bro. It's so liberating!” Sure, it sounds fantastic when he says it. But if you try it with zero leverage and zero experience, you’re just going to end up alone in a very small, very sad room.

It’s survivorship bias wrapped in a Stripe check-out.

Telling people to “just be themselves” is easy when you already have half a million people hanging on your every word. But how about when you are starting out at absolute zero?

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You cannot monetize “being you” when nobody knows who you are. The market does not care about your passions. It cares about problems. And when your audience is currently small enough to fit inside a 2008 Honda Civic, you cannot simply declare yourself a personal-brand guru.

You lack the gravity. And more importantly, you lack the data.

If you have a small audience, trying to find your niche is a trap. You don't even know what you're good at yet. When you're just starting out, you don't need a niche. You need a laboratory. You need to throw spaghetti at the wall until something sticks.

So let’s do ourselves a favor. Print the word “niche” on a piece of paper. Hold a small private ceremony. Say a few words if you need to. Then set it on fire and open a window.

The Niche Is Dead

I know we are all here to make a living with our art. Good luck with that. But money is not the point. Neither is the niche the problem.

There is something nobody in the creator economy wants to say out loud.

Most of the content promising to help you build a meaningful business is not built on generosity. It is built on the discovery that meaning sells better than money. That wrapping a business course in philosophy and identity work and the language of purpose makes it feel different from the obvious get-rich-quick scams.

But it’s not really different. It’s just better dressed.

Greed dressed up as purpose is still greed. It’s just harder to see coming. And considerably harder to walk away from because it speaks directly to the part of you that wants your life to matter.

The people producing this content are not lying. Most of them believe what they’re teaching. That’s what makes it so sneaky.

Here is the part that actually drives me crazy.

I have written about this before and I keep coming back to it because it drives me genuinely crazy that “how to find your niche” articles go viral every week while actively failing 99% of the people reading them. Not because the advice is stupid. Because it is structurally built for someone who is not you, packaged as universal truth, and consumed by people who then blame themselves when it doesn’t work.

The growth gurus built their audiences in completely different circumstances than yours with a completely different timing. Almost always they already had a reputation that helped them to take off. They look back at what worked and package it into a framework. But a lot of it was circumstance dressed up as insight after the fact.

When you follow that advice and fail, and you will fail because the map was drawn for someone else’s territory, you don’t question the map. You question yourself. Because realizing, that you spent months following structurally flawed advice, is too painful to admit.

Bankrupting Your Self-Trust

You have probably felt it. You read something that finally makes sense of everything, take notes, feel the momentum building, and go to bed thinking tomorrow is the day.

But in the morning you open their newsletter instead of writing. Again.

It’s not laziness. You are running a sophisticated operation to protect yourself from something that frightens you more than failure. The content gives you the buzz of forward motion without the exposure of actual creation. Every new framework feels like the missing piece, every course like the last thing you need before you’re ready. Your brain cannot tell the difference between thinking about your potential and using it, so it keeps choosing the option that feels like progress without the risk of finding out what you’re actually made of.

And the loop is costing you something nobody in this space talks about. Not time or money. Every morning you choose the content over the work, you make one withdrawal from the only account that actually matters, which is your trust in yourself.

You know this. That’s the worst part. You know exactly what you’re doing when you consume instead of create. And that knowing without acting is more severe than any external failure could be, because external failure you can blame on timing or the algorithm or advice that turned out to be wrong. But this is harder to explain away.

Here is what the content you’re consuming will never tell you, because it would immediately undercut the sale.

It sells you an identity. Think about it: Your unique combination of interests is your competitive advantage and the market will reward you for simply being yourself.

It tells you that you are already enough and you desperately want to hear that. That’s exactly why it doesn’t work.

You cannot think your way into a new identity. You can only act your way into one. Repeatedly. Over a long time. With real feedback from real people.

So you try. You post something, finally doing the dang thing.

You don’t have thousands of subscribers yet. That’s why you were consuming the “how to grow” content in the first place. So when you finally get the courage to post something, nobody cares.

That really hurts. If a marketing tactic fails, you can blame the tactic. But when the strategy was "just be yourself" and nobody buys it? That feels like a direct judgment on who you are.

Addiction with a Podcast Microphone

Here’s where it completely gets fucked up: You go back to their content. The thing that caused the damage becomes the treatment.

That's an addiction with a philosophy degree.

What you don’t see is that this is how the system works. In the beginning you will get ignored and the only way through is by stubbornly showing up. If your only drive is money or recognition you won’t survive this phase. You need to make peace with the fact that your work is going to suck for a while.

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The gap you feel between the creator you know you could be and the drafts folder full of things that never got published is not a problem to solve. It is the most reliable sign that you are already a creator.

It’s means that you have a highly refined sense of taste. That’s a competitive advantage because it cannot be bought, taught, or shortcutted.

Every serious creator lives permanently in that gap. It doesn’t close with more skill. It widens, because your taste develops faster than your ability. Ira Glass said this better than anyone.

The Blueprint is the Problem

There is an old parable about three bricklayers. Here is my version of it:

You ask the first what he is doing. He says: “I’m laying bricks.” Then you ask the second. He says “I’m building a wall.”

You go on to ask the third. He looks up and says “I’m a cathedral builder. I’m co-creating a sacred temple.”

The first guy is waiting for a foreman to tell him what to do. The second is following a blueprint. The third is different. He is doing the work because the work itself is an act of devotion

Every brick is part of something people he will never meet will walk into centuries from now and feel something they cannot name.

The cathedral is a metaphor for work that serves something larger than the individual making it. A cathedral is built for a community. It outlasts the builder and creates value for people who will never know the name of the person who laid a specific brick.

That’s the business model done right. Not monetizing your passion. Building something that serves people so generously that compensation becomes the natural consequence rather than the desperate goal.

Now look at your situation honestly.

Right now, somewhere on your computer, there is a folder called something like “brand strategy” that you have opened maybe twice. That is the first bricklayer doing the work of the third. And some part of you has known it the whole time.

You know the difference between laying bricks and building something sacred. You cannot bring yourself to do the former when you came here to do the latter.

Embrace this refusal. It is your most honest impulse. You just have to answer the call instead of running from it.

The cathedral does not build itself on honest impulses alone.

Show up to the page at the exact same time every day. Not to "grow your audience." But because sitting in that chair and making something out of nothing is the price of admission to a creative life. Embrace the suck. Make the promise to yourself, and then keep it.

That is how you buy back your self-trust.

Once you stop desperately searching for a niche, and just commit to the daily devotion of your craft without giving a damn about who’s watching, guess what?

Your voice will finally show up. And once your voice shows up, you’ll realize the niche didn’t need to be found. It was right there the whole time.

P.S. Everything in this article points to the same problem. You are trying to build something that looks like you without knowing what you actually look like.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you with that. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of trying to find your niche.

Discover Your Creative Archetype

It started back in 2016. I was supposedly doing my Master’s thesis in computer science at a software company. In reality I was slowly dying of boredom while writing a highly technical academic paper that absolutely no one on earth was ever going to read.

Right around that time a friend sent me an article about digital nomads. I took one look and fell straight down the rabbit hole. It was my introduction to entrepreneurship and it instantly clicked. It felt like the thing I was born for, but nobody ever told me that this is viable career path (thanks social conditioning).

Then came the moment my whole life changed. Really.

It was Saturday morning, ridging an elevator to a completely empty office. Because who works on Saturdays? Well me apparently.

My reasoning was simple. The faster I get done with this thesis, the faster I can figure out what to do next and build my business.

As I walked through the empty office I had sort of an epiphany. I don’t even know the CEO of this company. He definitely does not know me. In fact, nobody here actually knows what the fck I’m doing. The only guy who knew what I was doing was my overworked advisor who dumbed me off to co-worker who didn’t gave a shit.

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My decision was made. I just had to figure out how. After buying a one-way ticket to Thailand and trying to find enlightenment in a monastery (spoiler: I didn’t), I eventually ended up on a beach in LA.

LA had always been a dream of mine. I thought it would be a great place to find some real inspiration.

Instead I found an Instagram ad.

Why You Need To Break Things

I was scrolling through my feed, when it suddenly appeared. I don’t remember the exact phrasing but it said something along the lines of: “How to build a seven-figure online fitness coaching business in 12 weeks.” The guy in the video was named Sterling. At that moment, it sounded like God himself talking to me: My son, this one is for you.

I didn’t even have the money to pay for the course. But conveniently, it was payable in three monthly installments. I figured by the time the second payment rolled around I would have made all the money back anyway. Sterling projected absolute success. A million followers and financial freedom while traveling the world. It was a masterfully presented image. He was a textbook guru perfectly engineered to exploit my deepest psychological needs.

A month and a half later the dream didn’t materialize and I ended up broke in the basement of my parents house.

I bring this up because if you spend any time on Substack or Twitter these days, you are completely surrounded by the digital descendants of Sterling. They are everywhere: “How I gained 10k subscribers in 30 days,” and “Drop your link below so we can support each other!”

After almost 10 years of running my own business and getting burned by a dozens of gurus, I can tell you that the people doing this aren't necessarily bad people. They’re just responding rationally to the incentives of a broken system. The algorithm rewards noise and engagement bait.

But as someone whose lifelong strategy has always been when everybody goes left, I go right, I can tell you that great work doesn’t come from conforming.

You have to smash a little mud on the perfectly curated status quo.

If you want to survive the current creator economy without losing your soul, you have to be an outlaw. You have to reject the rules of the broken system and start writing your own. Literally.

Learn to Love the Crickets

Let’s get one thing straight. This is a tough gig. Writing something truly great that changes how a stranger feels, is incredibly difficult.

Most people in the growth cult will tell you to just post consistently. “Consistency is King!” But consistency is a metric for factories. An apple tree that tried to produce fruit every single day of the year would die.

What you really need is devotion.

When you sit down to write a piece and you hit publish with a trembling finger... and you get exactly four likes. Two from friends. One from a bot. And one from your mom.

That hurts. It feels like you’re shouting into the void. But it’s the part of the creative process where your muse is sleeping off a bad hangover behind a dumpster, the crickets are chirping, and tumbleweeds are rolling through the vast, empty space between your ears.

You think the market has rejected you. It hasn’t. The market is just busy. You are speaking to what I call the “Ghost Economy.” They are silent introverts and deep thinkers who actually read your stuff, nod quietly, and never leave a comment. The deepest waters are often still. You aren’t building a massive audience. You are building a small village. Outlast the crickets. Write for three years to absolutely no one. Sucking is the first step to being great. Make friends with sucking.

Don’t Set Out to be Famous

If you want to know what your Substack is about, don’t look at your analytics. Find the conflict.

Every good movie, every good novel, every good ad campaign runs on conflict. What is the bad guy in your story? Is it the hustle culture? Is it superficial marketing? Is it the loneliness of modern life? If you don’t have a bad guy, you’re just writing a brochure, and nobody voluntarily reads a brochure.

Once you have your bad guy, you need to embrace being contrarian. When building strategies for my clients, I always look for what the industry standard is. And then perfectly do the opposite.

If all the growth gurus are telling you to speed up, hack the system, and read 100 books a year at 2x speed, go 180 degrees the other way. Tell your readers to read one great book. To put it down and think about a single sentence for three days. Let it alter them.

Be beautifully unproductive. Share your worst post. Make something so honest and dripping with human imperfection that it stops the scroll. If you treat Substack like Twitter 2.0, you are fighting over table scraps in the dopamine economy. Dopamine fades. Depth compounds. Don’t build your business on a fading asset.

Starve Your Monkey Brain

I’ve met so many writers who are stuck. Their pages are blank, so they open a new tab and read an article about “How to overcome writer’s block,” which leads them to a Twitter thread by some 22-year-old guru about “The 7 habits of highly effective typists.”

You’ve got a bad case of what Buddhists call “Monkey Mind.” It’s your forebrain chattering away, swinging from branch to branch, terrified of doing the actual, unglamorous work of staring at the blank page.

If you want to write about building a creative business, do not read other people writing about building a creative business. You’re just drinking downstream water. Go to an entirely different galaxy.

Read biology. Read the history of the transcontinental railroad. Read a book from 1950. Go outside, build a damn wooden table with your bare hands. Have a difficult, uncomfortable conversation in the real world. Expose yourself to some grit and friction that hasn’t been optimized by a Silicon Valley product manager. Then come back to your desk and bring those weird, unrelated dots together.

That is how you develop an original voice.

Make Art Not Content

In my branding and design studio, I saw brilliant ideas happily murdered over and over again because clients demanded they fit the crappy bullshit marketing everyone else was doing on Amazon. They actively choose the safe and mediocre garbage over the risky and brilliant idea.

You don’t have a client to please. And you do not have to fit a template (really). This gives you ultimate freedom.

Don’t voluntarily cage yourself by trying to appease a mathematical formula or an imaginary audience. You are not a content creator trying to trick an algorithm into making you famous. You are a writer trying to make another human being feel something.

The people playing the Guru Game might rack up higher subscriber counts in the short term. They might wave their screenshots in your face. Let them. Their audience is built on the flimsy foundation of quick dopamine, and dopamine fades.

The future of the creator economy is not written by the loudest voices. It’s going to be won by the most resonant ones. The people who refuse to manufacture generic advice. The ones who treat their work as an offering rather than a funnel.

Greatness requires the sudden cessation of stupidity. Look at the sea of people screaming for attention, step back, and decide to just quietly build a fire in the dark.

Just sit down, stare at the glowing rectangle, pull an idea out of the dark, and make some art that has a positive impact.

Your business should be a vessel for your life’s work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you find that clarity. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Discover Your Creator Archetype

You pour your soul into a post, hit publish, and… nothing. Or worse, you miss a few days because you have the flu, or you wanted to see your friends, or you simply needed to sleep, and the numbers crash.

It feels like the system is staging a conspiracy against you.

It’s not.

The algorithm doesn’t like you. But it doesn’t hate you, either.

The algorithm is simply indifferent.

It is a system designed with a single objective: to show the right person the right thing so they don’t close the app. It doesn’t know your name, it doesn’t care about your bank account, and it certainly doesn’t care about your mental health.

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As much as we might hate it, we need the algorithm if we want to grow. It’s the only way to find the people who need to hear us. I haven't found a way around this reality.

Faced with this, creators usually fall into one of two traps:

1. The Neurotic: You become a slave to the algorithm. You post five times a day. You optimize for clicks. You put on a mask so thick you forget who you are. Or, more likely, you burn out before that happens.

2. The Cynic: You decide the game is rigged. You refuse to engage. You post once every three months and tell yourself that quality always wins. But because you are invisible, you don’t grow, and you become bitter that “grifters” are winning.

There has to be a third path. A strategic one.

It begins by looking at the false expectations the creator economy is selling you.

You see the bestseller lists, the Instagram lifestyles, the 7-figure revenue screenshots. Status is a sneaky force. The system uses your core psychological needs (status, affiliation, the fear of missing out) to manipulate you. They trick you into believing that if you aren’t a millionaire yet, you’re a loser. If you don’t buy their course right now, the window of opportunity is closing.

They tell you that you are falling behind.

But ask yourself: Behind who?

That’s the question they don’t want you to ask. Because if you ask it, you realize the game they are playing is “Capture the Flag,” and the flag is your wallet.

Do you actually want to run a 7-figure business? Most people wouldn't, when they realized the true opportunity cost: pulling regular all-nighters, neglecting relationships, and becoming a neurotic slave to a piece of code

Most people (if they are honest) just want to do good work, be fairly paid, and close their laptop at 5:00 PM.

It is okay if you are not posting today.

In fact, I wrote this very piece because of my own fear that the algorithm would punish me. I would love to post every week. Realistically, it’s every two weeks. But recently I got sick. “I missed my schedule.”

But that is short-term thinking.

What if you skip a week because you were sick, or because it was your mother’s birthday, or because you just didn’t have anything true, and people leave? Great. Because they are not your audience. They are traffic.

Traffic needs to be bought every day with new content. A real audience misses you when you are gone. They send you a DM: “Dude is everything okay?”

The “consistency gurus” will tell you that you are leaving money on the table. They might be right. You will grow slower. You won’t hit the viral lottery.

Let them be optimizing for a metric. You are optimizing for your life.

Choose the middle path. You might grow a little slower, but you will arrive at your destination with your sanity intact.

And you might actually love the life you build.

Your business should be a vessel for your life's work, not a prison of your own making. To do that, you have to know the difference between the performance you give for the algorithm and who you actually are.

I created The Archetype Navigator to help you find that clarity. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Discover Your Creator Archetype

It’s a closed system where creators sell “how to be a creator” to other creators. It’s loud, it lacks nuance, and the algorithm loves it.

You came here to escape that.

You read deep philosophy. You take advanced cohorts. You understand the complex market dynamics that the 20-year-old course-se…

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We measure our sleep. We curate our inputs. We refine our mental models and polish our desk setups. We read the philosophy, study the systems, and conceptualize the territory.

It feels like work. It requires discipline, intellect, and focus.

But it is a trap.

You are building a high-performance engine in a garage with the door closed. You are tuning the acoustics in a concert hall where no one is sitting.

You can tell yourself that you are doing the work. You are preparing. You are refusing to settle for the mediocrity.

That’s “getting ready.”

And the reason you are tired is that getting ready is safer than being ready.

The Sophisticated Form of Hiding

If you were lazy, this would be simple. You would just admit you don’t want to do the emotional labor.

But you aren’t lazy. You are smart. And intelligence is a double-edged sword when it comes to shipping creative work.

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Your intelligence allows you to visualize every possible failure mode. You can see the noise of the algorithm. You can see the 22-year-old hustle bros selling generic courses on Twitter, and you have (rightfully) decided you don’t want to be like them.

So you wait.

You wait until you have fully integrated your philosophy and formulated the Grand Unified Theory of our personal brand. You wait until the path is clear of obstacles. Everything has to be “optimized.”

You are using preparation as a proxy for progress.

But the plan is not the project. You cannot think your way into a new way of acting. You have to act your way into a new way of thinking.

The Shield

Many of us are professionals. We are experts at solving other people’s problems. We advise, we consult, we execute for others.

When we do this, we are protected by a shield. If the project fails, it’s the client’s brand. If the strategy stalls, it’s the system’s fault.

But when you step out to build your own body of work you have to drop the shield. In that moment you sign your name to your own philosophy.

If you ship your work and the world ignores it, it feels personal. It confirms your deepest fear: That without the shield, you are not enough.

So, the resistance kicks in. Your limbic brain is terrified of being judged and convinces your rational bran (intellect) to build a wall of “research.”

It tells you to take another course. To find another certification. To tweak the font size on your website one more time.

It’s a protection mechanism of your ego.

Your brain is so good at solving problems that it has invented a problem that cannot be solved: How to launch without the risk of being judged.

Theory vs. Practice

There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

In theory, you know what to do. You’ve seen the success stories. You understand the mechanics of the creator economy (probably better than the gurus themselves).

But theory is safe. Theory is a textbook. Practice is messy. Practice is standing in the rain.

The market does not care about your theory. People don’t care about your optimized morning routine or your perfectly curated knowledge management system.

They care about the connection. They care about the tension you relieve or the hope you offer.

And that connection only happens when you hit publish. When you ship. When you risk the possibility of being average.

Stop Performing, Start Pinging

The reason you are paralyzed is that you think you are entering a performance. You think you need to step onto the main stage and deliver a perfect show that makes the audience cry. That is a heavy burden to carry.

But strategy isn’t a performance. It’s a process.

Don’t shout. Ping.

Think of it like a submarine using sonar. You send out a ping. A small, focused signal. You are trying to get a bounce back.

Find ten people. Not a ten thousand. Ten people who need exactly what you have.

Share a rough idea. Share a draft. Share something you fear.

If it resonates, you have traction. If it doesn’t, you have data. Both are better than the silence of “getting ready.”

The Call to the Builders

There is a group of people who are tired of the noise. They are tired of the hustle culture and the empty promises of the algorithm.

They are waiting for someone to lead them. Not by shouting the loudest, but with a calm voice. They are waiting for someone who has the courage to be imperfect, thoughtful, and real.

They are waiting for you.

But they can’t find you if you are still in the garage, optimizing your engine.

You have enough assets. You have enough insight.

Open the door. The weather is uncertain. The road is bumpy.

Perfect conditions to begin.

P.S. To build something real, you have to know who you are. I created The Archetype Navigator to help you find that clarity. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your natural pattern, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you. It might save you years of climbing the wrong ladder.

Discover Your Archetype

“Follow these exact steps and you will get this result.”

Buy the course. Use the template. Copy the hook. Post at 8:00 AM. Replicate the system that worked for the famous guy with 500,000 followers.

And so you do. You embrace the discipline. You do the work. You feed the machine.

And... nothing happens.

Or worse: Something happens, but you hate it. You get the clicks, but you feel like a fraud. You get the followers, but they don’t care about the work you actually want to do.

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When the map doesn’t lead to the destination, we tend to blame the hiker. We tell ourselves we didn’t walk fast enough. We didn’t want it bad enough. We weren’t consistent enough.

I’m writing this to tell you that you are wrong.

You are not the problem. The system designed to keep you consuming advice about work instead of doing the work.

The Problem with Best Practices

When you are assembling IKEA furniture, an instruction manual is a beautiful thing. “Insert Tab A into Slot B.” It works every time.

But you are not building a bookshelf. You are building a life and business in a complex system that involves culture, time, algorithms, and human emotion.

When a guru sells you their blueprint to 10,000 subscribers, they are selling you their survivorship bias. They are saying, “This worked for me, in 2021, with my specific personality, my specific assets, my specific risk profile, and my specific luck.”

By the time they package their "map to reach the top 1%" into a course, the system has already shifted.

Trying to follow their map in 2026, with your personality and your assets, is like singing karaoke.

And nobody pays for karaoke.

You Are Doing It Wrong

A strategy isn’t a map. A strategy is a compass.

A map says, “Turn left at the big rock.” But what happens when the rock has moved? What happens when it rains? What happens when the path is blocked? If you only have a map, you are lost.

A compass doesn’t tell you where the rocks are. A compass points true north. It gives you the confidence to navigate the terrain as it is, not as you wish it to be.

We are all suffering from Guru Fatigue. We are tired of the hustle bros and the growth hackers because deep down, we know they are selling us a lottery ticket. They are selling us a false proxy. They tell us that “Followers = Success” (and other lies).

There is a reason these promises work so well on the internet. They tap into a deep, systemic fear: The fear that you are doing it wrong.

The gurus (and the algorithms that love them) need you to feel broken. If you are broken, you need their blueprint. If you are inefficient, you need their system. If you are behind schedule, you need their shortcut.

We enter a spiral of self-improvement, trying to “fix” a defect that doesn’t exist.

The Running Out of Time Myth

The internet is threatening you: “You only have 36 months to make it.”

Make it to where? To a number on a screen? To a specific tax bracket?

If the goal is to build a business that serves you for a lifetime, why is there a countdown clock?

The reason they invented the clock is to get you to buy the course now. They are inducing panic. They are leveraging your scarcity mindset to sell you a map. But the reality of building a body of work is that it takes as long as it takes.

If you try to turn an oak acorn into a mighty tree in 30 days, you don’t get a tree. You get a dead nut.

The Sovereign Path

Okay, we know the “get rich quick” doesn’t work and most maps are built on hindsight bias. The alternative is to build your own compass.

This is harder, because it makes you accountable. It requires you to answer questions that a template can’t answer for you:

• Who is it for? (Not “everyone.” Who specifically?)

• What is it for? (Are you helping them kill time, or are you helping them find courage?)

• What are your assets? (Not a band-aid on your nose. What do you have? Your unique voice? Your specific trauma? Your empathy? Your ability to synthesize?)

This is why I don’t sell a “system.” Because I can’t be you. There is no course that can save you from the beautiful, terrifying work of figuring out who you are.

If you are waiting for someone to give you permission, or a guarantee, or a perfect map... you will be waiting forever. The system relies on you waiting. The system profits from your insecurity.

You don’t have to “fix” yourself, because you’re not broken.

Forget about the "most important skill of the next 10 years." We need to start cultivating the self-trust to handle whatever the next 10 years brings.

You already have the compass. You just need to learn how to read it.

P. S. I built a free tool called Archetype Navigator as a way to start seeing your own path more clearly. It’s a free and takes less than 5 minutes to uncover your dominant creator archetype, so you can build a body of work that actually looks like you.

Discover Your Archetype

Of course you did. I would have clicked too.

We are all looking for the shortcut. The blueprint. The secret formula that everyone else seems to have but us.

The system is designed to make you click on headlines like this. It creates a loop of anxiety (“Am I falling behind?”) and offers a false promise of relief (“Here is the answer”).

But you know the truth.

The Trick is That There is no Trick

There is only a system.

The headline promised three things that the reptilian brain craves:

1. High Reward ($10k)

2. Low Time (30 days)

3. Low Friction (One trick)

The system is designed to sell you this promise. It wants you to believe that there is a secret lever, and if you just pull it, the friction of your life will disappear.

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In the creator economy, the people who claim to make $10,000 in 30 days usually fall into two categories:

1. The Hall of Mirrors: They made that money by selling a course on “How to Make Money Online” to people who are desperate to make money. They aren’t teaching you how to build a business. They are selling a feeling of hope.

2. The Fiction: They are lying. Or they are showing you revenue numbers while hiding their ad spend and their burnout.

The system wants you to believe that if you aren’t hitting these numbers, you are failing. It wants you to feel insufficient so you will buy the next shovel.

But here is the strategic question the headline distracts you from asking:

Do you actually need $10k this month?

Or has the system just convinced you that this is what “success” looks like?

Do you need the stress, the hustle, and the ethical compromises required to hit an arbitrary number set by a stranger on the internet? Or do you need the peace of mind that comes from doing work you are proud of, for people you care about, in exchange for a good living?

Selling Hope to the Hopeless

Take a close look at the person selling you the shovel.

You just have to go to the “Business” section of this You see an endless parade of certainty. People speaking with the absolute authority of a four-star general, scolding you for having “low agency,” telling you that “delusion is the only way,” and promising that you can productize yourself into six figures if you just want it bad enough.

They tell you that if you want to get rich, you need to quit your loser friends and start building relationships with bankers, lawyers, and investors.

Who are these people?

They are shouting about “network equals net worth” and “solving premium problems,” but they started their newsletter three months ago. It is AI writing generic wisdom for other AI’s to read. It sounds deep, but it’s just slop.

Not only is it annoying, it’s also dangerous.

The narrative of being creator has turned into a trap. We have influencers telling vulnerable people to quit their jobs, burn their bridges, and “go all in” on a system where the failure rate is about 90%.

They teach you a system they used after they already had a massive following, and pretend it will work for you starting from zero. That is survivorship bias par excellence.

When the money doesn’t show up and the mortgage is due the guru doesn’t apologize. They just sell you a new course on “mindset” or pivot you into their AI software. They sell hope to the hopeless and call it entrepreneurship.

Substack is Not LinkedIn

Substack was supposed to be the refuge.

It was the anti-social media. A quiet corner of the internet for writers, thinkers, and artists.

But the “7-figure” clowns have found the door. They are bringing the noise, the hustle, and the empty platitudes here. The library slowly turns into a marketplace.

It’s becoming another LinkedIn, filled with engagement bait like "In less than 10 words, what are you writing about?" and people just trying to sell you their crap.

When you offer a gift, people look for the upsell. When you offer connection, people check your subscriber count to see if you are “worth” knowing. It creates an ugly environment, where the only options seems to become a cynic.

I feel it myself. I get messages from people who say they love my work, but they actually just want a recommendation to grow their subscriber count.

The meaning of community is slowly changing to: "I’ll recommend you if you recommend me."

The Sanctuary of the Quiet Revolution

But we have a choice.

We can become cynical and decide that the whole game is rigged, that everyone is a grifter, and that art is dead. But cynicism doesn’t change anything. Cynicism is just fear with a better vocabulary.

The other option is to protect the core ethos of Substack.

Refuse to play the status game.

You do not need to be a “high-agency founder” or “optimize your dopamine.”

It’s okay to keep your day job because it funds your art. You are allowed to write because you love it, not because it makes you rich. You are allowed to be slow.

Write something so honest, so vulnerable, and so human that it cannot be generated by a prompt. Treat your readers with such dignity that they trust you for who you are.

We need more lived experience and a place that respects our bodies and our sanity. Above all we need more patience.

Stop trying to “make it” and start trying to make sense.

That is how we fight the status quo. It won’t make you rich in 30 days. But it can build a life of impact (however small that is) and start doing the work you are proud of.

The revolution is to stay human in a system that wants you to be a machine.

Don’t build a personal brand. Create something beautiful by being a human in public.

Be the artist you were born to be.

P.S. The most liberating thing in the creator economy is to know who you are, so you cannot be sold a “better” version of yourself.

If you are tired of the AI hype, I created The Archetype Navigator to help you ground yourself in your natural pattern. It’s free, it’s fast, and it’s a tool for sovereignty.