Imagine you have a deadline next week. That’s plenty of time to do the task—abundance—so you figure you’ll do it later. 

Eventually, you forget about it, and you only remember the day of the deadline. Now there’s scarcity: you have to do it, today, or you’ll face the consequences of missing the deadline. That’s just a simple example. 

That day would be stressful; you have your regular errands to run, and a task on top of that. You have less time and energy to focus on what’s happening around you. This is known as tunneling. 

Instead, imagine if you decided to do the task and submitted it that first day. You’d be completely free of it, and you’d have the options to spend your time however you like. You focused on doing something that first day, which created abundance in the future.

Buying a gift a month before your friend’s birthday means you have many more options. Buying a gift the night before, or the day of, limits the options to whatever stores are around you or can offer overnight shipping. That’s the first takeaway: you can create abundance by working ahead of time.

The second is a bit wider spanning, and it’s about our tendency to time bind our goals. We want to achieve things by specific ages like 30 or 40. 

In my case, I wanted to be a New York Times bestselling author by 30, so badly that I focused on doing stuff I thought those authors did like writing proposals or building audiences, that I didn’t write any book. It was only when I let go of that goal that I wrote my first book, which became Creative Doing.

Another example: a couple of years ago, I talked to a good friend who worked in real estate.  I told him that I wished I had decided to buy property in Toronto earlier, that I felt several years behind our friends. “You’re gonna own a house,” he told me, encouraging me not to worry. That was useful. I agreed with him, that it felt likely that I’d own property at some point in the coming decades. While I couldn’t specify when exactly, I didn’t need to rush to do it. That eased my mind, eventually freeing it up to make the Consistency Journal and resume my business writing practice. 

When you plan only in days or weeks, you’ve got a limited set of options. But when you think in years or decades, the possibilities are much wider. There’s also less competition.

A longer time horizon is a choice. It only becomes available once you can take care of your immediate needs. Playing infinite and natural games makes it more compelling.

Thanks Ricky Yean.

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Sometimes an experiment needs months or years to work out. Taking on work outside of an experiment can buy the time and relaxation you need to sustain it. It reminds me of how the Pokemon Company sustained itself by doing services work while making its first games, which delayed the process.

Part of this practice involved not engaging deadline pressure.

We made the first sample last September, and took photos in October. But it took a few rounds of revisions, as well as feedback from showing the sample to friends and family in-person, until late May to finally get it to the place where we felt good about it.

The first run of this is a proof of concept. It would be nice to make some money from it, but that’s not the main goal.

We ordered 300 copies for this first run. The margins would’ve been better with more, but ordering 500 or 1,000 felt uncomfortable. The intuitive, gut-level, reaction was to stick with 300; it felt recoverable.

Shipping is very expensive, so it’s critical to get this right (both shipping inventory inbound to you, and then out to customers). Packaging is also a factor. Those eat into margins. At this volume, free shipping is not a perk we can afford yet.

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In a literal sense, the toy train doesn’t “have” consciousness, the same way that a Word document or AI doesn’t have consciousness. But Jack asks:

Wouldn’t our world be better if we did indeed see Word documents as conscious? Would we be more considerate writers and readers, knowing that each composition was bringing beings into being, and give them proper funerals when we were through with them? Would slide decks be less tedious and superfluous if we knew that each Powerpoint presentation was awake, and each chart and table nested within was happiest when able to present its information honestly?

Think of how different you’d behave if you treated your objects as a child might treat their valued toys. Instead of buying a new pen each time it ran out of ink, you might find ways to refill the pen. Instead of tossing away a weathered jacket, you might be interested in repairing it. If you’re a writer, instead of wondering what your writing can do for you, maybe you wonder what you can give the writing. For me, each blog post isn’t livestock; it’s a pet (perhaps a cold-blooded one).

It reminds me of a passage Meghan O’Gieblyn writes in God, Human, Animal, Machine:

Japan, it has often been said, is a culture that has never been disenchanted. Shintoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism make no distinction between mind and matter, and so many of the objects deemed inanimate in the West are considered alive in some sense. Japanese seamstresses have long performed funerals for their dull needles, sticking them, when they are no longer usable, into blocks of tofu and setting them afloat on a river. Fishermen once performed a similar ritual for their hooks. Even today, when a long-used object is broken, it is often taken to a temple or a shrine to receive the kuyō, the purification rite given at funerals. In Tokyo one can find stone monuments marking the mass graves of folding fans, eyeglasses, and the broken strings of musical instruments.

It’s an interesting relational prompt, not unlike treating your own stress as if it was a pet dog.

The meme that people can be considered the equivalent of non-player characters (NPCs)—when, from a matter of perspective, everyone is the main character in their own story—suggests that we don’t keep in mind that other people also have consciousness.

So this perspective could be useful not only for taking better care of your stuff, but also developing more fulfilling relationships generally.

P.S., A quote from Sherry Turkle’s The Empathy Diaries comes to mind, “To be good at a job, you had to love the objects associated with that job.”

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Our walks started off far too ambitious. Our dog needed more time to get used to our neighborhood, as well as the sounds of the city. (I had no idea how loud downtown Toronto was!)

I used to go on long walks with my previous dog, with the assumption that she enjoyed it and needed to burn off energy. I needed to update the expectations and norms that came with that experience.

Getting her emotionally comfortable now, with these brief walks, will set her up for success later. Being hard on her is not constructive.

The neighboring condo has a big round driveaway, with beautiful in-ground lights. I never appreciated this until I walked the dog at night. Beside that, there’s also a patch of grass with a water feature I love listening to. I spend a lot of time near that condo now, because that’s where one of the quieter pockets around my condo are, and our dog feels safe there. 

My wife and I wake up at least an hour earlier than we used to. We prefer walking the dog early in the morning when it’s quiet.

We had hoped to introduce our cat, who just turned 15 (!), to her by now. That will probably need to happen later, if ever. Again, this needed more time than we’d thought.

We can keep them separate because we live in a two bedroom condo. Last year, we lived in a studio condo in New York City, with less space and separation, so the possibility of adopting a dog felt very distant.

Many dogs pee when they’re excited. I had no idea this was common behavior, let alone that it even happened. Again, I needed to update myself.

Hiring a trainer was a very good idea. The lessons we learned and practices we implemented after the first session created positive change within days. The trainer also interpreted some of our dog’s behaviors with an expert lens.

Before getting the dog, quiet time at home used to feel boring. Now, quiet time at home feels peaceful. It means our dog is relaxed and maybe resting, so is our cat, which means we can also do the same.

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A reliable way to create a life is to shrink the influence of one dominating area and introduce new aspects. Signing up for a recreational team sport is a common way to do this. Or learning something completely random (e.g., New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick playing guitar as an amateur). Or getting a pet. 

In other words, create and maintain a portfolio of things that can make you happy. That way, when one part gets difficult, you can find refuge in the others. They will keep you buoyant and help stabilize things.

You can zoom in on this as much as you like. For example, if you derive a lot of satisfaction from writing, find diverse sources of happiness there as well. Writing something you’re interested in is, obviously, is a big one. So is landing a pitch at a publication. So is getting paid. Meeting readers can be one. Calling a bookstore to land your book is another. And organizing a speech or event is one too. The list goes on!

Maintaining an ecosystem of activities where you can derive fulfillment, energy, and excitement, are good ways to create the conditions for happiness. 

Thanks James Q for the reminder.

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Eventually, I made a decision that I just wanted to buy a real Mac. That was a significant mindset shift: making due with the status quo wasn’t the only choice. I could just choose to do the real thing. 

In my case, get a job or do some odd jobs, save money, and eventually buy a real Mac computer. 

Or, look for contests that had Macs as a prize, participate in as many as possible, and try to win. (Like how a young Donald Glover won the Nintendo 64.)

Or, visit local garage sales and see if there were any used Mac computers on sale. 

Optimizing the status quo can only take you so far. Any time you spend improving a bandage solution is time you could have spent working towards a better real solution. Focus your resourcefulness on a better Plan A. 

You deserve the real thing. Settling for a bootleg version of it is a choice.

I’m glad I eventually learned this lesson, though as with all good things in life, I wish I learned it earlier.

If you want the real thing, figure out a way to go get it.

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He recently found a way to blend them together by volunteering to take photos of local tennis clubs and tournaments.

He could probably get paid a small fee, of course, but then he would be taking on a client. He would feel obligated to take on their suggestions.

Instead, he’s giving his time and energy as a gift. In exchange, he gets the freedom to practice his craft how he likes.

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For different reasons, OpenAI also shut down its video model Sora, even after its viral campaign mimicking Studio Ghibli’s signature images and signing a billion-dollar deal with Disney, because it wasn’t financially viable.

These are just a couple of bets that OpenAI have folded on. It has many other irons in the fire. There’s ChatGPT and Codex. 

There’s also the multi-billion dollar acquisition of Jony Ive’s io, to make a hardware product.

There’s the multi-hundred-billion dollar bet on Stargate, which it partnered with a bunch of other tech companies on. Both of them are running into headwinds; the day before I typed this, Apple is suing OpenAI for stealing trade secrets, and they seem to be having trouble executing on Stargate.

A couple of months ago, I read a phrase in an article about Stargate that caught my eye, “From core technology to partnerships, the company places overlapping bets and abandons all but the most expedient. The approach owes much to chief executive Sam Altman’s ‘venture mindset’, said one person close to the company.” 

I used the word “Bets” earlier, and I like the phrase, “Venture mindset.” It reminds me of all the products that companies like Amazon and Google discontinued, as well as the idea of small bets (though OpenAI’s are not so small). These products are effectively livestock; OpenAI starts or acquires many of them, and only sustains the ones with the most momentum.

OpenAI is often compared with Anthropic, which I see as much more focused. I don’t know Anthropic for much more than Claude, Claude Code, and Claude CoWork, as well as more recently Mythos and Fable. It’s pulling ahead on enterprise sales. It’s renting space from SpaceX instead of building its own. I’m sure there are setbacks, of course, but publicity for Anthropic seems more tightly buttoned up.

The paradigms driving these two director competitors feel different. It’ll be interesting to see how things turn out.

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It can be brief, like being the only person not drinking at a party because you want to wake up without a hangover. When your friends all egg each other on, and you decline and say, “I’m not drinking tonight,” or “I don’t drink,” expect peer pressure.

It can involve a different multi-year commitment, like renting a property when most of the people you know have taken on a mortgage because you like the flexibility and want to do something else with the cash.

It can mean resetting an expectation for yourself, because life has asked something different of you. This often comes in the form of a setback. Maybe your friends all got offered jobs and you didn’t, or you experienced an injury and need time to heal.

If there was an opposite to peer pressure, it’s self approval. If you want to get better at dealing with peer pressure, and living a life that’s real to you, figuring out how to earn your own approval—and being accountable to yourself, showing pride when you behave in line with your values even if you look silly to your friends—is a step in the right direction.

Moving in line with self approval doesn’t necessarily get easier, but like everything else, you improve with practice. You also feel the early wins, which make practicing more rewarding. Giving into peer pressure feels gratifying in the moment, but usually worse over time.

The more people you try to impress, the less yourself you can be. Impress as few people as possible.

When you cave into peer pressure, you condition your friends to push you; when you align with self approval, you condition your friends to respect you. You may lose some friends along the way.

The people you want around you are the ones who want you to win at being you, and aren’t afraid to win at being themselves.

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In writing this one, I came up with the phrase “creative stupidity,” which was a riff on “productively stupid,” that has caught my attention. 

If you’re not feeling creatively stupid every so often—as well as experiencing the self-doubt that comes with it—then you’re not taking enough risk in your work. Developing a tolerance for difficult emotions is part of getting better at your craft.

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