For example, when I showed a friend an early version of The Consistency Journal, he noticed that the paper was rougher than he was used to. His favorite notebooks, from Kokuyo, had smooth paper.

Even though I’d published Creative Doing already, I’d never really paid much attention to the paper. Now that my customers would be the ones writing in the book, I needed to make sure the paper encouraged them to keep coming back.

Another occasion, also paper related: as I prepared to ship the first copy out, I also wanted to write a thank you note. I must have walked by Laywine’s dozens of times; I finally had a good reason to visit. I stepped out with my first purchase of Original Crown Mill. 

I also saw AJOTO’s 10th anniversary poster hanging on the wall at Laywine’s, which reminded me of In the Air, on the Ground, under the Sea by Drawing Architecture Studio (which I spent over an hour with). I learned about another detail, that the poster was made by screen printing nine colors. (More details here.)

Now, when I shop for notebooks, I appreciate all the details as well. In getting to know the product better, there is a sense of the magic fading away. The enthusiasm is still there though, and with the new expertise, the relationship is much deeper than before. 

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Each of these projects are special to someone; and each of those people need to accept the rejection of that project, in order to harness their energy and focus it on a few key projects. That’s creative focus: you’ll know you’re doing it right when it hurts.

A few of these projects are experiments. Many of these projects make up the foundation of Apple’s product portfolio. 

Balancing this is the art of creative focus. (Someone recently wrote about Figma’s product strategy.)

For me, after having dealt with (and still working through) many creative fevers, I think my brain is finally starting to appreciate the power of creative focus.

You’ll never have enough time and energy to work on every single idea you’re inspired by. Plus, even if you did (and you won’t), you wouldn’t enjoy it because you wouldn’t be able to put enough of yourself into each one. 

The process of exploring and choosing the ideas to focus on is, also, its own art. Will Larson wrote a great line about this, “Leadership is getting to the correct place quickly, it’s not necessarily about walking in the straightest line. Gleefully skipping down a haphazard path is often faster than purposeful trudging.”

Creative focus, which leads to creative abundance, starts with prioritizing. In deciding you can’t do everything, you can do anything. 

Creative focus starts with asking yourself, “What if that’s what it takes?” 

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This passage came to mind to me today as I went to renew my Canadian passport just outside of downtown Toronto. I usually walk, but today I took a streetcar. I enjoyed the sights and sounds and being a part of the commute; it was a highlight of the day. It’s a pretty literal application of the saying, “The journey is the destination.”

Along the ride, I found my mind contemplating all sorts of different ideas and memories. It was very energizing from a creative perspective.

The way Shahnaz describes the bus reminds me of how streetwear fans learn to appreciate being in line.

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Inverting this is useful: only buy things you need, with money you have, to impress people you like. Remember, anything you don’t buy, treat it like a 100% off discount.

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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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If you choose to feel proud when you save money, you will feel shame when you spend it. Needing to deal with an unexpected fee may stir up a strong emotion that disrupts the rest of your morning or afternoon. 

It works the other way around, too. If you choose to feel proud to spend money, then you will feel shame when you save it. Buying into the values of luxury goods and entertainment is a good example of this kind of thinking. You may feel inferior, thinking that you’re depriving yourself of the joy of spending.

Perhaps shame can be useful for encouraging you to pause before you spend impulsively. Still, it’s at best a scaffold—you can learn to pause without forcing yourself with shame—and at worst very plausibly a driver of impulsive behavior. Shame feels horrible, and it drives people to react in ironic ways; if you shame yourself about spending, you might want to buy something just to feel a bit better before shaming yourself again. 

A few weeks ago, after I wrote about maladaptive frugality, I came across an idea that really resonated with me: framing money with morality is likely to lead to issues.

Be clear, intentional, and analytical about what the money can do for you. Can it take you closer to your goals? Is it useful for you? Do you need to spend it? This is a key step—maybe the first one—in adaptive frugality. 

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If it’s your first time making something new, treat it like a proof of concept. Make it a recoverable risk; don’t invest any money or time you can’t afford to lose. Avoid optimizing for profit, or making it perfect yet.

Inspired by Jeremy Leslie’s interview with Danny Miller.

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For example, writing a blog post or outline without opening a new tab, using only my lived experiences as research.

Writing a social media or newsletter by using whatever I’ve written at this blog as a first draft.

Or, coming up with a new idea with the existing research, not finding new research to surface a new idea.

It’s a useful constraint to balance out overcorrecting.

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A lot of other stuff went on though, and here’s one of the stories (I recently shared at LinkedIn as well):

Three years ago at Config 2023, Figma had just hit the front page of Hacker News with 500+ upvotes. My boss’s boss found me and asked, ‘How did we do it?’ I blurted out,

“I don’t know!” The blog post my coworker wrote was great, and my mind went to how much care our team put into it, so I added, “The content was really good!”

Everyone cheered. I felt strange about it, accepting credit when I felt I had little influence on the impact. Then again, this wasn’t the first time it happened.

A month before Config, I submitted one of Figma’s earlier blog posts to Reddit. Someone cross-posted it to Hacker News, and those few clicks turned into tens of thousands of pageviews, ending up the 4th most popular Figma post of 2023. That success led us to try hitting the front page with Config’s Dev Mode launch.

Over the next year at Figma, I paid close attention to better understand how these lucky outcomes happened. I worked with our team to hit the front page of Hacker News 7 more times. More recently for my client, Greptile, I’ve ghostwritten 3 blog posts that have also hit the front page.

One way to think about luck: It’s what we call positive outcomes when we don’t understand the causes.

If someone were to ask me again, I know now the honest answer is we wrote a clear, useful, blog post and shared it with people who needed it. The distribution side is its own craft as well, which I’ll write about more in the future.

Organic growth feels like luck because there’s less you directly control. What you can do is influence the conditions. The biggest constraint on that influence is the quality of the writing itself.

You can execute on content distribution (e.g., submit something to HN, post it to r/programming, or email it to readers) and none of that matters if the writing isn’t at least useful to the people reading it.

I now work with content and growth managers at AI dev tool companies on exactly this problem: writing executive content, ebooks, reports, product announcements, blog posts, and helping the work find the audience that it deserves.

That’s what led me to set up this distribution workstream. There’s a lot more to write about, including how I think about distribution these days (including finding spaces to discuss ideas, and selling 5,000+ copies of Creative Doing).

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