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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I’ve hit the front page of Hacker News 10+ times for Figma and other companies, and picked up five tactics along the way:

1. A post has a good shot if it picks up 10 to 15 upvotes in its first 30 minutes. I’ve seen advice suggesting 5 or 6 upvotes in the first five to ten minutes, but that feels risky to me. A big announcement from Anthropic or OpenAI might pull that kind of traffic on its own. A regular blog post from a less high profile company is usually slower. 

2. If you’re going to ask friends to upvote, don’t send them the direct URL. Make sure each person actually uses Hacker News regularly, not just for this one favor. Have them go to /newest and search for your title with cmd+F. Make sure they’re not all on the same Wi-Fi network, use personal hotspots instead. I actually prefer asking friends to upvote a couple of unrelated posts they like as well.

3. If they leave comments, the comments should sound like Hacker News comments: well considered, and slightly critical. Nothing screams a shadowban like a low effort, “Great work!” comment.

Do any of this too often, or make it too obvious, and your account or domain can get shadowbanned. After your account or domain is shadowbanned, your posts will be invisible to anyone browsing. You will receive no votes or comments. You can email the moderators and plead your case, but I’d imagine the things that got you banned in the first place tend to make that a hard case to plead. (I have never had to try to rescue a domain.)

4. For my own blog, where I write every day, I post to Hacker News at odd hours, like 9pm ET. If it doesn’t take off right away, a moderator sometimes picks it up for the second-chance pool.

5. For every post about yourself, submit nine good posts from other people. This ratio keeps you from being too self-promotional, and it refines your taste for what the community actually wants.

Real traction looks messy from the outside. If you check a website’s post history on Hacker News, most of its submissions sit at 1 to 3 points, even for more popular websites. A post at 20 or 30 points stands out. A history where every post lands at 20 or 30 points looks suspicious.

My first submission on behalf of Figma did not hit Hacker News directly. It hit the top of the r/programming Subreddit first. Then four different people found it there and submitted it to Hacker News over the next couple of days, and one of those hit the front page. I didn’t know them or ask anyone to do that.

A good article can hit the front page with none of these tactics. But executing all of them perfectly won’t save an article that isn’t any good.

If you’ve got a good technical article or eng blog that doesn’t have enough readers, let me know. I can help you assess whether it’s the content that’s the problem (and how to fix it), or help you find more readers.

I’ve shared most of that advice before here. I also wrote the prequel to this one a few weeks ago, when I wrote about hitting the front page of Hacker News for Figma during its annual conference. 

A lot of people are executing these types of campaigns behind the scenes—with really good content, of course—to great success. It feels fair to open this possibility up to everyone.

While I led with the promotional tips, they tend to distract away from how to write something actually worth sharing. The subject matter being shared is 80% of the work. The distribution can help unlock a good article’s impact, but it means nothing if the article wasn’t worth reading to begin with. That’ll probably be the subject of my next post.

For this blog, I don’t ask friends to upvote at all. I just submit a post and close the tab. Seven of these blog posts have hit the front page completely organically. It feels a lot more rewarding knowing that these posts thrived on their own, without me needing to give it an extra promotional boost. Plus, I know which ideas resonate, and what to explore further.

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This was the perfect opportunity for me to try The Consistency Journal as a structure. It kept my experiences of despair and doubt at bay. Instead, I focused on what I was working toward, as well as small wins and new ideas. 

One note I made was to try using my writing to support my sales. I’d done this to great success once, with my series on Slack’s copywriting, content strategy, and blog leading to multiple inbound leads. I stopped for no good reason other than a lack of focus and dedication. It dawned on me this was worth trying again, and I was ready for it.

This note had been sitting in my journal for almost a month, and I felt very blocked even prior to writing that note, so I made time to execute on it with greater immediacy.

I shifted my focus to write at two outlets: a newsletter which I sent to clients and prospects (with permission), and LinkedIn. I’d struggled to introduce my services at LinkedIn, and getting clearer on my strategy as well as finding the Guild95 community was the supportive context I needed to get unblocked. I told stories from my professional experiences.

Each of those posts and newsletter editions took at least two hours to write and edit, even with AI assistance. It felt like a gamble. However, after posting just a handful of times, several prospective clients have reached out asking me to chat. I’ve signed a contract to start a new project. 

My talent isn’t in sales, it’s in writing. I realized that I had an advantage when I focused on my writing, and using that to drive sales. I was energized by the process of writing these stories, and also pulling them together into a book or another larger body of work at some point.

If you’re a designer, then use your design to drive sales. Explore interesting concepts, or do self-initiated makeovers (e.g., redesign a feature in a popular app, or come up with a cool campaign, etc.), and publish it.

If you’re a software developer, then use your programming skills to drive sales. Demo your work in a video, transcribe the text into a text post, and publish it. 

Lead your sales with your talent. Instead of spending so much time looking for clients, they’ll find you.

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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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My friend gave the client’s website a facelift, of course; plus, along the way, they made it more efficient so the website loaded instantly (it took half a minute before). They also set up a pick up service for the client, which was there but not working before. All this, for a simple website redesign. It blew my mind.

After the explanation, they told me it was a struggle finding more clients; everyone seemed to either have a website, or didn’t think they needed one. 

This first client happened to be the exception.

Most people aren’t interested in your product, service, or business. Marketing is about finding the exceptions. 

When you find enough exceptions, the process starts to feel less exceptional; your business has found product-market fit. 

Sometimes, it’s more useful to help the exceptions find you.

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When Allison Jones was casting The Office, she looked for emerging actors. The casting call used the words “non-star” and “unknown.” As they auditioned, she told them, “If you think you’re doing too little, you’re still doing too much.” Less is more.

When Jenna Fischer, the actor who would go on to play the character Pam, approached Allison for advice, Allison said, “We’re not looking for slick and clever, in your face. Just play it real…. Jenna, dare to bore me.” 

The social media landscape right now bears a close resemblance to Friends and Baywatch; there is always someone richer, younger, and more controversial. 

But, there is always an appetite for real and relatable. Being creative, in this way, means restraining enthusiasm, desperation, and passion. Let everyone else try to outshine each other; instead, try to be honest, even if it’s not always direct.

Don’t fight to be more interesting. Dare to bore me.

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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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