The arc of success is long but it bends towards the prolific, and, why it's better to be average at something in demand than brilliant at origami.
Forty-two rules for forty-two years. Happy Birthday to me.
Writers know that the hardest part of any plot is the middle. With the start, you ask questions. With the end, you answer them.
In the middle you…? Meander around, mostly.
Today is my forty-second birthday. I’m now very much in the middle of what I can hope will be My Story. My middle is also proving quite the jumble. For most people, entering your late thirties is a time when you finally realise the aphorisms were right all along: you can dance like no-one is watching, because no-one is. In fact, no-one ever was. It’s quite a relief, and you can watch them sigh contentedly, then relax into themselves, at long last.
I learned about the Spotlight Effect early. I’m on the opposite arc, with a growing awareness of the finite where previously there was only great gaping infinite. I give a fuck now, because I don’t know many fucks I’ll have left to give, and how good those fucks will be.
Fuck.
And while I don’t have a map, I have a feeling quite a lot of what’s ahead is located uphill of here. So, I’ve decided to write down the lessons that mattered until now, with the hope that I won’t forget them.
Forty-two rules for forty-two years:
Act I: The Setup (Rules 1-14): On learning, creating, and finding your place
1. All advice is meaningless, especially this.
When people talk about their success you can stop listening, but when they talk about their failure, pay attention; failure illuminates, success blinds.
2. Often, the only difference between good advice and bad advice is timing.
More important than working out what someone needs to know, is working out if they're ready to hear it. Sometimes we need to fail and flounder a while, and that's okay. Any time you want to give someone advice, ask them a pertinent question instead.
3. Everything worth saying has already been said, but those that were listening have already forgotten and those that weren't, didn't hear.
Popular culture repeats itself every five years. You don’t need to worry about being original, you do have to worry about being heard. A large audience is worth much more than a brilliant message shouted into an empty substack (like this one).
4. You have to pick one thing and get good at it. There is neither, a choice nor a shortcut.
The better you get, the more time you’ll have to enjoy your mastery. The best time to start with yesterday. The next best time is after a bowl of ice-cream.
(For better or worse, Adam, you have picked writing/story. Respect it, it’s too late to go for mastery in anything else now, but the thing you have picked, or picked you, is complex enough to do for the rest of your life, so there’s that. Congrats.)
5. Success has two prerequisites: you need to get good at something (see 4.) and get good at telling people you are good at that particular thing aka The Luck Surface Area. Everyone forgets the second part.
6. The arc of success is long, but it bends towards the prolific.
Of the sixteen books I've written, the one I wrote in three weeks sold more than a hundred and thirty thousand copies, the infinitely better one that took ten months has shifted less than five hundred. The world is random and will stubbornly defy all your best predictions. If you don't know what plates will stick, the only hack is to throw a lot of them against the wall.
On that note:
7. The cheaper you make your life, the more flexible it can be, the more whimsy you can indulge in, the more interesting both the life and you become, the more plates you get to throw.
Pick a Pareto city where you can get 80% the lifestyle for 20% the rent. For everywhere else, there are holidays.
8. Until you’re financial free, you should always know your Freedom Figure (exactly how much your lifestyle costs you each month) and your Lifestyle Burn Rate (how long you could live your current lifestyle if you stop earning money, i.e. Savings / Freedom Figure).
Life, for all its many virtues, is not a well-calibrated machine in which you pour in talent and hard work and what comes is a matching lump of success. That are many variables between you and the interesting, createive, independent life you want, and most of them are completely out of your control.
The one thing you can influence, however, is how long you stay in the game. Every hour that you don't have to spend waiting tables to pay rent is an hour you can invest writing, drawing, making music or whatever tickles your soul.
Move somewhere deeply unfashionable. Have too many roommates. Eat from tins, or even bins. Find your clothes on the street. Or, if that’s all too dramatic, at least figure out how much it costs to be you, then ruthlessly cut that figure to the bone. Being a creative involves great sacrifices of geography, security, friendship, comfort, and luxury. Are you willing to make them?
9. What you desire is less important (unless you desire heroin), than that you desire something.
Humans are like sharks, we're meant to keep moving forwards. You should fear apathy like you fear cancer.
But remember:
10. All returns diminish.
If you find anything that doesn't, or that diminishes really slowly: treasure it, then build your life around it.
(The only ones that work for you, Adam, are friendship, flow, and story.)
11. If you're not using your money to buy time to do things whose returns do not diminish, you're using it wrong.
The good part of everything is the start, never the end. Retire first, work hard at the end, if you still have to. Once you’re middle class, greater happiness lies in gratefulness than acquisition. The former is much, much harder.
12. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, but better yet to need neither.
And a related Conor Oberst quote, “I’d rather be working for a paycheck than waiting to win the lottery.” Self-employment is the best employment. Self-publishing is the best publishing.
13. It's better to be average at something in demand, than brilliant at origami.
Whether the medium is the message or not is less important than that the medium dictates the size of the audience waiting to hear that message. Go where the masses are, then give them what they want to hear.
Iconoclasts die empty of stomach, but full of regrets.
14. Some things are harder for you than other people but MANY things are easier.
When you're despairing over something that's harder, keep in mind all the things that aren’t. Build your life, or at least your career around what’s easy for you.
Act II: The Complications (Rules 15-28): On people, relationships, and the messiness of being a person in the world.
15. One person's destiny is another person's dumb luck is another person's deserved reward is another person's unfair punishment.
Almost all of what we see is behind our eyes. Therefore:
16. When in doubt, do.
Regrets are too cognitively heavy to carry, so you can trust you’ll find a way to discard/reframe/ignore them. You are a post-hoc rationalisation machine.
17. Everyone thinks they're the good guy.
If you’re not a hypocrite, it’s only because you don’t stand for anything. You're not the good guy. Neither is anyone else. But it’s better to understand why they think they are, than to write them off as just being wilfully malevolent. On that note:
18. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” and “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.
19. It’s much easier to learn to like who you are than try to become someone different.
It’s like swimming with the tide instead of against it, in a lead suit.
20. If you do want to be someone different, change country.
If you don’t want to be your normal, put yourself somewhere no-one knows what your normal is, and where there is no normal, for you.
21. Some people would rather fail alone than succeed with other people.
You cannot help them. You should pity them.
(Also, you are one of them, Adam; work on this.)
22. The general arc of most people’s adult life is something like this:
Sex is the answer!
Travel is the answer.
Money is the answer.
*Status* is the answer.
Sex is the answer (again).
Drugs are the answer.
Love is the answer.
Buddhism is the answer.
There is no answer.
There isn't even a question.
Fuck.
How am I going to fill all the time?
Children.
Where did all the time go?
Death.
Or if you prefer things expressed in the worldwide currency of fucks:
Childhood: Fuck yes!
Teenhood: What the fucking fuck?
Early Adolescence: Fucking, yes!
Twenties: Giving too many fucks
Early-Thirties: Giving no fucks
Late-Thirties: Children. Fuck.
Early Middle Age: Unfuckable?
Late Middle Age: Fuck.
Old Age: Fucked.
Unless they’re family, it’s going to be hard but not impossible to have a meaningful friendship with anyone more than one stage above or below you.
23. You aren’t doing it wrong, we’re all doing it wrong.
Youth is wasted by the young, titillation is wasted by teens, superficial trends are traded by the twenties, mastery is wasted by the middle aged, safety is wasted by the senior.
Side note: Curiosity is rarely wasted by children; spend time with children.
24. If you can't explain it to your parents, you either don’t know it well, or shouldn't be doing it.
Nothing is new, but it often comes wrapped in several new layers of shiny new bullshit e.g. crypto.
25. Every romantic relationship is two years of bliss and x years of perfectly personable, worthwhile companionship.
Everyone is a bit disappointing in the end. Especially you. How good is the average Tuesday? is probably the best metric for evaluating who you should be with. You’re not picking a body, you’re picking a mind. That and finding someone you can imagine still wanting to talk to in ten years.
26. The length of something doesn’t decide its worth.
A relationship that ends is not necessarily a relationship that failed.
27. Your initial gut feeling about a person is almost never wrong.
28. Your gut feeling about everything else often is.
Act III: The Resolution (Rules 29-42): On legacy, meaning, and making peace with what is.
29. The most important decision you will ever make is with whom you procreate - you're deciding both half the genes of your child and much of how pleasant the raising of them will be.
Pick someone for whom unfairness hurts (in both directions), because you don’t need to police someone already policing themselves.
30. Parent/Child is life’s hardest relationship.
It’s defined by irreconcilable inequality. You are the great project of your parent’s lives, a project you didn’t ask to be part of, and often want nothing to do with. Your children are the great project of your lives, a project they didn’t ask to be part of, and you’re damn sure not going to make it easy for them to quit, the ungrateful bastards. Don’t they know how much you suffered for…
Everything you do wrong in the one role, will be done wrong to you in the other. Much of your life will be spent failing and ruing failures in this relationship, yet failure is inevitable. Accept it. Do your best. Move on.
31. If you don’t realise, often, that you’re wrong, you’re wrong all the time.
There’s no shame in saying “I don’t know.” There’s is shame in never changing your mind, because what are the odds that you got everything right first time? Dogmas make rubbish pets, but catmas are great company.
32. Depression isn't sadness, it's more of a paralysing despair.
The clinically depressed are the most accurate appraisers of their situation. If you no longer believe you can win, there's no shame in stopping to play for a while, or changing games. Also, suicide is not not wanting to live, it's not wanting to suffer any more.
33. Psychedelics are really, really wonderful (for you, Adam, not necessarily for everyone).
All the greatest days of your life will be on drugs, which sounds sad, but then everything is a drug, including, and especially, love. Some drugs teach (hello psilocybin), others drugs take. Choose wisely. You don't have to worry about becoming stuck there, you have to worry that you’ll realise just how stuck you are here, optimised by evolution not for happiness, but to want.
34. There are quality people, quantity people, and scarcity people.
Quality people get off on experiencing the best, quantity people from experiencing a lot, and scarcity people on how little they need. They rarely understand each other.
(You are a quantity person, Adam.)
35. There is nothing quite as alluring as a Grand Unified Theory Of Everything.
All models are wrong but some models are useful (thanks again, discordianism!). Useful Fictions explores this excellently.
36. It arises… to pass away.
37. “The four most important words in history are once upon a time.”
We are the storytelling ape. Our stories need an audience because:
38. "Good, bad, what's the difference? The most difficult thing for a human being is to knock on silence." - Saul Bellow.
People often ask me how I’ve managed to be a full-time writer for the past ten years—through all the frequent bouts of failure, loneliness, and slow improvement. While I could say that poverty and I suit each other, I usually reply with that quote. Only if writing becomes both its own form of companionship, and its own reward, can you survive those long silences waiting for one of your many knocks to be answered.
Knock knock.
39. The older you become, the greater the admiration you will have for the Amish.
If they’ve picked 1999 (dial-up internet was the sweetest internet), instead of 1850, you’d be churning butter right now.
40. “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
Thanks, Ghandi.
41. The average cloud ways more than three thousand tonnes. Everything is heavier than it looks.
You are heavier than you look. Even if you think you’ve let something go from your mind, you’re probably still luggingit around in your body.
42. The therapist often knows within the first ten minutes what the person’s problem is. Therapy is about preparing them to where they’re not only ready to hear it, but able to tell it to themselves.
You can’t change people’s minds. You can ask them interesting questions while you wait and hope they change them.
And that’s it, I suppose. The middle of the story. Still messy, still uncertain, but with increasing respect for the twists and turns in the plot.
Happy Birthday to me.
Happy Birthday to me.
.