“Bookstores shouldn’t exist,” said my co-worker. “Books are bad for the environment. All reading can be done online.”

My vision darkened and my leg shook. I spent that Friday night in my apartment, furiously typing the first draft of this essay.

The future he described felt like a threat on all of the books that had changed my life. When I imagined it, I was angered by the sense that something essential would be lost. As time passes, we progress toward something. Are we progressing toward the right future of reading?

Since then, I’ve spent eight months rewriting this essay. It’s the beautiful kind of essay where I changed my mind while writing it. Ideas converged, diverged, and surprised me.

I can argue why bookstores must continue to exist. Co-worker, you need them too!!

The Case for Kindle

The argument for Kindle is an argument for efficiency. Efficiency is “producing goods, providing services or information, or processing transactions with a minimum of waste.”1 By saying all reading can be done online, and that books harm the environment, my co-worker assumes the value of reading is its text.

Kindles, then, are efficient. My aunt and I recommend each other books. We download them for free, in seconds, through our library’s Libby app. No paper wasted. No space taken on our bookshelves. No emissions from transportation. Efficient.

But I was angry. It’s dangerous to measure efficiency before asking, “Efficiency towards what?” This is how we build a future that supports human values, not technological haze that erodes life in the name of “progress.”

I didn’t know yet how to find the efficiency of reading, but the anger in my gut guided my search.

What’s the Value of Reading?

It’s a ridiculous question to answer. Art has no confines. Yet my co-worker tried to confine art!

Who was he to say that paper and design weren’t part of the art? That writers succumbed to the monotonous design of Amazon and Substack, instead of building their own worlds? That writers couldn’t print their work? That knowledge was to be concentrated in big tech data centers, not physical assets people own?

The destruction of beauty was the first anger that guided me.

As field research, that Saturday, I interviewed several of my bookish friends. We were drinking Aperol spritzes at a house party and judging browsing the host’s bookcase. He failed. It was all self-help.

“My co-worker said bookstores shouldn’t exist,” I said. “All reading can be done online.”

“I love reading physical books!” My friends responded unanimously. “Kindle isn’t the same. I like to turn pages and smell them.”

Essay solved, I thought. Physical books are beautiful and essential.

But as I waited in line to refill my spritz, I realized: “I disagree. I read my favorite book on Kindle.”

When I read Girlhood by Melissa Febos, I literally changed how I live. My Kindle was efficient to pack in my backpack for six weeks while hopping European hostels. Sentences came alive. Febos’s memoir spoke to something so deep in me that I promised to stop kissing men in clubs and instead define youth for myself.

Now, I’m not saying my friends are wrong for loving physical books. But logically… they are wrong. If my favorite book of all time, I read on Kindle, then I can’t actually say that physical books deserve to survive because they offer a superior reading experience.

My anger was unresolved and pressed me forward.

When I graduated college and travelled Europe, I began to love reading. Books became pleasure, not information. But I was in a messy middle. On the one hand, a growing creative lineage of writers populated my bookshelf. On the other hand, I struggled to articulate my taste. Some books I loved and some I hated, with seemingly no thread separating them. The uncertainty of finding my next great book felt unbearable. I wondered irrationally: Had my reading peaked? Would an author ever fit me again? Was it something wrong with me or the world?

What if AI knows my reading taste better than me?

The thought hit me one night as I set another mediocre book down next to my bed. Desperate, I prompted Claude at midnight:

Claude recommended me 20 books. I took my new AI reading list to the library and checked out a pile of them. It guided me through sections of autobiography, fiction, essays, occult. I hobbled to my car, stack overflowing. Surely, I thought, Claude can match my taste. There must be some pattern between the writers I love. In my reading chair at home, I read the first page of each of the five books I found. This tone is pretentious, the topic is boring, the language diffuse, I complained to my cat sitting on my lap. I couldn’t make it past any first chapters2.

Except for one book. This book wasn’t recommended by AI. Its cover peeked out from behind a bookend in the nonfiction section. Why not? I had grabbed it because I recognized the author’s name.

Joan Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking in the year following her husband’s heart attack. The prose was elegant and sharp. For a week, it was the book I couldn’t help but pick up. I admired Didion’s strength to write:

I had no business reading about grief or marriage or hospitals. I was a single 22-year-old who fortunately hadn’t grieved in my adult life. But The Year of Magical Thinking spoke to something essential in me. It’s still a #1 book I recommend. To me, Didion describes how our bodies move without our minds, how our limited psyches attempt to navigate a formless reality. Her strength in documenting this year is remarkable, like field research on an experience nearly everyone goes through, but doesn’t dissect so deeply. She puts language to thoughts and experiences I had never imagined or anticipated.

Every great writer, for me, is a before / after3. A great writer is like an intellectual hug. Their prose opens new ways of seeing the world, their mastery expands what’s possible with language. Reading great writers is not pleasurable, per se, but captivating. Urgent. There are no words my brain would rather read. This person gets me.

Okay, love letter to literature is done. Back to my field research. Now, you know the literary hit I’m searching for.

Bookstores Are More Efficient Than Claude’s $1T Algorithm

If I read to find my next great writer (which can be on paper or Kindle), then “efficiency” in reading should be measured by how I find them. I was once again tortured by the uncertainty and a slew of mediocre books after finishing The Year of Magical Thinking. Had my reading peaked? Would an author ever fit me again? Was it something wrong with me or the world?

Since Claude had failed, I opened my Goodreads history and sleuthed the sources of my past hits:

• Melissa Febos and Carmen Maria Machado lectured at my university.

• Jeanette Winterson was recommended by Melissa Febos.

• Tim O’Brien was recommended by Stephen King, in the back of On Writing from a two-year-old phone screenshot.

• Jimmy Soni was recommended by David Perell in the “How I Write” podcast.

• Joan Didion I pulled off the library shelf.

• Jeremy Atherton Lin I pulled off the bookstore shelf.

• Olivia Laing … okay, Claude recommended her. But I found her smaller works Everybody and Funny Weather by my own sleuthing.

Every great writer I found through human recommendation or offline serendipity. Even books I loved and read online, I never found through an algorithm.

My anger subsided, and I became excited to investigate: How is a bookstore shelf more efficient than Claude’s $1T algorithm in finding books I love?

Bookstores Don’t Only Sell Books

I interviewed the owner of About Time Bookstore in Libertyville, Illinois. Well, it was more like I walked in on a Sunday after church and pestered her with endless business questions as she tried to restock shelves with the hot new releases in fantasy.

“You’re the owner, right?” I asked. I already knew she was.

“Yeah,” she said, setting down a box of fantasy books.

“Can I ask you a question? What do you view as the value of a bookstore?” I wanted to see if it was more than just paper books.

“Community. We host writing groups, author meetups, even baby showers. People want to gather around books.” Not exactly my interest.

“What about recommendations?” I tested my hypothesis.

“Oh, certainly, I can recommend you a book. What do you like?”

I mentioned creative nonfiction, political theory, business, memoir, and my recent obsession with the book publishing industry. She walked from the fantasy aisle to nonfiction. Her eyes scanned the curated shelves, which held one copy of each book. I wondered if she had memorized the store’s inventory. Unlike Claude’s infinite catalog, this recommendation was limited to what she had in-store. Her fingers traced the spines of a few titles before pulling one down and handing it to me:

“In Praise of Good Bookstores by Jeff Deutsch,” she said. “He ran Seminary Co-op in Hyde Park for ten years. This book is everything he’s learned on what a bookstore can be.”

I bought it for $16.95. I was surprised a whole book could be written on bookstore ownership. I was even more surprised by how many of the same conclusions we had come to, and how Deutsch deepened them.

His core thesis was:

Seminary Co-op literally hired an architect Stanley Tigerman to design an interior “that would confuse patrons and cause them to get lost in the stacks” (21).

Thanks, Jeff. Now, I’ll never visit a bookstore without analyzing the layout.

Browsing the Bookstore Stacks

To test his hypothesis, I visited Ravenswood Used Books in Chicago. I had a few days off of work between consulting projects. All I did was ride my bike, visit bookstores, and write about my bike rides to bookstores.

Ravenswood Used Books takes up two storefronts. But I couldn’t even walk through the middle. Crowded cases push browsers to the perimeter, guiding them first through wars, then world history, to fiction, essays, science, and sports. Section labels stuck out perpendicular to the shelves or stapled onto the front. Mismatched handwriting and typefaces, drawings of flags and humans, red yellow green orange blue, like a kindergarten class had gone rogue. Not even the aisles were navigable. A case in the middle here, a case there, asymmetry, creating nooks and valleys for the reader to wander. Stools and sofas designated browsing as leisure and lounge, to take one’s time.

The cases were the topography; the shelves the unit of discovery.

I pulled a stool to a shelf labelled “~ Genetics ~ Evolution ~” in red marker and started to laugh. The shelf itself entertained me. Darwin was beside Buddhism were on top of hypnosis manuals. Even on shelves, asymmetry, books stacked concealing other books, begging the browser to make their own topography.

All I could think about while wandering through the aisles, cases, stools, shelves, and sentences was Categorization.

As I walked out of the store, I noticed the owner tagging new (used) books to put on the shelves. My hand hovered over the doorknob, and I turned around to talk. I was nervous, but my field research required it. At the very least, I’d have a story for this essay.

“Can I ask you a question about the store?” I asked.

“Sure,” he looked up, hands still on the book.

“Do you think categorization and organization are part of the shopping experience?”

“Oh, sorry, it’s so cluttered in here. Last year we expanded next door, but even with that, the store is a mess. Sorry.”

The mess was awesome. But I felt rude. So I said nothing and left.

Though maybe he said exactly what I needed to hear.

Categorizing Commodities vs. Art

I biked back and stopped at Horner Park to sit under a tree and ponder categorization (typical Monday). Specifically, the difference in categorization between Amazon and a bookstore, like Ravenswood. Both stores have categories, but why does each feel so different?

Amazon categorizes books as commodities. I find a book that I already know I want. The “browsing” experience is a 2D feed suspiciously similar to Claude’s slop reading list. For other products, Amazon’s algorithm is efficient. Its top-recommended swimsuit is cheap, durable, and has 15 colors. But for art, there isn’t a single objective that an algorithm can feed me and combine data points toward. Art is not categorized as a commodity. Art is not even entertainment (unlike the feeds of the $330B+ social media advertising industry delude us to believe).

Bookstores categorize books as art. Instead of feeding us optimal products, these stores are like galleries. Browsing is leisure, an experience, a shared pursuit of beauty. Unabridged Bookstore in Chicago has a Staff Favorites shelf by checkout. This is as close to a “feed” as we get – the votes of actual people saying, This book spoke to something essential in me. What better data is there?

Under the tree, I pondered the root of this distinction. The distinction, I think, is infinity.

Amazon fails to select art because the catalog is infinite. Anyone can self-publish – and I mean anyone. I published my book The Art of College that I wrote during my senior year. It can be bought globally. To sort through infinity, algorithms are necessary. The feed must show us something, so it takes our past data. The limits in algorithms and categorizing infinity, I think, are a broader problem with internet and art.

At Ravenswood, I saw the owner tag a book to sell. Each book has a place in the store. Darwin is forced to associate with Buddhism and hypnosis because space is finite. Creative categorization determines the browsing experience, increasing serendipity. We‘re forced to walk past books that an algorithm would never have surfaced.

When a book captivates us while browsing, or a human recommendation delivers our next hit, these become the books we can’t put down. These rare discoveries — of books and of ourselves — are why we read.

Algorithms show us who we have been; Browsing shows us who we may become.

Thank you to and for their feedback on essay drafts.

Thank you to Jeff Deutsch (In Praise of Good Bookstores) and Danny Caine (How to Protect Bookstores and Why) for their wonderful books about bookstores written by owners of bookstores.

Thank you to various artistic friends, open mics, and bookstore owners in Chicago for sharing their ideas on the future of reading.

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

> George Orwell, “Why I Write”

For the last 13 months, I was driven on by the book demon. I can neither resist nor understand him. I filmed a video reflecting on my self-publishing process, what I’ve learned, and what I would change for future books.

Read The Art of College: How I Landed My Dream Job by Breaking the Rules (Amazon).

Timestamps:

• 0:50 - 1: Idea and Outline

• 5:20 - 2: Drafting “Messy Middle”

• 11:18 - The book rewrote me

• 13:32 - 3: Publish (design, marketing)

• 25:10 - How I used AI

• 26:34 - What I would change for future books

🖨️ Helpful Self-Publishing Resources

• How to Write Your First Draft: The Vomit Method (Scribe Media)

• Why You Should Write a Book, Now (Substack: Nat Eliason and Paul Millerd

• The Art of Deconstructing Success and the Secrets Behind Best-Selling Books (YouTube: Tim Ferriss and James Clear)

• Profits in Publishing, Why Self-Publish, How Authors Make Big Money (YouTube: Eric Jorgensen and Paul Millerd)

• My Self-Publishing Journey & Lessons Learned (73 Page Slide Deck) (Paul Millerd)

• There’s Always a Third Door (YouTube: Rich Roll and Alex Banayan)

• How to Format a Book for Amazon KDP (YouTube: Sean Dollwet)

Comment what writing projects you’re working on! I’d love to learn more 😊

P.S. If you have book marketing/launch experience, I would appreciate any advice.

Read The Art of College (Amazon)

Book Description:

College is four years to figure out your life, pick the right major, get straight A’s, and land your dream job.

That’s what everyone says. That’s what Jamie planned to do.

Then, she got rejected from every business club in her first month of college. She could either force herself down the pre-set path, or she could turn the next four years into an experiment: What does college success really require?

She experimented:

• Broke her 4.0 GPA

• Quit clubs

• Followed curiosity over career

• Skipped class to see Mr Beast

• Said “no thanks” to $140,000

The result? She landed her dream job while following her own path.

Written during her senior year, The Art of College distills four years of lessons into seven stories you can read in an afternoon. It is the blueprint for ambitious students who want to balance enjoyment and success.

I published my first book, The Art of College: How I Landed My Dream Job by Breaking the Rules!

I spent 400+ hours since September 2024 writing my soul onto the page. Now my soul can be bought for $9.99 on Amazon. Publishing is scary.

When I wrote this book, I imagined handing it to my 18-year-old self in a dark alley. This is the college advice they don’t want you to know. I learned it the hard way, through rejections, experiments, and uncertainty.

Readers who are not college-aged have enjoyed it, too. It includes themes of curiosity, validation, desire, corporate satire, and more. It mentions mushrooms, God, MrBeast, and nude beaches.

I posted two sample chapters on Substack, which performed well:

1. Saying “No Thanks” to $140,000

2. My Experiments in Corporate America

The holidays are coming up. It can be a great gift for any teens you know 🙂

You can read the book in 1.5 hours. It’s $9.99. Turn off Substack and read it (pretty please).

📕 I’ll post a longer video reflecting on my book-writing process, what I learned, and what I would change. I still don’t know how to describe it.

Life Updates:

• I backpacked Europe for six weeks (I loved Paris, Madrid, and Rome specifically)

• Raced my first Olympic-distance triathlon ( 🚴🏼‍♀️ is my new obsession)

• Moving to my first apartment in Chicago

• Attending Main Street Summit Nov. 4-6 in Columbia, MO (say hey 👋🏼 if you’re there or know anyone)

• Starting my first full-time job in 2 weeks

Thanks to everyone who has supported my work, especially writing coach . This book may not have been written without your early support.

Read The Art of College

This is a chapter from my college guidebook, launching this October. Subscribe for updates!

Subscribe now

In my fifth-grade yearbook, I listed my future career as “rich person.”

In college, I wanted to be a chief marketing officer (CMO). I genuinely loved business. I was that kid in elementary school who sold vegetables to neighbors and traded hand-drawn playing cards with classmates. When I imagined myself as a CMO, my life would be complete. Leading an industry. Giving a TED Talk. It was all I ever wanted.

So at nineteen, when I got my first internship in corporate America, I was actually excited. I could be in the “rich person” world of my future.

I had no clue what I would be doing, though. I worked at a multi-billion-dollar technology company. The job description was a riddle of corporate lingo:

• Closed-loop customer feedback

• Customer journey mapping

• Service design

• Personas

• Triage

It sounded strategic, and it was a fifteen-minute drive from my house.

Welcome to Fabulous Corporate America

On my first day in the office, I met my boss Tim. He led me up a maze of cubicles to the third-floor marketing department. I checked out my future corner office. Everything was white: white walls, white doors, white desks. The buzzing, fluorescent lights were brighter than the sun.

“We’ll treat you like a full-time employee,” said Tim. “You’ll have visibility and coordinate cross-functionally with teams across the organization, from sales to product management to strategy.”

I sat down in my cubicle and spent my first week watching company training videos. I barely kept my eyes open as a robotic voice lectured about distribution channels.

By the second week, I was excited to see my calendar fill with Zoom meetings. I listened as directors strategized supply chain and vice presidents integrated an acquired company. The only words I said were, “Hi, I’m Jamie, the intern.” I sent one email that week, which my boss wrote for me over my shoulder. Hi, please send this deck to sales partners for distribution feedback. I only pressed “send.”

Was this cross-functional collaboration?

As I ran an Excel correlation table for the fifth time in one hour, I realized that my job as an intern was not to work. I was hired so that I might accept a full-time job there. Fat chance. The company lost money on me.

Corporate Roleplay

I started to treat my internship like I was roleplaying work. In the background of my data analysis, I listened to lectures from startup founders. These founders gave lectures for fun. They wore shorts on stage. I couldn’t say the same about anyone at this company.

One morning, my co-worker Stacy caught me reading The Big Short in the company cafe while I was clocked in.

“We’re paying you to read?” she asked.

“I can’t start my day in an Excel pivot table,” I said, still rubbing the crust out of my eyes. It was 8:30 AM, too early to be dishonest.

When I wasn’t listening into a Zoom meeting, I watched company training videos. I learned about pricing incentives, channel sales, and B2B technology. I was genuinely curious. That internship taught me more about business than any college course. Still, corporate life unsettled me.

Every day, I counted down the minutes until 5:00 PM. During my lunch breaks, I walked the 0.5-mile concrete loop around the parking lot in sweltering summer sun. I nodded to other corporate workers, dressed head-to-toe in loafers, khakis, and long-sleeve button-ups, their security badges dangling from their belt loops. We exchanged a glance and half-smile. I wondered if they also felt like dogs being taken on a walk.

In the colorless maze of cubicles, under the beating fluorescent glow, I felt like I was just a brain behind a computer screen, producing value for shareholders. I realized that, within my forty-hour workweek, I would do none of it if I weren’t being paid. I didn’t see meaning.

My brain was fried from forty hours of screen time, yet every day, I ran and lifted weights to feel human. I produced YouTube video essays during my nights and weekends.

How did my middle-aged co-workers survive this for decades?

Conversations with the C-Suite

Like any good experiment, I conducted fieldwork. In between meetings and pivot tables, I emailed twenty-five directors, vice presidents, and executives for one-on-one conversations. I had to find out if work could be fulfilling.

One morning, I scanned my security badge and entered the office cafe. I had a 9:00 AM meeting with Yanni, a vice president of finance. He bought me a latte. The barista forgot to add sugar. I drank two sips before throwing the bitter atrocity in the trash.

We talked about mergers and acquisitions. Ten minutes in, my throat tightened as I asked my real question:

“How do you find fulfillment in your career?”

“My fulfillment is outside of work,” said Yanni. “I raise four kids and volunteer at my church.”

Thirty minutes later, I had an introduction call with Anne, a vice president of supply chain. In the background of my webcam, my co-worker Sarah blew out the candles on her birthday cake.

“Tell Sarah happy birthday,” said Anne. “I remember my first summer at this company, like you, thirty years ago. My co-worker had a birthday cake. I thought, This is what people get excited about now? Losers.”

“Did it ever get better?” I asked.

Her eyes glazed over. Then she asked me about global manufacturing.

For lunch, I met with Frank, a vice president of corporate strategy. This was our second conversation. He was my favorite person at the company, so I skipped the small talk.

“What job would you enjoy the most?” I asked.

“If I could do any job,” he grinned, “I’d be a poolside bartender at a resort in Cancun.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“Sixty hour weeks aren’t so bad. I learn every day. I support my wife and kids.”

That afternoon, all thirty interns gathered in a room to meet Pat, a top executive. After listing his seven steps for success, he opened for Q&A. I raised my hand first.

“What makes you passionate about working here?”

“If I followed my real passion, it would be tennis,” said Pat. He stared at the corner of the room. “But at work, I make myself passionate about solving customer problems.”

It sounded like cope.

Closing My Experiment

It was the last day of my internship. I still hadn’t met a single person who seemed fulfilled by their work.

“What motivates people to become C-suite?” I asked my boss, Tim. “It seems like you’d have to sacrifice so much to climb an empty corporate ladder.”

“Executives aren’t motivated by money,” he said. “A study showed that executives are twelve times more likely than average to be psychopaths1. Business is their baby. They sacrifice family and hobbies to succeed.”

Great. The way to succeed in corporate America was to be a psychopath.

My Field Work Continues

To get a new perspective on work, I texted my church’s pastor, Kim. We met at a local forest preserve and ran four miles on a wooded trail.

“This summer, I learned that work can never make me happy. I should find interests outside of my job to fulfill me.” Through panting breaths, I shared with Kim the depressing conclusion of my experiment.

“Jamie, everyone you talked to is in their forties and fifties,” she said. “Of course they value stability. They support families. But you’re twenty. You don’t need to have the same values.”

Back at church, she gifted me the book Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer. I read it in a weekend. Palmer wrote about “listening for the voice of vocation,” which is Christianese for finding fulfilling work. Two quotes pierced through me:

“Vocation at its deepest level is, ‘This is something I can’t not do, for reasons I’m unable to explain to anyone else and don’t fully understand myself but are nonetheless compelling.’”

“Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.”

Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer

Work Was My False Idol

Palmer turned down a prestigious career as a college president to become a writer. At first, this made no sense to me. I had wanted to be a CMO because it was the top. The higher I climbed, I figured, the more fulfilled I would be.

My internship shattered this illusion. From interns to executives, no one I met was fulfilled. In fifth grade, when I wanted to be a “rich person,” I actually meant fulfilled: a loving family, a healthy body, and creative projects. I thought climbing the corporate ladder would give me that.

Instead, I learned that work would only ever be a part of my life. I could still pursue skills, interests, and talents regardless of their status.

At first, this realization crushed me. The “perfect” career was no longer the ticket to my dream life. Then, it felt freeing. The ladder led nowhere.

Names, titles, and company information have been anonymized.

Huge thank you to writing coach , writing gym leader , and several college friends for feedback on this chapter 💜

Not like the Florida beach vacations growing up, or the spring break I planned with college friends by sorting “lowest price” on www.cruises.com. But travel as a rite of passage. What those viral Substack posts say I must do in my twenties. You’ll never have this much free time again.

Five days after finishing four years of college, I sorted my life into a thirty-liter backpack to visit seventeen cities in forty-four days.

I flew to Europe searching for something I don’t know. Like all rites of passage, I can only know this transformation by living it.

At least, this is my post-mortem on why I booked this trip, written from a lakeside deck in Italy.

I just finished week two, driving from Rome to Milan with my family. I’ll share my adventure so far.

🧱 3 Nights in Rome

Rome was overwhelming. Rome was my favorite city. Rome felt like the collective unconscious.

When it was built in 80 AD, marble covered the Colosseum. 80,000 people filled the stands; free tickets for any Roman citizen. The word vomit originated because everyone could evacuate within fifteen minutes, through the Colosseum’s eighty exits.

Subscribe now

Now, the marble is bare, its walls crumbled, and the pillars covered in holes. During the Renaissance and Middle Ages, the resources were stripped to architect other buildings around Rome. In 1349, an earthquake collapsed its southern side. Under the stage, two stories of underground tunnels held over a hundred people and animals, lit only by candles. “Give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt,” wrote the satirical roman poet, Juvenal.

“We’ve never seen art before now.” My brother and I stood in a hoarder’s house of deer, lions, men, all carved from marble. Every surface of the house was painted. Just to decorate a wall, were works more elaborate than I’ve seen in art museums.

We were in the Vatican Museum, home to over 70,000 pieces of art. And, of course, the Sistine Chapel.

We wondered how art has devolved from this. Even the U.S. Capitol, built two hundred years later, seemed like a cheap ripoff.

I might blame the decreasing cost of replication. Writing was invented circa 3400 BC. The printing press followed circa 1440 AD. Before the printing press, art was one-of-one, even if it was hand-copied.

A decorated wall was hand-painted. Now, any McMansion can have Toscana Dream White Cream pasted to its walls. Beauty is more accessible now, but is beauty limited by mass market viability?

🍷 4 Nights in Tuscany

Before we left Illinois, I told my family the one thing on my Italy bucket list is to eat the viral affogato from Vivoli in Florence. Affogato is one of my favorite foods. I waited in a line that stretched down the alley.

Before I ate, I took three pictures and one video. Everyone filmed the baristas scooping gelato into a mug or pressing buttons on the espresso machine. I wondered if baristas were hired for camera presence. People posed ten ways as their affogatos melted in the Florence sun. I posed, too.

Time to eat. The bitter espresso danced delightfully with the creamy vanilla gelato on my tongue. But… it was just an affogato. I wouldn’t wait in that line again, but I was glad I did the first time. FOMO ruled me.

My risk calculus went:

1. Wait forty-five minutes in line to eat (potentially) the best affogato in the world, creating a lifelong memory.

2. Or… spend forty-five minutes somewhere else in Florence anyway, probably bickering with my family.

Virality creates an emotional hype that may be impossible to match.

Florence was the most fashionable city we visited. I told my brother it reminded me of LA, and he made fun of me.

For the rest of Tuscany, my family rented a stone condo in the countryside. We shopped at Italian supermarkets, cooked pasta primavera, drank Peroni at the pool, and tasted a dozen wines.

🏝️ 2 Nights in Rimini

In this beach town, I rediscovered my life for drawing and americanos.

I drew my Americano by the pool. Immediately after, I posted my first Substack note. Drawing makes me playful. I enjoy it, even if it’s bad. It lowers my pressure for writing, too. Sometimes I purposely leave typso.

I’ve taken pictures every day, too. When I take a well-frame picture, my heart sings. Photography helps my drawing: seeing lines and positioning. I might have a visual artist inside me.

🛶 1 Night in Venice

In Venice, anxiety attacked me like a disease; I felt lightheaded, lost my appetite, and craved more red wine than normal.

I had read Dan Koe’s mini-book Purpose & Profit in the car. After, I felt like a failure. Like if I wasn’t directing my entire life towards entrepreneurship, I was weak.

When I graduated college, weight lifted off my shoulders. No more B.S. assignments. Just me and the world, free for me to crack open like an oyster. But there aren’t clear values. I drive myself crazy, thinking everything and its opposite makes sense. Should I follow in-the-moment enjoyment or long-term growth? How do I know when to trust emotions vs. logic?

But Dan even started Purpose & Profit with: “I am very open to this book being wrong, but… I find it silly not to share a perspective that may help another.”

So I disagreed with him. I wrote 3,000 therapeutic words of principles I believe about life. No more gurus who erode my inner knowing. It came down to:

• Curiosity is a compass

• Discipline leads to (internal) freedom

• Art is the nature of reality

• Truth is expansive

• The Kingdom of God is within you

My anxiety had nothing to do with Dan himself. Rather, I used Profit & Purpose to latch onto my existing insecurities. I had a conversation with the anxious part of myself:

Why are you pursuing entrepreneurship? I asked her.
"I want you to have external freedom," she said.
Why?
"So that you can feel free and expansive in your life."
What if I already feel free and expansive right now?
"I want you to continue to feel free and expansive in the future."
Why do you think feeling free now is at odds with that?
"In the past, when I expressed myself, I lost safety."
I'll keep you safe now, I promised.

Damn. Internal family systems (IFS) meditation should be taught in schools.

I banned AI for the rest of the trip. I’m testing some hypotheses about “AI fog” in emotions and creativity.

4 Nights in Lake Maggiore

Hiking in the Alps, anxiety still diluted my thoughts, like in high school chemistry class when we added water to weaken a solution.

Then I listened. My Reeboks crunched the gravel path. Alpine water crashed on rocks. A hundred birds chirped their songs. A bee buzzed by my ear, and I wasn’t scared of it.

Then I looked up. The most beautiful view of my life. Wildflowers rose from the meadow pink, blue, orange, yellow, white puffs of dandelions. The snow-capped mountains were harsh on top of lush green.

La Fine

My family flew back to Illinois today. I’m writing this on a flight from Milan to Madrid. Facing my next month in Europe, I feel the exact same unknown and wonder that I felt on my first day of college orientation.

Subscribe now

My favorite stops in Italy (ranked):

1. Rome

2. Lake Maggiore

3. Venice

4. Tuscany

5. Rimini

Food I’m still thinking about:

Hey! This is a chapter from my college advice book that I plan to self-publish in August 2025. Please subscribe to follow my work and reach out if you would like to be a beta-reader or support in any way.

“We’ll pay you $140,000,” the recruiter told me. I should have been elated, but instead, I felt like I was going to throw up. I was twenty-one years old, receiving my first full-time job offer. I was about to make one of the most important decisions of my life so far.

My internship at Capital One seemed like the dream job.

I used to view corporate life like Disney World. When I was nine years old, I watched The Internship, a movie where Google’s headquarters welcomed Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn with sunny pop music, Google-branded bicycles, self-driving cars (in 2013!), frisbees on the lawn, volleyball, free lunches, and an indoor slide.

When I rode a Capital One-branded bicycle, I lived out nine-year-old Jamie’s dream. There was so much free food that I rarely cooked dinner. I looked down at the rooftop below me with a mini golf course, food trucks, tiki bar, and biergarten. 95% of my time was spent behind an ultrawide monitor, not at corporate Disney World. Still, I made $60 per hour clicking buttons on SQL, Excel, and PowerPoint. My work energized me, and my coworkers were smart. But before I went to bed each night, my anxiety bubbled under the surface:

Is this the life I want? Am I passionate enough about my dreams to walk away from this? What would I do instead?

My mind was a pendulum. Every day, I texted my mom “I love work” or “I want to quit.” My college graduation was in less than a year. My future loomed over me like a dark cloud, and I didn’t know whether to take the money or follow my dreams in the creator economy.

“If Money Didn’t Matter, What Would Be Your Dream Job?”

I had to find out why I was unhappy. Halfway through the summer, I went to the rooftop for a free happy hour with five hundred other interns. This was the perfect day to collect data points. I wandered from table to table, sipping a mocktail of frothy coconut and pineapple juice (I wasn’t old enough to drink yet).

“If money didn’t matter, what would be your dream job?” I asked the first table of interns. Each intern’s face lit up. Their imaginations roamed. When was the last time they let themselves dream? After this flash of joy, they had the same answer:

“I wouldn’t work,” said each person. “I’d travel the world.”

“What would you do after traveling the world, then?” I asked.

“Keep traveling. I don’t know,” they said.

After that, I lost interest. These interns didn’t know their dreams, and they clearly didn’t want jobs doing “data work.”

I walked to another table.

“If money didn’t matter, what would be your dream job?”

This table had dreams: “Urban planner. YouTuber. Art curator. Composer. Video game designer. Screenwriter. Programmer.” But only the composer and programmer were pursuing their dreams in their free time. Dreams made my life worth living. I loved writing in my free time. But throughout the summer, it seemed like most interns didn’t have a dream. If they did have a dream, most of them weren’t acting on it.

By the end of the summer, I heard some other interns’ beliefs about work:

• “I like this job because it’s easy.”

• “If work is gonna be soul-sucking, at least this job pays a lot.”

• “I don’t like to work.”

I was shocked. I disliked the internship because it was easy. I didn’t want work to be soul-sucking or for salary to be its defining feature. These interns’ attitudes were half the reason I quit. My twenties were the time to think big. I needed to be surrounded by ambitious people, who could support my dreams, too.

Narratives Run Your Work

Now, I knew why I was unhappy. My coworkers and I had different expectations of work. I didn’t want a job to just mean clocking in at nine and out at five. But I still didn’t know how to find fulfilling work. After weeks of sinking into internet rabbit holes, I found a writer . Paul worked at McKinsey, then quit his consulting career to be a freelance consultant, career coach, and writer.

His books The Pathless Path and Good Work were some of the few books I finished that year. In them, he shared the “low-grade dissatisfaction” that was part of his previous work and how, instead, he found work he enjoyed in writing and freelancing. Through Paul’s books, he wrestled with the same questions I did. I learned that work isn’t just a paycheck. Work can be fulfilling.

In Good Work: Reclaiming Your Inner Ambition, Paul introduced the idea of “work scripts,” which are beliefs we “inherit from our culture, family, and friends. These scripts point us in certain directions and mold our desires for what we want to do in the world.” (Good Work, chapter seven)

As I read Good Work, I listed the scripts I grew up with. Do you agree with them?

• All adults must have a job at all times.

• I work hard now, so I can benefit later.

• Work is something I don’t do at home.

• If my future is not certain and secure, I may end up with nothing.

• I can only work part-time if I have a rich spouse.

• College is successful if I get a high-paying job by the end.

For the first twenty years of my life, I gathered these work scripts from family, friends, and culture. As I worked, I examined and altered them. When I interned at Creator Now, a YouTube education startup, my previous scripts were shattered. Creator Now didn’t feel like a “job.” It was fun. When it wasn’t fun, I was learning and impacting creators. The team was the most talented I had ever worked with. No one was annoying. Now that I knew work like this was possible, I didn’t have an excuse to settle for anything less.

By following my curiosity, I also found work I loved apart from a paycheck, like writing, video editing, and strategizing business models for online creators.

I wrote new scripts:

• Work can be energizing.

• Work can be more fun than relaxation.

• Work can develop me as a person.

• Work can have non-financial rewards.

• I can meet people through sharing my work.

• The reward for good work is more work, so I should find the challenges I enjoy.

• I won’t enjoy all aspects of my work, and that’s okay.

• The corporate ladder promises false certainty.

• I can be happy as an employee.

I was fired up. Paul’s mantra was “Coming alive over getting ahead.” Capital One got me ahead, but I spent all my time outside of work coming alive. Now that I had the agency to change, why couldn’t I find a job that made me come alive, too?

When I got back to my apartment, I called my mom.

“I don’t want to go back to Capital One next year,” I said.

“Why isn’t this enough for you?” she asked.

This is actually what she said to me. Writing this six months later, her question still haunts me. Was I wrong for wanting more?

The 30-Minute Call That Saved Years of My Life

If I wanted to turn down $140,000, I had to figure out what the hell I was going to do next.

I texted my mentor Zack, the co-founder of Creator Now, “Hey, could I ask you about career advice after college?”1 Our thirty-minute call saved years of my life.

“I need to decide where to work,” I said.

“Let’s back up. What would you do with infinite time and money?” Zack asked.

“I’d spend half my time writing and making videos about philosophy and the future of media. I’d spend the other half of my time advising YouTubers and media startups on business strategy,” I said.

“What skills do you need to get there? You don’t have those skills now or you would have already reached your dreams,” Zack said. That stung, but it was true.

We listed four skills I would need:

1. Leadership

2. Network

3. Content creation and virality

4. Business operations (sales, marketing, product development)

“If you want a chance at your dream future, you need to master these four skills. Evaluate any job opportunity for how many of these skills it builds. Ideally, a job builds three or four. But if a job only builds one or two, it probably doesn’t fit,” said Zack.

My internship at Capital One built none of these skills.

“Too many college grads take job offers and only see salaries. Even if a job pays $140,000, it doesn’t matter. Optimize for skills, and long-term earnings will come,” said Zack.

Hearing Zack say “$140,000” so casually jarred me. Before, salary was the defining feature of my internship. I was upset when my friend’s internship paid $10,000 per year more than mine. But now, I saw that salary was just a number. I was scared to give up six-figures, but I was more scared to spend the most valuable years of my twenties in an Excel pivot table.

Zack was the same guy who told me to stop having a 4.0 GPA. Now, he told me to quit my $140,000 job. Zack’s advice was always the opposite of my parents.

“If you want to impress any interviewer,” Zack’s eyes lit up and he said in a hushed tone, “Ask them: how does this opportunity fit me?”

Ugh. I didn’t want to interview for jobs again, but I had to. Using Zack’s skill framework, I plotted my career choices:

I Got My Dream Job by Telling the Truth

At my college’s career center, my focus was, “What can I do to get a job?” I spent a hundred hours on my resume and interview skills, molding myself into the perfect candidate. After talking to Zack, I reversed the question: “What can a job do for me?”

“Why consulting?” the partner asked me.

I was interviewing for a full-time consulting job, my mimetic dream when I started college.

The year before, I interviewed for the internship. I answered, “I want to work in consulting because it mixes my strengths of creative and analytical thinking.” I was rejected.

Now, as a senior, I was calm. I told my truth, “My dream job is to be business partners with YouTubers, but the industry is immature. I want to work in consulting for a few years to learn about business from smart people.”

I literally said in my interview that I planned to quit. With my new abundance mindset, I felt empowered to tell the truth. I found a job that fit my goals. When I told the truth, I got the job offer.

Huge thank you to my writing coach and friend for their feedback on this chapter!

• Books: sequential novels (since 1823)

• Magazines: serial fiction (since 1837)

• Film: serials (since 1910)

• Radio: radio dramas (since 1921)

• TV: soap operas (since 1930)

But on YouTube, most content is one-off. Viewers don’t need context; they pass from one video to the next.

At first, I hypothesized that series are outdated. Since traditional media has such high barriers to entry1, of course the same stories are reused. It’s inefficient to build new shows from ground-up, with large teams of writers, producers, actors.

Film studios are also entrenched in the franchise model. As entertainment grows more competitive, studios are more risk-averse. Instead of innovating, they release 34 Marvel movies.

Online creators aren’t dependent on series in the same way. Creators innovate and rapidly test concepts with instant feedback. Their production and distribution have no barriers.

But what if series aren’t just an outdated form from traditional media? How can creators learn and take advantage of the past 200 years of storytelling?

🎞️ What Is a Series?

A series is different from a format.

1. Series: a continued storyline, where each episode builds from the next.

2. Format: a continued structure, which viewers can watch discontinuously.

You’d never start watching a TV series on episode 5. If you have, you were probably confused. But many times, the first episode is not the best episode. As the series progresses, you become more invested in the characters, and each episode is more enjoyable. Series form small, loyal communities.

Formats are the opposite of series. Viewer enjoyment stays constant, yet videos reach broader audiences. Each iteration of the format appeals to a slightly different viewer, where anyone can watch any episode. There’s mass viewership, with lower average enjoyment.

YouTube is full of formats:

• The Hot Ones

• “I Tested 1-Star _____” (Ryan Trahan)

• “We Tried EVERY _____” (Good Mythical Morning)

• “I Tried _____” (Michelle Khare)

• “Abandoned for 24 Hours in _____” (Yes Theory)

Yet when I search “series” on YouTube, only traditional examples pop up. And a calculus video.

To be fair, YouTube has a few popular series:

• “I Survived on $0.01 for 30 Days” (Ryan Trahan)

• Kinigra Deon

Still, YouTube is mostly discontinuous. Especially with TikTokification and short-form content, our feeds are increasingly algorithm-based. We don’t choose who we watch. In 2014 YouTube, with more viewer choice, I watched the same 5-10 creators per week. Now, I watch 10-15 different creators per day.

Social media has become the complete opposite of the last 200 years of series-based traditional media.

🥇 Series as a Creator Advantage

Beyond just being traditional media, series reflect human relationships. Cliffhangers work because we care about characters. The Hero’s Journey is satisfying because we relate to people growing and changing. One-off content does not mirror human relationships. It feels transactional to watch a creator once and say, “Adieu.” Sure, it works (it’s addictive), but it’s not pleasant.

Series can be a competitive advantage for creators in 2 ways:

1. Habitual: by opening curiosity loops in each video, viewers are more likely to return to your next upload.

2. Community: with higher viewer enjoyment, you differentiate and form a loyal audience.

YouTube is built for formats. Creators are incentivized to reach as broad an audience as possible for advertising revenue. Yes Theory’s “Abandoned in Madrid with No Money for 24 Hours” probably reaches a different audience than “I Spent 24 Hours in Korea with No Money.” Same with Good Mythical Morning’s “We Tried EVERY Flamin’ Hot Snack” vs. “We Tried EVERY Monster Energy Drink.”

Formats focus on quantity. Series focus on quality.

Ryan Trahan has created both series- and format-based content. Let’s open Excel and compare the numbers behind the 2 styles.

1. Series: “I Survived on $0.01 for 30 Days”

   

   1. 30 Videos

   2. Average view count: 10.7M

   3. Total views: 320M

2. Format: Ryan Trahan’s most recent 12 months of uploads

   

   1. 21 videos

   2. Average view count: 17.1M

   3. Total Views: 360M

The Penny Series’ average view count was nearly half of Trahan’s format-based content (10.7M vs. 17.1M). However, the Penny Series received 320M views over the 30 uploads. In the past 12 months, Trahan’s format-based uploads received 360M views. With the Penny Series, Trahan still received 89% of the views in 8.3% of the production time.

Series aren’t a YouTube magic bullet, though. MrBeast has never posted a YouTube series. His new $100M Amazon show, Beast Games, will likely be a series, though. Traditional media structures lend themselves more to series.

YouTube channel Watcher suffered from YouTube’s broken model. In April 2024, they declared “Goodbye YouTube” and announced their switch to a $5.99/month streaming service, Watcher TV. Watcher wanted to focus on “Netflix”-style content, which had a high production budget and low mass appeal.

“Everyone has different missions they’re working towards on YouTube. Ours was to make a television show, and over time, you start to realize, ‘Hey, maybe television shows aren’t meant for YouTube. Perhaps we should find a different place that’s better suited to the content that we’re making and can support the dollar amounts that we’re putting into each of these episodes.’”

> Goodbye YouTube (Watcher)

Well, I would label WatcherTV’s “series” as more as “formats.” So maybe series weren’t the problem. Maybe Watcher just wasn’t reaching a wide enough audience with their iterations of formats.

👷‍♂️ Creator Implementation

Still, I think creators can learn from series, and they don’t have to hire a Hollywood production team to do it.

For series, the core question is: how can you compound viewer enjoyment from one video to the next?

With each video, reveal information that’s continued in the next video. A new viewer can still enjoy it, and returning viewers enjoy it more.

You can create compounding enjoyment and information in a few ways:

• Recurring characters

• Developing relationships

• Inside jokes

• Custom concepts or phrases

These advantages can work for both entertainment and educational channels. Dream SMP did it well. In each video, he has a recurring cast of friends. As viewers watch, they learn more about his friends’ personalities, pick up inside jokes, and feel like they’re building relationships. Enjoyment increases and viewers return for more episodes.

On the education side, Daniel Dalen documents his daily life building a business. When a viewer joins, they don’t know the exact characters (friends) or what Daniel’s business is. But as they watch and learn more context, they enjoy each video more. With both Dream and Daniel, the first video viewers watch is likely not their favorite.

Series have hooked audiences for 200 years. What can you learn from them?

Sources:

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_series

• https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing/Magazine-publishing 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cinematic_firsts 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_drama 

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soap_opera 

• https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/economics/barriers-to-entry/#:~:text=Barriers%20to%20entry%20are%20the,or%20education%20and%20licensing%20requirements. 

• https://thehoya.com/guide/reel-dilemma-the-modern-problem-of-the-cinema-industry/ 

• https://www.masterclass.com/articles/writing-101-what-is-the-heros-journey 

• https://www.creatorhandbook.net/mrbeast-strikes-100-million-deal-with-amazon-for-beast-games/

I’m starting my senior year of college.

Throughout college, I’ve experimented:

• I earned a 4.0, then made grades my last priority.

• I became a weightlifter, then a half marathon runner.

• I wanted to be a consultant, then a YouTuber, and now I’m going to be a consultant.

• I made social life my last priority, and now it’s my first.

… while accomplishing nearly every goal I wanted:

• Internships at Fortune 500 and a YouTube startup

• Lifelong friends

• Ran 3 half marathons

But I haven’t always been a “zen valedictorian,” as Cal Newport describes. I used to struggle for survival in tactical hell. Now, I play in strategic heaven.

By treating college like a Grand Strategy (of war), I orient my college experience around a larger outside goal. I’ve crafted an education — both in and out of school — that’s uniquely fulfilling. The accolades are a side effect.

Subscribe now

🔥 Tactical Hell

“… most of us exist in a realm that I call tactical hell. This hell consists of all of the people around us who are vying for power or some kind of control… Once you sink into this hell, it is very difficult to raise your mind above it. You are dealing with one battle after another, and none of them end with any resolution.”

> Robert Greene, “Tactical Hell or Strategic Heaven?”

For my first 2 years of college, I was stuck in “tactical hell.” I spent hours LinkedIn-stalking my classmates, comparing who was interning at which companies and how prestigious they were. I was obsessed with external appearance, so I only competed for obvious prizes.1

I focused on the one chess square ahead of me, instead of questioning if I was even on the right board.

My college-fueled coffee addiction wrapped me in constant anxiety. I lived 5-10 years in the future. Because I was playing a game that wasn’t mine, I knew the exact steps:

1. Work at X Consulting Group after college.

2. Graduate with an MBA from Y University, class of 2030.

3. Become an executive at Z Corporation.

I worked backward from those obvious prizes, begging for the world to tell me who I was.2 I applied to my college’s business clubs and was rejected from all 7 (yes, clubs with multiple rounds of interviews and 10-20% acceptance rates). My self-worth plummeted. The obvious prizes seemed out of reach.

I joined debate team, wrote for the student paper, and recruited for the business of sports club. I quit all these 6 months later.

🪵 My Breaking Point

Chasing prestige, I clung to certainty out of fear. I didn’t know where my true curiosities would lead me. By definition, creativity and curiosity are “low-status.” They are non-linear, done for their own sake, and can’t be compared to other people’s.

Since the college business clubs wanted nothing to do with me, I was forced to sit with myself:

• What was meaningful to me?

• What does a successful college experience look like?

• Who was I — and what did I want — when I wasn’t defined by what I had?

With time, my true desires popped up. For the first time in 6 months, I could imagine a path through college I was actually excited about. Before, it seemed inevitable that the 4 years would be full of stress, inadequacy, and box-fitting.

“My dream is to post video essays on YouTube and reach 50,000 subscribers,” I confessed to a senior mentor. My curiosity gave me an energy worth sacrificing for. It propelled me out of bed. Eventually, I reached a breaking point from my old path.

In April 2022, I wrote in my journal:

“Why overstress myself, constantly compare to others to go down a path that I don’t know if it’s true to me? Versus going down a creative media or startup route that excites me… I don’t know where my ‘true to self’ path would lead. Maybe it wouldn’t pay off, and having those ‘safe’ clubs and internships would look better to employers. But isn’t college about exploring?”

College is the time where I can take the most risk with the least downside. If I don’t have the courage now to pursue my “low-status” dreams, when will I ever?3 I couldn’t squander these years by fitting into a box. It was time to experiment and trust where life would take me.

🌤️ Strategic Heaven

“Strategy is a mental process in which your mind elevates itself above the battlefield. You have a sense of a larger purpose for your life, where you want to be down the road, what you were destined to accomplish. This makes it easier to decide what is truly important, what battles to avoid. You are able to control your emotions, to view the world with a degree of detachment.”

> Robert Greene, “Tactical Hell or Strategic Heaven?”

It took 9 more months — when I was halfway through sophomore year — until I had a goal larger than college. I zoomed out, saw the board I was playing on, and switched boards.

I pursued a lifelong dream: to work on the business side of the creator economy. During my interview, I told the co-founder, “Working in the creator economy would be the biggest ‘What-if?’ of my career if I never pursued it.” For 1.5 years, I interned at Creator Now on the community team. I learned from my dream mentors, built a network of 100+ creators, and developed skills and experiences more relevant to my future than any college course.

Instead of obsessing over external metrics like before, I chased internal growth. I prioritized opportunities for learning — whether that was studying 12 hours for a finance exam, going to therapy, or skipping a week of class to see MrBeast speak at a YouTube conference.

It wasn’t easy. I made big sacrifices with no guaranteed payoff. I still felt like a loser, without prestige on my resume, terrified of wasting my potential and being underemployed. “I’m such an idiot! What if consulting companies don’t interview me anymore because my GPA decreased? All I have on my resume is YouTube.”4

But I stuck it out. Internal growth became addicting. Progress towards my grand strategy was my new measuring stick. I grew accustomed to the formless path, not planning my future out a decade because I had no idea where it would lead. I just trusted it would lead me somewhere true.

🎓 Senior Year

A few days ago, I signed a job offer with the same management consulting firm I idolized freshman year. I revealed my grand strategy during the interview (though, Ryan Holiday advises against revealing your grand strategy — so I’ll leave it out of this post 😉). I believe it is the best growth opportunity for me after college.

I’m so grateful my path has led me here. I have no idea what the future holds. But I know that no matter the road, my gaze will be fixed beyond the tactical hell surrounding me, and upwards toward strategic heaven.

Sources:

“How to Become a Zen Valedictorian: Decreasing Your Stress without Decreasing Your Ambition” by Cal Newport

"Tactical Hell or Strategic Heaven?" by Robert Greene

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer

"Life as a Grand Strategy" by Ryan Holiday 

"Advice to a Young Man Hoping to Go Somewhere (Or Get Something From Someone Successful)" by Ryan Holiday

Walking around the quad, I was in awe of every student. They must be exceptional. In that instant, I decided: I want to attend a school like Vanderbilt, too. For the next 2 years, I pinned my identity on college admissions. I wanted the world to think I was exceptional.

🎓 Applying to My Dream College

My dream school was the University of Pennsylvania. Wharton, its Ivy League business school, is #1 in America. Clearly, I belonged there — so I applied early decision my senior year of high school. I waited 6 long weeks for results to release…

December 16, 2020. While my family was surrounded by palm trees in a Florida hot tub, I was above them, on the hotel room’s balcony, writing college application essays. That night, Penn admission results would be released. I barely touched the hamburger on my dinner plate. I had shivers despite the 80-degree weather.

As I opened my laptop, my throat was dry. My shaky mouse clicked the “View Update” button:

It was my first true rejection. The first time my life did not go according to plan. I felt like my potential had hit a ceiling. I would never be a Penn student. I failed.

My family took me to Sprinkles Ice Cream. As I ate the mint chocolate chip cone, I cried in the back of the car.

In the hotel room at night, I sobbed. The only reason I didn’t sob harder was because my brother was sleeping in the room next door.

My future crumbled before me. I would never walk the cobblestone streets of old city Philadelphia. I couldn’t wear my Wharton sweatshirt. Because Penn rejected me, I could no longer become an entrepreneur. I couldn’t marry who I wanted to in 10 years because I would never find “my people.” I was destined to live just below my dreams.

I wasn’t devastated because I would never attend Penn. I was devastated because I couldn’t be the person I thought attending Penn would have validated me into becoming. I thought Penn’s 6% acceptance rate would transform me into the person I dreamed of. But I’m still me.

🫂 The Community of Rejects

That year, over 53,000 other students were rejected from Penn — a 5.7% acceptance rate for the class of 2025.

On the sub-Reddit r/ApplyingtoCollege, 1,000,000+ applicants commiserate on the cutthroat admissions cycle every year. The majority of high school students are happy to attend their state school or go straight into the workforce. But for the top 10% of applicants, the admissions cycle becomes much more — it feels like life or death.

🧠 The Philosophy That Changed My Life

Now, I finished my junior year at Washington University in St. Louis. The past 4 years have been the most tumultuous of my life so far. The highest highs and lowest lows.

I mistakenly modeled my life around prestige: first, college acceptance; then, seeking a six-figure career. My life felt bipolar: the same thoughts that elated me and provoked optimism about my future were the same thoughts that held the power to spin me into days-long pits of anxiety, wondering how I would ever succeed in life.

I didn’t know what to value. I thought this was life now. The “real world”: an endless competition for more.

Some time in my sophomore year of college, I read the two articles “The Trouble with Optionality” by Mihir Desai and “College as an Incubator of Girardian Terror” by Dan Wang. My world view began to shift.

I discovered a philosophy that clicked everything into place. I’ve learned to quell the cycle of prestige and begin to live a life that I value, apart from comparison to others. This philosophy was developed in the 20th century, by French philosopher Rene Girard.

In the next 3 essays, I will share how mimetic theory has transformed me. Because of mimetic theory, I stopped striving for a 4.0 GPA. I pursued internships in media startups rather than finance. I play tuba in my college wind ensemble.

I hope my writing reaches other high school and college students — or their loved ones — to quell the endless prestige cycle faster than I did. So you can make decisions based on what you want, rather than what the people around you want.

🥇 Broken College Rankings

To applicants, a college’s ranking matters more than the actual school.

On the r/ApplyingtoCollege forum, students coined the term:

It doesn’t matter which college they attend, as long as it’s prestigious.

The internet has amplified mimetic rivalry. On YouTube and TikTok, students share their Ivy League acceptances to millions of viewers. College admissions are not only within high schools. Now, students compare themselves with every applicant across the world.

Starting senior year, I drafted my list of colleges:

1. University of Pennsylvania

2. University of Chicago

3. Washington University in St. Louis

4. University of Michigan

5. University of Illinois

Not by coincidence, my colleges were in order from lowest to highest acceptance rate.

The problem with college rankings lies in its very name: “rankings.” By pitting schools against each other, schools are valued based on comparison — not objective merit. Sure, merit is correlated with ranking, but ranking is not an end in itself.

This is a trap I, and many other college applicants, fall into: being more swayed by subjective desire than objective desire. Let’s nerd out on philosophy together.

⚖️ 2 Types of Desire

According to Girard, there are 2 types of desire:

1. Subjective (Metaphysical) Desire: “I want this object/achievement because of what it says about me. The value is my identity.”

2. Objective (Physical) Desire: “I want this object for itself. The value is its utility and features.”

At first, prestige may exist because of a slight increase in utility. Compared to University of Illinois, Penn has smaller class sizes, more Nobel-winning professors, and a larger endowment. Rankings correlate with quality.

But the problem with prestige is that it’s based on subjective desire: the value of the object you seek is directly tied to how many people DON’T have that object. Prestige is fleeting and only exists in comparison.

A quick example…

1. Subjective Desire: If suddenly Penn’s acceptance rate became 100%, it would have stopped being my dream school, even if nothing else about it changed. It would no longer make me feel exceptional.

2. Objective Desire: My favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla with Reese’s and cookie dough. As long as I’m eating it, I don’t care how many other people are eating it. My enjoyment is the same.

I use 1 question to determine whether a desire I have is subjective or objective:

“If someone else had more of _____, would it make me feel worse about what I have?”

If something becomes more valuable the scarcer it is, it probably derives its value from social competition, not the object itself.

🏫 College Choice Is Subjective

Most often, logic is subservient to our desires. We decide what we want — based on mimesis — then falsely rationalize why the most prestigious option (the option we want) is objectively the best option.

I decided I wanted to attend Penn after seeing its #1 business ranking. Then, I researched the features of Penn itself. Located in Philadelphia! A well-rounded curriculum! A double major in Marketing & Communications! It’s objectively my dream school!

Rankings and school quality are correlated, not causal. Penn likely has better academics, professors, and post-grad opportunities than Penn State, for example. At least, I hope Penn’s $21 billion endowment is going somewhere.

But the perceived difference between Penn (the Ivy League) and Penn State is massively inflated by Penn’s subjective desire — its selectivity and prestige. Subjective desire is fleeting. It has no impact on an individual student’s success. It only gives the false promise of turning you into someone you’re not — someone “more” than you are.

But the trick is: as long as you’re dependent on an external object to feel “more,” that object will never give it to you. Especially if its value is based in comparison.

“Research on the impact of college selection has focused on comparing the earnings of graduates of different colleges. In 1999, economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale published a widely read study that compared the earnings of graduates of elite colleges with those of “moderately selective” schools. The latter group was composed of people who had been admitted to an elite college but chose to attend another school.

The economists found that the earnings of the two groups 20 years after graduation differed little or not at all. A larger follow-up study, released in 2011 and covering 19,000 college graduates, reached a similar conclusion: whether you went to Penn or Penn State, Williams College or Miami University of Ohio, job outcomes were unaffected in terms of earnings.”

> “It Doesn’t Matter Where You Go to College” TIME

💡 Students who were admitted to an elite college, but chose to attend a less prestigious school, had the same outcomes 20 years after graduation as their would-be peers who attended elite colleges.

No matter where you go to college, you’re still you. It matters much more whether you’re the type of person who’s even applying to an elite school — who has the drive and intelligence to succeed wherever you go — than whether you attend the school itself. The objective values between colleges are more equal than their inflated prestige leads us to believe. There is enough room for everyone.

🥊 “I refuse to join any club that would have me for a member.” -Groucho Marx

College admissions, for me, was much more about external validation than the function of the school I would attend.

Subjective desire comes from a place of lack. We want to be more than we currently are. We can picture the feeling so vividly — a fullness of being — though we can’t quite articulate it.

By “refusing to join any club that would have me for a member,” we admit our desperate need for validation. We want the object not for itself, but for what the object says about us — even if we are unchanged. And if it’s an object we think we’re already “worthy” of, then we have no desire for it because it won’t transform us into the “fuller” person we want to be. It’s a sad, self-perpetuating cycle — but we can stop it.

❤️ Grounded in Love

The night I was rejected from Penn, one picture lifted my mood:

My mom shared this picture of me and my brother at dinner earlier that night, before the rejection. I read it repeatedly. My heart swelled, and I sobbed harder.

Her support grounded me to who I’ve always been. Wharton reject or not, I was loved, “adored,” and a full person. I still deserved “good luck and love and laughter forever,” no matter what ❤️

This essay is part 1/3 in my series “Mimetic Desire in College”:

1. Mimetic Desire in College Admissions

2. Mimetic Desire in Career Choice (releasing July 3rd)

3. Escaping Mimesis (releasing July 17th)

Sources:

• Jonathan Bi’s lecture series (YouTube)

• “Wanting” by Luke Burgis

• Rene Girard

• “Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror” by Dan Wang

• “It Doesn’t Matter Where You Go to College” (TIME)

• Mimetic Theory in 4 Minutes (YouTube)

1. Ambition: acting to achieve an outcome.

2. Enjoyment: acting to enjoy an activity.

I thought ambition was “impure.” If I’m motivated to do something for the outcome, I don’t enjoy the activity itself. For me, this is like lifting weights. I don’t enjoy it, but I value the outcome of a muscular body. But running is an activity I enjoy. I could run for years without improvement and not be bothered.

So, I aimed to follow enjoyment without caring where it led.

I am a casual runner. A casual YouTuber. But casual and laziness are cousins. “Casual” to me meant “no goals.” I’m not training for a race. I don’t have a video upload schedule.

In my two most important pastimes, I was lazy.

A conversation with friends changed my mind. With healthy goals, ambition and enjoyment are no longer at odds. Ambition shapes enjoyment.

🎨 Parallels Between Running & Art

Last week, I came home from college for the summer. All of my high school friends are home, too. One of my friends is a college runner. Another is an art student.

For 2 hours, the 3 of us talked in a dark car, drawing exact parallels between every step of the artistic process and competitive running.

My biggest breakthrough:

Runners are their best when training for a race. Artists are their best when publishing their work.

In college, I train for 1 or 2 half marathons per year. The remaining 6 months of the year, I’m a “casual” jogger: 4-5 runs per week for enjoyment.

During the 3 months leading up to a half marathon, my training transforms. Every weekend, I run 10 miles. At 7:00am, I’m on the track running mile repeats. I certainly wouldn’t be doing these strenuous runs if I weren’t training for a half marathon. Yet, I enjoy these training months more than when I am a casual jogger (both during and in retrospect). Training is a different kind of enjoyment that’s shaped by ambition.

With art (for me, writing and video), I had no consistency goal. Since I followed enjoyment, I just published “when I felt like it.” I had trouble focusing on an outcome without devaluing my enjoyment of the process.

🎯 Healthy Goal Setting: Reversal

Healthy goals shape my process, not value my process.

Even if I don’t hit my half marathon goal time, the three months of training weren’t a waste. It doesn’t matter whether I run 1:54:30 or 1:58:00. The reward of a goal is the daily effort of striving towards it — not hitting the goal itself.

My next running goal is a 30K trail race in November — 18.6 miles. It’s the longest run of my life. To train for it, I must become a new runner. My nutrition, sleep, and mileage will transform. This is an ambition fueled by self-love: reaching new heights in an area I care about.

If I remained a casual jogger, I wouldn’t have a reason to learn and progress. My effort would start and end in the present moment. When I set a new, exciting goal, my enjoyment of training is enhanced. I’m thrilled by the daily effort of becoming a new runner.

Nothing is wrong with being casual. I’m a casual tech consumer. A casual photographer. I don’t seek progression in these areas. But running and art are 2 of the most important areas of my life. I want to push boundaries and do things I’ve never done before. My enjoyment remains process-focused, but is also enhanced by the effort of striving toward a goal.

🏇 Why Set Public Goals?

“Shipping, because it doesn’t count if you don’t share it.

Creative, because you’re not a cog in the system. You’re a creator, a problem solver, a generous leader who is making things better by producing a new way forward.

Work, because it’s not a hobby. You might not get paid for it, not today, but you approach it as a professional. The muse is not the point, excuses are avoided, and the work is why you are here.”

> Seth Godin, “The Practice”

During a race, runners receive an objective time, cheered on by 1,000s. The race is the best they are capable of running at that moment.

When publishing, artists receive feedback from an audience. The piece is the best they are capable of creating at that moment.

Public goals change how I show up. When I know my writing or running will be viewed — and therefore judged — I put more effort into it. My performance is my peak capability in that moment. Yet, I still run for myself. I still write and make videos for myself. The daily process is just enhanced.

I’m held accountable by the judgment of my work — even though the judgment is not the value of my work.

🎬 My Public Goals

With unhealthy goals, I procrastinated. The goal valued my process. I wanted a 100,000-subscriber YouTube Play Button. But if I uploaded for years without hitting 100,000 subscribers, I thought the daily effort would have been wasted. So I never posted consistently.

In the spirit of public goals, here are my two focuses this year:

1. Run a 30K Trail Race in November 2024

2. Publish a Substack article weekly until May 2025 (until I graduate college)

P.S. I think a large part of following process > outcome comes from internal validation. With unhealthy goals, I set them to prove something about myself. I thought if I hit 100,000 subscribers, it proved I was capable. But now, with healthy goals, I realize that outcomes come as a side effect of processes. The value is in becoming the kind of person who can achieve what I want — not the outward achievement itself. Enjoyment in the daily processes.

For 15 months, I uploaded 60+ weekly comedy videos before hitting my first 100 subscribers. In the following two months, I grew to 2,000+. My videos amassed 500,000+ views. I was an overnight success — the kind that can only happen on the internet.

In high school, my identity was fully based on YouTube. But virality shifted my focus from my true passion (creativity) to the performance metrics associated with it. When passion becomes tied to outcome, it’s a losing battle. I’m still recovering 6 years later.

Early Years: YouTube as My Identity

In 5th grade, I lied about my age to start my first YouTube channel. I was only 10 years old, and Google requires 13 to start an account. Because of my videos’ low quality, I received hate comments that nearly made me quit.

But a tiny, unignorable voice inside drove me to continue uploading weekly. YouTube quickly became my entire identity. In my weekly videos, whether they were Minecraft or comedy skits, I poured every ounce of passion into them. They were the anchors of my week. My friends had some YouTube channels that came and went, but my consistency was unwavering.

Even when I had 10 subscribers, my identity was “YouTuber.” I couldn’t have been attached to the external validation at this stage; there was none. My identity was my weekly uploads; the experimentation, improvement, and creativity that each video required.

Going Viral

At 14 years old, I hit the rarest success of my life. Four years into my YouTube obsession, as I began my freshman year of high school in September 2017, a video started to go viral.

I still remember sitting in my high school gymnasium, refreshing YouTube Studio, and being in disbelief as my video gained 1,000s of views per day. My subscriber count rocketed by the 100s. My biggest dreams were coming true. At night, I stayed up restless, DMing my idol Logan Paul about the YouTube empire I was destined to build in the future.

My favorite part was replying to comments. Each day, dozens of comments poured in — many of them complimentary. I responded to every one. My channel started to have regular viewers: a core community who commented on every video. I spent my own money to send 50+ free “NotJamie”-branded stickers and handwritten notes to subscribers across the country.

For my 1,000 subscriber special, I baked a cookie with 500 chocolate chips in it — a chip for every 2 subscribers. I gave away Amazon gift cards. Money poured in, hundreds of dollars per month in YouTube AdSense.

My biggest pinch-me moment was when a subscriber in London recognized me while I was on vacation (I’m from Chicago).

I hadn’t done anything differently in the “10 Things ONLY BAND PEOPLE Understand” video. By objective standards, it’s probably one of the worst-produced videos on my channel. And its target audience was high school band kids. Not exactly the audience I wanted to build…

Yet, these lacking feelings in the production of the video did not matter at all to me. I was finally going viral! I grew used to the positive comments and each video attracting 100s more views than before.

Whereas before, my YouTube obsession was uploading my next weekly video, now my obsession became the metrics that each new video attracted. Each successful metric seemed one step closer to my dream future in LA as a full-time YouTuber.

Virality inevitably ends. Six months later, when views started to decrease, it destroyed my love of YouTube. I suddenly skipped weeks of my 110-week upload streak. I dreaded posting my next video. Even if I was proud of its production, if it only had 200 views, I felt like the whole process was a waste. I had no control over how my videos performed in the algorithm.

In September 2018, a year after going viral, I uploaded my last video. I never meant for it to be my last video. But after I posted it, I simply couldn’t bring myself to press “publish” again. I quit quietly, painfully.

My mental health reached a new low. Starting my sophomore year of high school, I didn’t know who I was anymore. Those weekly uploads had been the anchor of my life. I poured every idea, every ounce of passion into them. Friends in school knew me for YouTube. I pinned all of my future dreams on YouTube success. And now… that dream had died. For reasons I couldn’t explain. I simply lost the desire.

Passion without Metrics

When I quit YouTube, my love for video didn’t go away. I was just scared of publishing.

In December 2018, 3 months after my final YouTube upload, I started working as a sports journalist at MileSplit Illinois. MileSplit is one of the leading websites for high school cross country and track news.

In many ways, MileSplit was the opposite of YouTube. All the videos I produced were published on the company website — not social media. To this day, I had literally no way of tracking how many views my videos received. Instead, I received feedback from the site editors — as well as coaches and athletes — on how I can improve each video. I was 100% focused on the craft.

I’m not a pure artist though. For my 3-year internship at MileSplit, I had an unsatisfied itch: I want to be in charge of my own content. Build a business around it. Distribute it. Business and art have a complicated relationship. The middle ground is creators and entrepreneurs.

Today, I work on the business side of the YouTube industry at a startup called Creator Now. We help 5,000+ YouTubers grow through community-based education. Even now, when I work in my dream field, I have an itch to publish my own content.

The same fear I developed at 14 still lingers, though. I am scared to commit long-term to a YouTube channel. I am still dependent on the false, ruthless validation of metrics, rather than creativity itself.

A Way Forward

Growing up on the internet meant my childhood hobbies were tied to performance metrics. While I had infinite possibilities to find what I loved, I couldn’t cultivate my passions in a pure way. They were always tied to external validation.

Once I quit YouTube, I refound my “identity” in the rat race of prestigious college admissions. If one of these elite schools admitted me, I reasoned, then it meant I was exceptional. It didn’t matter whether I enjoyed the process of getting there; it mattered whether I had the external stamp of approval. I believe I learned this behavior from YouTube.

Even though I now have the SAT score, college admission, and internship that I once dreamed of, creativity is still my driving joy. I am the most energized when I connect new ideas and publish my work. The external markers fail to give me that same lasting energy.

I live for creativity. And even though my experience of going viral at 14 nearly made me lose this passion by confusing it for metrics, I am starting to find my way back, 6 years later.

Subscribe now

Wait… is social media really our generation’s cigarettes?

It started in 5th grade. I posted my first Minecraft YouTube video, and for the 10 years since then, I have been hooked. It’s my lifelong dream to work in online media. But is my dream career unethical? I started by asking:

Is Online Content Really a Waste of Time?

When we watch YouTube, it necessarily means time we’re not spending exercising, talking with friends, or developing hobbies.

As humans, though, I believe we’re wired to spend some portion of our lives consuming the stories and information of other people. Oral storytelling, for example, is estimated to have existed since the dawn of speech. Over 30,000 years ago, the oldest cave drawings were recorded in France. Online content is just the newest form of the same storytelling that is ingrained in humanity.

Not all the time we spend consuming content is “wasted,” even though it pulls us away from in-person activities. Stories help us make sense of the world around us. We emotionally connect with others, feel less alone in our experiences, and expand the possibilities of our own lives.

The internet is beautiful. It’s an innovation in the art of storytelling; anyone can share content across the world. We should be consuming some of it. But today, since social media platforms are free, the way we share stories is not sustainable for either the viewer or the creator.

From the ceaseless notifications to the fast-paced editing, social media algorithms are the “new cigarettes.” They are designed to be as addictive as possible. They do not foster the same emotional connection and education in storytelling that makes us human.

Luckily, there is hope to free the stories (and ourselves) from the algorithms’ addictive grasp.

When Something Is Free, You Are the Product

We feel markedly less “gross” after watching a 1-hour Netflix show than a 1-hour binge on TikTok.

The viewer experience is radically different because the platform incentives are radically different. Netflix already has your money. It doesn’t care how much time you spend binging, as long as you’re happy and renew your subscription. TikTok, however, earns money for each minute it can extend your binge in that moment, each new advertisement that comes across your feed.

Think about a farmer who sells cobs of corn at a local farmer’s market. His goal is to sell every corn cob so he makes the most money. In the case of free social media platforms, you are the corn cob. Your life and attention are the units being sold. Advertisers are your buyers. Platforms are incentivized to keep you consuming for as long as possible, selling you to advertiser after advertiser, for, hopefully, infinity.

Free platforms are damaging to artists, too. Creators are incentivized to produce “advertising units” that attract eyeballs, not artistic expression — creating an even worse viewer experience.

The Subscription Model

When we pay with our money, not our attention, platforms are incentivized to please us instead of advertisers. We can reclaim our attention. By dethroning advertisers as the demanders of media, we give ourselves power, instead of being the units to maximize.

To Netflix, it doesn’t matter whether we spend 0 hours or 50 hours watching content; it just matters that the experience feels good.

A Sustainable Future

There is a beauty to discovery algorithms. Take MrBeast. Since 2012, he has transformed from a 13-year-old boy filming in his childhood bedroom, to now 250M+ subscribers and a $500M/year chocolate company.

I would never want to completely paywall the internet to prevent the life-changing discoverability and access that it has opened for billions of people around the globe.

Spotify is a subscription service and discovery algorithm. With a subscription model, Spotify is incentivized to offer the best listener experience possible: high-quality music and healthy consumption. At the same time, with Spotify’s playlist features, any new musician can break through if their content finds a loyal audience. As Spotify adds more mediums like podcasts and video courses, there is hope that a humane media platform can exist.

On platforms like Patreon and Substack, you can pay directly to your favorite creators. Now, instead of creating art to serve as ad space, these creators are empowered to publish content which builds as strong of a community as possible. They are incentivized not to arbitrarily hold your attention (though this may happen organically), but to produce the highest quality art that makes you feel good while consuming it — so you renew your subscription for as long as possible.

Online content is not a waste of time. The algorithms which turn us into products, though, are “the new cigarettes.” We can take back control — create a better future for audiences and artists — by offering to pay with our wallets, not our lives.

Subscribe now

SOURCES

Facebook & Big Tobacco (CNBC). 

History of Storytelling (National Geographic) 

Storytelling is not just entertainment. It's a fundamental part of being human (CBC).

Dopamine, Smartphones & You: A battle for your time (Harvard) 

In the Belly of MrBeast (Time) 

Monetization will ruin the internet again (Rosencreutz - YouTube)

Escape the YouTube Rate Race (Jay Alto - YouTube)

The Internet is starting to Break - Here’s Why. (Mrwhosetheboss - YouTube)

Most things in life, you do for an output.

You go to work so you can earn money.
You go to college so you can earn a (hopefully, respected) degree.
You study for an exam so you will receive an A.
You work out so your body will look muscular.

But... how much time do you allocate without knowing where it will lead?

Would you still lift weights if they didn't improve your body image?
Would you spend 6 hours studying for an exam if it wasn't graded?

In life, there are 2 things we can spend time on:

1. Work: activities you do for output.

2. Leisure: activities you do for the process itself.

These 2 categories are mutually exclusive. Some of us might be fortunate in that activities we do intrinsically, we earn external benefit from as well.  But your motivation cannot be both output (extrinsic) and process (intrinsic) at the same time.

On YouTube, I’ve earned ~$1,600 from advertising, but I would have posted every video even if I wasn’t paid for them. The beneficial output is a side effect of the process, but not my motivation itself.

The Problem with Working for Money

"I'm always working. It looks like work to others, but feels like play to me. That's how I know no one can compete with me on it. I'm just playing 16 hours a day and if they want to compete with me and they're going to work, they're going to lose because they're. not going to do it 16 hours a day, 7 days a week."

> Naval Ravikant

When you work just for an output, you are not motivated by the process. Even though you may be proud of the output, your motivations are impure. You do not pour 100% of yourself into these activities because your mind will always hold space for what’s important – the process it would rather be doing. You won’t produce your best work.

External output, like money and social inclusion, are still important to survive. And sure, there are some activities you enjoy more than others that give you certain outputs. But really, would you still be working either job if you weren’t paid for it?

How to Pursue Leisure

"If you're interested, you're not astray."

> Paul Graham, “How to Do Great Work”

Earlier this year, I attended a lecture by a Catholic friar who gave a room full of ambitious college students this advice:

"Take 1 step down on the ladder of prestige. If your potential job is McKinsey consulting, work at Deloitte instead. Then, spend the rest of your free time pursuing leisure. If you're not careful, work will run your entire life because society rewards money and status."

As a business major, my class spends 4 years chasing these trophies of prestige. But even when I do consulting projects for class, the work feels like a chore. It dims in comparison to the rush I get editing a video or writing an article.

So if I know consulting is not a career I will intrinsically enjoy… why would I devote my life to 60+ hour weeks of it? Why would I let it determine the city I move to, the friends I make? By intentionally de-pedestaling work I do solely for money, I can still reap the benefits of a traditional job (incoming, learning, network), while also having abundant time for leisure (creativity, running, time with friends). In this way, my entire life becomes rich. It takes sacrifice; but external rewards are not my #1 optimization.

Finding Your Obsession

When you find what you intrinsically value, you are energized by the process itself. You lose track of time. Even though you’ve focused for hours, you feel more energized than when you started. Follow your energy.

You probably already have activities in your life like this -- perhaps creative hobbies -- but you rationalize that they're "not productive." You should spend your time doing things that actually "benefit your life" or "move you forward." The problem with this justification, though, is that activities you do solely for external ends are inherently unfulfilling. They're like Greek sirens: tempting, but you never quite reach what you want. You keep chasing the next promise and sign.

Ask yourself:

“Would I still do this activity even if it gave me the opposite of the external benefit I receive?”

I love running so much that I would still run even if it somehow made me gain weight. I would just eat less to offset this. But for weightlifting … I don’t enjoy it intrinsically. If instead of building muscle, it actually made my body look worse, I would find no value in it.

Finding Balance

If your job caused you to lose money, you would probably quit immediately.

But even though our hobbies cause us to lose money and time, we do them anyway!

Get comfortable “wasting” time, without knowing where it will lead. Even though society rewards output, the joy you find in intrinsic processes is what will infuse your life with meaning, energy, and love.