Letters to a Young Maker

Are your desires your own? Or are they what society taught you to want? We are slaves to our desires. Naval calls desires "a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you reach the thing you want." Perhaps it's not unhappiness, but a lingering sense of unfulfillment. Either way, something foundational seems worth asking: What do you really want? If you're not clear on what you want, you...

You should get dopamine from creation. But today, that’s harder than ever. We live inside a culture of constant interruption - a world shaped by phones, by noise, by an endless stream of micro-stimuli we never truly asked for. Always loud. Always distracting. Always pulling us out of the pure state of simply being. For makers, this is deadly. It destroys the conditions under which great creative w...

time is like sand. if you're not careful, it can slip through your hands leaving you wondering where it went. and years if not decades can fly by without you having made meaningful progress on anything. it's so easy to look back at a day, wondering what you have actually finished that was meaningful. this is because distractions are all around us. emails. friends. co-workers. work that seems impor...

to do great work, you need to do bad work first. a lot of it. there are no hac ks, shortcuts, or tricks. there is just applying yourself to your work. this is true for products, writing, arts, engineering even. you can think of your ability to do great work as a muscle you are training. you will start out embarrassed. the first sessions will be hard. and you will want to quit. out of shame, fear,...

clear thinking creates good outcomes. the lack of it, leads to chaos and failure. the result of good thinking is intentionality. instead of just acting, and hoping for an outcome, you move with clarity on why you are doing the thing you are doing. and intentionality is the precondition to success, defined as getting what you want. good thinking is not just that you are clear in your mind. but your...

You should do work in order. If you want to move fast, there is the temptation to multi-task. Solving a problem only to 80% and then continuing with the next 3 things that are on your mind. The problem with not doing work in order is that you will pay interest on the shortcuts you take down the line. So the idea of moving fast by cutting corners and not doing things right, and in order, from the s...

You won’t get it right on the first shot. Moving from an idea to something you can share with the world requires implementation. And through implementation, you figure out what you should’ve been building. Your sense of perfectionism doesn’t help. It’s an illusion that keeps you from completing the full creative cycle. At one of the companies I’m building, we went through this just a few days ago....

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet has had a profound impact on me and my creative work. My university professor, William Hernandez, gave me the book a few years ago. It’s a series of letters between Rilke and Franz Xaver Kappus, a young aspiring poet who wrote to him seeking guidance. I return to it occasionally — usually when I’m looking for answers about my own creative path. And ever...