Writing Wrapped
I published 52 pieces this year (plus favorite tweets and an essay from the vault).
I’ve been writing, on and off, for over a decade. Most people who read my work today wouldn’t recognize my earlier pieces.
One of the works I’m most proud of is a review I wrote about a Moschino fashion collection, exploring its cultural ties—and arguable complicity—in the prescription drug abuse crisis. It was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, a highly prestigious medical journal.
I wrote it when I was in training—a time when writing felt impossible to fit into my life. It reminds me that I’ve always loved writing because, even when I didn’t have time, I made time.
Now I do find myself with more time to write, in large part because I’ve made aggressive changes in my life to pursue more creative endeavors—among them creating products and art of various kinds.
I’ve been writing a public blog on and off for years, but this year I committed more intently to it. I wanted to write once a week, and even though it wasn’t evenly spaced, I managed to accomplish it, on average.
There are longer-term, larger-scope projects that I didn’t get as far on as I’d have liked, but I will sooner than later—and I will share when I’m ready to!
It’s fun to do something new when seasons and years change, so I expect to refresh my approach to writing this blog in 2025. Three things I’m sure about (though there will be other changes too):
Being even more picky about what I write long-form about (this year I tried not to discrimate too much on length based on topic, but naturally I discovered there are some ideas I care to write more about than others)
Being more creative in how I share my writing (and my ideas and creative explorations in general—i.e. varying up the formats)
Being more consistent in when I publish (this is mostly selfish, and will also be the hardest to accomplish given I don’t do this full-time, but hopefully it’ll force me to publish more of my writing instead of letting it sit in drafts).
One important note: Whether you're new here or a long-time reader (special shoutout to patrons), thank you for taking the time to read my words this year! And I hope you find something refreshing in these blurbs. :)
Long-form writing
I published 52 pieces this year—mostly essays, with a few musings mixed in—adding up to roughly 80,000 words, the length of an average novel.
A handful of essays went “viral” in my sphere and a few more were big hits within niche communities. I had an essay featured in Dirt and quoted in The New Yorker. I even got a nice DM from newest Lakers head coach, JJ Redick, about this essay.
While some of my writing is “technical” (e.g. frameworks for startups and creators), I realize much of it leans philosophical, exploring the inner workings of people in pursuit: building and creating, seeking to be seen, contending with ambition, and navigating life’s rites and rituals.
I’ve selected excerpts from 20 popular pieces and grouped them into three loosely-themed categories: ambition, creation, and attention.
Ambition
Status Limbo
“To get status, you have to give up status. You have to sacrifice some existing status to make it back and more. This is especially true in creative fields and high-upside games. Writers, musicians, actors, directors, entrepreneurs must all do their time in status limbo. And you don’t know how long it will be. How well you tolerate this state can be the “winning” difference between you and someone just as talented and hard-working as you.”
Pursuits That Can’t Scale
“My theory is that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale. The antidote to burnout and the existential inquiry it brings seems to be doing things that don’t scale in pursuit of things that can’t scale. It becomes exciting not to see what you can do without limits, but to see what you can do with them.”
Early-Arriver Arbitrage
“There are constantly new arenas being built and constantly new opportunities to play for their arbitrage opportunities. Yet I think people still undervalue new arenas because they fall into a common trap: it’s easy to think you’re already late to an arena even when it’s still so early. A crowd can look big until you see how big it can become; only then do you realize it was actually tiny before.”
The Theory of the Cool Self
“Much of ambition is just a quest to become a cooler version of yourself (or what you think will be or feel like a cooler version of self). The destination the ambitious are searching for isn’t always something so concrete as money, power, fame, influence, or the ability to buy things; it’s a feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction that gets you closer to cool.”
The Founder’s Dilemma
“The phenomenon of founders outgrowing their startups is more than just an intriguing pattern—it’s a sign of the evolving landscape of personal brands, identity, and ambition. As personal brands become as valuable, if not more so, than the companies they create, there’s a new calculus to consider… Is it logical to prioritize the person’s future over the startup’s? Is it disloyal to leave a company that you’ve outgrown, or is it just smart strategy? This is the new founders’ dilemma.”
The Prestige-Prosperity Gap
“In an ideal world, prestige and wealth rise hand in hand. But the modern world of ambition is a lot messier. The reality is often a bizarre mismatch where some people find themselves with more of one than the other, sometimes a lot more. Plenty of people are prestige rich, cash poor. And plenty others are cash rich, prestige poor. Which do you have more of relative to expectation?”
Invisible Duels
“Invisible duels are both classic and modern—increasingly the toxic spawn of hyper-visible timelines with hyper-curated identities. Social media doesn’t just force us to measure ourselves against the amorphous presence of billions; it gives us an endless stream of individuals to fixate on, sentencing us to siloed soft competition—unspoken, intimate, impossible to ignore. The invisible duel is a battle within yourself, masked as a silent battle with someone else, where their progress becomes a quiet threat to your own.”
Creation
The Rise of the “Software Creator”
“The democratization of media creation and distribution led to the rise of content creators. Similarly, the democratization of software creation and distribution, now accelerated by AI, will usher in the rise of “software creators”… Software creators will make up a significant portion of the industry’s non-professional creative class — self-taught, low-code builders that specialize in concept, creativity, and distribution more than in technical prowess.”
Taste Is Eating Silicon Valley
“Everyone’s software is good enough. Software used to be the weapon, now it’s just a tool. In a world of scarcity, we treasure tools. In a world of abundance, we treasure taste. The barriers to entry are low, competition is fierce, and so much of the focus has shifted — from tech to distribution, and now, to something else too: taste.”
Thoughts For Sale
“Substack hasn’t just made me a subscriber; it’s turned me into a willing participant in the marketplace of internet intellectualism. That’s the platform’s real magic trick—turning ideas into products, writers into entrepreneurs, and newsletters into status symbols. Its founders call the business model “magic dust”— helping writers own their communities, monetize their work, and ensuring the platform profits only when they do. But how does the famous Charlie Munger quote go? “Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.” Substack’s success doesn’t depend on better writing; it depends on better marketers of writing.”
Love the Mission or Love the Game
“The way I see it, there are two types of true entrepreneurs. There are those in it for the love of the mission that they’re obsessed with championing. And there are those in it for the love of the game of entrepreneurship itself, almost irrespective of the mission of the business. Sometimes the mission is the business and sometimes the business is the mission. Type I, and Type II.”
Great Products Have Great Premises
“The most powerful thing a product can do is give its user a premise. A premise is the foundational belief that shapes a user’s behavior. A premise can normalize actions that people otherwise might not take, held back by some existing norm. A good premise gives you context. It sets the stage to make you more comfortable doing something that can be hard to do. A great premise gives you permission. It tells you it’s ok to do something that you otherwise aren’t even sure is ok to do.”
Writer-Builders
“Building first and then writing is like lighting a match from a lit candle. Writing before you’ve built much can be like trying to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Building doesn’t have to come first, but it’s easier if it does. Write about what you build. Build what you write about. But the quality bar is high. Each needs to stand on its own. Because in this increasingly noisy world, only the best will break through.”
Attention
Companionship Content Is King
“I believe there’s a fundamental flaw in the short-form video format —something that tempers how much humans can ever relate to it. … Luckily, short-form video has a foil: long-form, passive, companionship content. Companionship content is the most durable in its closeness to human experience, to being around people. When we search for a YouTube video to watch, we often want the best companion for the next hour and not the most entertaining content.”
Baseline Fame
“Fame used to be a rare luxury but it’s moved down market and within reach of the masses. The tools and means to getting some amount of fame have been so normalized that having access to them, knowing how to use them, and even seeing a modicum of success no longer serves to differentiate you, but to standardize you. Having baseline fame is the new having a college education.”
Rabbitholes as Portals
“Rabbithole knowledge is the hyperspecific stuff you learn about a particular subject without any obvious need to know it. It's not related to your field of study. It's not related to a degree you're seeking. It's not related to a job you have. It's not related to a person you're trying to impress. Rabbithole knowledge is just the result of a strong gravitational pull of curiosity that can’t easily be explained.”
Placeholders for Life
“Placeholders are meant to be role players, not the main characters. But if you’re not careful, you can end up living an entire life full of placeholders: A placeholder couch. A placeholder apartment. A placeholder job. A placeholder relationship. — Life is not a dress rehearsal. Life’s also too short to just fill it with placeholders.”
3 Hours or Nothing
“Rule #1: don’t agree to anything “quick” unless you’re willing to spend 3+ hours on it. When you follow the 3 hours or nothing rule, your priorities get clear, you procrastinate less, you’re more focused and more productive, and time management becomes a lot easier. You say “no” a LOT more. And the “yes” becomes a lot more emphatic. You find yourself less stressed, less overthinking about the past and less anxious about the future.”
Personal Firewalls
“In 5 years, it’ll seem bizarre that we ever allowed anyone to email or text or call us AND the norm was to at least think about replying to them. Being reachable 24/7 by anyone and for anything will have been a blip in time, an absurd anomaly in the long arc of the hyperconnected digital age. In the coming years, we’re going to aggressively revoke access to our attention.”
About Practice
“Ask yourself what you like to perform versus what you actually like to practice. The catch is that you can’t answer the question without trying things. You don’t find what you love in theory — you find it in practice (pun very much intended). So try things. Try them long enough that you’ve given them a fair shot. And pay attention to how it feels when no one’s watching. What you like to practice is what’s worth pursuing. Getting to perform is just a bonus.”
Short-form writing
This year, my tweets collectively got 72 million views and ~2 million engagements (1M likes, 300K bookmarks, 150K reposts, and 30K replies).
This felt like the perfect excuse to revisit my “hits.” I’ve picked 20 viral favorites I have a soft spot for (excluding snippets of my long-form writing).
Generic ambition will give you anxiety. Specific ambition will give you direction.
If you don’t like politics, never work at a big company.
If you don’t like work, never work at a small company.
A lot of “burnout” is just the result of prolonged exposure to environments you were never truly aligned with to start.
You don’t need a vacation — you need 6 months of ambitious underemployment, of relaxed discipline, of productive exploration, of intentional meandering, … of hard leisure.
Sorry boss I can’t come in to work today, I’m behind on all my side projects.
I have a theory that most people could build a better body, business, side project, relationship, almost anything by just working on it intensely for 1 hour a day rather than working on it “full-time.”
Every startup needs a “cringe hire” — someone who will be as hyper cringe in public as needed to help the company win.
If you’re not working on your life’s work, you’re working on someone else’s.
Learn your taste. Trust your taste. And make a very short list of others whose taste you respect. The rest is usually just noise.
The purpose of reading a book isn’t to retain information, it’s to refine your worldview just a little bit with each one.
The millennial dream was to build a billion dollar company and rule the world. Gen Z wants to build a cash flow business that can just replace having a full time job.
Growing up is realizing it’s better to be direct about almost everything than to play a game of subtle hints and plausibly deniable nudges.
It’s surprising how much confidence and inner peace you can gain from creating one thing you’re truly proud of.
Writing increases your rate of revelation.
The best way to unblock yourself is to think of literally everything as just an experiment.
Some of you think the solution to everything is to walk more and I’m sorry I ever doubted you.
One remarkable thing to observe is that people who become truly great, in almost any field or discipline, tend also to become great philosophers along the way.
Socializing:
Telling old stories to new friends
Telling new stories to old friends
Half of friendship is just teaching the other person who the real you is so they can remind you when you’re confused.
Every single good idea starts with a good conversation. Optimize your life for good conversations.
One more time— Whether you're new here or a long-time reader (special thanks to patrons), thank you for taking the time to read my words this year.
I’ll be thinking more about how to evolve my writing next year—themes, style, cadence, and longer-term projects, so stay tuned. Suggestions welcome, and feel free to reach out if there’s an interesting way we could work together.
Per usual, if the ideas in this post resonated, consider sharing it with a friend or community you belong to that may appreciate it to. Happy new year!
Thank you Anu. Always a pleasure reading you! Happy 2025 🔥
So many gems of insight in your posts. Thanks for writing as you have this year. Look forward to reading even more closely next year! 🙏🏾