In the world of passionate craftspeople and deliberate mastery, the allure of ambition often overshadows the necessity of strategy. Far too many people think (and I’ll admit to being one of them in the past): If I just work hard enough—if I pour every ounce of passion into my craft—success will follow.

But as my painful experience suggests (and as Cal Newport warns in So Good They Can't Ignore You and Richard P. Rumelt emphasizes in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy), effort without focus is not enough. To thrive, we need more than passion and practice—we need strategy.

In this post, we'll examine how Rumelt’s insights in Good Strategy/Bad Strategy can guide us to align our passions with mastery, while making deliberate, effective choices in our careers as authors or engineers.

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Expected Takeaways

• Passion without strategy is just effort without direction. Diagnose challenges, set a guiding policy, and take coherent actions to ensure your work moves you forward.

• A good strategy isn’t just about working hard—it’s about working smart. Focus on high-leverage actions that align with your goals and amplify your impact.

• Avoid the traps of bad strategy. Fluff, ambition without focus, and ignoring reality can derail even the most passionate pursuits.

Diagnosis: Knowing What You're Up Against

A key tenet of Rumelt's kernel of good strategy is the importance of diagnosing the problem. Without a clear understanding of the challenges we face, even the most heartfelt efforts—like frantically writing that book you’re sure is the one that will get you noticed—risk being misdirected.

For those of us pursuing passion-driven mastery, this means asking:

• What are the real obstacles to progress in my craft or career?

• Are there industry norms, market trends, or personal skill gaps holding me back?

• Have I fallen into the trap of mistaking busyness for meaningful progress?

Action Step: Conduct a "self SWOT analysis"—assess your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Use this as a foundation to clarify where you stand currently and then focus your efforts on the most pressing challenges.

Guiding Policy: Crafting a Strategy that Fits

Rumelt's second component of a good strategy is a guiding policy—a clear, overarching approach to addressing the diagnosis. This isn't about setting generic goals like “write more” or “level up my coding skills.”

Those aren’t bad goals if you value only quantity or leaning into the abstract notion of what it means to “level up,” but neither of them move the needle in the direction of creating a framework for action that aligns with your circumstances and values.

For example, an aspiring author whose main challenge is staying consistent and building an audience might develop a policy like the below.

Focus on establishing a disciplined writing routine while sharing excerpts and engaging with readers through a personal blog.

This version of “write more” not only gives direction but also ensures that one’s creative and promotional efforts work in tandem.

Similarly, an early-to-mid-career software engineer looking to stand out in a competitive field might lay out the following guiding policy.

Specialize in a high-demand area like cloud infrastructure or artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) and contribute to open-source projects that showcase my expertise.

Bam! This framework focuses their energy on building both depth and visibility in their field.

Action Step: Write your guiding policy in one sentence. Let it act as your compass, ensuring every choice you make contributes to a coherent long-term vision.

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Coherent Actions: Aligning Effort with Purpose

The third component of a good strategy—coherent actions—ensures that your efforts align with the guiding policy and build toward your goal. These are the tangible steps you'll take—not in isolation, but as part of a cohesive plan.

For the author whose guiding policy is to establish a disciplined writing routine while engaging with readers through a personal blog, coherent actions could include:

• Set a daily writing target (e.g., 500 words or one hour of focused work).

• Schedule weekly blog posts, using them to share insights, character sketches, or reflections on the writing process.

• Engage with online writing communities by offering thoughtful critiques or participating in discussions to build connections and grow visibility.

For the software engineer aiming to specialize in cloud infrastructure or AI/ML and contribute to open-source projects, coherent actions might include:

• Take advanced courses or earn certifications in AWS or TensorFlow to deepen expertise in the chosen specialty.

• Dedicate a portion of your weekly schedule to contribute to open-source projects related to cloud or AI, showcasing one's skills to a broader audience.

• Present your work by writing technical blog posts or giving talks at meetups, demonstrating thought leadership in your area.

Notice how each action directly supports the guiding policy? They're not just a random collection of tasks—they work together to build momentum and reinforce progress. This is called leverage, and the more you can generate, the better.

Action Step: List three to five specific, repeatable actions that align with your guiding policy. Ensure they fit together like puzzle pieces to form a unified strategy.

Bad Strategy: Avoiding the Passion Pitfalls

While Rumelt outlines what makes a good strategy, he also, thankfully, highlights the dangers of bad strategy. Many of these pitfalls are similar to the passion hypothesis traps Newport critiques, some of which I detail in the Passionate Craftsman series:

• Fluff: Mistaking inspirational slogans (“Do what you love!”) for actionable strategy.

• Ambition Without Focus: Trying to do too much, too soon, with too little direction.

• Failure to Face Reality: Ignoring obstacles or skill gaps in favor of wishful thinking.

Action Step: Take a hard look at your current goals. Are they grounded in actionable plans, or are they lofty but vague aspirations (e.g. get a literary agent, or land a job at one of the MAANG companies)?

If it reads in the vein of either of the examples above, reframe your goals using Rumelt's kernel.

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Strategic Passion: Bridging the Gap Between Passion and Mastery

The craftsman mindset emphasizes deliberate practice, but even if you embrace that mindset, that on its own isn’t enough; it's like sailing without a map. Rumelt's strategy framework helps us direct our energy effectively, ensuring we don't just work hard but work smart.

By diagnosing challenges, creating a guiding policy, and executing coherent actions, you can forge a path that not only aligns with your passions but also maximizes the likelihood of sustainable success.

And as someone who knows a thing or two about unsustainable success, I really hope you take the importance of sustainability to heart.

To sum it all up, then, mastery isn't an accident—it's the result of consistent, strategic effort.

So let's not chase our dreams blindly. Let's build them—deliberately, strategically, and with an unwavering focus on what matters most.

Tell Me in the Comments

• What’s one passion-driven goal you’ve pursued that could have benefited from a clearer strategy?

• Have you ever mistaken busy-ness for meaningful progress? What helped you shift your approach?

Where we last left off, we’d survived the Triassic and Jurassic, including the rise of the dinosaurs, the initial splitting of the continents, and one or two site migrations.

Perhaps most harrowingly, we survived Blogger.

Science has truly given us so much.

Let’s continue our tour of our planet’s geologic history, then, including the lessons learned from oh-so-many prehistoric website migrations and domain name accumulations.

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Hold on to Your Butts: a Geologic History of Accumulation, Evolution, and Extinction (cont’d)

As in our last post, we’ll break our timeline up into eras, epochs, etc.

The Cretaceous

Why This Was Well-Intentioned

Check out the current price for a WordPress business plan and try to tell me I should have stayed with them.

Seriously, as of the date this post has gone live, a WordPress business plan is $25/month (that’s $300/year), and all it gets you (or all I really used it for) are some plugins and the ability to stand up an online store.

Those plugins and the online store are why I initially pursued the WordPress business plan; I needed a way to host and publish my podcast episodes to Apple Podcasts, and for a time I did sell signed copies of my books through my website.

But that $300/year covered only my author website.

When you account for the cost of that plan plus the premium plans I was using to stand up writescast.net and the sites specific to my books, I was dropping nearly $600/year on WordPress plans that didn’t even include a free annual domain name renewal.

So, yeah—in the same way the continents finally got serious about their split during the Cretaceous, I’m glad I, too, started to get serious about my split from WordPress.

The key word there being “started.”

Where I Beefed It

Did my moves during the Cretaceous save me some cash? Yes. Was I still leaving a bunch of money on the table each year? Yes.

How?

Because though I had consolidated writescast.net and my individual book and series sites, I was still forking over far too much (at least $300/year, remember) for the WordPress business plan that stood up my author website.

“Now, Ryan,” someone might have said if other humans had existed during the Cretaceous, “couldn’t you just downgrade your plan to either the premium or personal tier?”

And I could have, yes, if I wanted the Writescast Network to go dark and to have to redo my entire website.

The trick with the top-tier WordPress plan is that those plugins you pay for quickly balloon; no matter how much I might have diminished their value when I brought them up earlier, there’s a lot of power and functionality to be added to your site by taking advantage of them. Downgrading your plan shuts plugins down entirely.

That’d have meant no more Writescast Network on streaming platforms. No more online shop. No more Writing Prompt Generator or Google Analytics. You know, the good stuff!

None of this is to mention that in the absence of the Divi plugin by Elegant Themes, my author site would have looked like a pack of Anklyosaurus had taken their clubbed tails to it. A real smash-up job, and not in the good way.

Now, could I have pushed myself during the Cretaceous to do the work I would later do in the Paleocene and get off WordPress entirely? Yes, but if I was off doing that, who would have massaged the tired arms of those poor T-Rexes from all the waving they did as the continents split?

Lessons Learned

• Make incremental improvements where you can

• Keep an eye on accumulating costs over time

• Pride and elevated standards incur costs of their own

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The Paleocene

What Made the Paleocene Worth It

Despite the sarcasm in the recap paragraph above, the moves I made during this epoch get a rating of mostly worth it.

Remember, there was huge financial upside in pushing myself to get away from WordPress altogether. On top of those savings, by creating my own site from scratch and hosting it with anyone other than one of the cookie-cutter website services, I could use the new site as a solid portfolio piece for my work as a software engineer.

The pains taken to facilitate this (described in the next section) also made for good engineering challenges to take on, even if I would have preferred to pursue them without a tight, gotta-get-it-down-before-my-plan-renews deadline looming over me.

Where This Came Up Short

⚠️ Note: This section gets a little wonky, tech-wise.

If this makes you nervous, find the nearest consenting adult and ask them to hold your hand while you read.

The downside of getting away from WordPress once and for all was the amount of time I had to spend building my new website from scratch and the extraordinary pains that were required to keep historic blog posts online given how WordPress makes your content available to you when you export it.

It’s almost like they don’t want you to leave.

As an example, here’s what the full slate of my historic blog posts looks like when I exported them using the WordPress mass export tool.

Yes, it’s largely just a lot of HTML strewn about in there at content.rendered, but, if you’ll recall, I’d started using the Divi UI engine at some point to further customize my site. This introduced additional layers of what I’ll call gobbledygook into my posts, and that gobbledygook, unlike HTML, does not go gently into that good night and become JSX without a hitch.

The journey to render a historic blog post in the new experience (tell me in the comments if you want a separate post that covers the code itself) wound up looking like this—

• A reader hits a URL on ryanrcampbell.com that matches the /:year/:month/:day/:slug/amp? format.

• If the year in the URL matched the years I wrote on WordPress or earlier, a nearly 70,000 line object was combed over to find a match for the remaining URL parameters of month, day, and slug.

• Once a match was found, the information the reader actually wanted (content.rendered) had (most of) the Divi gobbledygook stripped from it, was parsed as JSX, and rendered in the browser.

Even then, this wasn’t perfect. A number of media assets just… wouldn’t show up in the new experience. It was all very strange, and with hundreds of blog posts to account for, this quickly became a mess in its own right.

But at least I wasn’t paying (as much) for it! Monetarily, anyway.

Even if frustrating at times, however, the algorithmic gymnastics required above made this move something to feel good about from an engineer’s perspective—just not a blogger’s.

Lessons Learned

• Even the best intended moves come with trade-offs

• Outcomes are rarely clean

• Find value where you can, when you can

The Pleistocene

The Positives of the Pleistocene

You know what they say: nothing keeps you warm during an ice age like starting—or, in my case, restarting—a blog.

Yeah, I don’t know why they say that, either.

Aside from cold, I’d gotten itchy during this epoch; I often found myself wondering what now or what next?

It was at this time that I felt I’d finally adjusted sufficiently to a new career in a new city, and I’d at long last returned to reading in my free time. With all of these new thoughts in my head and experiences under my belt, getting back into blogging felt only natural.

And, having put in that work during the Paleocene to create my own website from scratch, I had a place to do it (mostly) rent free! I wrote a blog post every month or so for a while, but then… that momentum fell off.

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Where The Momentum Went

⚠️ Note: The tech wonkiness returns in this section. You’ve been warned.

The eagle-eyed reader might have noted that my work in the previous epoch only supported historic blog posts. It didn’t address, in any capacity, how I might go about blogging in a sustainable way going forward.

Given the metaphorical Rube Goldberg machine I’d created to ensure historic blog posts were still available—and wanting to minimize my barrier to entry back into blogging—I leaned into a blogging “solution” that would let me use the infrastructure I already had in place without having to write entire posts in HTML at content.rendered.

If you’re curious to know how this all worked, well, it was a real cowboy job.

First, I created a new file, new-posts.js, that held all new post metadata. Then, in a neighboring set of directories, I would blog in JSX.

When a reader hit a URL ending in something like /2024/11/26/strategic-passion-a-playbook-for-aligning-passion-with-mastery, the year (2024), being greater than 2023, would have the site looking for a non-legacy post with a slug of strategic-passion-a-playbook-for-aligning-passion-with-mastery in a directory located at post-jsx/2024/11, as the URL indicated the post went live in November.

How much do you hate that? I can guarantee you don’t hate it as much as I did.

This was, again, a fine technical exercise, but it missed the point. Why would I lean into embracing a unique, yes, but more frustrating way of blogging when I simply… didn’t… have to?

Oh, and remember how I was trying to minimize my barrier to entry back into blogging?

Right. I’d missed the mark entirely.

Lessons Learned

• Future opportunities should be on equal footing with backwards compatibility

• Take advantage of existing infrastructure when you can (to a point)

The Holocene

What (I Think) Makes This Work

Ah, the Holocene. The current epoch, at last!

I have to say, I’ve really enjoyed Substack so far; by cleaving the blogging functionality away from my bespoke site and moving it here, I’ve unlocked a number of (wince) synergies I wasn’t taking advantage of previously or that simply weren’t available back in the Pleistocene or earlier epochs—

• Low barrier to entry for blogging

• Full integration between historic mailing list and blog posts

• Opportunities for compensation

• Engaged, platform-agnostic readership

First off, as had been the case since the last ice age, I wanted to get back into blogging, and here I am. Mission accomplished!

Or, well, hopefully. I don’t plan to unfurl a banner or anything. 😬

Even as the work continues, there’s a lot of potential to tap into on Substack. That it provides writers with a single-solution platform to reach their mailing lists and interact with their readers while finding new ones, well, that’s the stuff of dreams.

Where This Might Come Up Short

It’s still early days and I’m encouraged by how matters have played out so far, but I’m keeping a diligent watch out for a couple of potential problem areas that might arise as a result of my migration to Substack.

I do find it a bit odd that new blog posts will be decoupled from what has traditionally been my author website. As I go, though, I may make updates to ryanrcampbell.com that provide links to my latest posts while making it clear that visitors will be redirected to R: On Everything to read them.

Another concern is far more fundamental, namely that I’ll fail to embrace the “on everything” declaration I’ve made in this publication’s very name. I suspect it will be all too easy for me to return to blogging about topics that other authors find interesting, but, as I wrote about in my series on mission statements, it’s important I hold myself accountable to embracing the curiosity-centric mission of R: On Everything.

My aim is to use that curiosity to cultivate an audience that gathers here not for writing and publishing tips—not that there’s anything wrong with that—but instead finds itself intrigued by the topics and themes that will wind up in my works of fiction as they are published and, in some cases, re-published.

There’s some worry, too, that my return to online engagement will lead to social media burnout. I love writing and engaging with readers, but there’s a temptation to fall into a scroll hole whenever one adds a new social media platform to their digital diet, and even Substack’s algorithms appear to incentivize polemic content that isn’t great for trying to go about one’s day without their jaw clenched.

Into the Future

Only time—and, God forbid (or God willing?), another mass extinction event—will make it clear whether my latest migration to Substack is the one, to the extent a one can exist at all.

And with the bullet-point lessons dropped along the way here and in the previous post, there’s surely so much more to explore in this space. For example:

• What lessons might we distill from the experiences I’ve outlined over the two posts in this series so far?

• How might those lessons inform not only how we got about establishing and maintaining an online presence, but other matters in our personal and professional lives as well?

We’ll answer those questions in the third and final installment of this series, but to do that, I need your help.

Tell me in the comments: what lessons have you learned in platform juggling over the years? Or, if you’re relatively new to the notion of platform, how have you gone about making your decisions so far? Are you feeling positive, overall, with where that’s led you?

*These savings would have been valuable if the concept of paper currency had existed. Or the United States.

You may not know this about me, but I’m a collector.

From the flagship ryanrcampbell.com to the lesser-known (but fun!) realfakebirds.app, I’ve accumulated quite the cache of dot-coms, dot-apps, and dot-nets over the years, and oh-so-many of them have endured migrations that built them up, spun them off, or reconsolidated them over time.

The catch? I didn’t become a blog shepherd by design.

To tell the tale of how this collection came to be—and the harrowing migrations that led to its advent—we’ll have to go back in time. Way back in time.

As we work our way from the distant past and toward the present, we’ll expound on the lessons learned from these migrations, domain name accumulations, and brand extinction events known heretofore only to the fossilized remains beneath our feet.

Domain In the Membrane: a Geologic History of Accumulation, Evolution, and Extinction

Let’s begin, then, with a timeline separated into epochs and eras. A tour of eras, one could call it.

Oh, and note that the below only accounts for a subset of blog migrations and domain names acquired across millennia.

Yeah, I have a problem.

The Late Triassic

A Brief History of the Epoch

Highlights of the Time

After a great deal of deliberation and consternation, I realized the only way I was likely to fulfill my dream of becoming a published author was—what a revelation—to start writing.

In pursuit of this goal, I attended a seminar about how the publishing industry works, and one of my takeaways from it was that a solid manuscript alone would not be enough to catch the attention of a literary agent and sell one’s book to a publisher. Platform! You need a platform, they told me, so I built a platform.

After blogging into the abyss for some time, I at least had the wherewithal to get myself a domain name. I told myself this was to make my blog look more official—and it did!—but it had the secondary consequence of providing the makings of a brand around which content could be organized.

Much like how the dinosaurs didn’t know an asteroid would eventually wipe them from the face of the earth, I didn’t know at the time that establishing this brand—one that emphasized the craft of writing fiction—would improve SEO and provide the foundation for offshoots of my writing career down the road.

Sometimes, everything comes up Melanosaurus!

Where Evolution Went Wrong

I’ll say there were a few blog posts from this epoch that survived in some form or fashion—a couple would even become some of my most popular of all time after a great deal of re-work—but the content otherwise failed to connect with a significant audience. Why? Because it was mostly full of personal updates about word counts for manuscripts that would never see the light of day.

Thought I had attempted to embrace the conventional wisdom of “build a platform,” I had done so without ever asking who I wanted to reach and creating content that audience would find engaging.

The consequences of this misstep way back in the Late Triassic would echo throughout eras to delightful and devastating effect.

Lessons Learned

• Trust (some) conventional wisdom

• Build a brand

• Focus on content relevant to one’s audience

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The Early Jurassic

A Brief History of the Epoch

Why This Worked

Even homo habilis would have recognized moving from Blogger to WordPress as the right choice at the time. The problem? Homo habilis wouldn’t exist for a few hundred million more years, which left it to me to make this choice on my own.

By pivoting to WordPress—a platform that offered the chance to make my home on the web something more than a blog—I kept my options open for the future. Admittedly, I was at the time still years from seeing my goal of becoming a published author come to fruition, but migrating my content to WordPress before I truly needed to made it much easier to create unique hubs in a central location for my books, editing services, and other extensions of my platform.

Like Blogger, WordPress was free to get started with, and though I ended up paying for premium versions of the latter once I added the Writescast Network and an online shop to the WordPress site, the initial choice to move came with very little overhead and a lot of upside.

At this time, too, I really leaned into creating content that would resonate with other writers. By posting fewer personal updates—or at least by drowning them out with writing-related content informed by my relentless reading about the craft of writing fiction—I was able to find and engage with a community of similarly dedicated writers.

In sum, unlike the choice our single-celled ancestors made to squirm out of the primordial soup, this migration remains a good move to this day.

Lessons Learned

• Keep options open

• Build for the future

The Middle Jurassic

A Brief History of the Epoch

Highlights

In the same way evolving hollow bones did wonders for the avian dinosaurs and their descendants, landing a few publishing contracts in this epoch did wonders for me and my career. It would be poor form to suggest, however, that blog migrations and amassing domain names on their own put me in a position to sign on the dotted line, so to speak.

None of which is to undercut the value of years of dedication to blogging regularly, engaging with a community, and focusing on my work. If I hadn’t been putting in that time, I surely wouldn’t or couldn’t have learned all the lessons I’d need to learn—or met the people I’d need to meet—to position myself and my manuscripts for the attention and trust of industry professionals.

Spinning off the Writescast Network to its own home online was also the right move for the time; by establishing it as an entity in its own right—rather than as an extension of me, the host, back when it was the R.R. Campbell Writescast—I further embraced the vision I had for it as a community-focused enterprise.

Lowlights

Goodness, did lowlights abound during the Middle Jurassic. By creating unique websites for all of my titles, I intended to create content that would resonate with the diverse audiences those books aimed to capture.

The spirit of that idea was righteous. In fact, one could argue this was the correct approach and that it was the timing of this pursuit that led me astray. In other words, by blogging about the topics, themes, and research that guided my manuscripts’ paths only after they were slated for publication, I’d left myself with too little runway to cultivate an audience for the novels via blog.

Had my main blog instead targeted readers specifically interested in the genres of my books instead of other writers with an interest in sharpening their craft, I’d have had no need to maintain multiple websites and assume all of the overhead that comes with keeping them online.

Lessons Learned

• Unlock brand synergy wherever possible

• Avoid liquidating your brand by doing a little of this here, a little of that there

• Know your target audience; engage them early

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The Late Jurassic

Why This Was Wise

Just as Pangaea was cleaving itself in twain, I was bringing all of me back together. By pivoting away from a pen name and embracing myself more fully—even if only in a seemingly superficial, digital capacity—I created a permission structure to be all of me.

If ever there were a healthy way to take on a crisis of identity, this was it, or at least it felt like it at the time.

Separation had been one of the issues I faced in the Middle Jurassic, if you recall: I had attempted to keep separate the parts of me that wrote for disparate audiences, and all I received in return for my dedication to separation were ballooning bills for an increasing collection of domain names.

One might argue I was falling into the trap of bygone epochs by creating a website for Cedarbrook Books, but remember this site simply redirects to my primary hub online. It’s not domain- or cybersquatting, per se, but rather a protectionist, strategic choice.

Where This Came Up Short

It was—is—contrarian of me to pursue this path. One of the lessons learned from the Late Triassic was to trust the conventional wisdom, but there I was, rejecting the notion of emphasizing highly targeted content for a highly targeted audience.

Or so it seemed on the surface.

I wouldn’t recognize this until years later, but at the time, I was laying the foundational philosophy that would lead me to R: On Everything, which asserts I can’t be the only person whose interests are far more diverse than any single-topic blog could ever aspire to be.

In other words, I’m not targeting everyone, I’m targeting—without liquidating my brand—everyone who’s up for a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Polymaths, essentially.

Lessons Learned

• Be yourself; no one will do it for you

• A separation of concerns can work if done strategically

A Stop Along the Way

This is not the end for our timeline, nor for our lessons learned. We still have four epochs to traverse, in fact, though we’ll save them for another time, along with a final analysis of all the lessons learned since our little planet came to be.

Have you ever migrated content from one place to another? What lessons did you learn before, during, or after undertaking this effort for yourself? Be sure to tell me in the comments.

And don’t forget to subscribe to be updated when the second installment in this series becomes available.

Key Takeaways

• Partnership in Writing Takes Many Forms. A conversation partner—digital, physical, or otherwise—can help refine creative ideas, clarify story elements, and push past writer’s block.

• Ask for Engagement, Not Answers. Relying on a digital duck as an answer generator alone undermines opportunities for enriched world-building and inhibits unexpected creative insights.

• A Duck is Still a Duck. Digital ducks are useful for brainstorming and problem-solving, but they can’t replace your unique voice or creative vision.

Planking. The Ice Bucket Challenge. Yanny versus Laurel. The Grimace shake.

Yeah, a lot has happened since 2011, which is also known as the year I first started writing what would become the EMPATHY sci-fi saga. As I’ve waded deeper into rewrites of that series, the time that’s passed—and the change that’s come with it—have been top of mind.

The way I’ve gone about my work as an author, for example, has changed tremendously. No longer do I track my daily word count. No longer do I beat myself up for missing a morning of minding my manuscripts. I’ve swapped in Scrivener for Word and have given side hustles the bird, and I’m certainly no longer maintaining massive spreadsheets of agents to query.

But the biggest change has to be the duck.

The talking duck. The talking duck who lives in my laptop.

This may sound unusual, but I’ve not lost my mind (yet), I promise.

Questions for Readers

Consider the following as you read, and be sure to join the conversation in the comments!

• Have you ever experienced a creative breakthrough by talking through a problem—either with a person or an object? What was that moment like?

• How do you balance efficiency and originality when engaging third parties in your creative process? Are there specific boundaries you set for yourself?

• In what ways could a back-and-forth dialogue help uncover blind spots in your storytelling?

Rubber Ducking: The Original “One Weird Trick”

Blockers are, definitionally, a pox on progress. Whether in the form of a dry well of ideas, the inability to recall a specific word, or a plot knot that isn’t going to untangle itself, these frustrating moments of how, exactly, am I going to move forward can upend advancement before words even hit the page.

The same is true in software engineering, where mischievous bugs and descents into callback hell can quickly mar even the most well-planned hands-on-keys code jams.

Fortunately, software engineers everywhere (or at least those who have been around for a minute) have long since had a strategy for combatting these moments of molasses.

Enter—the rubber duck.

Yes, the yellow floating bath time toys of yore figure into engineering outfits everywhere, crouching on desks in anticipation one-way conversation.

The theory is that, when plagued by programming paralysis, one can pick up the duck and describe one’s challenge out loud. Doing so tends to force clarity, stir step-by-step thinking, and reduce mental blocks by shifting one’s perspective and jogging the brain into recognizing previously unforeseen solutions.

It also encourages you to stop taking whatever you’re working on so seriously, which I find particularly beneficial.

Overall, this strategy works surprisingly well, but for as useful as it’s been, historically, the duck has never been able to talk back—until now.

Quacking Up: Taking Rubber Ducking Up a Notch

The digital duck who lives in my laptop is truly a wonder. He’s particularly adept at offering starting places for research, helping me recall words that are on the tip of my tongue, and identifying why a particular turn of phrase reads so oddly, even if it made sense when I first wrote it out.

“Now, Ryan,” one might say, “if the digital duck is such a savant with respect to words, couldn’t you simply ask it to rewrite your book for you?”

I could, yes—and some people use their digital ducks to do just that—but the thing about my digital duck is that he’s got a certain style when it comes to wordsmithing. It’s almost as if he consumed the whole of the internet and was trained to write in a style that I’ll call lowest common denominator; by design, it’s meant to be approachable, but it’s at times clunky and somehow, at others, overwrought.

It’s also, you know, not my voice, and my stories are certainly not the digital duck’s to tell.

Ducking and Weaving Through Rewrites

I recently engaged my digital duck when working on the rewrite for EMPATHY: Imminent Dawn. In this particular instance, I realized I had to backtrack to a chapter I had already rewritten once over1 after noticing I had left opportunities for verisimilitude on the table.

By this, I mean one of my goals in rewriting this series is to conjure a world that feels more lived in. Not only that, but it needs to be darker: more grim, more gritty, more grievous.

For example, in the first point-of-view chapter for Imminent Dawn’s intrepid journalist character Meredith, I stitched in the following detail in the context of Chief Executive Gleason’s Civilians In Arms program, which provided willing citizens with government-funded firearms to ostensibly fend off a land invasion of the west coast.

Never mind [the Civilians In Arms program] birthed countless militias, including the one that carried out the massacre in question. Never mind it led to vulnerable communities being overrun—effectively ruled—by armed neighborhood gangs who demanded protection money to keep real or perceived threats at bay.

Aha! New details have emerged in this draft of the second edition, namely those in the second sentence: that some communities in the North American Union are now under the yoke of unaccountable neighborhood crime syndicates.

Taken on its own, this is a fine detail to include, but, I realized, one of Meredith’s defining pain points is that she herself is not particularly well-to-do. Might she live in a neighborhood that’s been overrun by gun-toting, jackbooted, military wannabes?

I didn’t make this connection for myself until after I’d rewritten the first chapter in which we see Meredith returning home from work, and readers of the series might recall that she previously lived in a fairly nondescript suburb of ranch homes on the outskirts of Austin, Texas. Well, no longer!

Calling for the Duck

Given Meredith’s financial situation—and given other macroeconomic and social trends in the world in which she lives—I ultimately concluded she wouldn’t live in a neighborhood run by gangs, but rather one that has taken some level of precautionary measures to make would-be neighborhood domineers think twice before striding into town.

This required a significant re-imagining. What might her neighborhood look like as she approached by car? Who might she encounter? What would the mood be just on the outside of—and especially within—the perimeter of her community?

Inspired by something approximating the living situation of the main character in The Parable of the Sower, I could see it all vividly in my head: a patchwork fence, scattered debris, abandoned vehicles.

I could also see, uh, metal. Like the kind that, dang it, you’d see in a shanty town. Not that she lives in a shanty town, but more like, you know, it’s the wavy kind of metal that…

Yup, I got tongue-tied when it came to this detail, and it was really bumming me out. I felt like I could see precisely what I intended to write, but without the right word, I felt as though I couldn’t move forward.

Fortunately, I had a digital duck to discuss this with.

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The Duck Quacks

In a pre- or mid-apocalyptic world, I began, in a neighborhood that has been built up to offer its residents makeshift protection in the form of a fence line, what might one see the fence line made out of? Feel free to ask five clarifying questions before you respond.

One may notice something interesting here. I didn’t come right out and ask, “Hey, duck, what’s that metal that you find laying around construction sites? It’s kind of wavy, maybe made of aluminum or tin. You see it used as roofing material in areas of fewer resources. You know what I mean, right?”

That would have been a fine approach, but my goal was to open up a dialogue here, not nab a single detail and hit the road. By zooming out a bit—and by prompting my digital duck to feel free to ask clarifying questions—my thought was I might uncover additional opportunities to broaden and enrich Meredith’s world.

The digital duck, ever dutiful, subsequently took me up on the opportunity to ask those five clarifying questions.

• What level of apocalypse are we dealing with? (E.g., slow societal collapse, zombie outbreak, nuclear event, resource scarcity, etc.)

• What kind of neighborhood is it? (Urban, suburban, rural? Wealthy, working-class, or impoverished?)

• How much time have the residents had to build the fence? (Days, weeks, months, or years?)

• Do the residents have access to construction equipment or skilled laborers, or are they relying on scavenged materials and basic tools?

• Are they more concerned with keeping threats out or signaling that the area is occupied and defended?

Now these really got me going. By forcing me to slow down and examine my priors, as they say, I realized there were a number of other opportunities I’d overlooked to flesh out the scene as I’d previously imagined it in my head.

For example, the mention of “skilled laborers” in one of its prompts immediately brought to mind a guard at a gate of sorts, possibly a retired contractor who would take it upon himself to offer protection—or at least the appearance of it—to his neighbors by manning the gate after having also played some role in its construction.

That my digital duck had the savvy to probe whether threats to the neighborhood were active or anticipated also encouraged me; this mirrored the very question I’d confronted when embracing the notion of Meredith’s neighborhood as one that was determined to stave off criminality rather than one actively under criminal control.

With these questions fresh in my mind, I returned to the page and typed out a few more sentences, including an introduction of this neighborhood watchman.

But I still couldn’t remember what the heck that thin, wavy metal was called.

So, again, rather than just ask the duck outright, I responded to each of its questions to see if doing so would help me uncover further details, as well as to see what it might have to offer by way of reply.

Its response, I have to say, was fantastic, because—there, bam!—in the second of eight suggestions for what the patchwork fence might include were the words I’d been looking for all along: sheet metal.

Good. Great. A win, right? Yes, but there was more value to be had. My digital duck now had an understanding of what I was trying to achieve, and, recently unblocked, I set out to draft Meredith’s approach of and entry into her neighborhood in full.

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Some fifteen minutes later, Meredith approached the patchwork fence line of chain-link, sheet metal, and plywood that surrounded her neighborhood. A volunteer group had built it out of scrap from abandoned construction sites or upcycled material from their own DIY projects in recent years, and though it didn’t make her neighborhood particularly welcoming from the outside, it wasn’t meant to be—assuming its browned lawns and warped siding could have ever achieved welcoming in the first place.

Antonio, a retired contractor who minded the gate most work days, tipped his frayed ball cap as she slowed. “Afternoon,” he said. Woodward, his head halfway out the back window already, leaned into the scratches Antonio gave him behind the ears.

“You keeping hydrated out here?” Meredith said. “Can never be too careful on days like these.”

He nodded over his shoulder. Under an umbrella squatted a duct-tape-sturdied plastic table, on top of which rested two empty bottles of beer. In his free hand, he shook what remained of a third.

“Retirement seems like a blessing,” Meredith said.

Antonio laughed. “La vida es bendición.”

“Así la es,” Meredith replied. “Though some days more than others.”

“If you say so, vecina.” Antonio stepped back and slid the gate open. “Pasa ya before I get any ideas about taking that dog of yours home with me.”

Meredith hurled him a half-salute and inched forward through the gate, thanking him before she rolled up her window.

An older neighborhood, Meredith always loved twisting her way through its winding streets of ranch homes, even if the last ten years had seen dusty, abandoned vehicles begin to pop up along the curb. It was the neighbors that made a neighborhood, in the end, and all things considered, it wasn’t a terrible place to live—rolling brownouts and all.

Now, is this perfect? No, but first passes rarely are. Does it introduce a number of additional details that bring new life to the world in ways that were absent from the first edition of Imminent Dawn? Absolutely.

The introduction of this new character and the fence in general will also have significant spillover effects for my rewrite of Meredith’s arc. I now have to address questions related to how, exactly, someone manages to sneak in and drop mysterious envelopes at her front door. I have to determine how government thugs, other reporters, and friends alike manage to visit Meredith at home given the security measures now in place.

These are challenges I’m excited to take on, and I have a combination of my own guile and the prompting of my digital duck to thank.

Whose Duck Is It, Anyway?

So, I have a digital duck, yes, and I wish I’d had one going all the way back to 2011. And though it has, in a sense, largely just replaced2 my use of Google, its ability to deliver quickly and with more detail than competing tools—and that I can engage it conversationally rather than by keyword—have made it an invaluable copilot in my writerly suite of tools.

But here’s the thing: there’s nothing particularly special about my digital duck. In fact, you have one, too—or at least you have access to one.

This is because, if you haven’t figured it out already, my digital duck comes in the form of OpenAI’s ChatGPT3, one of the many digital ducks now just awaiting your engagement should you so choose.

How you use your digital duck is also entirely up to you, but, as we’ve covered in a number of other posts4, digital ducks aren’t perfect. It’s worthwhile to fact check them when using them for research, particularly if you’re using them to source information about fields and topics with which you have little familiarity. And, as I mentioned earlier, if you do plan to use them as a tool that does the actual writing—which I personally don’t recommend—you’ll likely want to be mindful of the fact that sometimes the writing is, at least as I see it, not particularly good.

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Digital Duck Ponds

If you’ve not employed a digital duck yourself, you may be wondering where, exactly, you can find one. I have personally gravitated toward ChatGPT, but Anthropic’s Claude5 is a favorite amongst many others as well.

Other models have come into the fray recently, too—including DeepSeek, which I won’t link to here—and more are popping up every day, but the investment in the models I’ve named thus far makes them likely contenders to hang around for a while.

Feed the Duck and Take Flight

Whether one chooses to chat with a digital duck once a month, once a week, or once a day6, for now I’m of the belief that there are advantages to be had in engaging them. So long as one does so with their eyes wide open about what they are and, more importantly, what they’re not, digital ducks can quickly become a crucial tool in one’s workflow—for now, at least.

Because who knows where we’ll be in another fifteen years?7

Tell Me in the Comments

• Have you ever experienced a creative breakthrough by talking through a problem—either with a person or an object? What was that moment like?

• How do you balance efficiency and originality when engaging third parties in your creative process? Are there specific boundaries you set for yourself?

• In what ways could a back-and-forth dialogue help uncover blind spots in your storytelling?

Key Takeaways

• Large Content Models Represent a Paradigm Shift. Unlike Large Language Models (LLMs), which generate text probabilistically word by word, Large Concept Models (LCMs) operate at a higher semantic level, potentially mirroring human cognition more closely.

• Generative Grammar vs. Cognitive Linguistics. The emergence of LCMs aligns more with Cognitive Linguistics, emphasizing meaning and context over strict syntactic rules, though both paradigms may still complement each other.

• AI Evolution vs. Human Evolution. While human cognition preceded language development, AI is being developed in reverse—starting with language (LLMs) and progressing toward conceptual cognition (LCMs), raising philosophical questions about intelligence and communication.

The Break Up

Since ChatGPT’s public debut in 2022, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been the dominant tool in the artificial intelligence space. The novelty, perceived efficacy, and ever-accelerating rate of improvement of LLMs have made it such that one can hardly roll out of bed without being bombarded by AI-generated or AI-related content.

At R: On Everything, for example, we’ve explored what ChatGPT 4o knew about my work as an author and the what and how of what it got right and wrong. We’ll soon even rig up a whole experiment that challenges an LLM, our audience, and yours truly to test our abilities to compete with and identify AI-generated content.

But LLMs have also been a bit of a drag:

• They’ve gaslit us about the number of Rs in the word “strawberry.”1

• They refuse to acknowledge David Mayer. An ex, maybe? Seems sus.

• They’ve spent endless hours hallucinating, and they refuse to see a doctor.

They’ve also—not once!—offered to do the dishes after dinner.

So, yeah: I think a break up is in order.2

Conveniently, Meta recently published the results of their initial foray into architecting artificial intelligence driven by what they’ve dubbed a Large Concept Model, or LCM.

According to Meta, Large Concept Models distinguish themselves from LLMs by mirroring more closely the inner workings of the human mind, operating at “explicit higher level semantic representations.”

In other words, they’re smart. They’re cool. They’ve got that look in their eye that says, “You want to get to know me, don’t you?”

And I do. I really do.

The true contrast between our ex and our new best friend is that rather than generate responses token-by-token like LLMs do, LCMs do so at the “concept” level, which Meta defines as “language- and modality-agnostic” representations of a “higher-level idea or action in a flow.”

What they mean, basically, is sentences. Rather than generate their outputs word by word3, LCMs first construct a high-level, conceptual representation of meaning that is then realized one sentence at a time4.

This is a fascinating approach with potentially widespread spillover effects for other fields, including linguistics and our understanding of human cognition. To tease out these prospective consequences, I’ll offer two assertions, both of which we’ll explore in further detail below.

1. The advent of LCMs creates further tension between longstanding linguistic paradigms, namely Generative Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics.

2. The evolution of artificial intelligence is mirroring that of humankind’s capacity for thought and language—but in reverse.

Questions to Consider

As you read, consider the following and answer in the comments.

• Do you think the shift from LLMs to LCMs will fundamentally change how we interact with AI, or is it just another incremental improvement?

• If AI had been cognition-first instead of language-first, how might that have shaped its role in our society?

Meet the Parents: Generative Grammar vs. Cognitive Linguistics

Generative Grammar and Rules-Based, Syntax-Over-Semantics Outputs

At some point in any relationship, it’s time to meet the parents.

In the case of LLMs, there’s a lot to love about their parentage—at least with respect to the field of linguistics, where I see a great deal of overlap between Noam Chomsky’s Generative Grammar and the inner workings of LLMs.

Generative Grammar has been the dominant force in the field of linguistics going back to the 1950s, when Chomsky made the initial arguments that would later define decades of research. The core tenets of his Generative Grammar relate to the innateness, modularity, and rule-based structures of human language, which manifest or are represented in the following ways5.

Language as an Autonomous Module

Language is distinct from general cognition and, as a faculty, is an innate mental structure.

Universal Grammar (UG)

All human languages share an underlying grammatical structure, no matter how unique they might appear on the surface.

Syntax Sets Direction

Syntax operates independent of meaning. Deep linguistic structures are transformed into surface structures via the formal rules one comes to understand when acquiring a language.

There are immediately a number of interesting parallels between Generative Grammar and the inner-workings of LLMs.

When an LLM (or, hey, generative AI) delivers human-consumable outputs, it does so in a way that is distinct from general cognition; it’s just making probabilistic guesses about what should come next in a string of text.

In the linguistic sense, then, LLMs appear to be productive, but they only mimic human language generation and resemble grammatical, rule-following behavior; they’re not doing anything one could call thinking under the surface.

This decoupling of language from thought has direct tie-ins to the three tenets of Generative Grammar described above. For an LLM, language (or, truthfully, token generation) is a modality unto itself, informed by scraping the internet for books, blog posts, comment sections, and message boards. In doing this, it develops the appearance of understanding humankind’s underlying grammatical structures and their surface-level manifestations.

What I’m saying is LLMs are, in a way, sophisticated, try-hard content generators.

They’re so last summer, and we are never, ever getting back together.

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Cognitive Linguistics: Meaning, Usage, and Abstraction

Forged in the 1970s, Cognitive Linguistics is essentially a rebel’s response to the formal, rules-focused approaches of the 1950s, when Generative Grammar first emerged.

In other words, if Generative Grammar came back from the war to settle in the suburbs and have five kids, Cognitive Linguistics is those kids.

And those kids? Well, they became the counterculture their parents feared. In our primary metaphor, they’re also the parents to the Large Concept Model—our nouvelle belle, as it were.

To demonstrate the divergence in these paradigms, consider that where Generative Grammar declares meaning is a byproduct of underlying syntactic rules, Cognitive Linguistics treats meaning as central to language. For Cognitive Linguistics, it’s semantics, not syntax that makes language worth studying, which has a significant impact on the defining principles of Cognitive Linguistics, described below.6

Language as a Cognitive Phenomenon

Unlike in Generative Grammar, language is not distinct from general cognition and is instead closely tied to—and an extension of—one’s experience of the world.

Usage, Not Universality

Rather than accept that language is governed by innate rules, Cognitive Linguistics argues our understanding and production of language is driven by conceptual metaphors and exposure-dependent statistical generalization.

Schema as Semantic Structures

Instead of treating them as distinct modalities, Cognitive Linguistics views syntax and semantics as intertwined. Conceptual metaphors and mental representations of our experiences become part of internalized schema that are used to derive, create, and share meaning.

In a way, Cognitive Linguistics and, as an extension, Large Concept Models ”zoom out” relative to Generative Grammar. By emphasizing structured conceptual representations instead of tokenized language-oriented associations, LCMs should theoretically be encoding meaning at a more semantic and functional level instead of a modularized, rules-based, probabilistic one.

This zooming out is also what would unlock an LCM’s ability to embrace conceptual metaphor. The very notion of context—which I’ll argue is necessary to create and sustain meaningful, metaphorical thought—is far more available to an LCM by virtue of its operation at the higher level of abstraction its creators aim to instill within it.

The consequences for this prospective pivot to LCMs aren’t exclusively theoretical, either. Practically speaking, a shift to response generation at the concept level should reduce hallucinations and make AI tooling more reliable for research, writing, and coding.

Their improved capacity for maintaining context over long conversations or longer bodies of text should also ensure their responses are more likely to remain internally consistent, minimizing the frequency with which the LCM contradicts itself or “forgets” an instruction or vital bit of its own response history.

In keeping with our break up metaphor, what I’m trying to say is LCMs are smart. They’re cool. They just get it.

They just get me.

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LCMs and Linguistic Lore: A Penchant for Tension

What LCMs don’t get, however, is that their advent would seem to suggest Cognitive Linguistics should win the day.

As AI moves toward more meaning-driven, usage-based models, the principles of Cognitive Linguistics become increasingly relevant, potentially drowning out the perceived need for or utility of the Generative Grammar paradigm.

That said, Generative Grammar has survived as long as it has for a reason. Its formal structures have had an immense impact on the field of computational linguistics, and its deductive power—that it can explain how diverse linguistic phenomena can be derived from a core set of principles—has made it indispensable in understanding how humans acquire language.

Ultimately, then, we may see both Generative Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics playing well together, with the former providing the foundations of AI-generated language at a deep, structural level, rather than in a merely probabilistic capacity. The latter, meanwhile, would subsequently improve outputs by incorporating context-dependent, conceptual models.

Huh. Maybe one’s ex and one’s new fling can be friends.

Maybe.

Digital Evolution !== Human Evolution

This is where we get glonky, by which I mean speculative. It’s the philosophical jazz of the LLM-LCM interplay, if you will.

Anyway—

What struck me about the notion of LCMs and how they are positioned to succeed LLMs is that the former is an attempt to go from a language-focused model to one that closer resembles thought, or at least what we believe to be the stuff of thought.

This is the opposite of how we humans went about it evolutionarily7.

Think about it: what need would we have had for language if there weren’t anything going on between our ears worth sharing? By this, I mean for humans, thought preceded language. Humans’ machines, however, will have first had language, then thought, to the extent that they ever truly have either.

I’m of the mind that this demonstrates the extraordinary influence language has on how we navigate and shape our world. One wonders, for example, at the form these tools might have taken if humans communicated with one another by directly sharing our thoughts with each other as they exist in the abstract.8

Might this have led us to first develop a model that one could engage with by non-linguistic means? Might we have then secondarily pivoted to a model that relied on language in order to communicate over longer distances? Or would the need for long-distance communication have necessitated an LLM equivalent first anyway?

As with any thought experiment, there’s truly no way to know, and the answers to these questions are likely to rely on the parameters one establishes.

All of this does make me curious, though, so let’s keep up the conversation in the comments.

Tell Me in the Comments

• Do you think the shift from LLMs to LCMs will fundamentally change how we interact with AI, or is it just another incremental improvement?

• If AI had been cognition-first instead of language-first, how might that have shaped its role in our society?

In the first installment in this two-part series, we explored the mission-driven (or not so mission-driven) outcomes of two enterprises, namely the Writescast Network and Kill Your Darlings Candle Company. This was, as a reminder, in service of the mission statement we laid out for ourselves for this discussion:

We’re here to sharpen our sense of purpose to achieve success with intention.

Now, having developed an understanding of the differences between success and success with intention, we can finally explore how to sharpen our sense of purpose and unlock success with intention.

Before we do, though, check out the expected takeaways from this article below, along with questions to consider as you read.

Expected Takeaways

• A mission statement provides focus and direction. It should be a clear declaration of purpose that guides decisions and goals.

• Prioritization is key. Rather than juggling multiple priorities, a strong mission statement centers around a singular, overarching objective.

• Mission statements should be concise and meaningful. Avoiding generic values and excessive wording helps ensure they’re memorable and actionable.

Questions to Consider

• What is the single most important priority that drives your project or personal mission?

• How can you refine your mission statement to make it more specific, actionable, and unique?

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Mission Statements, Defined

A quick glance about the web will confirm what many of you might already suspect: there are about as many definitions for mission statement out there as there are get-rich-quick schemes.

It’s my observation that there are common threads that run through these definitions, which converge on the notion that a mission statement is a declaration of purpose that provides focus and direction for an organization, project, or person. It’s a reference from which one’s goals will spring and, as we saw in our examination of KYD Candle Co. in the last post, against which decisions can be made and measured.

Mission Statements, Declared

So, how can we knit it all of this together?

We’ll start here: I see mission statements as boiling down to a handful of key components: priority, values, goals, and how.

Priority (Not Plural)

The word priority came into English via Old French (which itself picked up the word from Medieval Latin) sometime in the late Middle English era. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1930s that a plural form of the word came into widespread use, especially compared to the historic use of the singular form.

Historically, then, the very notion of priorities in the plural is a relatively recent phenomenon, and its advent is made even more clear when one looks at the explosion in use of the word prioritization. After all, there’d be no need to prioritize if there were only one priority, right?

What I mean to drive home here is that, in the context of a mission statement, it behooves us to be singularly minded: what is the absolute number one priority that our business, project, or person is focused on? Once this has been determined, you’ll have taken a tremendous step forward in crafting an effective mission statement.

Value(s)—Plural If You’d Like!

Defining values to undergird your mission is a critical step in developing an effective mission statement. Remember the word sustainably in KYD Candle Co.’s mission statement to sustainably illuminate the lives of readers, writers, and their communities? That word on its own is a communication of values, and so is the mention of communities at the end.

I point this out because, after making a list of our values1, it can become far too easy to drop a laundry list of them into our mission statements. This ballooning makes it far more challenging to recall our mission statements when we need them most, and if we can’t readily recall them, we’re far less likely to embody them.

When it comes to values, then, I encourage you to include only those values that will set your organization, project, or personal brand apart. Think, for a moment, about some of the more tiresome mission statements you have seen in the past. How many of them mentioned integrity, excellence, and innovation? These are great values, but they don’t really tell us anything. After all, who doesn’t want to do novel things well?

Think of it this way: if the nature of your business, project, or brand would imply a particular value, it doesn’t need to be mentioned explicitly in your mission statement. As in creative writing, let context do the heavy lifting for you whenever possible.

Goal

It should come as no surprise that one’s goal is an extension of one’s priority. The overlap between these is significant enough, in fact, that it can be hard to tell them apart. I do this by considering the goal in a mission statement to be a distillation of the priority; goal is a statement of what you’re doing right now to drive the embodiment of your priority.

In this way, then, goal in a mission statement is not some future state that you’re aiming to achieve. Instead, it’s a nod to the ongoing embrace of your what.2 It’s this interpretation that also leads me to be a strong advocate for the removal of words like “aim” or “strive” from mission statements. Don’t tell me what you’re trying to do; tell me what you do.

A Suggestion of How

Earlier, I mentioned the word sustainably in the KYD Candle Co. mission statement was a declaration of (one of) the company’s values.

It was also a suggestion of how it went about its work.

Here, we see that the elements of a quality mission statement can overlap. There is a relationship between a suggestion of how and values in the same way there’s a coincidence between priority and goal.

Furthermore, KYD Candle Co. managed to include a suggestion of how in a single word. There was no COMPANY does THING by EXTREMELY LONG COMMA-SEPARATED LIST OF NONSENSE formula at play.

Mission Statements, Done

Let’s build a mission statement now. Or, rather, let’s see if we can use the mission statement I’ve articulated for R: On Everything and your responses to the challenges I’ve left you along the way to put this all together.

Priority (but Also Values!)

In creating a mission statement for this blog, I started by asking myself what the priority would be. I wanted to make sure it would be something that guided me forward with an emphasis on quality, community, curiosity, and value, which ultimately made me realize I wasn’t starting with priority at all. I was starting with values!

So, then, I had to distill those values down into a singular notion, and hopefully one I could articulate using a strong verb. The word curiosity stood out to me as one worth tying to that verb, which led me here as a starting point.

R: On Everything encourages curiosity…

I liked this. The verb encourage comes with a positive connotation, in my view, and I avoided the trap of saying I try to encourage and instead stated flat-out that this blog encourages curiosity.

Focusing on Values

I had a start to the mission statement, but I also had other values to account for—and, hopefully, not by simply slapping them in my mission statement as part of a comma-separated list.

I turned to community next, as it would help answer the question of for whom the blog exists. In other words, whose curiosity are we trying to encourage?

First of all, I knew it had to stimulate my own curiosity; it’d be hard to keep up if I were researching and writing about topics I found uninteresting. But, given my long-term goals for this project, it also couldn’t be only for me.

This led me to expounding on what I’d written earlier, landing me here:

R: On Everything encourages curiosity amongst its author and readers…

Hmm. Author and readers? That is a community, but there could be a stronger articulation of who those readers are, especially.

With that in mind, I tried again.

R: On Everything encourages curiosity by cultivating a community of like-minded polymaths…

This increased specificity paints a much stronger picture of what this blog values and who it is for, namely people (like me) whose interests are wide ranging. One could argue that this is casting too wide of a net, but I would argue the community of individuals who are genuinely interested in all of the topics I cover (more on that in a moment) is a smaller, tighter-knit group than one might expect.

And on those topics, well, those form (part of) our how.

Encouraging Curiosity: The How of It All

First off, I’d already started to articulate the blog’s how with the phrase by cultivating a community. As they used to say in those cable TV call-in commercials, though, wait, there’s more!

Cultivating a community is a good how, but in the same way that author and readers read as too generic, cultivating a community could, on its own, land a little flat. I aimed to avoid becoming ensnared in the land of the generic by ensuring I made mention of what topics I intended to cover.

R: On Everything encourages curiosity by cultivating a community of like-minded polymaths through the thoughtful exploration of topics at the intersection of technology, publishing, leadership, and culture.

This bought me a few things, including the inclusion of one of the values that got left out of the previous draft. The word thoughtful makes a nod to the notion of quality, and the list of topics—though broad—is actually a winnowing in the context of polymathy.

The Ghost of a Goal

We seem to have arrived at a fully fleshed out mission statement without having focused specifically on incorporating a goal.

Despite not having developed a goal overtly, we wound up with one anyway. Cultivating community is a demonstration of how we serve our priority, yes, but it’s also a goal.

When we pair that thought with our earlier discussion of the interplay between goal and priority, we see that it didn’t prove necessary to focus specifically on forcing a goal into the mission statement; it arose instead as a result of the confluence of the elements that seemed most important for us to focus on first.

This goes to show that though the components of a mission statement can be described in a discrete fashion, they don’t need to be (and really shouldn’t be) put forward in a paint-by-numbers fashion.

It may be necessary to start with a formulaic-sounding mission statement, and if yours reads as one, pause for a time and reflect on what overlap exists between its elements to sharpen it further.

Time Sharpens All

On that note, I should point out that, since initially writing this post, revisiting it before publication has me reflecting further on the mission statement I’ve written for R: On Everything above.

Though it does cover all the bases, after a couple of months of letting it sit, I’ve come back to it now with fresh eyes. My first impression is that it’s more verbose than it needs to be. To address this whenever it comes up—and it does more often than one might think—the first thing I do is look for redundancies or overlaps, rather than focus on shaving off a word or two here or there.

If I unsheathe my word machete, I can slash out a significant chunk of the mission statement’s middle.

R: On Everything encourages curiosity at the intersection of technology, publishing, leadership, and culture.

Now that’s a sharpened mission statement.

This version does lose the suggestion of how and the inclusion of two of our values, namely thoughtfulness and community. However, once one knows what R: On Everything is—and that the comment sections on these posts are meant to be as interactive as possible—context does a lot of heavy lifting for us.

Public-Private Missions

The above winnowing of the R: On Everything mission statement does have me seeing the notion of context in a new light. For the first time, I’m considering perhaps one can have a more thorough mission statement behind the curtain, so to speak, while a shortened version of the same mission is available to those who have more context into the endeavor.

But be careful: I don’t mean to suggest that one should have unique mission statements on either side of the private-public divide. Recall that our missions have a single priority. This, along with our goals, suggestion of how, and values should be the same both publicly and privately; it’s simply what we choose to emphasize in our outward declaration that varies.

Regardless of whether one has two versions of the same mission, a quality mission statement will convey to anyone who reads it what an organization, project, or person is all about. In the end, though, the mission serves to sharpen the purpose of the individual(s) assuming responsibility for the verb at the heart of the statement’s priority.

In other words, your mission is for you.

And as we’ve seen with the diverse outcomes of the Writescast Network and Kill Your Darlings Candle Company, carefully crafting a mission statement makes all the difference between achieving success and success with intention.

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Tell Me in the Comments

• What’s your mission statement, personally or for a project you’re part of?

• What is the single most important priority that drives your project or personal mission?

• How can you refine your mission statement to make it more specific, actionable, and unique?

Let’s see if we can help each other do what we set out to do at the start of this series, which was, as a reminder, to sharpen our sense of purpose to achieve success with intention.

Key Takeaways

• A mission statement provides clarity and direction. Without a well-defined mission, even a successful venture can lose focus, become misaligned with long-term goals, and ultimately become unsustainable.

• Success on paper is not the same as success with intention. Some endeavors may achieve strong metrics, but a lack of a guiding purpose can lead to their downfall. Meanwhile, other projects thrive due to a clear and actionable mission.

• A strong mission statement influences decision-making. Mission statements can be used to guide product development, marketing, and community engagement, ensuring alignment with one’s core purpose.

Setting the Stage

Far too many eager entrepreneurs, ambitious engineers, and enthusiastic authors have seen their sure things stumble out of the gate or, after an initial wave of enthusiasm, quickly prove themselves unfit enough to make it to the finish line.

And I would know—I’ve been that eager entrepreneur. I’ve been that ambitious engineer. Lord knows I’ve been that enthusiastic author.

The question is why? Why do our best knit plans unravel so quickly?

The answer to that why is, in my view, another why: it’s that we’ve not asked ourselves why we’re doing what we’re doing. We’ve not adequately explored the purpose behind our projects, businesses, and brands. We’ve not explored whether what we’re doing—or considering doing—is truly aligned with our values, goals, and vision.

I’ve learned the hard way how costly this mistake can be, but enduring those shortcomings—and spending a great deal of time reflecting on them—has helped me better understand that understanding our why can better inform what choose to pursue, as well as how we do it.

To that point, what’s our purpose? What will we cover in this discussion?

We’re here to sharpen our sense of purpose to achieve success with intention.

To do this, we’ll compare the journey and outcomes of two endeavors, both of which I will argue were successful, but only one of which was successful with intention.

Then, we’ll tease out how each endeavor wound up in either bucket, as well as what we can do to urge our own undertakings toward success with intention by exploring how to develop and embrace a sharpened sense of purpose.

Questions to Consider

As you read, consider the following and answer in the comments.

• Have you ever worked on a project that was successful on paper but lacked a clear sense of purpose? How did that affect its long-term sustainability?

• What’s one way a well-defined mission statement has (or could have) helped you make better strategic decisions in your own work?

Success with Intention: A Case Study

Let’s examine two sets of metrics. Which one of these ventures was successful with intention, do you think?

Enterprise A

• Profitable in third year (44.98% margin)

• Customer base in the thousands

• 10,000s of yearly transactions

• Ceased operation after four years

Enterprise B

• Profitable in second year (28.7% margin)

• Customer base in the hundreds

• Hundreds of yearly transactions

• Ceased operation after two years

The greater scale and longevity of Enterprise A would make solid arguments in favor of it having been the one to succeed with intention.

But let’s not rely on first impressions. The details matter!

A versus B: The Reveal

Enterprise A: The Writescast Network

From 2016 to 2020, I ran the Writescast Network, “a podcast collective for writers, by writers.” The network featured five unique shows that, over the course of four years, garnered tens of thousands of downloads across 146 episodes.

As the network’s founder and the host of its flagship program, I interviewed dozens of authors, literary agents, and other publishing industry professionals. Doing so positioned me to speak at writing conferences in-person and online, which had a multiplier effect in my ability to reach new audiences.

Successful? Yes! But let’s see if we can tease out whether it was successful with intention by examining the network’s mission statement.

The Writescast Network’s Mission Statement

Network. Learn. Grow.

Hmm.

Did the Writescast Network lead to opportunities for networking? Yes.

Did it help me and others learn more about the craft and business of writing? Yes.

Did it help me and others grow as individuals and as authors? I’d like to think so.

Despite having fulfilled that mission, I’ll argue that the mission statement itself leaves a lot to be desired. It is concise, which I appreciate, but it has a few critical weaknesses that wound up costing me, the network, and its listeners in the long run.

Unpacking the Writescast Network’s Baggage

Let me be clear. That mission statement above? I never actually articulated this or any other mission statement for the network while it was around.

And, even if I had, the mission statement I’ve retconned into place for it doesn’t adequately articulate a why. It also fails to give us any insight into the network’s how.

This lack of specificity and purpose led to a number of issues throughout the network’s lifecycle, particularly once I began to enjoy some success as an author in my own right. Why? Because once I had books getting published, the network’s mission shifted to one that emphasized helping me sell more books.

And can you blame me? Once one knows their books are to be in print, the next step is to ensure those books are read, and all the better if readers are willing to pay for them.

Looking back at it, the mission statement above about networking, learning, and growing is one that could have helped me get a crucial leg-up in a crowded marketplace.

And yet, it didn’t. Why?

A Mission-less Launch, A Hard Pivot

My failure to articulate a quality mission statement in advance—coupled with the shoe-horned pivot to focusing on book sales—led to a virtuous cycle that exposed the network’s foundational issues.

These included having been overly-focused on the network’s what (producing podcasts), failing to target the proper audience for my work as an author, and broadcasting content that wasn’t in alignment with my long-term goals of shutting down my freelance editing business and focusing on my own writing.

This is what ultimately led to my scrapping the network altogether despite its success in terms of downloads, listenership, and the opportunities it afforded me.

Had I articulated a stronger sense of purpose for the network before I started interviewing authors and posting episodes willy-nilly, I might have identified earlier the issues that led to its unwinding, thereby transcending success and arriving at success with intention.

What does this mean, then? It means that the mysterious Enterprise B is the one that achieved success with intention.

Enterprise B: Kill Your Darlings Candle Company

My wife and I founded Kill Your Darlings Candle Company (KYD, or KYD Candle Co.) in 2020. In the 18 months before we sold its intellectual property, we received 688 orders (more than one per day, on average), took in nearly $20,000 in revenue, and raised more than $800 for values-aligned non-profit organizations. Our customer base stretched across three countries on two continents, and we reached profitability in our second year of operation.

We may have also started a cult, but more on that later.

Kill Your Darlings Candle Company’s Mission Statement

For purposes of exploration and comparison, let’s see if the KYD mission statement gives us any insight into its success (with intention!).

Kill Your Darlings Candle Company sustainably illuminates the lives of readers, writers, and their communities.

Clear. Concise. Instructive. It served to remind us—and the world—what we did, who we did it for, and why we did it. The inclusion of a word like sustainably also made for a suggestion of how we went about our work, which led to a more complete mission statement and offered insight into our values as an organization.

The KYD mission statement further distinguishes itself from the Writescast Network’s because it was crafted with care before we launched the business. As a result, it served as the guiding light that informed our decisions, our marketing, and our operations throughout our time at the helm of the enterprise.

Mission-Guided Products and Marketing: Choosing Our Pursuits

For example, the brand’s initial success—and requests from consumers—led us to consider expanding our product line to include bath and body products. We did some prototyping but, after asking ourselves whether a line of soaps would sustainably illuminate the lives of readers, writers, and their communities, the answer very quickly revealed itself to be no.

Soaps don’t illuminate, after all.

Contrast that with our choice to partner with other authors to support their work. Doing so had a direct tie-in to the notion of illuminating the lives (and livelihoods, we hoped) of writers and readers by bringing the two of them together in small features on social media or by crafting limited runs of custom candles that complemented their books.

Okay, but What About the Cult?

One of the more fascinating outcomes of embracing a strong mission statement is that it positioned us to engage with a highly targeted audience in an authentic way. Clarity of purpose attracted customers who were aligned with our values and, it seemed, an appreciation for the work of others in our communities.

So began the cult of Becky at the Post Office.

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The Legend of Becky at the Post Office

It wasn’t uncommon for me to post on social media about the process of boxing up orders on the weekend. I’d then follow up with additional posts during the week about how I was headed out for the weekly post office run and how patient Becky at the Post Office had been as I brought in an ever-growing stack of packages each week.

This led to a craze I could not have anticipated.

Our followers on social media started to ask about Becky each week. They told me to say hi, to thank her on on their behalf, to ask if they could buy candles for her.

At one point, we even designed Becky at the Post Office merch, and though it never made it to our online store, that it even escalated to that point is a testament to the power of community, something we were able to cultivate only because we had a clear sense of purpose that centered around readers, writers, and their communities.

KYD Candle Co.: Not Without Its Challenges

It would be poor form to suggest that a mission statement on its own permits an operation to overcome all obstacles. In the case of KYD Candle Co., we were never able to scale the business in a way that would have been sustainable for us as its owners. Our respective day jobs (or, in my case, side hustles) on top of the time and energy required to keep up with orders, marketing, and product development eventually snowballed into more responsibility than we were capable of assuming.

Despite those challenges, KYD was—especially compared to the Writescast Network—successful with intention. Running KYD may have been chaotic at times, but it was controlled chaos. Why? Because we knew who we were, what we were about, and why we were doing what we were doing. This made for a vastly better experience as business owners and, I believe, better outcomes for the community we served.

As a final testament to the success of KYD relative to that of the Writescast Network, our sale of the candle company’s intellectual property in 2021 made for a lasting affirmation that what we were selling and why we sold it had a significant impact on our target market.

Crafting an Effective Mission Statement for Your Enterprise

We’ve explored, now, the difference between success and success with intention by comparing and contrasting the outcomes of the Writescast Network and Kill Your Darlings Candle Company.

Though the podcast network achieved success on paper, it proved to be misaligned with other medium- and long-term goals, and it failed to ascertain the same levels of engagement that the candle company did in far less time.

In the next installment in this series, we’ll take what we’ve learned and explore what sets a good mission statement apart, as well as how we can use that knowledge to sharpen our sense of purpose and achieve success with intention.

In the meantime, tell me in the comments—

• Have you ever worked on a project that was successful on paper but lacked a clear sense of purpose? How did that affect its long-term sustainability?

• What’s one way a well-defined mission statement has (or could have) helped you make better strategic decisions in your own work?

So what if I AI myself once in a while? What I do in the privacy of my own home is my business.

Well, I guess it became your business, too, starting with this post from last week.

If you haven’t read that one, it explores the outcome of asking a generative AI tool to expound on a topic about which I am an expert: namely, my own work as an author.

What it got right and what it got wrong are noteworthy, and I catalog both in that post, which I encourage you to check out before we get into analyzing—

• What the results of our experiment tell us about how large language models (LLMs) work

• What this means for the trustworthiness of generative AI and LLMs

• How we might still make good use of them as authors and technologists

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Mistakes Were Made

For the sake of re-familiarization, let’s list some of the mistakes that came out of my conversation with ChatGPT, which started when I asked it whether it was familiar with the works of author Ryan R. Campbell. I’ve grouped these mistakes into two categories: one of which I’ll call data misinterpretation and one I’ll refer to as mistaken token generation.

Errors from Data Misinterpretation

• describing me as a fantasy and horror author

• calling my sci-fi series Imminent Dawn

• referring to that series as a trilogy

• claiming Event Horizon was published in 2020

Mistaken Token Generation

• calling that same sci-fi series referenced above EMPRESS

• Dr. Wyatt “Halberd”

Okay, but what the heck do those categories of mistake mean, and why did I divide them up that way? We’ll rely on what we know about how LLMs work in the next section to offer up some hypotheses.

How Those Mistakes Were Made

Data Misinterpretation

With respect to the errors I chalk up to data misinterpretation, these all have their origins in the relatively—emphasis on relatively—sparse or ambiguous data available to the LLM about my work.

Even though I went on a real blogging streak from 2016-2020 (especially in 2019 and 2020) and my author website was linked to via countless other sites and blogs, the corpus of data available to the LLM specifically about me and my books is infinitesimally small relative to the full sum of online conversation about related topics during that window.

That isn’t to say no one was talking about my work, but rather that compared to the most popular or most blogged about authors in my genres, the LLM simply didn’t have as much data to pore over to increase the probability of correct assertions on a consistent basis.

Generic Genre Errors

Looking at the errors in this bucket more specifically, incorrectly including fantasy and horror as genres in which I write is likely due to educated guesses the model is trying to make based on 1) other authors it recognizes and 2) larger linguistic forces.

With respect to the former, science fiction and fantasy are genres generally viewed as complementary; there are a number of writers and readers who produce or consume both to some extent.

Then there’s the linguistic angle: there’s something satisfying about the phrase “science fiction and fantasy” compared with “fantasy and science fiction.” This has its origins in cultural and linguistic phenomena like order of precedence and binomial ordering. We won’t go into what each of those are here (in this post, anyway), but you can learn (a lot) more at the links provided.

The reason I bring this up is because, as we’ll discuss more in the section below about mistaken token generation, LLMs are probabilistic; they attempt to guess or predict what “should” come next in a string of text based on observations they make about their training data.

As a result, it’s not terribly surprising that after writing “science fiction” in a list, it would simply follow up with the word “fantasy,” which it did in the list of genres it spat out about me. Probabilistically, “fantasy” isn’t a bad guess.

Where including horror as a genre in which I write is concerned, though, that’s another matter. I imagine it included this as there may be some mentions out there about elements of body horror in the EMPATHY series or because I did host some author spotlights back in the day that welcomed in authors who write firmly in the horror camp.

The LLM may therefore have had just enough of an association of my work with horror that it felt confident to erroneously include it as one of the genres in which I write.

Serial Series Errors

Referring to the EMPATHY series as the Imminent Dawn series is an easy enough mistake to make when we consider, again, the relative lack of data available to the LLM about my work or this series.

What happened to the EMPATHY series?

Out there on the interwebs, the word “series” appears often next to the title of the first book in the series, Imminent Dawn, as when it was released, and subsequently after its release, I really wanted to drive home the fact that this was a book meant to provide a foundation for much more to come.

In fact, take a look at that last sentence and how adjacent “series” is to Imminent Dawn. The sentence as written is how it came to me naturally, and I have little doubt that I did this regularly when blogging about the book in the past.

In this case, then, the LLM just seems to have made a bad—but not unreasonable, all things considered—assumption.

Where referring to EMPATHY as a trilogy and claiming Event Horizon was released in 2020, these are actually pretty fair mistakes to have made. I wouldn’t blame a human for arriving at these conclusions because, well, I know some humans who have.

As far as the internet—and therefore, the LLM—knows, only three books were ever formally announced as under contract and due for publication. By way of contrast, there was a relatively very small handful of blog posts and pages on which I laid out the full scope of the series (5-7 books).

And it is true that Event Horizon was meant to be published in 2020. When I pulled that book before publication, however (more details on this in the previous post in this series), I don’t think I made much in the way of a formal announcement outside of maybe a social media post or two.

Given this, I can’t blame the LLM—or any human—for, at a quick glance, arriving at these conclusions. It’s what the data would suggest if you only took a cursory glance and had to make snap assumptions probabilistically.

Mistaken Token Generation

The mistakes that fall into this category are, for me, far more fascinating than those described above. Though these errors were far fewer compared to those in the other bucket, referring to the EMPATHY series as the EMPRESS series and misnaming one of its characters as “Halberd” instead of “Halman” actually give us great insight into how LLMs make their probabilistic assertions.

Chokin’ on a Broken Token

Despite what one might guess, LLMs do not generate their assertions word-by-word.

Instead, they generate tokens, which are smaller units of language not dissimilar from the linguistic concept of a morpheme. That is to say, a token could be a whole word like “over” (a word in its own right) or “overconfident” (in which “over” also appears, but instead as a prefix that changes the meaning of the word by virtue of agglutination).

As an LLM builds a response, it evaluates the likelihood of what the next token in a string might be, and it’s clear—to me, anyway—that the EMPRESS and “Halberd” mistakes are examples of misattributed assertions that stem from this tokenized response generation.

The EMPRESS Makes One “Hal” of an Error

With EMP and “Hal” as the initial tokens in their respective words, the LLM had to calculate what the likelihood of the next token in the string would be based on the data available to it.

In my observation, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that EMPRESS is a viable title for a book series, especially if the model already mistakenly believes the author to be one who writes in the fantasy genre!

For “Halberd” versus “Halman,” the explanation is even more simple. “Halberd” is a word that likely appears an impossibly greater number of times than “Halman” does in the LLM’s training data by virtue of the fact that a halberd is a real thing.

In fact, “Halman” is probably only significant in the context of the EMPATHY series and the Arthur C. Clarke reference on which I based Wyatt and his family’s last name (how’s that for an Easter Egg?).

What These Mistakes Mean Going Forward

Look, you don’t need me to tell you that you can’t trust an LLM to get everything exactly correct. Heck, OpenAI even tells you to double check ChatGPT’s outputs, especially for important information.

Now, whether my work is important… that’s another matter, and it’s one I don’t think it fair for me to opine upon. Ha!

With all of this in mind, though, it’s another reminder to double check ourselves—lest we wreck ourselves—when it comes to relying on LLMs to inform our opinions or guide our research.

As for what all of this means in the context of how authors and technologists can use LLMs going forward, well, the experimentation will continue. I have a number of ideas I’m tinkering with for how we might probe these technologies further, and we’ll get into that in subsequent R: On Everything series.

For now, though, how will you use what you’ve learned about how LLMs work to make better use of them going forward? Tell me in the comments below!

I can’t believe you caught me. It isn’t what it looks like.

I can explain.

It’s the first time, I promise, and I don’t know what came over me. I just got this idea, and, well, there’s no sense in hiding it, is there? Fine. I’ll come clean.

I admit it. I AI’d myself.

There! Happy now?

Even if you’re not, I actually was. Am! I learned something about myself, or at least about myself as the internet might see me, and maybe that will prove useful in better understanding my books from an outsider’s perspective. Maybe it’ll even inform how I approach marketing going forward. Who knows?!

Now that we’ve got the unpleasantness out in the open, let’s at least explore what ChatGPT 4o thinks about a topic about which I am a subject-matter expert, including—

• What it got right

• What it got wrong

• What this tells us about how large language models (LLMs) work

• What this means for how trustworthy we should find LLM outputs

• How we might still make good use of what LLMs do well

To do this, we’ll walk through the full text of the conversation, step by step. The transcript we’ll be using for this discussion can be found here.

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First Impressions

Before we dive in too deep, I should say I was surprised ChatGPT knew about me at all, not that I necessarily should have been. ChatGPT 4o can browse the web for current information, an improvement over the up-to-September-2021 dataset its predecessor models were trained on.

Given those predecessors were trained on data through September of 2021, I really shouldn’t have been surprised it knew about me, as the bulk of my digital footprint as an author was between 2016-2020.

Yes, it’s been a few years. Please don’t think me washed up.

Or do. I’ll be over here in the meantime telling myself in the mirror that I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me.

What It Gets Right

Here’s a list of where ChatGPT went right—

• Wisconsin author

• Speculative and science fiction

• Pen name R.R. Campbell

• Imminent Dawn

• Contributions to community

• Topics of speculative fiction work

Where It Flatters Me

I’ll be honest: it was nice to see a nod to genre blending, complex characters, and thought-provoking themes. If this is what the internet really thinks about my books, that’s a win, and one I’ll take.

Where It Goes Wrong

For as much as I might want to be reassured by its observations about genre, character, and theme work, well, it gets harder to take as gospel given what ChatGPT got wrong, which were far baser facts. A couple of notes—

• Imminent Dawn is not a series; it’s the first book in a series

• EMPRESS is not the name of that series; it’s EMPATHY

• EMPATHY (or, if you’re ChatGPT, EMPRESS) is not a trilogy

I’ll expound on why I think it got wrong the facts it got wrong below, but my first thought about what it got wrong was actually, Dang, can you imagine trying to use this thing as a student to write papers about people or their works?

Not that I expect anyone to be writing papers about me or my books, but… it was a thought I had.

What? ChatGPT may be capable of flattery, but no one flatters me like I flatter me.

Needless to say, given these errors, I thought I’d call one of them out and see what ChatGPT had to say about it.

First, it was reassuring to see ChatGPT get it right when challenged, though that patterns with how it ordinarily responds to pushback, at least in my experience.

That said, I do still get nervous when ChatGPT is so accommodating; this has meant historically that it might have overcorrected and become a citizen of hallucination nation, but, thankfully, that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

I could quibble with the characterization of mind-to-mind communication, but it is technically true. I was a little surprised it had gotten this far into describing the series without describing how that mind-to-mind communication occurred, namely via an internet-access brain implant.

At this juncture, though, I became interested not only in the objective, but the subjective as well. To do this, I responded to the question at the end of its most recent message with—

Yes, please tell me more about the series and how it has been received. Is it popular?

ChatGPT responded with a wall of text to this one, so let’s take it section by section.

This improves on mind-to-mind communication by getting more specific with direct neural communication, in my opinion, but it drops a big oof on us by listing Event Horizon as having a publication year of 2020.

More on that later, though. Here’s the next chunk of text it sent along.

This is actually a fantastic summary of the key themes and storyline, especially for the first book.

The problem? It gets the last name wrong of the only character it chooses to name.

It is close, however. The character’s actual name is Dr. Wyatt Halman, and the error ChatGPT makes here is in the same vein as the error it made earlier by calling it the EMPRESS series instead of the EMPATHY series.

I’ll expound on the likely reason for this mistake later, but for now, let’s look at the next bit of its response.

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This is, again, an exceptional summary overall. It does err in continuing to refer to EMPATHY as a trilogy, but I haven’t had a chance to correct it on that yet; remember, this is all still in response to a single question I asked it earlier.

I also can’t say whether EMPATHY compares to The Circle. I’ll admit I’m not familiar with Eggers’ work (should I check it out?), and this was the first time I’d seen my work compared to his, which means this is either a hallucination or there’s some media out there in which this comparison is made.

Maybe I’m being harsh on myself—or, well, the series—but I was surprised to see it be so generous with respect to EMPATHY’s popularity. I thought for sure it’d take a look at metrics like the number of reviews on the most common platforms and go, “Meh, looks like it didn’t do as hot as the author might have liked, sales-wise,” but no! Instead, it focused on a loyal readership and that it is—and this is according to ChatGPT, mind you—a standout in its genre.

The more I thought on it, though, I do think it’s fair to say EMPATHY has a loyal readership. People do still reach out from time to time to ask if I have more planned for the series (more on that here), which isn’t nothing.

But okay, back to the chat. ChatGPT has asked me a question, and I have an answer for it.

Okay, well, I have a question for it, and it’s one based on the glaring error it made much earlier in its most recent response.

When challenged, ChatGPT again does get it (mostly) right, which is reassuring.

It is true that Event Horizon was announced as the third installment in the series, and, to be fair, it was originally slated for publication in 2020. The rub is that, as a result of disagreements between me and my publisher with respect to how the book’s contents should be presented (they wanted to do a Martin-esque A Feast for Crows-A Dance With Dragons split given the number of POV characters and amount of ground covered), I ultimately pulled the book from publication.

To be fair, I don’t know if I ever shared that information publicly. This all happened in February and March of 2020, so one might understand how an announcement would have gotten lost in the fray. Confusion and delay, indeed!

ChatGPT does continue to insist on the bit about it being a trilogy—it was (is?) planned to be a pentalogy—but I don’t need to keep picking that nit.

What happened to the EMPATHY series?

Where does this leave us?

We’ve had a chance to review the conversation, to see where ChatGPT got it right, mostly right, and where it got me plain wrong.

In the next installment in this series, we’ll take a closer look at how ChatGPT likely made the mistakes it made, what that tells us about how LLMs work, and how we might use this knowledge to good effect going forward.

In the meantime, if it’s not too personal of a question, tell me in the comments: have you ever AI’d yourself? What did the LLM get right about you, and where did it come up short?

Current Status

As of December 2024, the EMPATHY sci-fi saga is out of print, with Imminent Dawn and Mourning Dove being de-listed by their original publisher at my request.

I’m grateful to NineStar Press for the opportunity they were willing to give this series when I initially signed with them in 2018, and I’m excited about what this reversion of rights means for the series going forward.

History of EMPATHY

What started as a short story I wrote in the early 2010s would, over the course of the coming years, grow into a multi-perspective novel-length manuscript titled Imminent Dawn. Here are the highlights of its progression thereafter.

2018

• Imminent Dawn is brought aboard for publication with NineStar Press.

2019

• Mourning Dove, the sequel to Imminent Dawn, is similarly offered a publishing contract with NineStar.

• Imminent Dawn and Mourning Dove are published in January and April, respectively.

• Event Horizon, the third book in the series, is drafted and likewise offered a contract for publication.

2020

• After considering the best way to present the series going forward, I ask that Event Horizon’s March 2020 release be postponed indefinitely.

• Imminent Dawn is named as a finalist in the International Book Awards by American Book Fest.

2024

• At my request, NineStar Press reverts to me the rights to the first three books in the EMPATHY series.

• I begin to rewrite Imminent Dawn to account for changes in the current technological landscape as well as the evolution of my approach to storytelling.

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What Comes Next

I’m determined to see through the rewrite of Imminent Dawn before I progress to doing the same with Mourning Dove and Event Horizon.

It is my intention to re-release the first two books of the series in conjunction with Event Horizon in 2026.

Bear in mind, this will require revisiting and reworking hundreds of thousands of words, and it is my aim to ensure that the subsequent books in the series are also outlined in full before the first three books are published once again.

I’ll provide updates on the rewrites as they progress. Be sure to subscribe below to ensure you get the latest news about the EMPATHY series going forward.

It’s been a minute.

In fact, it’s been 1,342,080 minutes, more or less, since I last sent out an author newsletter.

Since then, I’ve had time to adjust to a new career in a new city, to find my footing and feel, at long last, home once more.

I’ve had time to pause, too, and to reflect: on who I was as an author, on how it affected me as a person, on what it would mean for me—and how I’d go about it—if I ever got back in the game.

Today, finally, I do.

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Introducing R: On Everything

Together, we’ll elevate one word above all others. It will serve as our north star, our guiding principle in choosing what we explore and when we explore it. We will follow that word where it leads—not blindly, no, but with a sense of purpose, with a defining philosophy in place.

And that word? Curiosity. That purpose? Community.

So, let’s learn together. Let’s explore the intersections of publishing and technology, of leadership and culture and everything in between. Let’s explore everything that keeps us curious.

It won’t always be easy, but it will be worth it.

With that worthiness in mind—and with our curiosity carrying us forward—let’s get started. You’ll get an update on the EMPATHY series tomorrow, followed by the first of a new series of weekly posts beginning on Saturday.

In the meantime, happy new year, everyone. Keep curious.

I have come and gone a number of times over the years.

A tide of enthusiasm accompanies the comings. Unrelenting inspiration swells, manifesting in proclamations of a renewed sense of purpose, of a commitment to a new project, a new vision, a new sense of self.

The goings, though? The goings vary.

Some are announced. They come in the form of blog posts, of newsletter declarations, of social media mentions.

Others, still, are quiet, are little more than suggestions of an absence felt before it is confirmed, assuming it’s confirmed at all.

No matter how the goings have arrived, however, they have always arrived, and though today is a day for going, it is not, as has often been the case, a withdrawal.

Today is a day for going forward, for uniting these comings and goings in a movement guided not by aspirations of more, but by curiosity.

So, this time, on everything. This time, all of me.

More to come. Keep curious.

In the first two parts of this series, we explored the pitfalls of the passion hypothesis and the strengths—and limitations—of the craftsman mindset. Along the way, we examined how passion alone can lead to burnout and frustration, while an over-reliance on skill-building can erode fulfillment if pursued without regard for personal autonomy or joy.

Now, in this final installment, I'd like to propose a new way forward: a marriage of passion and craft that leverages the best of both approaches to create a sustainable, fulfilling career. Below, I'll lay out five principles for integrating passion into a craft-driven framework, drawing on lessons from both my experience and Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You.

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1. The Confluence of Mastery and Passion

The allure of “following your passion” can be intoxicating. Who wouldn't want to leap out of bed every morning, driven by the idea of doing what they love? But as we've seen, passion alone is often an insufficient foundation for a career. Without mastery, passion is like relying on kindling alone to fuel a fire—it may burn brightly for a time, but it will fizzle without fuel to sustain it long term.

Mastery, on the other hand, creates value. By developing rare and valuable skills, you accumulate what Newport calls “career capital,” the currency that allows you to negotiate for the autonomy, flexibility, and meaning that self-determination theory argues many of us rely on for fulfillment in our work.

And though passion may nudge us down a particular path, it doesn't always have to lead the way; it can follow you—complementing your pursuit of mastery to become that sustaining fuel—as you burn more brightly, becoming so good they can't ignore you.

2. Choose Objective Fields When Possible—Or Redefine Success in Subjective Ones

Some careers offer clearer paths to success than others. In software engineering, for example, the criteria for success are often objective: does your code work? Does it scale? Is it secure?

By contrast, fields like publishing thrive on subjectivity; success can depend on timing, taste, and luck as much as skill or effort.

This doesn't mean you should abandon subjective fields entirely—especially if they hold your interest—but it's important to redefine success in those areas. Instead of focusing on external sources of validation (e.g., book deals or landing on a bestsellers list), pivot instead to embracing the pride that comes from creating the work itself or connecting with a community of like-minded creators. In all cases, understanding the dynamics of your chosen field will help you align your efforts with achievable outcomes.

3. Balance Craft and Personal Fulfillment

The craftsman mindset teaches us to double down on skill-building, but skill alone doesn't guarantee satisfaction. As I've learned, investing in the wrong opportunities—no matter how lucrative or well-aligned with your skillset—can erode autonomy and leave you feeling unmoored.

To counter this, balance your pursuit of craft with personal fulfillment. This might mean saying no to projects that don't align with your values or carving out time for passion projects that reignite your sense of purpose.

With respect to my work as a software engineer, I've found immense value in blocking off Friday afternoons for what I call Exploration Afternoons, where I work on pet projects that excite me and expand my skills in directions that feel meaningful.

Meanwhile, in my capacity as an author and blogger, I still find value in reading, writing, and reflection in the mornings as I drink my coffee to start the day. Whether what I write or read ultimately leads to content that is consumable by others is irrelevant; it's in the notion that I've taken the time to stimulate my curiosity that I find the most value.

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4. Integrate Passion into Craft

While passion may not be a reliable career compass on its own, it can complement and enhance your work when thoughtfully applied. By bringing your unique perspectives and external passions to your field, you can stand out from the crowd and create a career that feels authentically yours.

For example, my love of storytelling has shaped how I approach software engineering, particularly when presenting technical ideas to colleagues or advocating for user-friendly solutions. Your passions don't have to align perfectly with your job description to add value—they just have to be integrated in a way that feels natural and impactful.

5. Leverage Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness

At the heart of self-determination theory lie three psychological needs: autonomy (control over your work), competence (mastery of your craft), and relatedness (connection with others). The craftsman mindset aligns well with these principles, but it's up to you to ensure your work supports all three.

Take autonomy, for instance. I regained a sense of control over my time and focus by leaving behind ventures that demanded more than they gave and transitioning into a field where deliberate practice yields tangible results. Competence followed as I honed my skills, and relatedness grew as I found peers who shared my interests and values.

Whether you're in publishing, tech, or another field entirely, designing your career around these principles can maximize both satisfaction and sustainability.

The Path Forward

So, where does this leave us? Should we abandon passion altogether in favor of pure pragmatism? Absolutely not. Passion has its place—it just shouldn't be the sole guide for your career. By combining the deliberate skill-building of the craftsman mindset with the joy and individuality of your passions, you can create a career that offers both purpose and satisfaction.

And if it's true that the best things in life come from balance, then perhaps the real secret isn't to follow your passion, but to shape it—and yourself—along the way.

Why Skill Triumphs Over Passion: The Craftsman Mindset

“Ask not what your career can do for you. Ask what you can do for your career.”

This, in a nod to the Kennedy inaugural address, is one way to distill the craftsman mindset. Rather than expecting to follow one's passions to the ideal job—which focuses on the value one's career can offer them—those who adopt the craftsman mindset instead sharpen their craft through deliberate practice in order to accumulate career capital, which they can later exchange for greater autonomy and fulfillment.

In part two of this multi-part series, we'll consider examples of the craftsman mindset in action before examining its results and identifying the gaps it leaves behind.

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Craftsman at Work

In So Good They Can't Ignore You, author Cal Newport lays bare the craftsman mindset and how it better aligns with what actually brings people joy in their careers, namely autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

If these terms seem familiar, you're likely already acquainted with self-determination theory, which posits that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the psychological needs that “underlie growth and development,” as the University of Rochester Medical Center describes it.

Autonomy, one might point out, is precisely what those who pursue the passion hypothesis garner for themselves. After all, if one follows their passion, will they not find themselves with a career that empowers them to do what they will, when they will, as they see fit?

This was not my experience as a full-time author, nor is it the experience of thousands of entrepreneurs whose work lives have long since eclipsed whatever might have remained of their personal lives—none of which is to mention the lack of autonomy they might experience in their work itself.

For example, though I had cultivated—or at least believe I cultivated—a great depth and breadth of competence in the realm of creative writing and, in doing so, tapped into a strong sense of relatedness via the expansive and engaged writing community, I had to take pains to ensure I had time to focus on my own writing day to day.

Between an obligation to social media algorithms (platform, platform, platform), an always-on-time production schedule for the Writescast Network, and my freelance editing clients, there was always someone who depended on me to deliver for them. In time, these pressures consumed me as they have so many others—including those detailed in the early pages of So Good They Can't Ignore You.

For my part, I felt the only way to reclaim a sense of self was to discontinue my editing services and shut down the Writescast Network. In other words, I had to trade relatedness and public-facing demonstrations of competence to reclaim the autonomy I had lost in my adherence to the passion mindset. It's only thereafter that I used this rediscovered autonomy to tactically invest in upskilling alongside others who were looking to do the same.

From Craft and Passion to Craft and Craft Alone: A Risky Proposition

Having successfully followed my passion to a career in publishing, it felt dangerous to abandon that which vocational awe had led me to believe was an extraordinary privilege. It took little reflection to recognize that casting that privilege aside to enter a highly-competitive, ever-changing field did not always seem like the best proposition.

After all, I'd made a years-long investment in upskilling in the world of all things writerly, which, in its own way, suggests that the craftsman mindset isn't all it's cracked up to be. Simply put, an investment in sharpening my craft in one field had once led me astray; why did I believe I would find a better balance in a field not my own?

There are a couple of reasons for this: differences between the fields themselves and my own poor investments of career capital.

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Fields of Play, by Which I Mean Work

Working in tech distinguishes itself from publishing in a number of ways, one of which is along objective-subjective lines. By this, I mean there is almost always something subjective when it comes to evaluating the outputs of authorship (read: books, short stories, query letters, etc.).

Contrast this with working as a software engineer, where, at the end of the day, your code either satisfies acceptance criteria or it doesn't. If your code works and you're on a tight delivery schedule, congratulations! Let's merge it and begin the delivery cycle anew. If you're not up against a deadline, yeehaw. You've got plenty of time to take that already-working code and fine-tune it further for future-proofing and performance.

These contrasts are of course simplifications. One could make the argument that there is a sense of the objective that emerges when evaluating a manuscript. For example, imagine someone pitching their work as a capital-R romance when it's clearly contemporary fiction with a romantic element. This does happen, and there are objective (or close to objective) criteria for defining the lines between genres.

And in the world of software, there are clearly countless ways to engineer one's way to solutions. When those solutions are later reviewed by one's peers prior to acceptance into the greater codebase, subjective matters of style and approach can arise. However, everything that undergirds one's code is ultimately ones and zeroes the deeper down one drills, so the arguments to be made in favor of or against some approaches have their bases in the immutable.

The takeaway here is that engineering tends toward the objective; the same cannot be said for publishing. As a result of this difference, as one upskills with respect to the former, there is a greater likelihood of correlation between skill and success.

The appeal of this, to me, made taking the risk of starting from close-to-zero in a new field more than worth it. There was always the chance that it wouldn't work out, but with enough dedicated study and self-advocacy, I could see a way forward in engineering in ways that were far more uncertain in publishing.

Bad Bet

I'd be remiss to not count my own poor investments as among the contributing factors to my demise as an individual who worked in publishing full time. When I signed my first publishing contracts and left my job in regulatory affairs to focus on writing, I suddenly found myself facing a dilemma I had not yet encountered: I had to—or felt I had to—justify my choice to abandon my career by making money from writing-related work as soon as possible.

This is a natural fear to have had, but I went about addressing it in ways that weren't in alignment with my long-term goals. The quickest way to generate income was to trade in the career capital I'd been accumulating (industry and craft knowledge) and expand my client base as an editor. This required me to increase my reach as a podcaster, which required me to record more episodes, which required me to spend more time on social media to promote them, all of which was, again, in service of expanding a client base that would require more of my time.

The end result of this cycle was one that pressed me to spend more and more time away from the very thing I'd left outside-the-home-employment to do: write. In other words, I'd made a bad bet with my career capital; rather than focusing exclusively on my own work in order to increase the likelihood of sustainable success, I surrendered nearly all of the autonomy I had earned for myself in those years of honing my craft as a writer and establishing myself as a trusted voice in the writing community.

The cycle that underlies this series of events is discussed in So Good They Can't Ignore You. It is also, affirmingly, not an unusual circumstance for those who adopt the craftsman mindset to find themselves in. When one has become sufficiently skilled as to attract the attention of others, the advice the author gives is to embrace opportunities that give you more autonomy and reject those that do not.

It should go without saying that I really wish I'd read this book years ago.

Knowing what I know now—and given the industry differences described above—my belief that I could find a better balance in a field not previously my own should be much more understandable.

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Autonomy and Control: Lessons Learned and Applied in Engineering

On that notion of embracing that which grants one more control, though: I did lose some autonomy by returning to more traditional employment. I'm beholden to direction of the organization and my department, yes, but this was to be expected. The career capital I'd cultivated in publishing was not, unsurprisingly, wholly transferable to this new-to-me field of software engineering.

But, in the three years since I made this career transition, I've already found ways to accumulate industry-specific career capital for myself, which has translated to greater autonomy and, as self-determination theory would have it, an increased sense of job satisfaction.

It may seem that I've just contradicted myself. How can I be beholden to an organization's mission while still having opportunities to pursue that which appeals to me while on the job?

Because I make time to do the latter.

Every Friday afternoon, I have my calendar blocked off with a big red do-not-disturb meeting that reads Exploration Afternoon. During that time, I work on pet projects whose purposes range from making me or my team more efficient to building apps that ensure customer support teams are able to resolve client inquiries as quickly as possible.

Despite the success these Exploration Afternoons have brought me—and how they've helped me further my technical skills—I know I'm not, nor do I believe I will ever become, the kind of engineer for whom reading textbooks about Typescript design patterns is an ideal weekend. Those engineers have a unique marriage of craft and passion for this specific field, and it's these individuals to whom I can turn when highly specialized knowledge is required.

At the same time, it's also these folks one must compete with for promotions.

This could engender a sense of embitterment or fear: if my relative lack of passion for the close-to-the-metal technical aspects of my day job is unlikely to position me for long-term success, have I perhaps chosen the wrong career path? This is where the craftsman mindset comes up short. I'll argue that the craftsman hypothesis, when taken to its extreme, embraces the notion that only most highly skilled individuals in a field can ever expect to succeed in that space.

As we've explored here, skill is deeply important, yes, but one's passions need not be aligned with an industry's stereotypes to enjoy success. In fact, as I'll argue in the next post in this series, bringing one's unique, external passions to a position that would not ordinarily emphasize them can create an ideal environment to stand out from the crowd. In the long run, this helps one further develop a sense of autonomy, feel a sense of relatedness, and demonstrate one's competence all at once.

And wouldn't acolytes of self-determination theory take solace in that? I know I do, and I'm hopeful you will as well after reading part three in this series.

Don't Follow Your Passion

This is the opening salvo of Cal Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You, which, admittedly, made for a tough opening chapter to a book I'd very much looked forward to reading.

I've written plenty about the notion of passion over the years, including in ways that, in retrospect, perilously bought into the injurious notion of vocational awe. I even did an entire podcast episode about writing one's passions back in 2020, as well as a separate episode altogether about how a penchant for passion-hopping led one guest from a career as a professional hockey player to one as an author.

And why shouldn't this have been celebrated? The belief that one should follow their passions is, in our culture, axiomatic; find what you love, follow it where it leads, and never work a day in your life.

That's the adage, anyway.

Now, even as someone who knows firsthand that the notion of never working a day in your life when pursuing one's passion is an absolute falsehood, I found myself struggling to read beyond the initial pages of Newport's So Good They Can't Ignore You.

And yet, here I sit having finished the book, bracing myself to share with you that, believe it or not, I think I'm now with Newport. Don't follow your passion.

Why? Because there's something better. There's something more than, and I want you to have—to become—that more than, too.

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The Pitch to Ditch the Passion Pit

“The key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you're passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion.” This is, as Newport calls it, the passion hypothesis.

He goes on to argue, by way of others' career journeys, that the passion hypothesis often leads to chronic job hopping and crippling self-doubt, going so far as to say that “telling someone to follow their passion is not just an act of innocent optimism, but potentially the foundation for a career riddled with confusion and angst.”

His arguments against the passion hypothesis are well supported; though he acknowledges our culture is riddled with tales of much-heralded entrepreneurs who claim to have followed their passions to achieve great success, the truth is often far more complex. In profiling these and other figures—Steve Jobs among them—he demonstrates that for every one of these exalted fables, there are countless others whose spirits have been crushed after they left their careers behind to start youth yoga studios, lifestyle blogs, and other doomed-to-fail ephemera undergirded only by the shaky notion that if one's passion shines through, the pay, acclaim, and autonomy of entrepreneurship will follow.

I won't detail here the specifics of the individuals who Newport interviewed for the book (you can—and should—read the book for yourself if you'd like all of that), but I will share how frightening it was to find myself relating to the arguments he constructed over the course of its first chapter before, in the next post, we examine Newport's counter to the passion hypothesis: the craftsman mindset.

Riches and Ruin

My experiment in following one's passions wasn't one of woe alone. On the contrary, jumping ship on a burgeoning career in international regulatory affairs (sound familiar?) to achieve my dream of becoming an author was, at the time, an extraordinary gift.

How many people can say they were willing to take that leap? How many people can say it led to their books making it to print? How many people can say it provided opportunities to speak at conferences, to read and write as the pillars of one's day, to mentor and coach others on how they can improve their chances of doing the same? Very few people, it turns out, and I remain grateful to have had all of these experiences (and, to the extent I'm able, to continue to have them to this day).

That said, and this will not be surprising for those of you who have watched me come in and out of passion-first pursuits over the years, my experience was not without its pitfalls. I've detailed elsewhere the pitiful pay and fraught power dynamics one endures in publishing. And that autonomy I expected with respect to reading and writing all day? Between the purported need (read: industry demand) for authors to build a platform from which to preach—and the hustle required to keep up with ever-changing social media algorithms—well, it's enough to make one feel as if they've traded a career working for a buck for one that has them working for the Zuck.

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None of this is to mention that my particular pursuit of my passion led me to an ecosystem where subjectivity rules the day. Publishing is, to put it plainly, not a meritocracy. The effort one puts in to honing their craft and cultivating captivating stories does not correlate strongly with the outcomes of those efforts. I can attest to that, personally, having worked with dozens of authors over the years whose work absolutely astounded, but who never once found the traction they or their books deserved. Meanwhile, you needn't pluck too many tomes from the shelves of your local bookstore to find yourself questioning how, exactly, a particular tale made it through all of the industry's hurdles to wind up in print.*

If this sounds frustrating, it is! And in what does it have its origins? In the misguided belief that to sow one's passions is to, without question, reap a life of joy in the long run.

The Craftsman Cometh

What's one to do, then? Abandon all hope? Accept a fate as a desk-tethered paper-pusher?

Not at all.

In So Good They Can't Ignore You, Newport posits that adopting the craftsman mindset is the true key to occupational satisfaction, and in part two of this multi-part series, we'll explore what makes the craftsman mindset so appealing—as well as where it comes up short. Then, in the third and final installment, we'll take a look at how the marriage of passion and craft may, in fact, be the key to loving one's work and, most importantly, oneself.

*As someone who looks back on some of their publications and goes, “Oof,” I am not exempt from this outcome. I try to tell myself they can't all be winners, but… it still hurts to think about.

From the Light (Mode), Darkness

Among the more popular trends in UI/UX in the last few years is the build-out of dark modes to create a more robust and accessible online experience. Think you're unfamiliar with the idea of dark mode? That may not be as true as you think.

In the upper-right hand corner of this page, you'll see either a sun or moon-and-stars icon. Clicking or tapping that icon will fundamentally change the site's appearance, shifting it to either the more traditional white-out background with black text or to an experience that is comprised of light text against a dark background. The latter, which I made the default experience as part of my recent site migration, is what is known as dark mode.

Dark Mode as a Matter of Accessibility

One thing you may notice in shifting between light and dark mode is, quite simply, how it feels. If you don't believe me, try a couple of toggles for yourself now. You may notice that, after a few seconds of engaging with the site in light mode, your eyes strain to endure the blast of light.

Now imagine staring at light-mode-only interfaces for forty hours per week (longer if you count all that time staring at your phone while doing, well, literally anything). Oof. Ouch. Those poor, poor eyes.

Even if you're not feeling the strain personally, you don't have to take your own experience (or my word) as gospel. The Bureau of Internet Accessibility, for example, cites that dark mode "has substantial benefits," and Perkins School for the Blind adds that "[dark mode] can be especially beneficial for users with low vision and light sensitivity."

It would seem, then, that dark mode shouldn't be an alternative, but rather the standard. Why provide a mode toggle at all?

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Do Not Go Brusquely Into that Good Night

As it turns out, despite its benefits, dark mode can cause trouble for some users, including those with dyslexia, which could affect as much as 17% of the U.S. population according to the University of Michigan's Dyslexia Help Center.

It seems, then, that offering users the option to choose between a light mode and a dark mode is the way to go, but how does one add a dark mode to their site?

Let There Be light-dark()

Before we explore light-dark()—one of the latest ways to add a secondary mode to one's site—I should note that light-dark() is not how I ultimately chose to implement dark mode via the toggle at the top of the page. We'll explore the reasons why I opted for a distinct approach later, but light-dark() does offer a light-weight, CSS-native approach to making dark mode available to your site's users, so it's worth knowing how to take advantage of it.

Alright, all of that said, I think we're ready for the how-to.

The What and How-To of It All

light-dark() is a CSS function that allows you to easily implement light and dark themes on your site. It requires no JavaScript, no third-party packages, and no additional HTML elements. In other words, it can be implemented only with vanilla CSS, making it, as I mentioned earlier, about as light-weight as light-weight can be.

Spin Up a New App

For the purposes of this exploration, let's spin up a new React app called theme-machine with Vite.

Note: You may be prompted to install Vite when running the first command. If you are, do so.

npm create vite@latest theme-machine -- --template react
code theme-machine

Once you've got your app open in your IDE, be sure to install the necessary dependencies before running the app.

npm i && npm run dev

Now head to http://localhost:5173 in your browser to see the Vite template in action. If you're an acolyte of the darkness like me—by which I mean you have already set your OS to prefer dark mode—you'll notice that the Vite template is already in dark mode.

If the Vite React template is already preference-responsive out of the box, we're done, right? Ha! Only if you plan to turn your back on light-dark()!

As it turns out, the Vite React template achieves a similar effect to light-dark() by implementing the prefers-color-scheme media query instead. This can be seen in portions of the index.css file the template generates below.

:root {
  ...
  color-scheme: light dark;
  color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.87);
  background-color: #242424;
}

...

@media (prefers-color-scheme: light) {
  :root {
    color: #213547;
    background-color: #ffffff;
  }
  a:hover {
    color: #747bff;
  }
  button {
    background-color: #f9f9f9;
  }
}

We could call it quits here, yes, and say we implemented both a light mode and a dark mode, but... we haven't yet done it with light-dark(), which, you know, is the entire point of the post, so let's pivot away from prefers-color-scheme and instead, at long last, implement light-dark().

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Turning On (or Off!) the Lights: Implementing light-dark()

To truly make this app our own, let's visit src/App.jsx in our theme-machine app and replace it with the following code.

import './App.css'

function App() {
  return <h1>It's me, your pal light-dark()</h1>
}

export default App

Next, replace the contents of src/index.css with the following code.

:root {
  font-family: Inter, system-ui, Avenir, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
  color-scheme: light dark;
}

body {
  margin: 0;
  display: flex;
  place-items: center;
  min-width: 320px;
  min-height: 100vh;
}

Alright, let's take a look at our browser and inspect our work so far.

We removed the prefers-color-scheme media query, yes, but if the app still appears in dark mode for you—which it should if that's the preference you've set at the OS level—that's to be expected at this juncture.

How? Why? Let's explore.

It turns out, setting color-scheme: light dark at the :root level is enough to trigger some responsive behavior in the browser, even if you haven't set additional color-related styles of your own. This is achieved by the browser applying its user-agent styles to the :root pseudo-class, which in turn apply to the rest of the page.

But we're not here to rely on the browser's default styles, are we? No, we're here to implement light-dark()! To do this, let's add some color and background-color styles to the body element styles in App.css, at long last making use of light-dark().

body {
  /* BEHOLD, LIGHT-DARK() AT LAST */
  color: light-dark(midnightblue, aliceblue);
  background-color: light-dark(aliceblue, midnightblue);  

  /* STYLES THAT WERE HERE BEFORE */
  margin: 0;
  display: flex;
  place-items: center;
  min-width: 320px;
  min-height: 100vh;
}

Color Me (Un)Surprised

light-dark() accepts more than named colors as arguments! You can use hex codes, RGB values, HSL values, or even custom properties.

In your browser, you should now see one of the following, depending on your OS's color scheme preference.

How It Works and Testing Both Themes

As one might surmise from the implementation above, light-dark() takes two arguments, with the first of these accounting for the color that should be used in light mode, and the second representing the color to display in dark mode. The function then returns the appropriate color based on the user's preference. In the case of the body element in our app, the text color is midnightblue in light mode and aliceblue in dark mode, while the background color is aliceblue in light mode and midnightblue in dark mode.

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Fun Fact

light-dark() can be used with any CSS property that accepts a color value, not just color and background-color!

To test both themes, you could, yes, change your operating system's preference (or, if you embrace dynamic color scheme preference, wait for the sun to go up or come down, depending on the time of day), but that's a bit of a hassle. Instead, you can use the browser's developer tools to simulate each theme.

In Chrome, this can be achieved by opening your dev tools, clicking the three dots in the top right corner, selecting "More tools," then "Rendering," and finally selecting the color scheme you'd like to simulate in the "emulate CSS media feature prefers-color-scheme" dropdown. You should see the page's styles update to reflect the selected color scheme the moment you select the option you'd like to simulate from the dropdown.

Congratulations and Cautions

You did it! You've successfully implemented light-dark() and know how to test it out for yourself.

That said, maybe don't start slapping it in all of your apps quite yet.

Why? Because as of the date of publication for this post, light-dark() has only just become available to all of the most popular browsers. MDN indicates it's available in all of the below browsers, though only in the latest versions of them.

Beyond browser limitations, it should be noted that light-dark() is also always tied to a user's color scheme preference, which means there's no innate way to let users toggle between light and dark mode when they visit your site. And, as we explored above, providing users with a toggle is important for any developer who wants to maximize their site's accessibility.

This is among the reasons I ultimately chose to forego the use of light-dark() when rebuilding this site. Providing users with the ability to toggle between light mode and dark mode was an important feature for me to provide, personally, but if you're looking to provide some baseline responsiveness with respect to your site's color scheme, light-dark() is, as stated previously, a light-weight, CSS-native approach that will get you to MVP expeditiously.

Just keep in mind that the M in MVP stands for minimum viable product, and I like to think that, whenever possible, we should strive for a little more than minimum, whether we're in the dark or the light.

The Right Book. The Right Time. Right On.

That's how I felt mere pages into The Good Enough Job by Simone Stolzoff. This came as a great relief; given its title, I came to the book with a bit of trepidation. Would it prove to be a thinly-conceived anti-work* screed? Would reading it undercut the momentum I'd been building to push myself out of my professional comfort zone?

I'm happy to report I was incorrect on both counts.

In the end, The Good Enough Job serves as an affirmation of what many skeptics of workism surely feel at times, even if it's difficult—or a professional hazard—to articulate.

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Workism: the -ism that Should Be an Isn't

In The Good Enough Job, Stolzoff presents workism as a philosophy that elevates work as the altar at which many (read: most) Americans worship, with the majority of the afflicted doing so unknowingly or, for those who do it with an alleged sense of agency, at their own peril.

What do you do for a living?

This is the question the book's introduction posits to be the first many Americans will ask another shortly after meeting. If that rings true, well, case in point: the primacy of this icebreaker as a supposed gateway into understanding a person as defined by the trade they ply is, on its own, an indicator of the value our culture places on work.

The book's own author concedes that they've “spent much of [their] career searching for a vocational soulmate, for a job that doesn't just pay the bills but is a unique reflection of who [they are].”

Again, if this resonates, you're not alone.

In fact, that single quote speaks to the heart of two of the themes in The Good Enough Job that hit home for me particularly hard as a reader, namely vocational awe and enmeshment.

The Awesome (Awful?) Power of Vocational Awe

Let me be clear: Simone Stolzoff did not coin the term vocational awe, nor does he take credit for having done so. On the contrary, Stolzoff cedes the stage through The Good Enough Job to the nine individuals he interviewed for the book, including Fobazi Ettarh, who introduced the world to the term vocational awe in the context of librarianship.

There are a number of facets to be explored with respect to vocational awe—Ettarh wrote an entire academic paper on the topic, after all—but for our purposes, we'll explore it as the notion that there are some professions inherently worth holding in high esteem, not because they are the highest-earning careers, but rather because they are jobs that individuals sacrifice a great deal for personally while often earning very little for the privilege.

The trade-off for those who assume these positions is, as the prevailing narrative would have it, that those in these fields are following their passion or doing what they love or realizing their dreams.

Those of you who have followed my blog or podcasts over the years may see where I'm going with this. Worse yet, you may be already feeling acutely the same pang that plagued me as I turned from one page to the next in this particular section of The Good Enough Job.

If you're not there yet, let me be direct. Authorship and work in publishing—especially the closer you are to content creation—far too often take advantage of those who participate in the ecosystem by abusing the air of vocational awe that surrounds it.

To expound on this, there was a time, years ago, when some debate emerged online about when one could say they had made the transition from “aspiring author” to “author.” Those in the gatekeeping camp argued that to be an author is to have earned it via publication, whereas those in the inclusive camp suggested that to have written is to have become a writer.

The merits of either argument aside, that the debate existed at all speaks to a consequence of vocational awe. If to be worthy of the social esteem associated with authorship requires some amount of sacrifice, should those who have made such sacrifices not demand some scrutiny with respect to that which, as they might have it, separates the doers from those who would do?

The debate itself is not particularly productive. It serves, ultimately, as a distraction from the true injury suffered by creators and creators-adjacent in the publishing ecosystem, which, excepting the exceedingly successful or otherwise wise to the game, preys on those whose passion drives it, no matter what they call themselves.

Some will object to this characterization of the business of publishing as predatory. I would challenge that reaction, however, by countering that any knee-jerk objection is likely a culturally conditioned extension of the very vocational awe to which I in this post—and Ettarh in her work in library sciences—draw attention. One not need look particularly long to uncover examples of the abuses—or opportunities for abuse—that exist in publishing: the unbalanced publisher-publishee power dynamic**, the proliferation of profiteering pay-for-play vanity publishers (or vanity publishers disguised in the clothing of independent presses), the litany of scams that prey on the hope of the aspiring, pay that amounts to pennies on the hour. The list goes on.

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And how is this ecosystem perpetuated? Via statements that anyone who participates in the industry as a creator should be so grateful they get to work in a field that lets them follow their passion.

This, I suspect, is the origin of the mantra that reminds creators to write not for the fame or fortune, but rather for the love of the written word. I believe this to be a right-minded recommendation, even if many may more shallowly interpret it as commentary on the likelihood of success as opposed to a philosophy that even those who succeed ought to abide.

The Good Enough Job explores these sentiments in a manner that lets readers understand vocational awe in the context of specific industries. The book also recognizes vocational awe as a notion whose very existence becomes an indictment of a culture whose regard for work makes willing sacrifices of those who embrace it, or at least those who embrace it as an extension of the workist philosophy.

Stolzoff does not stop at merely familiarizing readers with vocational awe, either. Instead, through Ettarh's story and his own commentary, Stolzoff provides a structure for understanding the impact of vocational awe and, critically, how one can find ways to overcome its corrupting effects. In this way, The Good Enough Job is not only a descriptive guide, but a prescriptive one as well, not only with respect to vocational awe, but to enmeshment as well.

The Loss of Me in Enmeshment

Listeners to the Writescast Network or visitors to this site (see the extended version of the about page) will have some familiarity with enmeshment already, even if not by that name.

Simply put, enmeshment describes the phenomenon of the loss of one's self to the idea of one's self as their career. For example, those affected by enmeshment may fail to draw a distinction between who they are as a person and their identity as, say, a paramedic, author, or software engineer.

I've written about—or at least hinted at—my experiences with enmeshment as an author, but my acquaintance with enmeshment extends beyond the realm of publishing. As part of my about-face from all things writerly, I ran headfirst into web development, not as a matter of passion, but desperation.

Having only understood my adult self as one defined by his trade, I found myself falling into the same traps that had ensnared me in my time as an author-first individual. At what point in my web development journey would I no longer be an aspiring engineer? And until I could drop aspiring from that sense of self, what did that mean in the in-between? If I was neither an author nor an engineer then, well, what was I?

That these questions were asked at all is indicative of the toll enmeshment—and a residual nastiness imposed by a longstanding adherence to vocational awe—can take on an individual's sense of self-worth in a culture so willing to entangle one's career and one's identity.

However, when Stolzoff writes “we are not born with a fixed identity; it's something we build over time,” I find myself refreshed. It's true, after all: how similar is your sense of identity now to the sense of identity you held at seven, nineteen, or thirty years of age? It's not as if one only comes into an identify of their own upon finding a career; imagine believing a seven-year-old lacks an identity because they haven't yet become a triple-threat astronaut-cowboy-archaeologist. Laughable, right?

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If we're willing to accept the notion of identity as malleable, we liberate ourselves relative to a paradigm that encourages one's sense of self to be defined by their occupation and the value one provides to stakeholders.

I'll point out that enmeshment need not be limited to one's vocation, either. I suspect the inspiration for this Tim Robinson sketch (if you have Netflix and can watch the full version, do) comes from the frequently-reported loss of personal identity associated with parenthood. When one's identity is consumed by the idea of being a parent, what happens when one becomes an empty-nester? Those individuals remain parents, of course, but, well, it's certainly not in the same way as when their children were still at home. And what became of those parents' senses of self while the kids were under their roof?

Here, again, we see the trappings of enmeshment. Whether via cultural conditioning, biology, or a sense of duty, the outcomes are the same.

More Than Through Less

It would be easy to, given the above, feel as though there is little reason for hope. If we're up against the prevailing narratives of the culture in which we persist—as well as, in the context of parenthood, thousands of years of evolutionary biology—what's to be done when we find ourselves stricken by vocational awe or unsure where we end and our careers begin?

When Megan Greenwell, the individual profiled for The Good Enough Job's chapter on enmeshment, says that she wonders “what percentage of [her] drive to work all the time is that [she] truly [loves] it, and how much is that [she doesn't] know what else to do with [herself],” the situation can feel even more dire.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Cultivating an awareness of these phenomena is an important first step in the journey to reclaiming one's autonomy and sense of self. By subsequently accepting ourselves as more than, we empower ourselves to be defined not merely by what we do for a living or by our relationships to others, but by who we are to ourselves, both now and in the future.

After all, despite Greenwell's lack of certainty regarding her relationship to work, Stolzoff writes that she still “sleeps, eats, and breathes journalism” but has “taken her foot off the gas [by leaving the industry in a formal capacity] for long enough to find worth in other ways too.”

And how has she done this? By spending time with family and, as Stolzoff recounts it, “by being a better friend than in any other period of her adult life.”

So, yes, we can be more without needing to do more. In fact, it's entirely possible that one might have to do less to become more than.

To do this requires courage, yes, but it's a courage that lies at the heart of all the whos who make our us. That courage can be channeled. It can be directed. It can be the key to unleashing that more than inherent within us all.

And it can start with the you who is reading this. It can start right now.

The Verdict

Ultimately, The Good Enough Job does more than a good enough job describing these and many other facets of the struggle to reclaim life from work, and I recommend it to anyone who has ever endeavored to understand themselves as more than any one act, job, or choice.

I suspect there are at least a few of you out there.

*For the record, I hold acolytes of the anti-work movement in a fair amount of esteem. That said, as with many other movements on the cutting edge of redefining or reframing deeply entrenched social or cultural narratives, there are a number of boisterous hangers-on who undermine the message and whose volume, I suspect, is increased by those who would see the movement stymied. It's far easier to uphold a prevailing narrative—even one worth questioning—when those who benefit from its hegemony make caricatures of select targets in the counterculture.

**Yes, this example is taken from the realm of music publication, but, as an "of the arts" industry that is historically difficult to break into without the aid of a record label, the point remains. As it turns out—excepting the obvious abuses at the hands of vanity publishers and outright scammers—it's hard to find individual authors speaking out about their naïveté having been taken advantage of by a publisher. This could be because it simply doesn't happen. I can think of at least one other reason why there might be an absence of stories about this, though, too. That said, I'm working on a follow-up post that will explore this in more detail and offer plenty of counterpoints to this assertion as well, so stay tuned.

Call Me Ishmael

On second thought, don't. I've had enough nicknames for one lifetime; the list needn't grow longer.

That I've had as many nicknames as there are stars in the sky is likely unsurprising, at least not when juxtaposed against the jack-of-all-trades theme that runs throughout this site.

And why shouldn't that be the case? The truth is I've been a bit of everything. Pizza-slinging psycholinguist? Check. Soccer-playing polyglot? You know it. Even in my youth, I was somehow both the kid with the lead in the school musical and a member of the state-championship-winning track team.

Go figure.

Ultimately, it's taken me a long time to understand—and to embrace—myself as an all-of-the-above person, and the only way to understand that for yourself is to see the story in sum, or at least the story as I've experienced it.

Big Plans

The year is 2012, and a bright-eyed boy by the name of, well, it's me. We're talking about me. Anyway, I graduated from college with big plans: I was heading to Brazil for three months to teach English and Spanish, and, once I returned, I planned to continue my independent language studies and apply to MIT's graduate program in psycholinguistics.

To think I'd be accepted wasn't unreasonable; I was a high-achieving student who had graduated from UW-Madison with a double major in Spanish and linguistics (with honors in the major!), and my junior- and senior-year hobbies consisted almost entirely of devouring the works of Chomsky, Ladefoged, and Pinker. I'd even written my honors thesis on the very approachable (and not at all unreasonable to bring up casually at dinner parties) topic of the psychological representations of underspecified vowels amongst speakers of languages that feature vowel harmony. Yeehaw!

Simply put, a world of opportunity was waiting for me, if only I had the determination to seize it.

As I saw it, things were going to work out precisely as planned (definitely! for sure! no doubt about it!), beginning with that three-month stint in Brazil.

Things were going to work out precisely as planned... no doubt about it!

Southward Bound

Has this ever happened to you? You head to another country for three months to teach a couple of languages, but then when you get there, it turns out there is no job and you've just moved like 4,000 miles almost entirely for the sake of it? Has this ever happened to you?

Yeah, it happened to me.

I'd spent the previous year preparing for this trip, taking accelerated Portuguese-language courses and setting aside whatever cash I could from my pizza delivery gig to save up for this southbound excursion, but I learned in a matter of days after my arrival that the opportunity I'd been preparing myself for was not, shall we say, as advertised.

At this point, I had two options. I could either instantly incinerate what savings I had remaining and move forward my return flight to the U.S.—where I'd presumably be cast into the fires of a good-old-fashioned post-graduation job search—or I could slowly incinerate what savings I had remaining and stay in Brazil, forging friendships and deepening my foreign-language fluency.

It's worth noting that only one of these options also came with diesel-strength espresso, and viewed through that lens, my choice was more or less made for me. Brazil it was!

In a surprise to absolutely no one, three months of largely unstructured time—fueled by copious amounts of the aforementioned espresso—led to interesting outcomes, the most notable of which was that I finally got around to writing that novel I'd been talking about for years.

The Great American Novel

Ah, yes. The Great American Novel. You know, the novel everyone writes when they sit down to write a novel, especially if it's their first. How hard could it be, right?

That the novel in question does not figure among my published works should tell you precisely how hard it is.

Naïveté aside, over the course of those three months, I did write something vaguely resembling a manuscript, a dream I'd had since I was in elementary school. I thought for sure that once I returned to the U.S., I'd not only land my first Real Job™, but I'd also apply to grad school and, naturally, get a novel published on the side.

This is not at all what transpired.

Best Laid Plans

Life comes at you fast, as they say, and I'm not sure life has ever come at me much more quickly than in my first few months back stateside.

After a fruitless series of interviews in the quest for the fabled Real Job™, I relented and returned to my pizza guy gig (which, I would later recognize, was a Real Job™ in its own right, but we don't have time for that right now). In between late night pizza delivery shifts, I wrote. Like, all the time. I even carried a back-pocket-sized notepad with me to write on when it wasn't practical to bust out my laptop.

I also sought community. Through the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Continuing Studies in Writing program, I enrolled in courses, connected with a critique group, and dedicated myself to attending it every other Saturday morning for years. It turned out I had far more to learn than I ever could have imagined, but I remained determined to see my work through to publication.

However, after two years of dedicated practice and study (and countless attempts to attract a literary agent to represent me and my work), I felt no closer to seeing my words in print, and the late-night pizza operation was finally taking its toll. Oh, and that psycholinguistics program at MIT... whatever happened to that?

Clearly on the verge of a quarter-life crisis, I did what any reasonable person in my position would do: I quit my job and went back to Brazil. Vambora!

Trade-offs, Trade-ups

My second stint in South America coincided perfectly with the 2014 World Cup, which Brazil hosted. After taking a month to rekindle my affinity for radioactive espresso and futebol, I concocted a plan: this time when I returned home, I'd focus not on my dream of becoming an author, but rather on the practicalities of becoming a real life adult who, I deeply hoped, would finally find himself one of those Real Jobs™ everyone kept going on about.

This, again, did not go as planned. It seemed that after a couple of additional years in the service industry, employers had me pegged as a lifer. More frustrated than ever, I coped by, you guessed it, returning to writing as much as I could in between job hunting and attempting to up-skill (my first flirtation with JavaScript!).

Then, on a late summer day in 2014, fate intervened, by which I mean the HR department of an agricultural firm. To support their sales in Latin America, they were in desperate need of someone who spoke Spanish and Portuguese, which, wouldn't you know it, were two skills I just so happened to have.

Imagine, now, a montage: me, struggling to settle into my first Real Job™ (is this really what everyone does for 40 hours a week until they retire or die?), learning the ins and outs of livestock and feed scales (not to mention the associated vocabulary in Spanish and Portuguese), jumping from the world of agriculture to a similar job in the field of medical devices (and, again, learning the associated vocabulary in Spanish and Portuguese), transitioning from sales support to international regulatory affairs, being offered a publishing contract for a novel—

Wait. What? Being offered a publishing contract for a novel?

Rise of All Things Bookish

Yup, there was no keeping me away from those novels I'd been working on. Despite the daily grind, I'd still been at the hustle: getting up early to write before work, writing on my lunch breaks, writing when I got home, still attending those critique groups on the weekends... the list goes on. It's also during this window that I founded the Writescast Network, which introduced me to hundreds of other authors and industry professionals over its four years in operation.

With a publishing contract signed (and a couple of others on their way to my inbox), I left the world of Real Jobs™ behind to finally commit to my ✨Dream Job✨.

The following years consisted of book launches, platform-building, speaking gigs, and coaching other authors in their pursuit of publication. For a brief time, I taught through the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Continuing Studies in Writing program and served on the board of the Wisconsin Writers Association. Oh, and my wife and I founded Kill Your Darlings Candle Company, which, as its mission statement would tell you, sustainably illuminated the lives of readers, writers, and their communities.

At long last, I was living the life I was meant to be living all along! Everything was exactly as it should have been. Perfect, really. Great. Good. Wonderful. Fine.

Why are you making that face? I said everything was fine.

Everything Was Fine (Or Not)

Like everyone else, I was not immune to the vagaries of the pandemic, during which one personal revelation hit me particularly hard: the path I was on was no longer sustainable, assuming it ever had been at all.

In the same way that the pizza delivery job's late night hours eventually chased me from the service industry, the round-the-clock maintenance of my work as an author, podcaster, writing coach, and business owner had more or less ground my soul into dust, and that's without mention of a truth I'd been ignoring for years—

I'd had a much easier time supporting myself as a pizza delivery driver than was ever going to be the case as an author.

More disillusioned than ever, I had to shake things up, and I knew I'd have to try something different. No amount of running away to Brazil was going to save me, not this time.

No amount of running away to Brazil was going to save me, not this time.

Enter Bootcamp

No, not the military kind, the coding kind. In assessing how to align my interests and skill set, I realized my background in linguistics and language learning—along with how much I'd enjoyed building websites for all of my entrepreneurial endeavors in the preceding years—might make me the perfect candidate to learn the languages of the web in pursuit of an entirely new career.

This time, however, my attempt to up-skill would be no mere flirtation with JavaScript. To make the most of the opportunity, I had to commit.

For the next six months, I dropped (almost) everything. The hours previously spent writing, podcasting, and teaching were replaced with hours of coding, committing, and learning. For the first time since college, I felt truly immersed in and challenged by an educational experience, and I look back now realizing how much I loved every minute of it.

The risk I'd taken to make this transition had paid off, or at least it would so long as I landed myself a job after the bootcamp's completion.

Fortunately, after countless interviews and a handful of offers, I accepted a position at a financial services and insurance firm in Milwaukee, about 90 miles east of where my wife and I lived outside of Madison.

The Only Constant Is Change

So, we packed up and moved, somehow managing to sell the candle company along the way and, for my part, publishing another novel while I settled into a new life in a new city with a new job in a new industry.

As one might expect, this transition was not without some bumps along the way, and plenty of secondary consequences accompanied the move. After seven years playing on the same soccer team, I had to bid the Men of the Night's Watch adieu and look for a team in the Milwaukee area with which I could ply that particular trade. We had to sweat it out while we waited for the sale of our Madison-area condo to close, and my wife had to adjust to the now fully-remote version of her own job.

And our cats Hashtag and Rhaegar, well, they were fine, honestly. They're cats.

Perhaps the biggest adjustment for me was my return to full-time employment outside of the home. After years of focusing on my own projects and workflows, I was thrust into the world of Jira boards and Agile development, and I learned rather quickly there are things no coding bootcamp can prepare you for.

But, just as I dedicated myself to getting the absolute most out of my bootcamp experience, I embraced the challenges of my new career as well, all while finding ways to apply my skill set from publishing in the software engineering space. After only seven months as an associate engineer, my commitment to squashing security vulnerabilities, developing documentation for Kubernetes namespace migrations, and starting a company-internal podcast to improve cross-functional communication had earned me a promotion (more on what I've done in the software engineering space can be found in the "boasts" section of the tech hub).

In my current role, I continue to complement my burgeoning technical repertoire with skills from my past by speaking at company events, representing my teams in Hackathon presentations, and writing on tech topics for the company-internal blog.

Stability, Or Something Like It

A few years into this new life in Milwaukee, I'm happy to report I'm finally finding the balance I've been in search of all these years. I'm embracing the idea that it's okay to be more than one thing. We contain multitudes, as they say; there's little sense in pretending otherwise. That's why, whenever you change pages on this site, the title associated with my name at the top of the page changes, too. Am I an author? Yes. A technologist? Yes. A blogger and podcaster and community builder and soccer player and pet padre and polyglot and—? Yes, yes, yes.

So, if ever you find yourself wondering who—or which of some subset of whos—you are, choose not to define yourself as any one of these; choose all of the above. It won't be easy—we can't be everything to everyone all of the time—but it will mean you can bring the most of yourself to the world every day, and that has to count for something.

Besides, if whatever you're doing isn't working out, there's nothing a trip to Brazil won't fix.

Well, I'm Back

It's been a while—nearly two years, to be exact—but golly, do I have some updates, one of which is the very site you're visiting now.

But first, since most of you are more likely familiar with me as an author than anything else (at least at this point), let's start there.

Author Business

Hey, remember Scambait? When I last posted, it had hardly been out for a month. Since then, your support and reviews have been wonderful to be on the receiving end of, and I'm thrilled to announce that (back in 2022), Scambait was named a finalist in the International Book Awards!

Of books I've written, Scambait remains a favorite for me, personally, so it was deeply gratifying to see it get that recognition.

In light of Scambait's success, one might be wondering, "what's next?" or, given that it's been two years without a writerly update, "what happened?"

Be patient. We're getting to that. Like, now.

Business Business

Those of you who subscribe to this Substack, follow me on Twitch (or did back when I was still streaming), or otherwise know me from around the web may also recall that in late 2021, my wife and I moved from Madison to Milwaukee. You might also know this move was part of a career transition for me.

For those who want to learn more, I documented all of that change extensively in this post, but one of the consequences of adapting to my new life as a full-time software engineer was that writing fell to the wayside.

Like way-way-way to the wayside.

... writing fell to the wayside. Like way-way-way to the wayside.

It pains me to share that since my last post in mid-May of 2022, I've sketched out ideas for novels, short stories, and even a poem or two, but when it comes to writing words in an actual manuscript, well, I have nothing to report.

This is likely astonishing for those of you who recall I was at one time a strong advocate for writing every day (or at least as close to every day as is possible), but at some point after that 2022 vacation to Puerto Rico, I realized I could no longer sustain that intense writing regimen while remaining sufficiently focused on the new career I'd uprooted my life for. Simply put, something had to give.

But it's not all bad news (I'll encourage you again to read the new post documenting the story so far to better understand everything that went into making the move to Milwaukee a successful one).

In fact, I'd say the break was a necessary one, and one that has me ready, again, to get back into the groove. A new groove.

Please don't throw it off.

New Business

In my time away, I realized something: at one point, I'd become so caught up in the idea of being an author that I forsook so many other parts of myself in service of that singular identity. And that was, dare I say, not great.

Like I detail throughout this new site and in that new post (can you tell I want you to read it?), I've returned to embracing the idea of self as more than, by which I mean we are more than any one thing, idea, or act. We are everything people, and I felt it was time I start acting like it.

Inspired by this notion to once again to clickity-clack at my keyboard, I decided enough was enough: I was no longer going to pay WordPress for something that, equipped with my new skills as a software engineer and web developer, I could do on my own.

And so, this new site was born. From scratch. Bits and bytes HTML tags and all.

I'd become so caught up in the idea of a singular identity, and that was... not great.

What To Expect

Everything is about to become a very important word, or at least everything as I see it.

As you bounce around this new site, you'll notice in the upper-left-hand corners that I change the descriptors under my name more often than a chameleon changes color (though I don't think they change color as often as we like to believe). This is intentional, and not, I hope, a defense mechanism (as is the case with chameleons).

The topics, ideas, and identities I hint at in those page banners and on the site's landing page are precisely the matters we're going to explore here going forward. We'll talk tech, language, literature, and life, and we'll do it in ways that stimulate our curiosity and expand our understanding of ourselves and the universe we live in.

That's the goal, anyway.

The Philosophy Going Forward

To achieve that goal, we won't embrace a regular posting schedule; I want to ensure that what I'm sharing with you is more than something thrown together to meet a personally-imposed deadline.

In this way, we'll focus more on quality than quantity, on purpose more than frequency.

And, if some of the pursuits I'm kicking around prove to be worth their while, there might be some surprises in store for you, too.

A Work in Progress

In the meantime, I ask for your patience. Building this site from the ground up was no done-in-a-day task, and mapping the WordPress version to this new one was not without its tribulations.

What this means from a visitor's perspective is that, for legacy blog posts, you may encounter awkward formatting or missing links. Images may be strangely sized (or missing altogether), and some previously available content may have been removed so that it can be refined and repurposed.

I promise you, though, your patience will pay off. It's all for the better, in the end, because we're better when we're all of us—when we're everything people—and I'm so looking forward to the everything we'll discover together.

It's been a whirlwind couple of weeks. While I worked on preparing When the Stars Conspire for another round of beta reads and sketched the initial shape of Not A Cult, I Promise, I also spoke at my first in-person writing-related event after two years of virtual speaking engagements.

Oh, and I spent some time on the beach for the first time in just as long (if not longer, honestly).

Lakefly Writers Recap

After originally having been slated to speak at the 2020 iteration of Lakefly Writers Conference—which would go on to be canceled in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the pandemic—I was invited to present at the 2022 installment of this fantastic event in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Here are some photos from my presentation on the Five Fun Floaties of Scene Structure and from around the conference in general.

Rolling Around Rincón

Okay, so we only rolled around Rincón if you count the rental car, but the point is this—my wife and I were able to go on our first vacation since February 2019 in recent weeks as well. This was our second trip together to Puerto Rico, though my wife has been there a number of other times for school and subsequently to visit friends.

And yes, I know I mentioned coffee on the beach in the post title, but I didn't happen to snap any pictures of me drinking coffee on our balcony overlooking the beach. You'll just have to take my word for it. Also, the cat? His name is Tuxedo, and he's the resident lounger-in-chief at the Tamboo Hotel in Rincón. Truly a celebrity.

Okay, Well, Back to Work

I'm really relieved and grateful to have had the opportunity to speak to the writing community as well as go on vacation again. We're already looking forward to our next trip, which we're hoping will be to Spain later this year.

But, in the meantime, it's back to work. I've got manuscripts to write and revise, and there's the ol' day job to check in for as well.

Share Your Experience

Until we connect again, tell me about a recent trip of yours in the comments (or, if you haven't taken a trip in a moment), tell me where you want to go next!

And want to have me speak at your event for readers or writers? Feel free to reach out in the comments.