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Joined August 2023
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May 12
"If there is no price you are the price"
The paradox of being online despite craving the offline.
This is what I'm reflecting on while reading Tommy Dixon's essay "How to end your extremely online era" in my garden in Puglia last Sunday.
Recorded this in one long take. Full video in the comments below.
(Discovered the essay in @MichaelDean_0 anthology "Best Internet Essays of 2025")
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my italian neighbors think I'm a writer which is technically true but the way they say it, "scrittore," sounds way more dignified than what I actually do, which is sit in my underwear typing on a laptop while a cat stares at me with contempt. in italian everything sounds like an ancient profession. they don't need to know about the carousels.
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hemingway wrote standing up. dickens walked 20 miles a day. beethoven counted exactly 60 coffee beans per cup. toni morrison wrote at 4am before her kids woke up. every great creator had a ritual that looked insane from outside and necessary from inside. mine is arguing with a cat and staring at a fig tree. doesn't have to make sense. has to be yours.
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when I don't feel like writing I write about not feeling like writing. sounds dumb. works about 60% of the time. "I don't want to write today because..." leads somewhere interesting more often than you'd think. the resistance is the material. the other 40% I close the laptop and go outside. both are acceptable. the only unacceptable outcome is staring at a blank screen for two hours and doomscrolling instead.
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Jun 12
I hate the word "sales." here's my version: I describe what I do. share what past clients experienced. say the price. don't follow up. don't manufacture urgency. don't "overcome objections." if it resonates you'll know. this approach is slower and I've never had a refund request. I'll take that trade.
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Jun 12
what to do when nobody engages with your posts: keep posting. the silence doesn't mean anything. I posted for four months straight before anyone consistently engaged. then one day someone DM'd me "I've been reading everything you write but never liked anything until now." lurkers are real. they're reading. they're just not ready to be seen reading yet.
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Jun 12
most lead magnets are garbage and everyone knows it. a PDF nobody reads in exchange for an email nobody opens. when I wrote the Becoming the Guide letters I decided they had to be good enough that people would pay for them. real writing, real vulnerability, real thinking. the people who subscribe actually want to hear from me. makes everything downstream easier.
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Jun 11
people underestimate how much aesthetics drive trust online. the font on your carousel. the grain on your photo. the weight of your typeface. your audience can't articulate why they trust you but half of it is visual. I've unfollowed people with great ideas because their feed looked like a canva template factory. sounds shallow. it's just how humans work (especially those of us that are visually-inclined).
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Jun 11
I stopped doing discovery calls and my business got better. the dynamic was wrong from the start. me performing competence while they decide if they can afford it. nobody's honest. now I just say here's what I do, here's the price, here's some writing so you can see how I think. the people who book this way are better clients. every single time.
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Jun 11
"finding your voice" isn't something that happens in a workshop. it happens around post 200. your first hundred posts are you imitating people you admire. the next fifty are you trying too hard to be different. then somewhere around 200 something clicks and you write like yourself without thinking about it. most people quit at 30 and wonder why nothing feels natural yet.
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Jun 11
All I want to do is walk, read and write. And maybe grow some vegetables.
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Jun 10
the four stages of building an online business: 1) excited about the idea 2) building things nobody asked for 3) wondering why nobody's buying the things nobody asked for 4) finally talking to a real human and realizing what they need is simpler than everything you built. most people stay in stage 2 for eighteen months. I stayed for two years.
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Jun 10
most people don't need a website in year one. I've made more money from a link in bio and a google doc than from any website I've built. the website is procrastination wearing a business costume. build it when someone googles your name. until then a bio, a link, and a real conversation is enough.
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Jun 10
everyone overcomplicates pricing. here's how I figured mine out: I picked a number that made me slightly uncomfortable and charged it. if everyone says yes immediately your price is too low. if nobody says yes for months it's too high. the right price makes you a little nervous every time you say it out loud. that nervousness is the signal.
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Jun 9
picasso could paint photorealistic portraits by age 14. spent the rest of his life unlearning realism to paint like a child. mastery is what you need before you can break the rules on purpose. I think about this when someone says they need "one more certification." you have enough. start making the weird stuff.
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Jun 9
the part of guidance work nobody warns you about is how lonely it gets. you hold space for people all day. process their grief, confusion, transition. close the laptop and the feelings that aren't yours somehow got under your skin anyway. having a real practice for this, not a "self care sunday" one, is the difference between lasting and burning out in two years.
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Jun 9
something I've noticed after working with about forty people on their brands: the ones who struggle most with messaging are usually the most interesting. they can't reduce themselves to a tagline because they genuinely contain multitudes. "find your one thing" advice actively harms these people. some of us are the portfolio. the variety is the brand.
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Jun 8
unpopular but I think journaling is overrated as a self-help tool. most people journal to vent which just reinforces the same loops. journaling that actually changes you requires sitting with a question for thirty minutes without answering it. that's the kind nobody teaches because it doesn't sell a pretty notebook.
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Jun 8
someone asked me yesterday what my "content strategy" is and I said "I write whatever I'm thinking about and hope someone relates." they looked at me like I was joking. I wasn't.
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Jun 8
the creator economy peaked in 2023 and there's a quiet correction happening. people deleting offers. simplifying. going from seven products to one. the maximalists are becoming essentialists. I talk to five or six creators a week and they're all saying the same thing: less is working better. the sequel to "build an empire" is "build something you actually enjoy running."
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Jun 7
the "raise your vibration" crowd and the hustle culture crowd are running the same program. both avoid sitting with what's actually present. one spiritualizes away the discomfort. the other productivizes it away. the person who can sit with discomfort without reaching for either escape is the one who actually changes. that person usually doesn't have a big following. sitting still doesn't make good content.
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