premeditated bangers
any good work has a surprising amount of history
2 months ago, I released what ended up being my most read blog post of all time.
People seemed to really resonate with this article, more than anything I’ve put out before. The writing was good, but it also helped that the subject matter was Riley, an absolute legend.
Lots of good things happened afterwards. I got to meet the co-founder of Notion, praise flooded my inbox, and some important people I’ve looked up to for years finally followed me back on Twitter. Riley also got a lot of fun inbound including an incredible potential job opportunity and props from a not-so-niche not-so-micro internet celebrity.
People really liked the title, to the point where it’s now the first search result for “training the idea muscle”. I have no idea how I came up with it. I thought it just came to me in a dream.
Turns out, I’d actually come up with it last May. I write a secret substack for myself and close friends where I just braindump and give weekly updates. It’s a really low pressure way to practice writing and build the habit without feeling pressured to “target an audience”. I’m 40 weeks in at this point, and every week I give the piece a funny nonsensical title. Scrolling through the archive recently, I found this:
Even further back, there’s a video in the piece from 2024 where Riley and our friends are dancing on stage at the finale of our SF wide scavenger hunt. No one else could really have that footage from that angle unless they were one of the 30 or so scavenger hunt helpers.
Even further back, Riley ran a fake steakhouse in NYC in 2023. I was supposed to help cook steaks there but my cousin was getting married so I skipped out, but because I was around Riley a little while he was planning it, I had stories that the public couldn’t.
Even to start off the profile, I pulled out receipts from 2020 to make a joke about b2b SaaS.
I say I spent a week with Riley to write the piece. And that’s true, except I’ll also joke that the piece was 5 years in the making, ever since we met in 2020.
Sometimes when I’m having an especially unproductive day, I’ll think about how the Beatles were able to write a song in 2 hours. They can write music that reaches millions of people in 2 hours! And it takes me 2 days to write a substack for 200 people. But then I think about how many days they have like that, and it’s probably few and far between.
Most of their days probably yielded no output at all. How many empty days did they have before getting one where everything they’d soaked up ambiently coalesced into something coherent?
I used to think of myself as idle. Now I think of myself as pre-banger. Many of my favourite people in any profession didn’t set out to make that profession their career. It just happened as a byproduct of stumbling through life.
JK Rowling took 5 years to write the first book of Harry Potter after writing 2 novels of ‘rubbish’ before the idea randomly came to her on a train to London.
Mark Carney is my favourite Canadian PM and heralded as the only world leader that ‘gets it’ nowadays, yet he’s not a career politician. Just a goated banker who saw an opportunity to make the country better.
Steve Jobs was a hippie interested in design and drugs. He had a million unrelated experiences in Ashrams in India and calligraphy classes that culminated in him being perfectly suited to bring personal computing to the masses.
He also dropped one of my favourite quotes ever:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
I could’ve never known that by writing articles on Medium at 16, the then-CEO of Medium would read one and mention it when we met. I could’ve never known that would be the start of seven years of writing online, admittedly to not very many readers, but one of those readers would end up becoming one of my best friends and emergency contact.
That one of my Twitter mutuals would ask me to come visit him in SF, and I’d become stubbornly obsessed with moving here one day after sleeping on his couch for 2 weeks.
That one of his mutual friends would convince me to live in SF for a summer and make YouTube videos, and those videos would be watched by the CEO who gave me my first sales job with no prior experience because he thought I was funny.
Not just individual work products, but any level of success is premeditated by a million little dots that make no sense until 1 day a line is drawn through them.
If I had to give some advice to anyone who’s having a few too many days where the dots don’t feel like they’re connecting, it’d be to think less about the connection and think more about how many dots you’re producing.
This is what people mean when they say luck is a skill. So-called lucky people have put out a million feelers into the world through interactions and creations.
A dot can be as simple as any form of connection between you and another person. The internet makes it easier now because you can use social media to instantly reach at least 10 people. That’s 10 people, 10 dots, that could one day conspire in your favour. If you get good, you can create millions.
Working on yourself doesn’t directly create dots but can help you produce dots in the future.
Toiling away in your room never showing your work to anyone will get you absolutely nowhere, because most people’s idea of success requires getting something from other people; money, recognition, or influence.
Refining your craft will let you leave a stronger impression on whoever sees your work someday. Getting feedback will also help you improve in ways you couldn’t have come up with yourself. Better dot placement and size makes them easier to connect later.
For me, most good ideas have come through some sort of collaboration, even if I didn’t directly seek it out. Yet the kinds of collabs I can do are way more productive when I’ve done a lot of work myself.
Anyone I know who makes good stuff also consumes what they create. Good writers read a lot, good musicians have hundreds of playlists, and good coders try a lot of software.
Too much is dangerous because it’s easy get stuck in read-only mode. So is consuming with the intent to create because of the risk of copying, so I usually find that it’s best to pay attention to frequency over recency. If I keep coming back to an idea, I’ll make something of it, rather than if I’ve just learned about it and it seems exciting.
Dot production is the major part of making stuff. The connecting is all about trust. Everything will connect somehow once I have enough dots. I often talk about how I can “see the piece in my head” after a while. I felt the same way when I was making YouTube videos, and other creative friends also seem to have magical moments when it all just clicks.
What sucks is when you have to make creativity into a career and force a line where there isn’t one, or else you can’t eat. Maybe that’s why it’s easier to make stuff as side projects, because dot connection is tougher under pressure. Once you’ve pulled out all the natural threads, there’s only so much life you can live in such a short time when we’re all given the same 24 hours.
I’ve never seen anyone who’s been able to put out a high volume of creative work all imbued with equal amounts of soul. The exciting part is that sometimes, putting out the work itself makes a dot that one day will be connected to something better. If every song on an album tried to be a banger, none of them would be. They’d all be strangled by trying too hard.
People create dots all the time without noticing. They get easier to collect when you decide to focus your attention to them. I always thought I was decently funny and had friends tell me to do a standup set. I finally set my mind to it last year.
Everytime I naturally told a joke that made someone laugh, I’d write it down. Intending to do a set at some point, my friend just happened to host a comedy night that summer and forced me to perform.
I didn’t come up with those jokes that week. I already had a bunch collected throughout the year and just had to string them together. I also didn’t sign up for a comedy event, but the comedy event came to me. But I’d already primed myself to pay attention to whenever I made a joke, trusting I’d have an opportunity to connect them some day.
So much has to go right for so long for anyone to look like an overnight success or effortless. I love thinking about that, because it reminds me that even on my off days, I’ve probably made some dots I just havent realized will connect some day.
What a beautiful way to go about life.
dude u always got the best memes in ur post. investing in this pre-banger 🤙🏻
JUST GOTTA MAKE MORE DOTS