About a year ago, I decided to flip that: I started to think of myself as a writer who also builds things. This was hard for me to admit. For a long time, my identity as a founder had crowded out that as a writer. Writing felt too luxurious, maybe a little shameful, and definitely not as respectable or remunerative as founding a company.
There’s a tremendous friction that arises when you don’t allow yourself to do what you really want to do with your life. You make a lot of halfway decisions to negotiate your competing priorities: what you want, and what you want to want.
ot only has the medication significantly reduced my symptoms so that OCD doesn’t run my life anymore, it’s also changed my sense of self. I’m not fundamentally different; I still have the same personality, interests, tastes, loves, and fears. But it’s allowed me to evolve in ways that I hadn’t previously been able to: I’m more confident and less conflict-averse, and it’s easier for me to take risks and make mistakes. I’m sad and angry that it took me so long to find the right treatment. But I’m also filled with hope that treatments like this exist and can work. (Obviously, Zoloft is not for everyone. Asking whether it works is kind of like asking whether paint works to make art. On average, paint makes random smears. For some people, it makes Starry Night.)
Our core activity, at the bottom of the pyramid, is to produce writing and other forms of content that reach millions of people. We monetize the audience with our Every subscription—a bundle of content, software, discounts on products, community events, and more for tens of thousands of people. At the top of the pyramid, we offer higher-ticket items like courses, consulting, and advising for small numbers of people in our audience who can afford to pay for our expertise. We then take the cash we generate and funnel it into producing more great writing. Hopefully, this will allow us to build Every into a creative playground for smart people to make the best work of their lives. I am confident that this is a viable way to build a business with writing and creativity as its core—one that also becomes large and valuable.
Instead, I stopped trying to fit myself and Every into an old model of what a founder, software startup, or media company needs to look like. Those are all old ideas, from an older context. They can be useful when needed. But they’re dry and dead. I’ve just tried to be honest about who I am, what I want, and what I believe to be true about the little piece of the world we’re trying to build in. Newness comes as an automatic outgrowth of that. It doesn’t require trying—only honesty.
Emerson wrote, “Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.” You sail into uncharted waters because you’re actually looking at reality instead of seeing what you’ve been told to see. You’ve lifted your eyes from old maps and started reading the stars and currents around you.
