Notices by JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)

My rule for saving anything:

If I can’t write one sentence on why it matters, what it changes, and where I’ll use it - it doesn’t go in my notes.

It takes 30 seconds. If I can’t be bothered, it wasn’t worth keeping.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/5-rules-for-a-second-brain-youll

As a writer, you can't win the volume game against a machine.

They don’t sleep, they don’t get writer’s block, and they don’t care. Like John Henry, you can outwrite them for a moment, but even that victory will kill you.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/why-500-words-beats-5000-in-the-age

The peach tree doesn’t apologize for its fruit. It leans into the sun, bows to the seasons, and gives what it has to give.

Talent, discipline, ambition, capital - none of it changes the nature of your roots.

All you can do is be a bloody good peach tree.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/you-are-a-peach-tree-beareth-thou

You wouldn't walk into an Apple store and offer them "exposure" for a MacBook.

Stop treating creators like a charity.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/fuck-you-pay-me

Why does seeing people experience pure, unapologetic joy over a comic book movie make some internet critics so furiously angry?

Because rage is often just a mask for loneliness, grief, and boredom.

When someone else's happiness feels like an insult, the problem is you.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/hating-marvel-movies-is-not-a-personality

Everyone talks about exponential growth like it's this beautiful hockey stick graph.

What they don't tell you is that the flat line at the start feels endless, years of grinding.

Exponential only happens if you survive long enough. Start small, stay consistent.

Stop trying to build for "the algorithm."

Stop trying to scale to a million faceless users.

If you want to make something people actually give a shit about, shrink your target audience to a single person you know.

5 rules for creating work that leaves a mark:
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/how-to-make-something-people-actually

US AI labs: "Scraping the entire open internet without consent is fair use! It's transformative!"

Also US AI labs when someone distills their models: "Wait no not like that, that's intellectual property theft"

New post on why distillation is just the industry looking in the mirror:
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-great-ai-double-standard

The reason humans don’t want to generate personalized AI movies is the same reason humans don’t talk about their dreams:

Nobody else gives a shit
https://youtu.be/ZXJGYrlfi6A?si=H8m1uJQZ3kesYPpJ

"Link in bio" for writers is usually a mess of random URLs.

Kerouac syncs everything you've ever shipped on Substack, Ghost, & Medium into one clean profile.

One URL. Put it in every bio. Let people find your work without a scavenger hunt.
https://www.kerouacapp.com/u/joan

The unexamined life is fine, actually. It's the over-examined life that never ships anything.

8 years ago in a drunk spiral, I deleted a blog with 100,000 subscribers.

Gone in a flash. Woke up the next morning horrified, but it was too late.

7 years ago, I quit drinking and started rebuilding my writing career from scratch.

I'm still nowhere near where I could have been. But I'm getting there.

I built a tool called Kerouac to help me track my writing and publishing across my blog, Substack, Medium etc.

Just seeing the activity graph light up reminds me - I'm rebuilding.

We replaced God with the Gross Domestic Product.

But we kept on feeling guilty about resting and virtuous about toiling.

The religious veneer faded, and the moral weight of work never left.

Rest shouldn't require an excuse.

But here we are.
https://youtu.be/8fsnsuiTZvc?si=ThVzMIz39nVCE8uR

A blog is the only employee you have who works for you 24/7, sells your ideas while you sleep, and never asks for a raise.

If you actually have a brain, you have to admit LLMs have become orders of magnitude worse at creative writing. The decline is undeniable. The outputs are becoming embarrassingly homogenous, overwrought, over written and melodramatic. Everything I read keeps sounding like MySpace poetry from a vest-wearing philosophy undergrad.

Real taste is idiosyncratic and unbounded by price. It can be a $1,000 dinner or a Michelin starred $10 noodle shop.

Manufactured taste marches in lockstep with price tags - which is how millions independently develop a love for the exact same fuck-ugly monogram.

https://open.substack.com/pub/jawestenberg/p/the-question-luxury-brands-dont-want?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The future of privacy may come down to a very awkward sentence:

“Yes, I do mind. Please turn it the fuck off.”

https://buff.ly/gHSZytP

If you base your entire indie hacking career on being the only asshole who knows how to center a div or hook up a Stripe API, you are going to lose.

Code is dead as a moat.

But the indie hacker is not.

Why the AI doomers are entirely wrong about the future of SaaS: 👇

https://www.selfonomics.com/p/defensibility-through-giving-a-shit

John Boyd’s fork: do you want to be somebody or do something?

Early on, both paths look the same. Later, the real work costs you the promotion, the patron, the story you liked about your trajectory.

Pick the fork early. By the time it feels expensive, you may have already spent yourself.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/to-be-or-to-do-which-way-will-you?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

“We plan to be here in 100 years” is a competitive advantage in a market full of fly-by-night companies looking for the exit.

But you don’t build a 100-year company by announcing one.

You build it by renewing a choice, every day, against every incentive telling you to cash out, bulk up, or drift.

https://www.selfonomics.com/p/can-you-still-build-a-100-year-company