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  This is your official end-of-the-month reminder to go cancel that random subscription you used exactly once. You're welcome.

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  The best parental control ever invented was a 56k modem and a mum who needed to use the phone.

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  Forty hours a week is plenty of time to make something great if you stop spending twenty of them in meetings about the other twenty

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  My 10-year-old, on learning I write a newsletter: "so it's like YouTube but nobody can see you." Yes. That is the dream.

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  We've learned to treat ironic detachment like intelligence. It keeps you safe, and it also keeps you stuck. Caring out loud is uncomfortable. The alternative is a permanent crouch on the sidelines, very smart and going nowhere. Elan is sincere forward commitment. Move on the thing you mean. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-death-of-sincerity-and-how-to

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  Delegating to a committee was moral cover. Delegating to an AI is cleaner. The model can't leak. It can't refuse. You reframe the prompt until it agrees, then say the AI decided. Agency laundering, perfected. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-art-of-agency-laundering

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  The classic Soviet bureaucratic failure applies to modern productivity: we spend more time organizing our notes than actually thinking with them. Most people’s "Second Brain" is just a digital graveyard of untagged links, orphaned thoughts, and guilt. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-age-of-the-third-brain

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  I don't get involved in all the petty online arguments you mortals waste your breath on. I, an intellectual, instead write 2,500 words on Substack about why such small matters are beneath me, which is a far more sophisticated way to spend 6+ hours thinking about them

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  One book, dog-eared and worn, carried for a year, is worth more than a hundred books counted, listed, and posted for public admiration. Read like it matters. Because it does. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/your-book-body-count-is-worthless

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  Our entire attitude toward education is flawed. We spend years in primary school and then secondary school being coerced into absorbing information and hammered with the misconception that the point of learning is meeting arbitrary goals and being measured on our ability to memorize facts and formulas. That’s bad enough...🧵 1/13

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  An army without discipline is just a mob. Any undirected force creates only chaos. The same principle applies to your goals, your startup, and your daily routine. Washington knew it 250 years ago, and it's still true today. https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/an-army-without-discipline-is-a-mob?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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  The hardest lesson in leadership: Learning what to let burn. As Frederick the Great said: "He who defends everything defends nothing." If you aren't making calculated sacrifices, you aren't strategizing. You're just hoping to survive. Let go of what you must. https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/fight-for-what-matters-give-up-what?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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  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

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  A good critic asks, "Why does this matter? What need does this meet? What hunger does this fill, and what does the crowd feel?" The intelligent understand joy; they don't mock it. They can see craft and commerce and emotion in more places than an arthouse flick. They can hold more than one thing at a time. https://youtu.be/dp3KLKIHNTU

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  We are addicted to noise. And we confuse activity with accomplishment, while pretending introspection is a dirty word. But history's most ruthless strategists knew a secret: You make your highest-leverage decisions when you are alone with your thoughts. https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/the-art-of-productive-introspection?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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  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

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  Every morning, I write a free daily email called The Daily General. I share quotes, notes, and battlefield tactics from history's greatest leaders - from Hannibal to Von Clausewitz - and break down how to apply them today. Check out the latest ("How to laugh at a legion") and subscribe for free here: https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/how-to-laugh-at-a-legion?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post viewer

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  Stop building for broke, time-rich tech creatives on Twitter. Go build a boring spreadsheet replacement for someone who owns a plumbing company. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-indie-hacker-economy-is-a-pyramid

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  When JD Vance and Trump berated Zelenskyy in the Oval Office for not wearing a fancy suit and tie, they were demanding he play the fiddle. Themistocles could have told them the only answer that matters: "I cannot fiddle, but I can make a small village a great city." Real leaders don't do parlor tricks for the camera. They hold the line. 🇺🇦 https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/the-trap-of-performative-leadership?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&sh...

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  Have you ever watched one of those reality TV singing competitions? You’ve probably seen a hundred young people, eyes shining, clutching microphones and talking about their dreams. They’ll explain that ever since they were kids, they wanted to be singers. Note that: BE singers. Be. They hardly ever say they want to actually sing. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/how-to-make-something-people-actually

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  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.

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  Everyone’s selling picks and shovels to people already drowning in picks and shovels, in a great big barrel of picks and shovels at the International Pick and Shovel Convention. https://medium.com/westenberg/the-indie-hacker-economy-is-a-pyramid-scheme-d06cb5789648?sk=3c08a9ad0a541c0f0c6bcccf198863f8

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  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

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  Listening to a podcast at 2x speed while answering emails isn’t "learning." It’s just noise with a productivity badge. If you want real leverage, turn off your phone, sit in silence, and read a damn book. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/read-more-read-often-read-every-day

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  If your data is bad, adding more compute just helps your AI learn the wrong things faster. Before you buy more GPUs or double your model parameters, ask: Do we actually need more compute, or do we just need better data?

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  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

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  Julius Caesar didn’t conquer empires by waiting for 100% certainty; he moved at 80% and adjusted on the fly. In a world of slow committees, speed is an unfair advantage. https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/the-asymmetrical-advantage-of-speed?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

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  (Free download) Everything is seamless. Frictionless. Immediate. You can summon a meal, a driver, a dopamine hit, or a partner with the slide of a thumb. The world has been engineered to demand absolutely nothing of you. And it's making us soft, uncreative, and fragile. https://onfriction.com/

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  The most "AI-pilled" people on tech Twitter aren't optimists. They're doomers suffering from severe availability bias. They're so overexposed to whitepapers and new tools that they think we're 6 months away from a permanent techno-feudal underclass. It's not long-termism. It's just anxiety. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-permanent-underclass-is-a-myth

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  "If you're not paying for it, you're the product." Wrong. A product is finished, shipped, and left alone. You are not the product. You are the mine. Your attention is drilled into daily. Worse: every scroll, pause, and rage-click trains the machinery on exactly where your richest seams are. Stop allowing yourself to be extracted. Become an owner instead. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/you-are-not-a-product