🏷️ Categories: Time management, Minimalism.

You are trapped in an invisible cage.

A cage built with your own hands under a premise that society has repeated to you until it has been engraved into you: you have a perpetual obligation to perform.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls it “the burnout society.” In the past, you were exploited by an obvious external authority, such as the feudal lord or the slave owner. In modern life, the game is much more perverse. You have become “the torturer and the tortured.” You voluntarily exploit yourself, chasing metrics you can compare in order to prove that you performed well, while aspiring to the success narratives that everyone being exploited applauds on social media.

• Being famous.

• Making your first million.

• Building a fortune by investing before 30.

• Being ultra-productive and not wasting a single minute of the day.

To withstand the pressure of this matrix, doping has become the norm. You dope yourself with caffeine, “rest” through algorithmic stimulation to trigger dopamine release, and take melatonin pills to ease the anxiety that keeps you from sleeping. This is the routine of a large part of the population. People who treat their bodies like a phone battery, only charging them at night and when they are about to collapse with the red indicator at 1%.

Rest does not work like that.

Rest is the refuge that makes everything possible. It is not optional. Every area of your life depends on it, from your physical health to your mental health. If you do not respect your energy and protect your time, your environment will keep draining you until there is nothing left.

Here are the 3 keys I learned and use to put the brakes on and recover every day.

1. Your calendar as a trench

We were taught to see the calendar as a workspace.

We look at our schedule and, if we see a blank space, we feel an irresistible urge to fill it with a task. That is the first black hole that pulls everyone straight toward burnout.

If all your time is available to be productive, you will always fill it.

You need to start treating your blocks of disconnection as a non-negotiable appointment with yourself, not as “free time” (that diluted concept you give away to anyone who asks). If you scheduled a meeting with an important client, you would not cancel it because “something else came up.” So why do you constantly cancel the moments meant to organize your own mind?

You need to take rest seriously, and you can do it with this simple rule.

Implement a physical constraint in your system. For every 2 or 3 hours of deep work, block 30 minutes of scheduled inactivity in your calendar. By blocking it visually, you remind yourself: this space is not for sale. Then, when external noise tries to assign you more workload, you will look at your calendar and see that it is full.

Full of yourself.

That is how you recover so you can be present when it actually matters.

2. Deliberate emptiness versus dopamine consumption

An underrated skill: being able to get bored.

At the slightest hint of fatigue or emptiness, your hand slides toward your phone to receive a dose of stimulation; society has already been trained for this. Just observe what happens at a public transport stop or while waiting in line at a store. Everyone scrolls passively, from tab to tab, from video to video, and the funniest part is that they say they are “resting for a while.”

A lie.

You are subjecting your nervous system to a bombardment of scattered information.

The modern person’s inability to tolerate boredom is precisely what destroys original thinking. If you cannot hold the emptiness, you will never be able to silently connect the dots or focus on creating anything meaningful.

The solution is simple: disappear.

Absolute silence terrifies a mind used to processing 35 GB of daily noise, but crossing that barrier is the price you pay for clarity.

• Lie on the floor for ten minutes without screens or music.

• Observe a landscape, your plants, or look out the window for a while.

• Wait in a line without taking out your phone, just watching what happens around you.

• Drink a coffee without screens or distractions, focusing only on the taste and the moment.

• Go for a walk without your phone and without a destination, and get lost in streets you never usually take.

The goal is to free your thoughts from the tyranny of results.

3. Cultivate obsessions for pleasure

Social conditioning is so influential that when you find something that sparks your curiosity, your mind immediately jumps into the trap of turning it into work:

• How can I make this profitable?

• How can I build a personal brand around this?

• How can I package this into a business model?

If you write for pleasure, you think about creating a paid Substack. If you cook, you think about starting a recipe YouTube channel. That is the ultimate obsession with performance: making you turn your own existence and your time for exploration into work. And although this can be beautiful, allowing work to spread into your hobbies eventually creates responsibilities and pressures that weigh down the relaxed experience — the one without goals to achieve, where you could simply flow and rest.

There are things that are better kept for yourself as pure passion and nothing else.

It is necessary

Rest is not optional. Nor is it a reward you have to earn after proving yourself.

Disappear from the noise. Recover your focus and energy for things that cannot be monetized. Feeling guilty for doing nothing is not normal.

Lie down for a while.

— Álvaro

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. The impressive minimalist routine of Charles Darwin

2. Why are we so tired? The burnout society

3. Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including yourself

✍️ Your turn: What activity would you keep in your life even if it could never become money, recognition, or a professional opportunity? In my case, creating art through painting, writing, photography, and learning languages.

💭 Quote of the day: “Learning to rest is an ongoing process.” — Rachel Hollis, Girl, Wash Your Face: Stop Believing the Lies About Who You Are So You Can Become Who You Were Meant to Be

P.S. I also offer 1:1 consulting to help you grow on Substack.

If you’re just starting out and don’t know how it works, or if you’ve been at it for a while but are stuck, this will help you. I’ll help you find your direction, position yourself as a leader in your niche, and build a system tailored to your needs for sustainable growth.

My credentials? Over 93,000 global readers in 2 years, 100% organic growth, with 250,000 monthly visits. All from scratch, writing all by myself in my spare time.

If you’re interested, email me at: jardinmental@proton.me

Share

See you next time! 👋

The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.

🏷️ Categories: Deliberate practice, Continuous improvement, Learning.

Your ability to process information largely defines your life.

This is not an exaggeration.

Human evolution could be understood as a constant upgrade of our physical and mental capacities. We optimize what works so as not to become obsolete. That has been survival in a ruthless world. As for the mind, the great advantage lies in the intentional use of knowledge at the right time and in the right place. The practical value of wisdom is in providing us with the tools to overcome all kinds of obstacles and anticipate future challenges.

“Is it not pleasant to study and, in due time, put into practice what one has learned?” “The wise are active.” — Confucius, Analects

In this society saturated with stimuli, where your attention is stolen every minute by noise and thousands of data points, the vast majority only passively consume what others say and do, without taking action. That is why knowing how to choose valuable information and apply it grants you a crushing advantage in almost any area.

That is the key question: How do we learn and apply what we consume?

Confucius, one of the earliest thinkers, provided the keys to achieving this:

“The best substitute for innate knowledge is to listen much, choose the best and follow it; to see much and retain the image.” — Confucius, Analects

“Those who possess innate knowledge are of the highest rank. Next come those who acquire knowledge through learning. Following them are those who learn through the vicissitudes of life. In the lowest category are the people who go through the vicissitudes of life without learning anything.” — Confucius, Analects

From this come the three paths of learning:

1. Learning by imitation.

2. Learning by study.

3. Learning by experience.

Let’s look at each one and how to apply it.

1. The Path of Imitation

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every day.

Intelligently copying the success of others is the first step toward elevating your wisdom. It is pure reverse engineering. You see what works and you replicate it in your own case to avoid unnecessary bottlenecks and thousands of hours of errors. Many problems have already been solved by brilliant minds of the past. The shortcut is to replicate the mental models and tools these geniuses already validated for you.

Consume specific, high-quality information about your area of interest.

Biographies of role models, scientific papers, expert presentations... Others’ experience is an excellent teacher because you let them pay the price of failure while you acquire the lesson for free and in record time.

This is what I call the “late-mover advantage.”

2. The Path of Study

If imitation is the shortcut, study is the map.

Most of our screen time is spent consuming content without a clear purpose, jumping from one piece of content to another in the internet’s black hole. The path of study is the opposite: choosing a single element and delving as deep as you can. This will give you expert judgment from multiple sources and a competitive edge over almost everyone in any goal you set for yourself.

How to execute it:

1. Start with a simple rule: less information, more depth.

2. Choose one concrete area you want to master and reduce the noise. Instead of consuming random content, focus on a few high-quality sources.

For example:

• If you want to improve your health: You don’t need 50 different videos on nutrition. You can thoroughly study a couple of solid, science-backed approaches, compare their key points, and extract a simple system you can apply.

• If you want to improve your work or business: Study how people who have already solved your problem operate. Analyze their decisions, their repeated mistakes, and the principles they use to make decisions. Follow them closely.

• If you want to learn a skill: Don’t jump between 100 tutorials. Choose a couple of elite role models and study how they practice that skill. Write down everything you can and compare them to understand the dominant pattern to imitate.

The difference between consuming content and acquiring knowledge is intention.

3. The Path of Lived Experience

Living on autopilot is the default state for many.

If you move forward without observing your own patterns, it is easy to repeat the same mistakes and waste energy on actions that don’t take you where you want to be. That is why reflection is indispensable: learning to observe yourself as if you were your own experiment. This is known as metacognition—analyzing how you think, what you do, what results you get, and what patterns repeat in your life.

From that moment on, you begin to make evidence-based decisions.

How to execute it: Create a simple logging system. Don’t complicate it: a notebook and a few minutes a day are enough. Some questions you can answer:

• Where did I use my time, and where did I say I would use it? This difference reveals the gap between your intentions and your conduct. Measure your screen time and use your phone’s timer to check how much you actually dedicate to each activity of the day. I did this during my first 3 months of writing to observe my performance, and it was one of the best decisions I made.

• What emotions or thoughts repeat? This will help you detect patterns, fears, distractions, or impulses that influence your daily decisions.

Over time, your journal becomes a map of how you function.

• If you want to improve your health, track your sleep, diet, and training to discover which habits affect your performance.

• If you want to improve your work, measure your focus hours, your peak energy times, and the conditions that generate the best results.

• If you want to learn something new, record how much you practice, which methods work, what obstacles appear, and how you evolve.

What is not measured does not exist, and reflection turns loose experiences into useful information for taking your next step.

The Three Paths

True wisdom lies in knowing how to combine the three paths:

1. Imitate: Observe the masters to decipher the formulas that already work.

2. Live: Take action to collect your own data.

3. Study: Disappear from the noise of fast-paced life, open your journal in calm, and connect the dots to calculate your next big step.

Hope you find this useful.

— Álvaro

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Genghis Khan: The nomad who learned how to conquer the world.

2. The lesson from the sage Zhuang Zi to master any skill in life.

3. How to master any skill, according to the best sushi chef in history.

✍️ Your turn: What useful knowledge have you consumed recently that you haven’t yet turned into a concrete action?

💭 Quote of the day: “Eat without filling your belly; choose a dwelling without demanding comfort; be diligent in your work, prudent in your speech, and seek the company of the virtuous. Thus, it can be said that you have the desire to learn.” — Confucius, Analects

P.S. I also offer 1:1 consulting to help you grow on Substack.

If you’re just starting out and don’t know how it works, or if you’ve been at it for a while but are stuck, this will help you. I’ll help you find your direction, position yourself as a leader in your niche, and build a system tailored to your needs for sustainable growth.

My credentials? Over 93,000 global readers in 2 years, 100% organic growth, with 250,000 monthly visits. All from scratch, writing all by myself in my spare time.

If you’re interested, email me at: jardinmental@proton.me

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Confucio. Analects. URL

🏷️ Categories: Creativity, Writing.

The amount of information surrounding us has reached an unprecedented level.

However, original thinking is going through one of its most fragile moments.

Most people consume content constantly without filtering or questioning it, repeating ideas and trends that spread quickly but are rarely understood in depth. The result is a progressive erosion of independent judgment.

How is it possible that, in theory, we have more tools than ever to think and yet we think less and less for ourselves…?

The answer lies in information overload: chronic overstimulation.

“The abundance of information creates a poverty of attention.” — Frank Herbert, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World (1971).

When everything competes for your attention, nothing manages to occupy enough mental space to be processed deeply. The mind stops building concepts and starts reacting to an uninterrupted stream of data. Because of this, I am sometimes asked how it is possible that I don’t run out of deep ideas to write about, as if there were an endless spring of creativity...

And, in a sense, the answer is yes.

Reality is not mysterious at all. After hundreds of hours studying the psychology of attention and the mechanisms that activate creativity, I ended up designing a system that filters, organizes, and amplifies any inspiring stimulus until it transforms it into deeply articulated ideas.

To make it replicable for you, I have condensed it into 50 triggers that allow you to activate each level of the creative process in different contexts, regardless of the situation.

The system is structured around three levels of thinking:

• Probe

• Question

• Amplify

Let’s dive deeper…

Level 1. Probe

Explore your own interests, experiences, and knowledge.

1. Identify what you already do effortlessly: Identify an activity you perform fluently or almost without realizing it. Break down the 3 invisible principles that make it work for someone who has never practiced it.

2. Find your current point of convergence: Choose a topic that sparks your current curiosity, a problem you solved through personal experience, and a useful need for your audience. Find the central point where these three variables intersect.

3. Turn a mistake into a clear direction: Review a painful failure or mistake from your recent past. Extract the 3 exact operational lessons that transformed that experience into practical wisdom.

4. Translate an obsession into a useful idea: Choose a technical topic, hobby, or secondary interest you constantly think about. Translate it into a simple analogy applicable to personal development or digital business.

5. Recognize your invisible skills: Make a list of the knowledge you have acquired outside formal education. Which of these has given you the greatest sovereignty and control over your time?

6. Explain what others do without realizing it: Observe a repetitive, inefficient, or absurd behavior you notice daily in your environment. Explain the deep psychological root of why people act that way.

7. Reduce your past learning curve: Remember exactly how you felt when you started in your current area of focus. Write the “minimum viable effort” guide that would have saved you 6 months of confusion.

8. Unlock the biggest obstacle you overcame: What was the technical or mental obstacle that was hardest for you to overcome this year? Detail the exact method you used to unlock it.

9. Combine two worlds that don’t fit together: Combine your most analytical or business-related interest with your most abstract or artistic one. Develop a hybrid concept that uses the rules of the first to solve problems in the second.

10. Recover your state without automation: Identify a modern routine or habit you used to do unconsciously and have now removed to recover your focus. Explain the cognitive cost it was charging you.

11. Develop a forgotten idea in transit: Search your personal notes for the strangest idea you wrote down during a transitional moment (a train, a line, etc.). Develop its internal logic.

12. Explain what is difficult as something natural to you: What do others consider “difficult” or “complex” but feels natural for you to execute? Structure its basic logical steps.

13. Turn theory into something you can use today: Take a purely theoretical concept you recently read about in a book. Design a 5-minute practical exercise so the reader can validate its usefulness today.

14. Rewrite who you are after a key decision: Write about how your way of seeing the world changed after making a radical, high-agency decision. What labels did you have to destroy?

15. Explain what you achieved without anyone seeing: Identify an achievement you are deeply proud of but nobody else knows about. Explain the invisible discipline principles you had to maintain alone.

16. Connect two ideas that should not connect: Choose two completely unrelated topics from your recent browsing history. Force a logical sequence showing how understanding Topic A makes you better at executing Topic B.

Level 2. Question

Remove predictable paths, clichés, and force original thinking.

1. Remove your first three obvious answers: Write the 3 automatic and obvious ideas anyone would say about your topic. Cross them out and define a path that completely ignores those options.

2. Rewrite your idea without using the usual approach: Explain your central idea about your niche, but introduce this absolute restriction: it is strictly forbidden to use the conventional approach of productivity, business, or traditional discipline.

3. Expose only what is usually hidden: Take a common argument in your niche. Remove all literal and direct explanations. Write the concept showing only the practical consequences and underlying subtext.

4. Find where good advice destroys you: Identify the most repeated advice accepted as absolute truth in your field. Find the exact scenario where following that advice destroys you or makes you mediocre.

5. Explain your problem as if to a child: Describe a complex problem in your niche. Remove all technical or corporate vocabulary. Explain it using only words a 10-year-old would understand.

6. Solve without relying on modern tools: Propose a strategy for achieving a goal under one restriction: the reader cannot use technology, apps, or automations.

7. Defend the opposite of what everyone believes: Defend a position that completely contradicts your audience’s general consensus, but build it with solid logic.

8. Show the result without waiting the normal amount of time: Explain how to solve a critical problem in your field by removing the variable of “waiting time.” What does the change look like today?

9. Detect when you are pretending to make progress: Analyze how searching for information or organizing becomes procrastination. Define the exact indicator between real progress and simulated progress.

10. Explain importance without talking about benefits: Approach your idea only from the perspective of chaos, friction, and loss that occurs if it is not applied.

11. Prove why the common shortcut is a trap: Take the fastest solution the mind seeks when facing a problem and explain why that path perpetuates the problem.

12. Build your idea from zero resources: Design the action plan assuming zero budget and only 30 minutes per day.

13. Expose what nobody wants to admit about success: Remove the promise of guaranteed success and describe the real probability of failure along with its sacrifices.

14. Remove your professional role and think like a system: Strip the topic of any professional label and explain the problem from a high-agency perspective.

15. Design your idea without the internet: Assume the internet disappears tomorrow. How does your idea survive in the physical world?

16. Check whether you truly believe what you write: Submit your idea to a brutal question: does this come from integrated experience or intellectual aesthetics?

Level 3. Amplify

Take external ideas that inspire you, detect their gaps, and increase their value by adding clarity, depth, usefulness, or another differentiating element.

1. Complete what others left unfinished: Take a great idea from another author. Identify what is missing in its execution and complete their system.

2. Organize scattered ideas into a clear structure: Take a confusing text or newsletter and turn it into a clear logical sequence.

3. Demonstrate an abstract theory in practice: Take an interesting but abstract theory and support it with real experience or a practical case.

4. Explain what truly blocks action: Take a simple piece of advice and reveal the psychological forces that make it difficult to execute.

5. Add a new layer to an already improved idea: Take an idea improved by another author and add a new layer of value or usefulness.

6. Turn a complaint into a system of personal power: Take a global problem and rewrite it as a manual for individual sovereignty.

7. Resolve two opposing ideas into a superior one: Find the conflict between two ideas and create a third one that integrates them.

8. Reduce a big idea into an extreme application: Turn a general idea into an ultra-specific and practical version.

9. Extract the universal law behind a specific case: Take a specific example and find the general principle that explains it.

10. Design the environment so action becomes inevitable: Define the environment that makes a correct action happen without willpower.

11. Find the single rule that saves any strategy: Reduce a complex strategy to one emergency rule.

12. Turn reflection into immediate action: Transform a contemplative idea into a direct instruction that forces action.

13. Make sustainable what is normally demanding: Redesign an intense method into its minimum viable daily version.

14. Measure what actually matters in a project: Define the real percentage of energy, time, and attention required to achieve initial results.

15. Find a metric that confirms real progress: Define one single metric that demonstrates real and undeniable progress.

16. Rewrite a viral idea with a voice of sovereignty: Take a viral text and rewrite it with a deeper, more autonomous voice.

17. Translate the technical into a human idea: Turn a complex concept into a simple and understandable metaphor.

18. Explain how an idea returns total control: Describe how mastering that concept restores sovereignty over decisions and the direction of life.

The essential idea

Do not use these templates mechanically to generate tons of empty ideas. Use them to cultivate one single idea deeply. Do the work of connecting the pieces, immerse yourself as deeply as possible through research, and build your own knowledge with an irreplaceable style.

May it be useful to you.

— Álvaro

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Brainstorming doesn’t work, do this instead

2. Toaster project: how innovative ideas are born

3. Isaac Asimov’s hidden guide to generating ideas... written for a secret U.S. project

✍️ Your turn: What small change could you make starting today to consume less information, but do it more intentionally? Less quantity, but more quality.

💭 Quote of the day: “You cannot exhaust creativity. The more you use it, the more you have.” — Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Herbert, F. (1971) Designing organizations for an information-rich world URL

The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.

🏷️ Categories: Life lessons, Creativity, Motivation.

Ira Glass is one of the most influential radio hosts in the United States in recent decades.

He is best known as the host and producer of This American Life, one of the most influential radio and podcast programs. Although his career did not start with prestige or clarity—quite the opposite—he began in 1978, at age 19, as an intern at NPR, and spent the next 17 years working in nearly every radio production role before launching This American Life in 1995 (Fisher, 1999).

That makes what came next particularly interesting.

The most valuable part of his story is not the success itself, but what he understood during the years when he still hadn’t achieved it. In a reflection that would later become famous, Ira Glass explained that almost no one warns beginners about a serious problem.

Many artists start creating for pleasure, because they have good taste.

They can recognize and appreciate good art; they know what makes a work of art “good.” But for a long time, their beginner-level skills are not yet at the level of that standard they can already perceive and aspire to. It is uncomfortable, because they can clearly see that what they make does not live up to what they imagine or hope to achieve.

That disappointment, Ira Glass said, is what makes many people quit (and he almost did himself).

That is the importance of this story.

The same artistic sensitivity that led you from consuming art to creating it can become the very reason you want to quit if you don’t manage it. For Ira Glass, the key is to stop judging your work and focus on consistently producing long enough for your skills to catch up with your ambitions.

The artist’s job is to create, not to judge.

Don’t judge yourself while you work

For two years, I have been publishing articles every two days on Jardín Mental.

Some days, the words come easily—that’s true. Other days, writing a single sentence is painful—that’s also true. And there have been many moments when I have felt exactly what Ira Glass was talking about, I assure you.

“I thought this was a good article. Why does it seem like no one is interested…?”

Or, conversely, writing something I felt was inadequate and seeing it become one of the most-read texts. Whatever the final outcome, I have learned one thing: we are terrible at judging our own work.

Ira Glass insists on this.

Not only are you a poor judge of your work while you are in the process, but that is also not your job. It is not your role to spend every minute deciding how valuable what you are doing is. It is not your role to constantly compare it to others’ work. It is not your role to anticipate the final result and decide whether it will be appreciated, useful, or important. And, certainly, it is not your role to tell yourself “no” before you have even finished your work.

Instead, your responsibility is to create.

There are people in almost every profession who turn each day into a work of art through the way they practice their craft. In that sense, almost everyone is an artist in some way or another. And yes, every artist judges their work—it’s natural—but don’t let that judgment stop you from doing your job.

Artists create, even when it is not easy.

Keep your eyes on your own page

When I started training calisthenics, a friend who is much better than me once told me something I still remember and apply: “Learn the technique from the best. Do the exercises as well as they do, but don’t do their same workouts.”

He wanted to prevent me from rushing ahead, to prevent injuries.

However, within that sentence there was a deeper idea for life. It doesn’t matter how good others around you are. You must focus on your own level and your own practice. That is your task. You won’t get there faster just by trying to rush.

It doesn’t matter what you dedicate your days to.

Every morning you return to your task. You can learn from those ahead of you, but you cannot skip the fundamentals that belong to you. All great artists painted doodles. All great singers went out of tune. All great writers have notebooks full of drafts and crossed-out lines. Your job is to do the daily work, not to judge it at every step. Being mediocre is part of the process.

We need to normalize being bad.

Only then can you become good at something.

This is the video of Ira Glass talking about self-criticism and the ambition to create.

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. The Helsinki bus theory: The mistake that kills most creative careers

2. Everything in its time: Are you patient enough to see results?

3. Are you underestimating your long-term potential?

✍️ Your turn: How many times have you stopped creating something because it didn’t match what you imagined? I used to have tons of half-finished drafts I would reject before even completing them, but that’s over now.

💭 Quote of the day: “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly at first.” — G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. This American Life. (2014). The gap URL

2. Fisher, M (1999) American Journalism Review - Archives. URL

The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.

🏷️ Categories: Attention, Writing.

David Ogilvy was perhaps the greatest advertising man of the 20th century.

In the 1950s, he was already astonishing the business world by selling whatever he wanted, to whoever he wanted, using nothing but the power of his words. He transformed advertising into a science and built a worldwide empire. He was an exceptional writer: his texts captured the attention of millions of people and convinced them to buy in a market that was already beginning to become saturated.

How was it possible that his words were so powerful?

Ogilvy believed there was no need for empty wording. All you needed was to understand human psychology, extract the essence of the message, and communicate it clearly in the tone that attracts your target audience. Those same principles still apply today to writing on the internet. In an environment overflowing with stimuli, the scarcest resource is attention. Breaking through is almost impossible… unless you understand the rules of the game.

These are Ogilvy’s 5 keys to mastering writing on the internet:

1. One message, one idea

2. Research the background

3. Express your point of view

4. Write the way people speak

5. The headline is 80%

Let’s dive deeper.

1. One message, one idea

“If your advertising does not contain a big idea, it will pass you by like a ship in the night.” — David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising.

We are overwhelmed by stimuli in today’s world, so trying to say everything in a single message while making it appealing is impossible. To capture attention, you need to be like a dart: precise and fast. Don’t overwhelm your audience with multiple points that dilute the central focus. If you deliver a single idea, you make it as easy as possible for people to understand the message in the moment and remember it afterwards.

Think about Substack.

You are competing in your subscriber’s inbox with hundreds of other emails. Here, distraction is deadly. If your newsletter tries to solve three different problems at once, the reader won’t understand what the email is about at a glance. Every issue should revolve around one powerful concept that is easy to summarize.

• In the email subject line: Instead of a generic “Marketing strategies, AI tools, and how to organize your week,” go for a clear statement like: “Why your marketing strategy is failing (and how to fix it today).”

• In the structure of the post: If you are going to talk about productivity, don’t wander into software, sleep habits, and nutrition. Focus on one idea (for example, the two-minute rule) and develop it deeply.

One message, one idea. That’s the formula.

2. Research the background

“Your next task is to find out what kind of advertising your competitors have been doing for similar products and with what success. This will give you an idea of where to start. Then comes consumer research. Find out how they think about your type of product, what language they use when they talk about the subject, what attributes matter to them, and what promise is most likely to make them buy your brand.” — David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising.

You cannot reach your readers if you are shooting blindly in unfamiliar territory.

Before launching any message, you must study the playing field: analyze what your competitors are doing so you know where you stand, and understand your reader deeply. Listen to how they speak and what matters to them. Only when you understand their needs can you write in a way that appeals to them. The modern writer must write, but must also do research and analyze data.

On Substack, this is simple. The platform itself gives you tools to understand your performance, and you can easily see what others are doing.

• Analyze the leaders: Review the most-read newsletters in your niche. Look at which questions appear repeatedly, which posts get the most likes, and what information gaps they are leaving that you can fill by improving what already exists.

• Use Notes: Before writing a long essay, publish a Note that summarizes the core idea. These kinds of tests will show you general interest in the topic before you invest time writing full articles.

Research first, success follows.

3. Express your point of view

“If you and your competitors make excellent products, don’t try to imply that your product is better. Simply explain what is good about your product, and do it in a clearer, more honest, and more informative way. Sales will lean toward the seller who best creates confidence that their product is truly good.” — David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising.

The same applies to writing.

On the internet, parity is absolute: anyone can access the same data and write about the same topic as you. The difference is not what you say, but how you say it. Readers are not only looking for cold facts — that’s what Wikipedia is for. They are looking for a voice, a unique view of reality through the eyes of an expert or someone with a special understanding, perhaps a community that provides that extra value. The challenge is to transform common information into a unique experience, elevating your writing into something more than just words.

On Substack, people are willing to pay for your expert judgment, your analytical ability, or information that is difficult to access and that you have because of your unique position.

You are not just “selling” text — you are selling your perspective on that topic.

That is your differentiator.

4. Write the way people speak

“Some copywriters write misleading headlines: double meanings, wordplay, and other ambiguities. This is counterproductive. In an average newspaper, your headline has to compete with 350 others. Readers move quickly through this jungle. Your headline must clearly communicate what you mean.” — David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising.

You don’t need to sound intelligent. You need to be the clearest.

Complex wordplay and double meanings only slow comprehension and tire the reader faster. In a world where attention is the scarcest resource of all, absolute clarity is your competitive advantage. If you write poetry, novels, or other formats, it is different, but if you are writing online — especially headlines — remove the unnecessary decoration and speak directly.

• Avoid cryptic headlines: A title like “Walking Through the Storm of the Algorithm” confuses readers in their inbox. It is much more effective to write: “How to Survive the Algorithm in 2026 as an Online Writer.”

Speak as you are, write as you speak.

5. The headline is 80% of the text

“On average, five times as many people read the headline as the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have already spent eighty cents of your dollar.” — David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising.

The headline accounts for 80% of your text’s success. That is the harsh reality. If it fails, nobody will read the rest, because we tend to judge books, articles, food, and everything else by the cover — by the first impression. That’s why it is essential to push yourself until you have written twenty or thirty different versions of the same headline.

Optimize the headline + subtitle combination: On Substack, the subtitle appears as the preview text in the email. Use it as support.

• Example:

  • Headline: The End of Average Writers.

  • Subtitle: Why AI won’t take your job, but a writer who researches might.

Treat your headline with the same care as the rest of your writing.

At first glance, these ideas may seem basic, but that is exactly why they last.

They are the foundations. Ogilvy didn’t invent anything; he simply structured psychological processes and the way language works in a clear way to gain an advantage over the rest of the market. Nothing more.

On a screen, we are still looking for the same things we looked for in newspapers, radio, and television.

Changing paper for a Substack inbox, a social media profile, or any other medium does not change the rules. Environments change, people do not.

Use these 5 principles and you will notice the difference immediately.

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. I wrote 300 articles in 500 days: 7 keys to instantly improve your writing

2. 4 ways to differentiate your writing: You need to be different, not better

3. Susan Sontag’s 7 keys to becoming a great writer

✍️ Your turn: How much time do you spend researching your writing category and getting to know your readers compared to the time you spend writing?

💭 Quote of the day: “Never write an advertisement you wouldn’t want your own family to read. You wouldn’t lie to your wife. Don’t lie to mine. Treat others as you would like to be treated.” — David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man.

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Ogilvy, D. (1963). Confessions of an Advertising Man.

2. Ogilvy, D. (1983). Ogilvy on Advertising.

The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.

🏷️ Categories: Life lessons, Motivation, Learning.

In 1964, during the premiere of Mary Poppins, Walt Disney seemed to have reached the summit of a mountain that very few people ever manage to climb in their lifetime.

He had revolutionized the animation industry, built Disneyland, brought cinema to television, and created a company that transformed the way people consumed entertainment. A year after his death, more than 240 million people had watched one of his films, millions read his books, and bought his products. He won 22 Academy Awards, more than any other person in history. However, his true legacy was not the awards—it was the characters that shaped the childhoods of millions: Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Cinderella, and Bambi.

From the outside, it seems as if the story was always brilliant.

But people begin in the shadows long before they shine…

A harsh childhood

Long before he became the famous Walt Disney, he was just an exhausted child.

At nine years old, he worked seven days a week delivering newspapers for his father’s business. While other children played, he would wake up before sunrise, complete his delivery route, attend school, and return to work before the day ended. During winter, the cold was so intense that he sometimes curled up inside bundles of newspapers to stay warm. The hardest part was that he received no compensation for his effort. All the money went to his father, who managed the business (Gabler, 2007).

He repeated that routine without rest for six years.

Decades later, Walt would recall that period saying he was working all the time and never truly had a childhood (Gabler, 2007). His relationship with his father offered little refuge. Elias Disney was an authoritarian man who cared only about work, so Walt grew up without a childhood beyond his father’s business.

The wounds did not disappear when childhood ended.

The relationship between them became so strained that when Elias died, Walt chose not to interrupt a business trip to attend the funeral. Despite everything, after a childhood marked by labor and deprivation, he had an idea: he dreamed of building an animation company. He wanted to tell stories and create worlds, perhaps to compensate for everything he had missed as a child (Gabler, 2007).

That dream would be tested more times than he could imagine.

In 1921, he founded his first company, Laugh-O-Gram Studio. He managed to secure contracts to produce several animations, but the business did not generate enough income to stay afloat. Desperate to save it, Disney bet on a new project called Alice’s Wonderland, a short film combining live action and animation, but it was unsuccessful and the company went bankrupt (Gabler, 2007).

Walt was devastated.

He had failed the investors who trusted him and the friends who supported him. He then decided to move to Hollywood with the intention of becoming a film director, but after months of searching for work, he had to admit another defeat—he could not break into the industry (Gabler, 2007; Schickel, 2019).

For many, this would have already been the end of a dream.

But he kept going.

Walt got back up once more and began showing Alice’s Wonderland to film distributors. Most did not respond, but eventually, a woman named Margaret Winkler, a distributor in New York, gave him a chance. She offered him $1,500 for six Alice shorts. The audience responded well, and more orders followed. Soon after, Walt and his brother Roy founded Disney Brothers Studio, the company that would later become The Walt Disney Company, eventually achieving worldwide fame (Gabler, 2007; Schickel, 2019).

The story changed completely.

When we look at Walt’s life, the only constant was his ability to keep moving forward despite obstacles. That is why his journey contains some of the most valuable lessons on learning and resilience.

Let’s go through the key ideas one by one.

1. Follow what matters to you

The path toward any goal is already difficult on its own.

It becomes even harder if we pursue something that does not truly fit us…

Many people try to find motivation for goals that, deep down, never felt like their own, and pursue them only due to external expectations. This can be one of the worst kinds of suffering: struggling for something you don’t even believe in.

Walt did the opposite.

He rejected a more conventional life and chose to pursue animation when it was still a small and unprofitable industry. His father constantly criticized that decision, but instead of being discouraged, he pushed forward.

All obstacles weigh less when the destination is truly yours.

2. Fail more in order to succeed

We live in a culture obsessed with success.

However, behind every shining story there is often an invisible mountain of mistakes. Walt understood this through repeated failure. Rather than avoiding it, he learned from his errors and kept moving forward with his project.

“All the adversity I’ve had in my life, all my troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a hard hit can be the best thing in the world for you.” — Walt Disney (cited by Disney Official Account)

To succeed more, you must be willing to fail even more.

3. Commit for the long term

In poker there is a move called all in, where a player bets everything on one hand.

Walt lived much of his life this way. He invested his time, energy, and resources into a vision that no one could guarantee would succeed. The idea is that the more priorities and plans you have to manage, the fewer resources you can dedicate to each one. So if you commit everything to one, you are more likely to develop the skills, knowledge, and opportunities needed to surpass others.

It is pure mathematics.

The risk is higher, but it maximizes your impact on your single priority.

4. Never stop learning

Invest in knowledge; stay curious.

Walt was a tireless learner who spent hours studying animation, always willing to experiment and learn new techniques, and eager to travel and connect with people from all walks of life to take the best from each of them. It is simple: the more you know about something, the better you become at it. The better you become, the more opportunities come your way and the more confidence you gain.

That is why he considered books one of life’s greatest treasures.

“There are more treasures in books than in all the pirate loot on Treasure Island and at the bottom of the Caribbean… and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.” — Walt Disney (Walt Disney Archives)

Knowledge puts you ahead of the rest.

Because of all this, his story continues to inspire decades later.

He was an ordinary man who experienced failure and hard work, but he chose not to make it the end of his story. He was stubborn and passionate, he did not give up, and he kept going until he turned the vision he had as a young man into reality.

A child without a childhood who wanted to give children a better childhood.

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. First they will mock you, then they will admire you: The life of the greatest high jumper

2. Before the world believes in you, you have to believe in yourself

3. Practice matters more than standing out: Stephen King’s lesson on success

✍️ Your turn: What knowledge or skill could change your life in five years if you started developing it today?

💭 Quote of the day: “But a man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” — Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Gabler, N. (2007). Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

2. Schickel, R. (2019). The Disney version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney.

🏷️ Categories: Attention, Learning, Writing.

We live trapped in a storm of information.

The average person consumes more than 35 GB of information every day (Bohn & Short, 2012). Many spend their days consuming other people’s thoughts, endlessly scrolling through artificial, highly edited content optimized solely to retain users and feed the algorithm behind it. We have been transformed into passive consumers of meaningless digital noise.

As a result, original thinking is dying.

Your ability to determine who you are, what you value, and where you’re going is crumbling in front of a screen that dictates what you should think about based on an algorithm, constantly shifting your focus between trends and 30-second viral videos.

This needs to stop.

Keeping a notebook is one of the few tools left that allows you to slow down an increasingly accelerated world, process chaos at a manageable scale, and structure your own mind before the algorithm does it for you.

This is the essential guide to using a physical notebook and what to put inside it.

The Myth of the Perfect Record

Many people begin their notebooks with the wrong mindset.

They believe they must create a flawless record of their lives, imitating what they see online: neat, aesthetic notebooks that, of course, have all been edited to fit the perfect photo. That approach turns writing into a performance rather than genuine thinking. Instead of exploring your mind, you end up imitating the very thing we’re trying to escape.

This is something writer Joan Didion warned about years ago:

“The notebook that is meant for public consumption is a structural device for collecting a series of witty observations. We are talking about something private, fragments of the mind too brief to be used elsewhere, an indiscriminate and erratic collection whose meaning exists only for its creator.”

— Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook

Real writing is messy and far less polished than what you see online.

It is the intentional act of sitting down with your thoughts and forcing them into a physical form through poorly written passages, half-finished diagrams, and crossed-out ideas everywhere. In doing so, you create a space where your past cannot become malleable, preserving your lessons, mistakes, and ideas.

Everything is safe there, on paper, in your hands.

The Power of the Tangible in a Digital Economy

Total digitalization is stripping away part of our humanity.

When everything is pixels and interactions through avatars, life feels more superficial, social relationships become less satisfying (Boyd & Ellison, 2007), and our minds struggle to grasp concepts as deeply (Carr, 2010).

Everything has become fast and shallow.

A physical notebook creates friction and remains tangible. You can fill it with fragments of everyday life, turning writing into a time capsule where everything valuable to you can coexist in one place, far removed from digital noise.

• A sketch you made on a napkin with friends at a restaurant.

• A sticky note containing an idea from a meeting.

• A hand-drawn concept map.

• Clippings, photos, labels...

Everything has a place in this space for thinking, remembering, and creating.

The Mental Refuge

Building an analog thinking system requires only a minimal set of tools. You do not need complex software or another productivity app to begin. You simply need to reconnect with analog slowness.

Here are the essentials you should carry in your backpack:

• A Notebook: Any notebook in a size that works for you.

  • A4: 21 cm × 29.7 cm (8.3” × 11.7”): The standard sheet-of-paper size. Difficult to carry by hand but excellent in a backpack. Ideal for drawing, attaching photos, clippings, and all kinds of materials alongside your writing.

  • A5: 14.8 cm × 21 cm (5.8” × 8.3”): Half the size of an A4. Compact and portable. The most popular format. Think of a planner. It offers the perfect balance between portability and writing space.

  • A6: 10.5 cm × 14.8 cm (4.1” × 5.8”): Small and practical, roughly the size of a pocket notepad or smartphone. Ideal if you want something that fits easily into a bag or pocket. Perfect for carrying everywhere.

Make this choice a conscious experience. Visit a bookstore and touch the paper. Find a canvas that suits your needs. Choose a format and don’t be afraid to experiment with others. It was never meant to be a permanent decision.

• A Pen or Pencil: Keep it simple. Use your favorite basic pen and nothing more. Over time, you may upgrade to a higher-quality writing instrument or experiment with fountain pens, but everything has its time. The obsession with doing everything perfectly is what prevents 99% of people from doing anything at all. Don’t fall into that trap.

• Sticky Notes or Page Tabs: A good notebook houses multiple interests and intellectual obsessions. You need a simple navigation system. Use colored tabs to label different “lines of thought” (such as Philosophy, Marketing, or Psychology).

• A Highlighter: Optional if you already use sticky notes. But if you prefer building your color-coding system directly into the text, that’s perfectly valid.

  It’s a simple way to highlight fundamental principles and key ideas worth revisiting when writing your next essay or project.

Beyond this, most accessories are unnecessary and only add complexity.

Setting Up Your Mental Refuge

Before writing your first line, you must structure the space where your mind will operate. Clarity in your environment encourages clarity in your thinking.

1. Define Your Navigation System: Decide whether you will use sticky notes or a highlighter to distinguish between your intellectual obsessions. Then leave the first pages blank to gradually build a living index of everything you record. This opening space is mental infrastructure in formation, capable of adapting as your curiosity evolves. The number of pages you reserve depends on your notebook size (A4, A5, or A6).

As a general guideline, 5–10 pages are usually sufficient. The goal is to leave enough room for the index to expand naturally as your mental refuge grows.

2. Divide the Mental Territory: Decide how you will organize your notebook.

   Will you create fixed sections for each topic from the beginning, like a traditional subject notebook? Or will you write freely and categorize information as you go, allowing ideas to grow organically and fractally?

There is no wrong answer. Only the approach that best fits the rhythm of your thinking and your lifestyle.

That’s it.

The analysis is over.

It’s time to stop passive consumption and start using your notebook.

What to Capture in Your Mental Refuge

If your mind doesn’t know where to begin, start by collecting intellectual raw material without excessive filtering.

1. Research: Notes extracted from books, lectures, magazines, conversations, observations, videos, podcasts, quotes, and thoughts. Whether consumed intentionally or discovered while aimlessly scrolling, these become the foundation for synthesizing your interests and making sense of the world around you.

2. References: A record of sources you’ve already consulted and others you plan to explore in order to investigate your interests more deeply.

3. Action Lists: An Ivy Lee–style list containing your six most important tasks, or an inventory of your medium- and long-term goals.

4. Outlines, Images, Clippings, Mind Maps, and Drawings: Include anything that is not pure text but still supports your thinking, preserves memories, or fuels creativity for future projects.

It’s Essential

Carry your notebook everywhere.

Do not leave it on your desk or gathering dust in a corner. Put it in your backpack, bag, or pocket, and always keep your pen or pencil nearby. If you’re waiting in line, sitting in a café, riding public transportation, or enjoying a quiet moment while everyone else reaches for their phones to get another hit of dopamine, open your notebook. Read previous notes. Write about your recent days, your thoughts, and your future actions.

Reclaim your attention.

Processing reality on your own terms is the first step toward becoming yourself again.

— Álvaro

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Thinking Is Uncomfortable, That’s Why We Don’t Do It Anymore

2. Gresham’s Law: Why Mediocrity Dominates Social Media

3. Autopilot: What ChatGPT Is Doing to Your Mind (and You Don’t Notice)

✍️ Your turn: How much of the information you consume every day is actually processed into thoughts rather than simply accumulating as mental noise?

💭 Quote of the day: “The point of keeping a notebook has never been to maintain an accurate record of what I did or thought. It is to remember what it was like to be me. That is always the point.” — Joan Didion, On Keeping a Notebook

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Bohn, R. E., y Short, J. E. (2012). Measuring Consumer Information. International Journal Of Communication, 6, 980-1000. URL

2. Boyd, D., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal Of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210-230. URL

3. Carr, N. (2010). The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains.

4. Didion, J. (2017). On Keeping a Notebook URL

The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.

🏷️ Categories: Motivation, Continuous improvement.

In the early 1970s, a young aspiring comedian began performing on small stages in New York to find out whether he could actually make people laugh.

In 1975, he tried his luck at an audition at the Golden Lion Pub. He had a joke about being left-handed. The audience burst into laughter, and something inside him changed forever: he felt that this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life (Remnick, 2024).

But realizing your calling is not the same as mastering it. Work is still needed.

A year later, he tried to make his debut at a famous comedy club in Manhattan. The experience was disastrous: he completely froze (Britannica, n.d.). He barely managed to mumble a few words before stepping off the stage, discouraged and embarrassed.

He knew he could do it—he had already proven it before—but he still needed a lot of practice.

So he went back to work. Night after night, he refined his jokes in New York clubs. Over time, he saw the key: comedy is not about being funny in the moment; it’s about having written better jokes the night before. Try, erase, adjust, repeat. A great comedian is, above all, a great writer (Ferriss, 2020).

That slow process of trial and error gradually shaped him.

After years of effort, in 1981 he made his first major appearance on The Tonight Show. That was the breakthrough that launched his career nationwide. Later came his own TV series, and he became one of the most recognizable faces in American comedy.

And it all started with a few jokes in a small New York club.

His name is Jerry Seinfeld.

Seinfeld’s story invites us to reflect on the power of consistency.

Think about comedy. It is not a field for the timid. Is there anything more terrifying than standing alone under the lights, microphone in hand, and getting no laughs at all? Yet Seinfeld faced that fear night after night for years.

This leads me to a question that perhaps all of us have asked ourselves at some point.

Why are there people like Seinfeld who manage to develop that discipline and achieve extraordinary results, while most of us struggle so much to stay motivated?

The answer is more interesting than it seems. Here it is...

The “edge-of-challenge” rule

The human brain loves challenges.

But there is a catch: only when they are in the right zone of difficulty.

Imagine you are a football fan. If you play a serious match against a small child, you’ll get bored in minutes. Too easy. You win every point effortlessly. Now imagine the opposite: facing Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi. In seconds, motivation disappears. It’s too hard.

What if you play against someone at your own level?

The match goes on. You win some points, you lose others. You have a chance of winning, but only if you truly commit. Your attention sharpens, and you enter a state of flow (that moment when time disappears and only the game exists). This happens when the challenge is perfectly calibrated to your level (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Fong et al., 2015).

Jerry Seinfeld’s career is a perfect example of this.

He didn’t build his success with a single performance. He did it with thousands of shows, each one adjusting the level. He tested new material, read the audience’s reaction, kept what worked, and threw away what didn’t. There were enough wins to keep motivation alive, and enough failures to force him to keep improving.

That is exactly the edge-of-challenge rule.

Goal-setting psychology confirms it: when we work with demanding but achievable goals, we exert more effort, persist longer, and adjust our behavior to grow (Locke & Latham, 2002).

Measure your progress

If you want to learn how to stay motivated to achieve your goals, there is a second element you cannot ignore: measuring your progress.

It all comes down to finding the balance between effort and satisfaction.

Seeing that you are improving is what drives us most. Jerry Seinfeld saw it: he told a joke and immediately knew whether it worked. The audience’s laughter was his signal. That immediate feedback allowed him to adjust, keep the good material, or discard the bad instantly.

But in other areas, measurement takes different forms. The function is the same.

• In dieting, when you finish a week and check your weight.

• In writing, when you publish your article and see readers’ reactions.

• In the gym, when you lift more weight than the week before.

You need to see your progress because you can only improve what is measured.

In addition, psychology has shown that when we are close to achieving a goal, our interest in it increases and we commit more intensely (Bandura & Schunk, 1981). Seeing a small win makes it much easier to keep going.

That is why measurement is so powerful.

The 2 keys to daily motivation

If we had to distill everything needed to maintain motivation, it would be this.

• Seek the edge-of-challenge: Work on tasks that are manageable but difficult—right at the edge where effort feels necessary but not exhausting. That is the point where you can improve the most with each day of practice.

• Make your progress visible: Measure what you do and seek immediate feedback from the data. To do this, use the goal-gradient technique; you will see yourself advancing, feel more motivated, and have data to improve precisely.

Everyone has goals. The hard part is continuing day after day when the initial excitement fades. If you want your motivation to be solid and lasting, start with a challenge you can master, measure every small step, and repeat the cycle.

Consistency is just knowing how to play the game.

Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to explore:

1. Conquering Everest: How mountaineer Edmund Hillary applied the edge-of-challenge technique to reach the top of the world

2. The metamorphosis of becoming good at something: The gap between beginner and expert (and how to close it)

3. The 7 differences that separate amateurs from professionals

   

✍️ Your turn: What could you adjust today to move into that point where the required effort is optimal? For me, it was writing one article per month, then every two weeks, then every week, and now three per week. Think about your own case.

💭 Quote of the day: “Practice is not what you do when you’re good. It is what makes you good.” — Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Remnick, D. (2024). The scholar of comedy. The New Yorker.

2. Britannica. (s. f.). Jerry Seinfeld. En Britannica Kids. URL

3. Ferriss, T. (2020). Jerry Seinfeld—A comedy legend’s systems, routines, and methods for success (#485). The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss.

4. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience.

5. Fong, C. J., Zaleski, D. J., & Leach, J. K. (2014). The challenge–skill balance and antecedents of flow: A meta-analytic investigation. The Journal Of Positive Psychology, 10(5), 425-446. URL

6. Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717. URL

🏷️ Categories: Literature.

Francis Bacon once said: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested thoroughly” (Of Studies, 1625), but with so little time to read so many books, how can we avoid reading bad books and instead find those few great books that “must be chewed and digested thoroughly”?

In 2002, the Norwegian Book Club tried to answer this question.

That year, the club invited writers and leading literary figures from all over the world to create a selection of the 100 best works of all time. The goal was to create a map of world literature, without ranking the 100 works. It includes foundational works from different cultures and eras.

Below is the complete list of the 100 selected books.

The 100 best books of all time

1. “1984”, by George Orwell, England (1903–1950)

2. “A Doll’s House”, by Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828–1906)

3. “Sentimental Education”, by Gustave Flaubert, France (1821–1880)

4. “Absalom, Absalom!”, by William Faulkner, United States (1897–1962)

5. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, by Mark Twain, United States (1835–1910)

6. “The Aeneid”, by Virgil, Italy (70–19 BC)

7. “Anna Karenina”, by Leo Tolstoy, Russia (1828–1910)

8. “Beloved”, by Toni Morrison, United States (b. 1931)

9. “Berlin Alexanderplatz”, by Alfred Döblin, Germany (1878–1957)

10. “Blindness”, by José Saramago, Portugal (1922–2010)

11. “The Book of Disquiet”, by Fernando Pessoa, Portugal (1888–1935)

12. “The Book of Job”, from the Hebrew tradition, Israel (600–400 BC)

13. “The Brothers Karamazov”, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russia (1821–1881)

14. “The Buddenbrooks”, by Thomas Mann, Germany (1875–1955)

15. “The Canterbury Tales”, by Geoffrey Chaucer, England (1340–1400)

16. “The Castle”, by Franz Kafka, Bohemia (1883–1924)

17. “Children of Gebelawi”, by Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt (b. 1911)

18. “Ficciones”, by Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina (1899–1986)

19. “Collected Poems”, by Giacomo Leopardi, Italy (1798–1837)

20. “Complete Stories”, by Franz Kafka, Bohemia (1883–1924)

21. “Complete Tales”, by Edgar Allan Poe, United States (1809–1849)

22. “The Confessions of Zeno”, by Italo Svevo, Italy (1861–1928)

23. “Crime and Punishment”, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russia (1821–1881)

24. “Dead Souls”, by Nikolai Gogol, Russia (1809–1852)

25. “The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories”, by Leo Tolstoy, Russia (1828–1910)

26. “The Decameron”, by Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy (1313–1375)

27. “The Devil to Pay in the Backlands”, by João Guimarães Rosa, Brazil (1880–1967)

28. “Diary of a Madman and Other Stories”, by Lu Xun, China (1881–1936)

29. “The Divine Comedy”, by Dante Alighieri, Italy (1265–1321)

30. “Don Quixote”, by Miguel de Cervantes, Spain (1547–1616)

31. “Essays”, by Michel de Montaigne, France (1533–1592)

32. “Fairy Tales and Stories”, by Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark (1805–1875)

33. “Faust”, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany (1749–1832)

34. “Gargantua and Pantagruel”, by François Rabelais, France (1495–1553)

35. “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, from ancient Mesopotamia (c. 1800 BC)

36. “The Golden Notebook”, by Doris Lessing, England (b. 1919)

37. “Great Expectations”, by Charles Dickens, England (1812–1870)

38. “Gulliver’s Travels”, by Jonathan Swift, Ireland (1667–1745)

39. “Gypsy Ballads”, by Federico García Lorca, Spain (1898–1936)

40. “Hamlet”, by William Shakespeare, England (1564–1616)

41. “The History”, by Elsa Morante, Italy (1918–1985)

42. “Hunger”, by Knut Hamsun, Norway (1859–1952)

43. “The Idiot”, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russia (1821–1881)

44. “The Iliad”, by Homer, Greece (c. 700 BC)

45. “Independent People”, by Halldór Laxness, Iceland (1902–1998)

46. “Invisible Man”, by Ralph Ellison, United States (1914–1994)

47. “Jacques the Fatalist and His Master”, by Denis Diderot, France (1713–1784)

48. “Journey to the End of the Night”, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, France (1894–1961)

49. “King Lear”, by William Shakespeare, England (1564–1616)

50. “Leaves of Grass”, by Walt Whitman, United States (1819–1892)

51. “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy”, by Laurence Sterne, Ireland (1713–1768)

52. “Lolita”, by Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States (1899–1977)

53. “Love in the Time of Cholera”, by Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia (b. 1928)

54. “Madame Bovary”, by Gustave Flaubert, France (1821–1880)

55. “The Magic Mountain”, by Thomas Mann, Germany (1875–1955)

56. “The Mahabharata”, from India (c. 500 BC)

57. “The Man Without Qualities”, by Robert Musil, Austria (1880–1942)

58. “The Mathnawi”, by Jalal ad-Din Rumi, Afghanistan (1207–1273)

59. “Medea”, by Euripides, Greece (c. 480–406 BC)

60. “Memoirs of Hadrian”, by Marguerite Yourcenar, France (1903–1987)

61. “The Metamorphoses”, by Ovid, Italy (c. 43 BC)

62. “Middlemarch”, by George Eliot, England (1819–1880)

63. “Midnight’s Children”, by Salman Rushdie, India/UK (b. 1947)

64. “Moby-Dick”, by Herman Melville, United States (1819–1891)

65. “Mrs. Dalloway”, by Virginia Woolf, England (1882–1941)

66. “The Njál Saga”, from Iceland (c. 1300)

67. “Nostromo”, by Joseph Conrad, England (1857–1924)

68. “The Odyssey”, by Homer, Greece (c. 700 BC)

69. “Oedipus the King”, by Sophocles, Greece (496–406 BC)

70. “Père Goriot”, by Honoré de Balzac, France (1799–1850)

71. “The Old Man and the Sea”, by Ernest Hemingway, United States (1899–1961)

72. “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, by Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia (b. 1928)

73. “The Garden”, by Sheikh Saadi, Iran (c. 1200–1292)

74. “Othello”, by William Shakespeare, England (1564–1616)

75. “Pedro Páramo”, by Juan Rulfo, Mexico (1918–1986)

76. “Pippi Longstocking”, by Astrid Lindgren, Sweden (1907–2002)

77. “Poems”, by Paul Celan, Romania/France (1920–1970)

78. “The Possessed”, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russia (1821–1881)

79. “Pride and Prejudice”, by Jane Austen, England (1775–1817)

80. “The Ramayana”, by Valmiki, India (c. 300 BC)

81. “The Recognition of Śakuntalā”, by Kalidasa, India (c. 400)

82. “The Red and the Black”, by Stendhal, France (1783–1842)

83. “In Search of Lost Time”, by Marcel Proust, France (1871–1922)

84. “Season of Migration to the North”, by Tayeb Salih, Sudan (b. 1929)

85. “Selected Stories”, by Anton Chekhov, Russia (1860–1904)

86. “Sons and Lovers”, by D. H. Lawrence, England (1885–1930)

87. “The Sound and the Fury”, by William Faulkner, United States (1897–1962)

88. “The Sound of the Mountain”, by Yasunari Kawabata, Japan (1899–1972)

89. “The Stranger”, by Albert Camus, France (1913–1960)

90. “The Tale of Genji”, by Murasaki Shikibu, Japan (c. 1000)

91. “Things Fall Apart”, by Chinua Achebe, Nigeria (b. 1930)

92. “The Thousand and One Nights”, from India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt tradition (700–1500)

93. “The Tin Drum”, by Günter Grass, Germany (b. 1927)

94. “To the Lighthouse”, by Virginia Woolf, England (1882–1941)

95. “The Trial”, by Franz Kafka, Bohemia (1883–1924)

96. “Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable”, by Samuel Beckett, Ireland (1906–1989)

97. “Ulysses”, by James Joyce, Ireland (1882–1941)

98. “War and Peace”, by Leo Tolstoy, Russia (1828–1910)

99. “Wuthering Heights”, by Emily Brontë, England (1818–1848)

100. “Zorba the Greek”, by Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece (1883–1957)

What to do with this?

The goal is to avoid wasting time on mediocre books.

This list is not meant to tell you what to read first, but rather to give you a map of world literature—100 gateways into different ways of seeing the world. Based on feedback from those surveyed, the following conclusions were reached:

1. Don Quixote is considered by many to be the greatest work ever written.

2. Fyodor Dostoevsky is the author with the most books on the list, with four.

3. William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, and Leo Tolstoy each have three.

This selection by the Norwegian Book Club serves as a compass to help you navigate the vast, ungraspable universe of literature. It does not include all masterpieces, of course—I myself miss The Analects by Confucius and Plato’s Dialogues, among others—but all 100 works listed are masterpieces.

Not all masterpieces are included, but everything included is a masterpiece.

These are works that have survived the judgment of time and cultures.

I hope you find it useful.

— Álvaro

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Why you should read the classics

2. How to choose your next book: A simple method to avoid failure

3. The Anti-Library: The books you haven’t read are the most valuable

✍️ Your turn: What book has truly changed the way you see the world, and why?

💭 Quote of the day: “When you read, don’t just consider what the author thinks; consider also what you think.” — Tom Schulman, Dead Poets Society.

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. The Guardian. (2002). The top 100 books of all time. URL

🏷️ Categories: Life lessons, Continuous improvement.

Until recently, I had never stepped foot in a pottery workshop.

Yet one day, without really looking for it, I was invited to a class. I learned by watching the potter at work, he guided us as we shaped our own vessels, and I felt deeply connected to the task. Life sometimes places you exactly where you didn’t even know you needed to be. I thought I would see beautiful ceramic pieces—perhaps some bowls, mugs, maybe a vase...

I never imagined I would walk away with a lesson about life.

As I listened to the master potter explain how to work clay on the wheel, I almost immediately felt that internal click: the way we shape clay also says something about us. We are malleable, yet we are shaped by our habits and our environment. And like clay spinning on a wheel, each day is another turn. In the same way that a work of art emerges from clay, we emerge too.

This is what he explained to me.

Lessons learned from pottery

Potters create pieces by shaping clay as it spins on the wheel.

From the outside, the process looks beautiful. It’s as if a vessel is born from a block of clay that gradually transforms into a mug, a bowl, or a vase.

The reality is much more complex than it appears.

One of the most important moments in the entire process is pulling up the walls of the piece. The potter places their hands around the clay and begins to raise it, giving it height. But this is also where the risk appears: if they try to pull up too much clay at once, the piece loses stability. The walls become distorted, bend, or worse yet—they collapse.

While explaining this to us, he said something that stayed with me.

“If you try to pull up too much clay at once, the piece will collapse. The best way to do it is to raise the wall gradually, with gentle and consistent pressure.”

That is the key to clay—and to life in general.

First, you center the clay. Then you make a small opening. Then you raise the wall a little. Then a little more. Then a little more after that. And so, slowly, until the piece begins to resemble what you imagined from the start.

You must never rush the shaping process.

The goal is to guide it.

When you work with small movements, the piece becomes stable and well-formed.

And life works the same way.

Pottery in everyday life

Changing your behavior, building new habits, or learning a new skill is much more like raising a vessel on a pottery wheel than most of us realize.

Yes, you can try to change everything at once.

We can do it—at least in theory. It’s what many people promise themselves year after year with New Year’s resolutions. We decide to completely change our diet overnight, or we get carried away and think we can transform our physique in just a few months. If our life were that piece of clay, we often try to reshape the whole thing in a single pass.

And that’s the mistake.

It’s very easy to become obsessed with the perfect final result and forget about the daily process—the turn after turn on the wheel—that supports it. We are fascinated by achievements, yet we ignore the system behind them. We think about the goal, but not about how to reach it without burning out along the way. I don’t know about you, but I’ve fallen into that trap many times.

I get excited very quickly.

I’m an intense person.

And then I dive in with all the energy I have. But shortly afterward, I begin to lose momentum. The piece becomes distorted, and I end up having to start over from scratch because I quit.

Again.

Approach change like a potter

The alternative is to look at life the way a potter would.

Move slowly, with care and patience.

Start with a small movement—so manageable that it doesn’t destabilize anything—and do it well, day after day. Then repeat with a slightly bigger step, without forcing the process, but introducing a small improvement with each new turn.

That’s how a life truly changes.

This approach is the essence of homeostasis. You need to make changes so subtle that you can barely feel the friction. That’s exactly how pottery is shaped: with minimal resistance, turn after turn. Then you improve again or raise the bar slightly. Then you repeat. It’s not particularly impressive, but it works.

The potter works slowly because they want to do it right.

They know exactly where they want the piece to go, and they know they cannot force it to get there all at once without destroying it in the process.

You and I can do the same.

We can continue shaping our lives through small changes and steady improvements. With patience, a day will come when we have something beautiful in our hands—not a crooked piece defeated by haste.

A piece raised little by little, strong enough to stand on its own and worthy of pride.

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Why 90% of New Year’s resolutions fail (and how to actually achieve yours)

2. Everything in its own time: Are you patient enough to see results?

3. Homeostasis: The reason you always end up starting over

✍️ Your turn: In what area of your life are you trying to pull up too much clay at once instead of progressing little by little? Sometimes I wonder if I write too much; so far, the clay hasn't collapsed.

💭 Quote of the day: “You must learn to take things more lightly in life, dear. The world is always changing. Learn to allow it.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

Share

See you next time! 👋

The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.

🏷️ Categories: Learning, Attention.

November 25, 1915 was the day Einstein presented the theory of general relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences. The work, built over nearly a decade, propelled him to global fame and secured his place in the history of physics.

A few days earlier, he had written a revealing letter to his 11-year-old son.

The letter was addressed to Hans Albert, who was living in Vienna with his mother, Mileva, and his brother Eduard (Lawson, 2008). The letter is not about science, but about learning, attention, and curiosity as a way of life.

My dear Albert,

Yesterday I received your letter and was very happy about it. I was afraid that you no longer wanted to write to me.

When I was in Zurich, you told me that it feels uncomfortable for you when I come to visit. Therefore, I think it would be better if we met somewhere else, where no one would interfere with our comfort.

In any case, I will insist that every year we spend a whole month together, so that you can see that you have a father who loves you. You can also learn good and beautiful things from me that others cannot offer you so easily.

What I have achieved through so much hard work should not be only for strangers, but especially for my children. These days I have completed one of the most beautiful works of my life. When you are older, I will tell you about it.

I am very pleased that you enjoy playing the piano.

For someone your age, I think piano and woodworking are the best activities, even better than school. They are things that fit you naturally. Play what you enjoy, even if your teacher has not assigned it.

That is the way one learns the most: when you do something with such enjoyment that you do not notice time passing.

Sometimes I become so absorbed in my work that I forget about lunch.

Give Tete a kiss from your father.

Greetings to your mother.

Learning Happens Naturally

This sentence says it all: “That is the way one learns the most: when you do something with such enjoyment that you do not notice time passing.”

For Einstein, the key to learning was doing something out of passion—something so natural to you that you learn without even realizing you are learning. He does not force his son to do what he is supposed to do; instead, he recommends woodworking and piano because he knows they are attractive and natural for him.

That is where someone can truly shine.

When you do something driven by your passions, becoming good at it is almost inevitable.

• For someone who does not enjoy playing the piano, practicing for two hours can feel like torture, and maintaining focus becomes difficult.

• For someone who loves playing the piano, practicing for three hours can be pure joy, and they will devote their full attention to the process.

This applies to everything. The more you force yourself to do what you dislike simply because it is what others expect of you, the further you move away from discovering your true potential. To become a genius, you must first discover what you would gladly do for hours purely for the pleasure of it.

Those who are curious and passionate about something eventually excel in that area.

Flow

“The world cannot reject someone who comes from passion. Stay focused on what you love.” — Robert Greene, Mastery

Einstein intuitively understood something that psychology has since given a name to: the flow state.

It is that moment when you become so immersed in what you are doing that you forget the time and even whether you are hungry. Surely there is something that makes you feel this way, right? This flow state makes your greatest achievements possible, and understanding how it works is key to making the most of it.

The most important thing to know is that it is a temporary state.

You cannot remain in a state of flow 24 hours a day because it consumes a great deal of energy and produces mental fatigue. The optimal approach is to alternate between periods of deep focus and periods of genuine rest.

This is how I like to do it:

• Work for 50 minutes, focused on one single task.

• Take a 10-minute break (walk, water plants, look at the scenery, etc.).

• Every 4 or 5 cycles, take a longer break of 15 to 30 minutes.

In addition, you should avoid interruptions during a flow state.

To give you an idea, it takes us about 25 minutes to return to a flow state after being distracted (Mark et al., 2008), and around 50% of people cannot go a single hour without becoming distracted (Dropbox, 2023). That is the root of the problem, because without sustained attention, it is impossible to achieve anything truly meaningful.

The easiest way to become good at something is to do things that absorb you so completely that you disappear into them.

We may never become Einstein, but it is clear that genius begins with enjoyment and curiosity. Be curious and try many different things; that is how you discover what truly excites you. Only then can you cultivate something with burning passion and excel at it.

Just flow and enjoy the process.

Want to Learn More? Here are 3 related ideas to explore further:

• The Zen concept for mastering any skill

• The lesson of an ancient sage for mastering any skill in life

• How to master any skill, according to the greatest sushi chef in history

✍️ Your turn: What activity could you do for hours without noticing the passage of time, as if learning were happening effortlessly?

💭 Quote of the day: “Most people focus on the wrong thing; they focus on the result, not the process.” — Ronda Rousey, My Fight / Your Fight

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Dropbox. (2023). The modern workday is full of distractions—and it’s costing businesses big. Dropbox Blog URL

2. Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). The cost of interrupted work. URL

3. Lawson, D. M. (2008). Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children.

🏷️ Categories: Attention, Motivation, Memory.

Nietzsche said that “without music, life would be a mistake” (Twilight of the Idols).

Perhaps he was right for reasons far deeper than we usually imagine.

Besides being an art form, a means of cultural expression, and a source of entertainment, music also changes the way we think and feel. We often treat it as background noise accompanying our daily routines, but neuroscience has shown that its impact goes far beyond what we believe. Music alters cognitive processes such as attention, memory, stress, physical performance, and even our tolerance for boredom.

However, there is one key idea you need to understand from the beginning: not all music works the same way, and not all brains respond to it in the same way.

Here’s the science behind music and productivity...

1. Music improves mood and reduces stress

Listening to music you enjoy activates dopamine circuits.

The brain releases this neurotransmitter, which is linked to the reward system, increasing motivation and pleasure. At the same time, it reduces stress-related effects such as elevated heart rate and blood pressure (Chanda & Levitin, 2013).

What’s most interesting is that its effects can be anxiolytic.

Before facing situations that generate anxiety, music can act as an emotional regulator, helping reduce tension and improving adaptation to uncertainty (Nilsson, 2008).

Music can improve sustained attention, calculation speed, and decision-making.

But here comes the first important contradiction...

2. Music with lyrics reduces mental performance

Not all music enhances cognitive performance.

Studies have found that songs with lyrics interfere with linguistic tasks and reading comprehension. This happens because the brain tries to process both the language of the task and the language of the song simultaneously, creating competition for mental resources (Shih et al., 2012). For this reason, ambient, classical, or soft electronic music is usually more effective.

Simple rule: the more understandable the lyrics, the worse the performance (Jahncke et al., 2013).

Although this rule changes when we move into the physical domain.

3. Music improves physical performance

The effects of music on physical performance are highly positive.

Sports psychology has spent decades studying how certain musical stimuli increase endurance and reduce the perception of effort. Research has shown that synchronizing music with exercise rhythm can improve endurance performance by up to 10% (Karageorghis et al., 2010).

Music does not eliminate fatigue, but it changes how the brain interprets it.

And something similar happens with mental fatigue.

4. Music makes repetitive tasks more tolerable

When an activity is monotonous, music helps alleviate boredom.

It helps maintain optimal levels of arousal during routine tasks and reduces the mental fatigue associated with repetitive work (Levitin, 2006). However, this effect decreases as the cognitive complexity of the task increases.

In other words: the more mechanical the task, the more useful music becomes.

5. Familiar music promotes concentration

I’ve always felt it, but science confirmed it.

The brain responds differently to new music than to familiar music. When we listen to familiar songs, much of the auditory processing becomes automated (Large et al., 2015). The brain already anticipates what will happen next, reducing cognitive load. That’s why many people work better with repeated playlists or predictable music such as lo-fi or smooth jazz.

In my case, I often write with the same songs on repeat for hours.

Simple rule: use your favorite playlist.

6. Music affects people differently depending on personality

Individual differences also change the equation.

Introverts tend to perform worse on cognitive tasks when working with background music, especially in memory and verbal comprehension tasks. This appears to be because, due to their preference for lower-stimulation environments, additional stimuli can more easily overstimulate them (Furnham & Bradley, 1997).

Extroverts, on the other hand, tolerate higher levels of environmental stimulation more effectively.

This explains why some people need complete silence to focus, while others feel uncomfortable in environments that are too quiet.

And after all these findings, the final question arises...ç

7. What type of music should you listen to?

The answer depends on the type of task.

• For analytical or language-based tasks, simple, predictable, instrumental music without lyrics is usually the most effective.

• For physical exercise or repetitive tasks, more intense and energetic rhythms tend to work better.

The key is understanding what your brain needs at any given moment and choosing the soundscape that best supports that state.

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Why store music makes you spend more money (without realizing it)

✍️ Your turn: What kind of music do you usually listen to while working? Have you noticed any differences in your performance?

💭 Quote of the day: “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent.” — Victor Hugo, Choses vues

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Chanda, M. L., & Levitin, D. J. (2013). The neurochemistry of music. Trends In Cognitive Sciences, 17(4), 179-193. URL

2. Furnham, A., & Bradley, A. (1997). Music while you work: The differential distraction of background music on the cognitive test performance of introverts and extraverts. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 11(5), 445–455. URL

3. Jahncke, H., Hongisto, V., & Virjonen, P. (2012). Cognitive performance during irrelevant speech: Effects of speech intelligibility and office-task characteristics. Applied Acoustics, 74(3), 307-316. URL

4. Karageorghis, C. I., Priest, D. L., Williams, L. S., Hirani, R. M., Lannon, K. M., & Bates, B. J. (2010). Ergogenic and psychological effects of synchronous music during circuit-type exercise. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 11(6), 551–559. URL

5. Large, E. W., Herrera, J. A., & Velasco, M. J. (2015). Neural Networks for Beat Perception in Musical Rhythm. Frontiers In Systems Neuroscience, 9, 159. URL

6. Levitin, D. J. (2006). This is your brain on music: The science of a human obsession. Dutton.

7. Nietzsche, F. W. Crepúsculo de los ídolos.

8. Nilsson, U. (2008). The anxiety- and pain-reducing effects of music interventions: A systematic review. AORN Journal, 87(4), 780–807. URL

9. Shih, Y. N., Huang, R. H., & Chiang, H. Y. (2012). Background music: Effects on attention performance. Work, 42(4), 573–578. URL

The following letter is part of our “Distilling Books” collection, in which we extract the most revealing ideas from literature.

🏷️ Categories: Attention, Decision making and biases.

«If you don’t want someone to feel uncomfortable, don’t give them two perspectives on an issue to worry about; give them only one.» — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451.

What is reality?

The question seems silly—until you’re alone with it long enough. We live immersed in our routines so naturally that we rarely stop to think whether what we experience every day is reality. We tend to call it “real” because it feels familiar. We’ve seen it many times; it has become part of how we understand the world. But familiarity is no guarantee of truth. Just because something is familiar to our senses doesn’t mean it is reality. It may be only a mirage, a fantasy, a false idea.

More than 2,000 years ago, this question was already being asked.

Plato confronted it in one of philosophy’s most important reflections: the Allegory of the Cave, included in Book VII of The Republic. There he describes prisoners who have lived since childhood inside a cave, chained in such a way that they cannot turn their heads or look at anything other than the wall in front of them. On that wall they see projected shadows—blurred figures that, for them, constitute the entire world, because they have never known anything else. They do not suspect that an outside exists, nor that what they are seeing is not reality.

Their mistake does not come from stupidity, but from the simple limits of their experience.

They have seen nothing else in their lives and believe that this is all there is.

Think about it for a moment.

All of us, in one way or another, inherit ideas, norms, aspirations, and versions of the world that keep us chained. They feel so personal and obvious that we don’t even stop to question them. For us, that is reality.

Now imagine that one of those men manages to leave the cave.

It would be a painful scene. The outside light would hurt his eyes and cause rejection, because discovering reality can feel like that: like a blow to the face. Gradually, however, that same light would allow him to see what he previously only knew as shadows: real objects, true forms, the origin of what he had mistaken for the world. The revelation would consist in understanding that his entire previous reality was incomplete.

What if he returned to the cave to tell the others?

That was what Socrates wondered.

Most likely, he would feel compassion for the others, because he would know they are still trapped in a narrow reality without even realizing it. If he decided to return and share what he had seen, his testimony would not be received with gratitude. The prisoners would see his account as a threat to the order they know and would react as human beings so often do when something disrupts the stability of their certainties.

Truth often looks like madness in the eyes of those who are not ready to see it.

The digital cave

If Plato were writing this allegory today, the cave might not be a dark space.

Perhaps it would be flooded with screens, brightness, voices, notifications, and endless messages competing for our attention. That is the contemporary problem: mental saturation from information overload. The average person consumes 35 GB of information per day (Bohn & Short, 2012).

We no longer live among shadows of an incomplete reality.

We live among lights so bright they blind us.

Here, Byung-Chul Han’s perspective is intriguing. In works such as The Burnout Society, In the Swarm, and Psychopolitics, he describes how the digital world has saturated our lives to the point of disorientation. The digital world exposes us to an infinite stream of information, algorithmically personalized content, and performance metrics in the form of comments, “likes,” and shares.

Sometimes we think we are choosing, when in reality we are being guided.

The algorithm does not enter your mind, but it does have the power to decide what appears before your eyes again and again, which topics become ubiquitous, which voices are visible, and which are buried under more profitable or addictive content (Gilardi et al., 2022). We also know that platforms like Facebook and other networks have influenced political and electoral behavior (Bond et al., 2012).

No one tells you what to think, but they do decide what you think about.

That is the reality of content with the nice-sounding name “For You” or “Recommended.”

It is not a perfect conspiracy—just a handful of platforms organizing the attention of millions of people, ultimately shaping what feels urgent, visible, and, in a sense, what counts as real to them.

What is not made visible does not exist.

Leaving the digital cave

There is no need to disappear from the world or become a hermit.

Leaving the digital cave means learning to relate to the digital world in a more critical way. The key is becoming a little harder to manipulate.

In this era of speed and instant reaction, we need to slow down and think more carefully.

1. Compare before believing

One of the simplest ways to break a narrative is to see it from multiple angles. When you only consume one version of a story, it is very easy to mistake framing for full reality. That is confirmation bias: we tend to trust information that reinforces what we already believe.

• Look deliberately for topics, authors, or media that go against your views.

• Notice which data stays consistent and which changes depending on the source.

• Ask yourself what information appears in one coverage and disappears in another.

• If a topic matters to you, go to the original source: report, public document, statement, or study. Don’t stay on the surface.

2. Give more weight to the slow than the urgent

Fast information usually arrives first, but almost never arrives well.

Today’s headlines are designed to capture attention, rarely to provide clarity. It is impossible to fully understand events that have just happened and whose information has not yet settled. The present is only truly understood once it begins to become the past. Everything else is noise.

• Reduce real-time consumption if it does not directly affect your life.

• Spend more time on analysis, reports, essays, or research.

• Wait a few days before forming an opinion on recent news.

• Save important topics to revisit when there is more context.

3. Be suspicious of what hijacks your emotions

If content tries to make you angry, alarmed, or excited before giving you context, it is probably not trying to help you understand. It is trying to capture your attention and monetize it.

Be wary of content that triggers instant reactions of anger, fear, or euphoria.

Before sharing something, ask yourself: is it informing me or agitating me? Take time before commenting or sharing.

4. Consume less, but with more intention

An overloaded informational diet does not necessarily make you more lucid. The mind also needs space to process.

Avoid opening social media or news every time you feel bored, uncomfortable, or empty. Get informed when there is something you are genuinely curious about and want to explore.

Replace fragmented consumption with longer, more sustained reading.

Clean up accounts and channels that only add noise. Less is more.

The key is not to know everything. That is impossible.

The key is not letting others decide what should exist in your mind.

That is why the Allegory of the Cave is still so relevant. Plato imagined prisoners confusing shadows with reality because they had never seen anything else. We live in a world where the problem is no longer lack of information, but the biased, accelerated, and uneven selection of what we see.

Thinking for yourself starts with choosing where you place your attention.

Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to explore:

1. Stop watching the news: Ideas about noise and the search for depth

2. “For you”: How algorithms shape your worldview

3. Are your opinions really yours?

✍️ Your turn: When was the last time you changed your mind after hearing a different perspective?

💭 Quote of the day: «Coming out of darkness into daylight, that soul has been blinded by the excess of light.» — Plato, The Republic

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Bohn, R. E., y Short, J. E. (2012). Measuring Consumer Information. International Journal Of Communication, 6, 980-1000. URL

2. Bond, R. M., Fariss, C. J., Jones, J. J., Kramer, A. D. I., Marlow, C., Settle, J. E., & Fowler, J. H. (2012). A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. Nature, 489(7415), 295-298. URL

3. Gilardi, F., Gessler, T., Kubli, M., & Müller, S. (2021). Social Media and Political Agenda Setting. Political Communication, 39(1), 39-60. URL

4. Plato. The Republic.

The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.

🏷️ Categories: Learning, Literature.

Read less.

The obsession with speed has turned reading into yet another form of anxious consumption. That’s what I felt when I opened Goodreads in January with the hope of doing the challenge of reading 52 books a year—that is, reading 1 book per week. A ridiculous idea, but at the time it seduced me, as if the only goal of reading were to accumulate books read. I reduced reading to a number, like someone counting calories.

Luckily, it all fell apart a few months later.

In February, with book number 6 in hand, I already understood that it didn’t make sense for me. Instead of thinking about quantity, I started thinking about quality—about reading slowly but internalizing and applying all those brilliant ideas I was underlining, which in the previous 5 books had served for nothing more than being forgotten within a week.

It took me almost 3 months to finish book number 6.

That book was Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Yes, almost 3 months for one book. The book was a goldmine; every few pages I had to stop, write something down, and think about how to apply that idea in my life. The book followed me everywhere, and for weeks I worked hard to change my habits and incorporate its key ideas until they became natural. It was so nourishing that it even sparked a series of 3 articles.

1. Why we make bad decisions (and how to avoid them) - Part 1

2. Why we make bad decisions (and how to avoid them) - Part 2

3. Why we make bad decisions (and how to avoid them) - Part 3

Just 1 book gave me more ideas than the previous 5 combined.

How could that be?

A matter of speed.

If I had read the previous 5 books slowly, they would have transformed me just the same. But instead, I let myself be carried away by the anxiety of wanting to increase my “Read” list. I left Goodreads, deleted my account, dropped the reading challenge—it was absurd.

We’ve turned reading into a simple obsession with consumption.

Even reading itself, a private act, has become another dashboard where you track your performance and publicly compare yourself with others, as if the goal of literature were to have the longest list of books read. It makes no sense.

The harsh reality is that nobody changes their life just by finishing a book.

That’s not how it works.

The books that change you are the ones you read slowly. You need to internalize those words, give them meaning within your worldview. I wrote it like this in my journal: “To change your life through a book, you must become that book.” And I still believe it, because a book shouldn’t just sit on your shelf and be forgotten.

You must become that book, and that is a slow process.

That’s what almost nobody is willing to do. The easy path is flipping pages while skimming, like scrolling through Twitter. Finishing a book in two afternoons is easy; the hard part is closing the book and realizing you now have to change your habits, conversations, routines, and decisions for months until those actions become unconscious. The hard part is accepting that a single sentence can force you to rethink the life you’ve been building for years.

That is what’s scary.

The same applies to videos, podcasts, newsletters, conversations, and films. They’ve become fast, indigestible consumption, at a dizzying speed the brain cannot fully process. That’s why the best reading advice I can give is this: read less, read slowly.

Give books enough time to change your life.

Want to go deeper? Here are 3 related ideas:

1. Double-loop learning: Get out of autopilot and truly learn

2. How to read a book (for real)

3. How to choose your next book

✍️ Your turn: How many ideas from the books you read last year have you actually applied in your life?

💭 Quote of the day: “Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled ‘This could change your life.’” — Helen Exley

Share

See you next time! 👋

🏷️ Categories: Habits, Behavior, Minimalism.

A few months ago, I crossed paths several times with someone, and I noticed something about them.

The person I’m talking about is a friend of a friend of mine, and on every occasion I noticed the same detail: they wore lots of bracelets and elastic bands around their wrists. They weren’t particularly elegant, nor did they seem to have been chosen for fashion, but they did have something very distinctive about them: each one seemed to represent a part of who they were or be connected to their life in some way.

One day, driven by curiosity, I pointed at their wrist and asked:

— What’s with all those bands?

They raised their wrist and replied with something like:

— Well, this one is from the band I play in, this other one was given to me by my father and it’s from the military, this one is from a music group I like...

They were all pieces of their life, interests, memories... The first thing I thought was that their arms told their whole story without them even having to open their mouth. Their wrists were a museum of everything that defines them. For a while, I thought a lot about that—about the psychology behind the idea and its impact on us.

And from that reflection, I decided to run an experiment.

I grabbed a few colored elastic bands and started using them as visual reminders for certain habits I wanted to maintain. I wore them on my left wrist at the start of each day, and every time I completed one of my daily goals, I moved the corresponding band to my right wrist. I did this with my three daily objectives:

• Writing (Blue)

• Reading (Red)

• Exercising (White)

Just a few elastic bands, a handful of habits, and one simple rule: see, do, move.

The more I practiced it, the clearer it became why it worked. It helped me visualize my daily progress and made it impossible to lose sight of what mattered. During the two weeks I tested it, I consistently completed my goals earlier than usual.

This is the science behind this curious technique that I recommend you try.

Visual Triggers

There is a concept that explains why this works so well: visual triggers.

After using this technique for a while, I realized that many times we don’t fail because we don’t want to do things. We fail because we rely too much on motivation and too little on our environment.

And that’s the whole point.

We tell ourselves that tomorrow we’ll finally work out, that this time we’ll read more, send that message, drink more water, or return to that small habit we know is good for us. Then the day begins, interruptions appear, urgent matters demand attention, and what was important gets pushed to the bottom of the to-do list and forgotten.

The elastic band technique prevents that.

It makes your priorities impossible to ignore.

It constantly reminds you of what you said mattered. It’s always in front of your eyes throughout the day. If you do what matters every day, then no day is completely wasted. Even if progress is small, you’re still moving forward—and that, repeated enough times, always pays off.

That’s exactly where most of us stumble.

We want to be consistent, but we keep postponing things because it’s difficult to integrate new actions—reading, exercising, studying, writing—into real life, which is almost never calm or predictable. Yet if you reduce the day to just a few key actions, the entire tone of the day changes.

• It might be a busy day, but I can always do a little exercise.

• Maybe I won’t be able to read much today, but I can use my bus ride to get through a few pages.

• Maybe I can’t sit down and write seriously today, but I can send myself a voice note on WhatsApp with an idea, save it, and develop it tomorrow.

The point isn’t to do it perfectly.

The point is that, by the end of the day, all three bands have changed wrists.

No matter how the day unfolds, there’s always a way to move forward, even if only a little. That’s all that’s needed to achieve remarkable long-term results. You don’t need extraordinary days—you just need consistency on ordinary ones.

How to Create Your Own Elastic Band Technique

The best part is that anyone can adapt it to their life in less than five minutes.

You only need two things: elastic bands or bracelets, and a couple of daily goals.

For example:

• Want to exercise every day? Assign one band to that goal and move it to the other wrist when you’re done.

• Want to read more? Use another one as a reminder that even ten minutes counts.

• Want to write every day? Do the same: one band, one specific action, one wrist switch when it’s completed. Simple.

The important thing isn’t having 20 goals. Focus on just a few key priorities. That’s enough to help you build the habit and start seeing the results of consistency in a relatively short time.

You don’t need a sophisticated app or a complicated productivity system. A couple of elastic bands on your wrist are enough.

A visible signal.
A constant reminder.
A simple way to keep what’s important in sight.

Minimalism wins.

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Two Harvard scientists reveal why we procrastinate (and how to stop).

2. How to change your habits (without relying on willpower or effort).

3. How to redesign your environment to achieve goals without depending on motivation.

✍️ Your turn: What three daily goals would you wear on your wrist?

💭 Quote of the day: “Step by step, day by day, your choices shape your actions until they become habits, and through practice those habits become permanent.” — Darren Hardy, The Compound Effect.

Share

See you next time! 👋

The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.

🏷️ Categories: Writing, Time management.

Recently, by chance, I came across a collection of letters by Kurt Vonnegut.

I’ve always been interested not only in books, but also in their authors. Behind every work is a life that moves forward, stumbles, doubts, works, rests, and tries again. We tend to imagine great writers as legendary figures about whom very little is known and whose lives are somehow extraordinary—people with unmatched creative abilities while the rest of us simply try to survive life.

Letters shatter that fantasy.

I like them because they reveal the other side of the work. In letters, authors let us glimpse part of their writing process, their day-to-day state of mind, their schedules, concerns, and ordinary problems. In Kurt’s case, one letter in particular immediately caught my attention: one in which he describes his routine to his wife.

This is revealing.

In the mid-1960s, Kurt received an offer to teach at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. His family remained in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, so for a time he lived as a husband and father from a distance, maintaining his family ties only through letters. During this period, his life was somewhat disorganized because he had to balance teaching, writing, and being away from his family. It was not a perfect stage of life, and that is precisely why it reveals how great writers deal with everyday life and, at times, chaos.

On September 28, 1965, he wrote this to his wife Jane:

In an unmoored life like mine, sleep, hunger, and work arrange themselves in their own way, without consulting me. And I’m quite glad they didn’t consult me on the tedious details. What they have decided is this: I get up at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, run errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool—which I have entirely to myself—and swim for half an hour. I come home at 11:45, read the mail, and eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do university work, either teaching or preparing classes. When I get home from school, around 5:30, I numb my lively intellect with several Scotch-and-water drinks—$5 a bottle at the state liquor store, the only liquor store in town, though there are plenty of bars—cook dinner, read, and listen to jazz—there’s lots of good music on the radio here—and drift off to sleep at ten. I do push-ups and sit-ups all the time, and I feel as though I’m becoming lean and sinewy, though perhaps I’m not. Last night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and it moved me deeply. For an unmoored middle-aged man like me, it was heartbreaking. That’s okay. I like having my heart broken.

That’s all—and it’s also a great deal.

The routine itself is not extraordinary. If you look closely, he isn’t making inhuman sacrifices to write, nor is he obsessed with squeezing productivity out of every minute, as we’ve been encouraged to do in this hyperproductive 21st century. He simply writes with focus, prioritizes what matters, and maintains a healthy balance.

His routine can be analyzed like this:

• 5:30 — Wake up and write: He starts before the day becomes noisy. Writing comes first. This is a key characteristic of many authors. Early morning is ideal because there are no interruptions from the day’s urgencies, and your attention is directed toward the page. Hemingway, Haruki Murakami, Derek Walcott, Toni Morrison, and many others (myself included) write very early in the morning.

• 8:00 — Breakfast at home: A simple break. Nothing remarkable.

• 8:00 to 10:00 — More work: He works in blocks, rests, and then returns to work. Science has shown this to be one of the most effective ways to work: intervals of deep concentration.

• Late morning — Walk, errands, and swimming: He incorporates physical movement and a change of scenery. Just ordinary life.

• 11:45 — Mail and lunch: He handles external demands only after completing his most important work. First he protects his creative work; then he responds to the world. This is a common trait among productive people and reflects the same mindset behind techniques such as the Eisenhower Matrix or the Ivy Lee Method.

• Afternoon — Teaching or preparing classes: Responsibilities. Now he turns to the work that brought him to the University of Iowa and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

• 5:30 — Whisky, dinner, reading, and jazz: He lowers the intensity. He doesn’t turn the evening into another work session. It’s time to relax. Notice that he doesn’t obsess over being as productive as possible. It’s enough to be consistent and return tomorrow.

• Night — Asleep by ten: He goes to bed early because he starts early. Nothing unusual. I tend to go to bed around the same time.

• In between — Push-ups, sit-ups, and sometimes swimming: Physical activity is part of his life. He manages to integrate leisure, work, personal priorities, exercise, and everyday responsibilities.

The important thing is not to copy his schedule.

The important thing is to understand the mindset. Kurt puts first what matters most: writing. Then, when the rest of the world wakes up, he begins dealing with errands, urgencies, and external obligations. Finally, he rests. It’s a simple routine, but it has an intelligent hierarchy.

That hierarchy is crucial.

Many people live in reverse. They start the day by looking at their phones, answering messages, checking email, and scrolling aimlessly, filling their minds with stimuli and destroying their clarity. By the time they finally have a moment for themselves, they’re exhausted and end up consuming whatever is easiest rather than doing meaningful work.

Kurt shows another option:

• First, what matters.

• Then, what’s necessary.

• After that, everything else.

And that’s why it matters.

Kurt was one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century, yet this letter does not portray an unattainable life. In fact, it feels deeply human. He simply prioritizes his creative work, even if that means going to bed early and waking up very early. He leaves room for leisure but doesn’t surrender to distraction.

1. You don’t need to be in a hurry all the time.

2. You don’t need to sacrifice your entire life for a goal.

3. You don’t need to squeeze every second out of the day to be productive.

You simply need to know what deserves your best energy and make it your highest priority.

Don’t ask yourself, “How can I do more?” Ask yourself, “What deserves the best hour of my day?”

Want to explore this idea further? Here are three related topics:

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Writing at 4:00 AM, raising a family, and working: Toni Morrison’s routine

2. Derek Walcott’s demanding routine: You don’t lack time, you lack priorities

3. Writing from dawn: Ernest Hemingway’s unusual routine

✍️ Your turn: What activity truly deserves the best hour of your day—and are you giving it that hour?

💭 Quote of the day: “You learn about life from the accidents you have, over and over again.” — Kurt Vonnegut, interview with J. Rentilly (2002).

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Vonnegut, K. (2012). Kurt Vonnegut: Letters.

2. Rentilly, J. (2002). The Best Jokes Are Dangerous, An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut, Part One. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. URL

🏷️ Categories: Happiness, Life lessons, Minimalism.

Satisfaction is a trap.

It will never be complete.

When you’re young and say you want to be rich, famous, own a mansion, and drive the most expensive car, nobody sits down with you to tell you that having more won’t save you from anything. It will only give you a bigger room in which to feel just as broken.

Nobody tells you this when you begin to desire things...

An economic law explains it coldly. According to the law of diminishing returns, adding more of something positive generates benefits—but only up to a point. Eventually, adding more starts to make things worse. If I keep adding workers to a field, production increases, but there comes a moment when they get in each other’s way, there is idle time, and there aren’t enough tasks to go around.

A cold way of describing something deeply human.

Even good things fall apart when you don’t know when to stop...

And this happens with love too.
And happiness.
And freedom.
And us.

Abundance rots.

The law of diminishing returns also speaks to the way we live—to the insatiable hunger of always wanting more. More money. More beauty. More plans. More travel. More happiness. More love. More productivity. More friends.

More, more, more.

To what extent? Is it never enough?

There is too much of almost everything.

• Too much ambition becomes anxiety.

• Too much freedom becomes paralysis—you can’t decide.

• Too many friendships become lots of company and very little depth.

There is no absolute good without associated costs (Grant & Schwartz, 2011). Everything positive benefits us up to a certain point, but once you pass that point, the costs begin to consume the benefits.

Good things have an exact dosage too.

Aristotle said it centuries ago, but we didn’t pay much attention. He spoke of the golden mean, of having neither deficiency nor excess.

• If you’re too kind, people will walk all over you. If you’re not kind, they’ll hate you.

• If you have too little courage, you’re a coward. If you have too much, you’re reckless.

Virtue lies in the middle.

It’s beautiful to say and difficult to live, because no one ever tells us where the middle point is. You’ll never know the exact amount of love, money, discipline, desire, and ambition that won’t destroy you.

If only we knew.

But life doesn’t work that way, and balance is learned by losing it. When you realize you’re working too much and sacrificing your health and friendships along the way. When you realize you’re saying yes to too many plans and end up being with everyone and everywhere, yet never spending enough time with anyone to truly enjoy it without looking at the clock.

We all discover excess when we suffer from it.

Never before.

You have to learn how to step back, not just move forward.

The perfect dose is not a life filled to the brim. It’s a life with enough money not to live in fear, enough love not to beg for it, enough ambition to keep moving, and enough solitude to hear yourself.

That is the center of the curve.

We always punish ourselves with the question, “What am I missing?” But what about: “What do I have too much of?”

Try retracing your steps instead of desperately running forward. Fewer connections, but deeper ones. Fewer plans, but more presence. Fewer goals, but more clarity. Less freedom, but more certainty.

That’s the hardest part.

Giving things up is far more difficult than we think...

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Why I Chose to Live a Boring Life: Are you living a fulfilling life or merely a full one?

2. The Donkey’s Paradox: The more options you have, the less satisfied you are with your choice.

3. Perfect Days: The film that changed my life.

✍️ Your turn: What part of your life feels full lately... but not fulfilling?

💭 Quote of the day: "He who is content has enough; he who complains has too much." — Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Aristóteles. Ética a Nicómaco.

2. Grant, A. M., & Schwartz, B. (2011). Too Much of a Good Thing. Perspectives On Psychological Science, 6(1), 61-76. URL

3. Montevirgen, K. (2026). Diminishing returns. Encyclopedia Britannica. URL

The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.

🏷️ Categories: Procrastination, Time management.

Victor Hugo was one of the most important writers of the 19th century.

But before becoming the author of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and being remembered as one of literature’s towering figures, he was also a young man who procrastinated. In 1830, at the age of 28, he had a very human problem: he had promised to deliver a novel to his publisher… but he hadn’t written it. Months had slipped away between other projects, visits, and distractions until time itself became a threat.

His publisher, tired of waiting, gave him a strict deadline. If he failed to deliver the manuscript within a few months, he would have to pay a fine for every week of delay.

How did he manage to finish such a massive work after postponing it for so long?

The answer is almost absurd.

He hid his clothes.

Hugo gathered all his clothes, locked them away, and kept only a sort of robe that he couldn’t wear outside. Without decent clothes and with the key out of reach, he couldn’t leave his desk. He locked himself inside with enough ink and started writing because he had no other choice. He entered his novel as if entering a prison—a prison from which he emerged and made literary history.

Here’s what we can learn from him to stop procrastinating and achieve our goals…

The Trap of Waiting Until We Feel Ready

What’s interesting about Victor Hugo’s story is not that he hid his clothes.

That, after all, is just the anecdotal part. What truly matters is that he understood something many of us take years to accept: wanting to do something is not enough. Between intention and action there is a huge gap that many people never manage to cross.

That gap is as old as humanity itself.

Ancient Greek philosophers called it akrasia.

Aristotle defined akrasia as the state in which a person acts against their own will due to a lack of self-control. Plato and Socrates argued in Protagoras that this happened because desire overpowered reason. Who hasn’t experienced this? Knowing you should do something and not doing it. Knowing you should take care of your health, save money, start that project, or have that conversation—and still choosing what is easier and wrong.

It’s not that you are weak.

It’s just that when the moment of decision arrives, you do not decide rationally by thinking about the better future. You decide from your present self: the one that is tired, restless, bored, overwhelmed, or searching for quick relief.

And that is why we procrastinate.

Victor Hugo’s technique was brilliant precisely because he designed an environment where procrastinating was harder than working. He decided to protect himself from excuses before they appeared and locked away his clothes. He was trapped at home.

He could only write.

Designing the Environment

We tend to think of willpower as an internal battle.

A kind of war between the noble part that wants to grow and the lazy part that wants to stay in bed scrolling through meaningless things. But reality is different. Many of the decisions we make every day are not conscious choices—we are guided by our environment without even noticing.

Victor Hugo knew that if he had proper clothes, he could go outside.

And if he could go outside, he would.

Applied to our own lives, there is no need to be dramatic. You do not have to lock away all your clothes and throw the key out the window. It can be something as simple as leaving your phone outside the bedroom if you know it steals your mornings, paying for a class in advance so missing it has a cost, blocking certain apps during working hours, preparing the document before going to sleep, or telling someone your deadline so it becomes an external expectation you do not want to disappoint (Bryan et al., 2010; Gollwitzer, 1999).

You do not need to torture yourself. You simply need to make the cost of procrastination real.

Time Constraints

We also need to understand something uncomfortable: “Someday” is not a day.

“Someday” is a place where many versions of ourselves go to die. “When I have time” sounds reasonable, but often it is simply a way of avoiding the decision to choose a real moment. A good deadline must create pressure without becoming impossible. Victor Hugo demonstrated this with the deadline for his novel, and it works because it applies Parkinson’s Law of productivity (Parkinson, 1955).

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

To avoid wasting time, the deadline must be close enough to force you to move and far enough to allow you to finish.

• It is not the same to say “I want to write more” as it is to say “I’m going to write three pages before Friday.”

• It is not the same to say “I want to organize my life” as it is to say “On Saturday at ten I will review my weekly expenses.”

The mind needs tangible actions.

Proving to Yourself What You’re Capable Of

Victor Hugo’s story is a story about humility.

As his daughter Adèle said when describing him:

“There was no time to lose; he had to be punctual. He bought an ink bottle and a thick gray wool coat that covered him from head to toe, locked away his clothes to avoid the temptation of going out, and immersed himself in his novel as if entering a prison. He was very sad.” — Adèle Hugo.

Even a brilliant mind has flaws.

Even someone talented can lose their way if their environment is designed to distract them. We like to romanticize inspiration; movies and books have made us believe that great things emerge intensely, fueled by burning motivation. Reality is different. Most of the time, the process is far more tedious than people show—but that is life.

• We need to set concrete deadlines.

• We need to create consequences for procrastinating.

• We need to prepare the desk and remove distractions.

• We need to return even on the days we do not feel like it and laziness tempts us.

Dreams are too fragile to depend on the mood of the day.

Victor Hugo finished his novel only because, during a crucial period, he designed a life where writing was the easiest path. And perhaps that is what we need to remember: make sure your environment makes work easier instead of holding you back.

Lock yourself in front of the desk and prove to yourself that you can do it.

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Ant vs. Cicada: a mental model for life

2. The psychological technique that doubles your chances of achieving your goals

3. Two Harvard scientists reveal why we procrastinate (and how to avoid it)

✍️ Your turn: How could you design your environment so that doing the right thing becomes easier than procrastinating?

💭 Quote of the day: “There was no time to lose; he had to be punctual. He bought an ink bottle and a thick gray wool coat that covered him from head to toe, locked away his clothes to avoid the temptation of going out, and immersed himself in his novel as if entering a prison. He was very sad.” — Adèle Hugo, daughter of Victor Hugo (Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie, 1867).

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Bryan, G., Karlan, D., & Nelson, S. (2010). Commitment devices. Annual Review Of Economics, 2(1), 671-698. URL

2. Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493-503. URL

3. Hugo, A (1867). Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie. Tome II, Paris,

   Librairie internationale. p. 297. URL

4. Platón. Protágoras.

5. Parkinson, C. N. (1955). Parkinson’s law. The Economist. URL

🏷️ Categories: Mental models, Minimalism.

For a long time, writing on Substack meant living with a frustration.

I tended to write too much, and that was a problem. Too much context, too many ideas, too many detours. And time and time again, I ran into the same Substack warning: the text was too long to be published. Substack wouldn’t let me expand with the full freedom I wanted to write with. There was a limit beyond which I simply couldn’t keep adding.

At first, this genuinely bothered me.

Because when we write, we tend to believe that depth of ideas and length of message are synonyms. That a longer text will be a more elaborate one, that more explanation equals more value… But that’s not always true.

Over time, I began to notice the opposite.

What I had perceived as an obstacle was actually improving my writing.

Having to condense a large amount of information into just a few lines forced me to sharpen my ideas. It taught me to distinguish between what was essential and what was secondary. It pushed me to say more with less. And little by little, I understood a truth that goes far beyond writing itself.

More is not always better.

We need a good limitation.

The power of limits

If someone asked you what you need to do your best work, you’d probably say something like:

• More time.

• More space.

• More tools.

• More peace to think.

We want more because we assume greater freedom leads to better results, but often the opposite happens: too many options scatter us. Because of the Donkey Paradox, freedom makes us less precise when deciding.

That’s exactly what I discovered while writing on Substack.

When I knew I couldn’t extend myself endlessly, an inevitable question appeared: Which part of all this truly matters?

That question changed the text completely.

Every sentence had to justify its existence, every idea needed a real reason to be there; otherwise, it would be mercilessly deleted. In that way, only the best survived, and with less quantity, there was more quality. I learned a valuable lesson: what makes a text strong is not its length.

It’s its density.

A limited life

The more I thought about this, the more evident it became that this idea didn’t only apply to writing.

It applied to living.

We tend to imagine a better life as a life with more of everything: more time, more money, more freedom, more tools, more possibilities, more things. We think abundance will solve our shortcomings, as if it were just a matter of quantity.

But it isn’t always so.

I’ve seen it in different areas of my life.

• As a reader, for a long time I had an endless to-read list, but over time I traded quantity for density. I started trimming the list until only a few carefully chosen books remained. That restriction changed the way I read. I no longer read to accumulate books; I read to ensure each one is worthy of my time. The paradox: by reading less, I learned more.

• When organizing my time, I used to think a “good day” was a day full of tasks done and boxes checked. Soon I discovered the opposite: that only left me tired and distracted. I started setting just six small goals a day at most and, paradoxically, I get more done and have more free time.

• When traveling, I noticed I tended to fill my backpack with “just in case” items. By switching to a smaller backpack, I’ve had to choose wisely, and I’m surprised by how little I actually need. It helps me travel lighter, feel less tired, and pick only the essentials.

• As someone who saves money, I started limiting my monthly budget. At first it felt like losing freedom, but the opposite happened. Having less margin forced me to use my budget efficiently and, paradoxically, I began living as comfortably—or even more comfortably—than before.

That’s the power of limiting yourself: clarity appears when possibilities shrink.

We love freedom and hate restrictions, but it’s not that simple. As you’ve seen, limitations push us to be more creative and search for better solutions to play well within those boundaries.

It’s a matter of density, of finding the most within the smallest space.

Share

See you next time! 👋

The following letter is part of our “Notes on Giants” collection, in which we explore the thoughts and lives of humanity’s greatest minds.

🏷️ Categories: Deliberate practice, Creativity.

Legend has it that one day Pablo Picasso was eating in a restaurant when someone approached him with a napkin in hand and asked him for a drawing. Picasso took the napkin, made a quick sketch, and handed it back in exchange for the absurd sum of one hundred thousand dollars. The person, of course, protested, because from the outside it seemed ridiculous.

“But it only took you thirty seconds.”

And Picasso replied:

“No. It took me forty years.”

Although the story is perhaps too fabulous to be entirely real, Picasso did often paint sketches in bars. In any case, the story still gives us a valuable truth that we sometimes ignore…

What we see is always the thirty seconds.

We see the quick gesture, that grace with which someone does something that seems impossible to us, and instantly we call it “genius.” We assume it’s innate—if Picasso could draw like that, it must have been because he was Picasso. However, this ignores the most important part of the story: the forty years of practice.

No one sees the forty years.

No one sees the failed drawings, the smudges, the hours of study, the changes and experiments with different styles, the discarded ideas, the doubts… No one sees any of that, but all of it is inevitable. Picasso was not great because he could draw a beautiful sketch in thirty seconds; he was great because he had spent an entire lifetime preparing to be able to do that in thirty seconds.

That is the crucial difference.

Genius is not a coincidence

Picasso is often remembered as an eccentric, groundbreaking painter, but before he was eccentric and groundbreaking, he was a master of classical techniques. Between these two paintings of his, there are 40 years of difference.

Do they look alike?

Picasso broke the rules and became a genius after 40 years of practice.

It was all the result of a fierce accumulation of work during which he…

• Academic training: Picasso painted the classical style with great skill.

• Blue Period (1901–1904): he explored poverty, loneliness, and suffering with cold, melancholic tones.

• Rose Period (1904–1906): he shifted to a warmer palette, with harlequins, acrobats, and circus scenes.

• Primitivist phase (1907–1909): influenced by African and Iberian art, opening the door to a radical break from his previous style.

• Cubism (1907–1914): together with Braque and Juan Gris, he dismantled traditional artistic perspective and changed the history of his discipline forever.

• Classicism and Surrealism (1917–1937): he revisited Greco-Roman themes.

• Late work (1940–1973): far from repeating himself, he continued experimenting with techniques and formats in highly varied ways.

In fact, according to Guinness World Records, Picasso is the most prolific painter in history, with about 13,500 paintings and designs, plus 100,000 engravings, 34,000 illustrations, and 300 sculptures and ceramics.

So no—there was no overnight success, nor was everything due to innate abilities. Behind that napkin he was asked to draw on were thousands of drawings, years of learning, changes in style, failures, obsessions, and a quantity of work no one sees.

That’s what we must not forget.

Talent may be visible in thirty seconds, but it is cultivated over years.

Whatever your passion is, learn to be invisible; genius will come. Patience.

Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:

1. Geniuses don’t need inspiration; they follow a routine

2. The mathematical formula that predicts your success as an artist

3. Threshold Theory: Why intelligence doesn’t predict success in life

✍️ Your turn: What is something you do so well that others think it’s your talent? How long have you actually been cultivating that skill?

💭 Quote of the day: “Art does not evolve by itself; people’s ideas change, and with them their mode of expression.” — Picasso (Statement to Marius de Zayas, 1923).

Share

See you next time! 👋

References 📚

1. Guinness World Records. Most prolific painter. URL

2. De Zayas, M. (1923). Pablo Picasso. Art Humanities. URL