Welcome to Mental Garden, a newsletter about creativity, focus, and systems for writing and building projects on the internet. To explore the full library, go here.
🏷️ Categories: Writing, Creativity, Learning.
The modern creator no longer competes against other creators.
They compete against the noise.
Recently, I was reading New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change by Winifred Gallagher. One of her central ideas is that evolution adapted our brains to survive in an environment that no longer exists. Thousands of years ago, any new stimulus—a sound among the trees or a silhouette on the horizon—could mean food or danger. Paying attention to novelty increased our chances of staying alive.
That mechanism still works the exact same way. The world, however, does not.
Today, we live in an environment of hyper-abundance that exploits that very same brain instinct: every screen, advertisement, media outlet, or headline competes to trigger that curiosity for novelty that once kept us alive. Attention has become the most valuable economic asset on the planet. As Gallagher writes in the book:
“In this high-velocity information age, our well-being demands that we understand and control our fascination with the new so that it doesn’t dominate us. We already process four times as much data as we did just thirty years ago... To thrive, we must shift from being mere seekers of the new to becoming connoisseurs of the new.”
The result is clear.
We have never had so much access to knowledge.
We have never been so overwhelmed.
Information grows relentlessly
Clarity does not.
And to top it off, AI has arrived, reducing the cost of producing content to almost zero. Every day, millions of new words, images, and videos are published. But the easier it is to produce, the less value there is in producing just one more piece.
We have an excess of content.
We have a shortage of understanding.
The 21st-century creator wins by reducing noise, not by producing more. They win by taking a chaotic world and turning it into something understandable. They win by distilling thousands of data points into a single idea worth remembering. If you observe those who are building a voice in this new economy, you discover that almost all of them follow one of two paths.
Some create maps.
Others create new ways of looking at the world.
I call them: the Cartographer and the Alchemist.
Let’s look at each one to discover which you want to become.
1. The Cartographer
“I found the way for you.”
The Cartographer knows well that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, as Herbert Simon said in 1971 in Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World. Their competitive advantage lies in mapping the chaos. While the world drowns in thousands of scientific papers, books, podcasts, and tweets, the Cartographer does the heavy lifting.
They dive like a scuba diver into the massive noise to find the treasure.
They read what you don’t have time to read.
They discard 90% of irrelevant content thanks to their expertise.
They cross-reference sources and find the contradictions that others ignore.
They distill weeks of dense research into twenty minutes of pure clarity.
The Cartographer’s product is time, not information.
Their value to the audience lies in their judgment and rigor in choosing the highest-value information and designing that database, summary, chart, or map that gives you wisdom in minutes that would otherwise take you weeks or months to obtain.
The audience listens to them for their curation, not their originality.
2. The Alchemist
“I don’t collect data. I transform it.”
If the Cartographer explores the environment to find answers, the Alchemist retreats into their mind to formulate better questions and visions. The Alchemist does not offer a synthesis of data; they offer perspective. They don’t compete to deliver a scoop or summarize a book better than a machine. Their job consists of taking scattered signals and combining them through their unique lens to create a new vision. Their audience isn’t looking to “know better facts.” They are looking to learn how to think, to discover innovative ideas. People listen to them for their irreplaceable philosophy.
Let’s see both examples in action across different topics:
Economics
Cartographer: Global market analysis, monthly trend reports, detailed insights on companies to invest in.
Alchemist: New business ideas, updates on stock market investing, emerging business growth strategies.
History
Cartographer: Researches archives, books, and documents to reconstruct events, build timelines, and synthesize complex contexts.
Alchemist: Uses historical events to build new interpretations of politics, leadership, innovation, or human behavior.
Marketing and Content Creation
Cartographer: Analyzes successful campaigns and algorithms, compiles case studies, compares strategies of major creators, and summarizes industry trends.
Alchemist: Develops theories on positioning, personal branding, or the creator economy; creates concepts that others end up using.
There is a very simple rule that sums up the difference:
The Cartographer answers the question: “What should I know about this topic?”
The Alchemist answers the question: “How should I think about this topic?”
Which of the two paths are you going to master?
Some master the art of being the ultimate filter for their topic, while others package their obsessive curiosity into an intellectual brand that is impossible to replicate.
Even so, at the top of the game, both archetypes merge, but you always have to start somewhere. The Cartographer who spends years analyzing a topic inevitably develops superior intuition and becomes an Alchemist. The Alchemist, to feed their curiosity and creativity, never stops being a Cartographer who is always exploring new topics of value.
Start by choosing a path, be meticulous and consistent.
Stay creative.
— Álvaro
Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:
How to get so creative it’s scary (50 ways to generate ideas on any topic)
The mistake that kills most creative careers (and how to avoid it): The Bus Station Theory
Gresham’s Law: Why mediocrity dominates social media (and how to reclaim quality content)
✍️ Your turn: As a creator, which path feels more intuitive to you? In my case, I have dedicated hundreds of hours to being a Cartographer.
💭 Quote of the day: “Pay close attention to everything. Notice what no one else notices. Then you’ll know what no one else knows, and that’s always useful.” — Jeanne DuPrau, The City of Ember
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
References 📚
Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information rich world. In M. Greenberger (ed.), Computers, communications, and the public interest.
Gallagher, W. (2011). New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change.
Interesting division of labor. And then there are those of us who share our essay, fiction, and poetry. Where do we fit in with these two areas? Or is there a third: the Rest Zone, where readers can enjoy a romance, mystery, or comedy and rest the mind without feeling obliged to store that piece of work in their brains' archive.