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Kafkaesque.
Orwellian.
Machiavellian.
Stop for a second on that.
A surname shouldn’t become an adjective. That’s not normal. And yet there they are, intruders in language, functioning as a tool of thought to describe the world. You use those words for absurd situations, oppressive systems, ruthless policies, and you never even stopped to think about the anomaly they represent.
That’s what they are: anomalies.
They hit culture so hard that they left a mark even on language itself.
The question you should be asking is: what had to happen inside a person’s mind for the rest of humanity to start thinking, without realizing it, through their way of seeing the world? Because that’s what happened. Kafka, Orwell, or Machiavelli expressed a worldview that remains alive generation after generation, with an immense influence on the collective imagination.
And if you understand that mechanism, you also understand why 99% of today’s creators, writers, and thinkers, no matter how much content they produce, will never leave a mark that survives the passage of time.
Let’s dig into how to find your original worldview.
Your legacy is not your works
A book can disappear from shelves. A scientific theory can become obsolete the moment a better model appears. A company can go bankrupt. An empire can fall. A trend can evaporate in 24 hours. But a new way of looking at reality remains generation after generation and can leave an indelible mark on people’s lives and their way of thinking.
These are perspectives that, once you know them, you can’t “un-know.” They become part of you.
Books don’t change the world, but they do change people. And people gradually change culture. And culture contains language, which ends up incorporating your name, like Kafka, Orwell, or Machiavelli. The work stops being what matters; anything can be “Kafkaesque.” It’s their worldview that’s the key.
This is the path:
Book → personal change → collective change → linguistic change → legacy.
I want you to see this with the same clarity I see it, because it’s going to change how you approach anything you want to create from today on.
It’s not book → fame.
Fame and legacy are different things, almost opposites. Fame is consumed quickly, like this year’s bestsellers, few of which will still be relevant works in 10 years because of the Lindy Effect. Legacy settles into the world, into people, into how they describe reality. It lives in language. I wouldn’t say Plato, Cervantes, or Shakespeare are “famous,” but they are influential — they have an immense legacy.
Have you heard of “platonic love”? There’s your proof.
Legacy is the consequence of continuously expressing your vision through your art.
The importance of vision
This answers the most important question in the analysis.
How is a new way of interpreting reality built?
The structure is this: Worldview → principles → works.
Each level is born from the one before it.
Your worldview is the fundamental way you interpret existence, human beings, work, suffering, success… it’s your way of seeing the world.
Principles are your basic “laws” that describe that way you see the world. They are the pillars of your beliefs. They are your axioms and mottos.
Works are where your principles materialize, like articulated fragments that describe ideas from your worldview — like books in a great library that is your vision. Articles, books, theories, companies…
This structure reverses how the internet thinks.
The internet believes that publishing a lot generates a brand. That a brand generates an audience. That an audience generates a legacy. In other words, that the process starts from the bottom, from the works. You push and push and push, hoping that at some point your identity will emerge from the fog of content you keep publishing.
Here I say the opposite.
First reflect on your vision, your principles will appear, your principles will give you ideas for creating works you can be proud of and motivated to make. This happens because you have an identity bond with them — you want to express yourself.
Everything flows from top to bottom.
Later there will be time to refine your worldview through your works. Every day I publish on Substack, I live that process. You can’t afford to drift for months or years without even knowing which direction you want to express yourself in.
Think of a tree.
The articles you write are the leaves.
The principles are the branches that group the leaves.
Your worldview is the whole tree, with the central trunk that holds everything up.
Most creators spend years staring at leaves. They never ask themselves what belief system is producing those leaves in the first place. They are fragmented, erratic authors, hard to categorize and hard to connect with. They’re chaos.
What’s missing is the overarching vision that ties together and multiplies the combined weight of all their works.
When you read Kafka, you see that suffocating universe everywhere.
When you read Orwell, you see those political ideas in the background everywhere.
That’s what I mean. Whatever they’re talking about, there’s a coherent vision. It’s inseparable.
Your vision can’t be copied
We live in an age where anyone can generate, in seconds, a correct article without a single spelling mistake. Information is no longer scarce. Any fact, summary, “how to do X in 5 steps” is a click away, and a machine can produce it better and faster than you can.
That should only terrify you if information is your only product.
But no one can replicate the exact sequence of experiences, readings, obsessions, and wounds that led you to think the way you think. No one. An AI can imitate Kafka’s style, but it can’t have lived through what turned Kafka into Kafka. It can spit out an idea, but it needs some precedent or reference. AI doesn’t generate from nothing. Your worldview is the only intellectual property that can’t be pirated, because it lives inside you.
Your vision cannot be replicated — you are the only person in the world who knows it 100%.
“Each of us holds many mental maps. We interpret everything we experience through them.” — Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
People search for those artists like water in the desert. They want connection, identity, a person with a particular vision they can identify with, who can help them resolve their own vital questions. They want to feel that, by reading you, listening to your music, or seeing your painting, they see a part of themselves.
That’s why Kafka hooks so deeply into anyone with inner doubts. Same with Camus.
That is the real reason your vision matters more than ever.
If you want to know more about how to become irreplaceable, read this:
For today, we’ll continue with the process of finding your vision.
How to find your vision
Let’s get straight to it.
Step 1: Find your obsessions
Those interests that are inseparable from you, that define your way of life.
What topic occupies your mind every day?
What can you talk about for hours?
What subjects do you research over and over?
What things can you not stop doing or thinking about?
What topic do people ask you about and associate you with?
That’s what matters to us. If you need inspiration, here are some of mine: writing, literature, creativity, attention, memory, all the psychology related to human behavior, good life habits, calisthenics, languages, geography.
Anyone who knows me could instantly associate those topics with me.
My writing reflects a percentage of my obsessions.
What are yours?
Don’t worry if you have many — you just saw my case. Your interests aren’t a random, disconnected pile of topics; deep down, you can write about anything and still be varied, because the most profitable niche that exists is you yourself, with all your obsessions expressed from one single vision.
Do you think that if Albert Camus talked about sports, gastronomy, or architecture, his worldview would change?
I doubt it very much.
That’s what I mean. Every great thinker and artist in history spent decades, not months, decades, trying to answer the same questions from a thousand different angles.
Nietzsche asked, over and over, how to create your own values in a world without God.
Jung asked, over and over, how to integrate the rejected parts of ourselves that live in our minds and that we avoid.
Kafka reflected the lack of hope and purpose in life through every one of his stories.
James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has spent years studying how habits affect long-term performance.
There’s no other secret — it’s simply an obsession with certain topics, and expressing your vision through them.
If James Clear talked about finance, he’d talk about how financial habits can make you rich.
If Kafka talked about architecture, he’d say it’s just a way of trying to leave something permanent in an ephemeral, cruel life.
If Jung talked about gastronomy, he’d tell us how flavors and family meals shape our minds, reminding us who cooked for us as children and the mark those flavors left on us.
See it now?
Expressing your vision through principles in your works builds your legacy.
Step 2: The world is your library
When you have an obsession, the world works in your favor — literally.
If your obsession is clear, everything you see gives you raw material to deepen it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a conversation, a movie, a book, or a lived experience. You can’t help but see it everywhere. That effect is called the availability heuristic. Once you’re at that point, the world becomes an infinite library from which to extract raw material.
Want some examples for inspiration?
Having read so much about human behavior makes it impossible for me not to observe, with an analytical eye, the people walking by while I sit in a park. How they relate to others, whether they read, whether they look at their phone, how many minutes before they switch activities. What pattern they repeat in their behavior…
Having read so much about creativity and writing makes it impossible for me to stop looking for patterns or keys that give meaning to a book. I can feel when the author structured things a certain way to give the work rhythm. I notice the connection between their ideas and those of the authors who inspired them.
There’s a nuance that multiplies the value of this step.
Two people can read the same book, watch the same movie, or come across the same idea, and walk away with different raw material. The idea doesn’t change — what changes is the light passing through it. It’s like light through glass: it refracts differently depending on the material.
If your obsession is attention, a book about investing will speak to you about consistency and time horizon.
If your obsession is creativity, that same book will speak to you about how to spot patterns before others do.
The book is the same. Your vision makes it yours.
That’s why two authors obsessed with the same topic never produce the same work. The raw material is shared; the filter isn’t. Hold on to that idea.
All of this leads you to gather an enormous amount of raw material: examples, books, quotes, authors, movies, experiences, conversations, podcasts, scientific articles… The amount of information you find that supports your vision is immense — it can become overwhelming. Honestly, these days I have a list of ideas that could keep me writing nonstop for almost two years.
What should you do if your obsession is already clear but you don’t know where to start?
Here are some examples.
If my obsession were existentialist philosophy, I would spend 24 hours a day focused on that vision — I’d learn everything about Kafka, Camus, Emil Cioran, Osamu Dazai, Yukio Mishima, Dostoevsky, or Kobo Abe. Everything I saw would inspire me more and more in my own vision. I’d watch every cult film about existentialist philosophy, every book, painting, and song.
If my obsession were finance, I would learn everything about Ray Dalio, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Jim Simons, Benjamin Graham, or Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I couldn’t walk into a coffee shop without mentally calculating its fixed costs, profit margin, and business valuation.
Start there, then expand — become a polymath. You’ll start expressing your vision in everything, whether it’s gastronomy, astrophysics, or architecture.
That’s what I mean.
Step 3: Detect recurring principles
Here we consolidate your vision into fundamental laws.
Ask yourself: what principle always shows up, no matter what topic I’m dealing with? Right there, that’s where your philosophy begins. After enough reflection, you’ll see a set of principles underpinning your entire vision.
Need some inspiration?
One principle I hold is that, from studying attention at the psychological level, I discovered that the ability to sustain attention is plummeting, and unfortunately, if you can’t focus, it becomes impossible to achieve anything in life. Any life goal requires patience and prolonged concentration — things that are failing today.
That’s one of my principles. If you’ve read me a bit, you can confirm it. It repeats.
That’s what I believe, and I can back it up with dozens of books, hundreds of scientific articles, and thousands of everyday examples where I’ve seen what I’m defending. My vision led me to research the topic until I found that essential principle.
Every author holds principles — it’s just a matter of time until you find yours.
Transcending
If someone, someday, ends up seeing the world differently because of an idea you expressed with enough clarity — even if they never remember your name, even if they never cite the source, even if they simply start thinking “this way” without knowing where that “way” came from — then the phenomenon that produced the word “Kafkaesque” has already happened.
Maybe on a much smaller scale.
Kafka is in the top 0.1%.
I can’t promise your surname, name, or pen name will make it into the dictionary, but the mechanism is identical when we talk about being remembered online, on social media, in your generation, or wherever your vision is able to reach.
Being prolific is an advantage, but only if your work has quality and vision.
Most people jump straight to the end without going through any of the earlier stages of building a vision and developing their own principles. That’s why their content, no matter how much they optimize it, never ends up sounding like anything of their own. It’s erratic, sometimes even contradictory — today they say “A,” tomorrow they say “B.” You don’t know where they’re headed, and it’s hard to connect with them because even they never got their own mind in order.
You now have the keys to create your own vision.
Stay creative.
— Álvaro
Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to explore:
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 95,000 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