JA Westenberg

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

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

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

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

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

RIP Lindsey Graham. You taught us all that it's never too late to abandon every single thing you claimed to believe in as recently as 60 seconds ago. Brave. Iconic. Unhinged. We'll miss you.

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

US AI labs: "Scraping the entire open internet without consent is fair use! It's transformative!" Also US AI labs when someone distills their models: "Wait no not like that, that's intellectual property theft" New post on why distillation is just the industry looking in the mirror: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-great-ai-double-standard

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

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

Stop trying to build for "the algorithm." Stop trying to scale to a million faceless users. If you want to make something people actually give a shit about, shrink your target audience to a single person you know. 5 rules for creating work that leaves a mark: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/how-to-make-something-people-actually

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

You wouldn't walk into an Apple store and offer them "exposure" for a MacBook. Stop treating creators like a charity. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/fuck-you-pay-me

Why does seeing people experience pure, unapologetic joy over a comic book movie make some internet critics so furiously angry? Because rage is often just a mask for loneliness, grief, and boredom. When someone else's happiness feels like an insult, the problem is you. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/hating-marvel-movies-is-not-a-personality

The reason humans don’t want to generate personalized AI movies is the same reason humans don’t talk about their dreams: Nobody else gives a shit https://youtu.be/ZXJGYrlfi6A?si=H8m1uJQZ3kesYPpJ

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

Everyone talks about exponential growth like it's this beautiful hockey stick graph. What they don't tell you is that the flat line at the start feels endless, years of grinding. Exponential only happens if you survive long enough. Start small, stay consistent.

Tech millionaires dropping fortunes on longevitymaxxing are repeating the exact same psychology as ancient kings eating mercury pills. They view death as a technical problem waiting for a technical solution. It's a desperate refusal to sit with the discomfort of finitude. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/given-the-alternative-i-find-myself

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what I believe. I believe that structured learning doesn’t answer the entirety of your educational need. I believe that it doesn’t answer even 50% of it. I believe that it lays the groundwork for the rest of your life as a learner. 8/13

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

We then believe that after only 18 years of our lives, we have gained the information and experience we need to deal with the next 60–70 years. That’s crazy. It’s a crazy attitude, but it’s one that almost everyone slowly adopts. When School’s Out, Learning Lets Out Too. 3/13

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

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

When you view your schooling and your college education as being the foundation, not the entire block, you can start to build on it. If you spend every single year until you die ensuring that you have continued to learn, that’s going to change your level of understanding, readiness, and general insight. 9/13

It’s the fault of the schools, sure. But it’s also the fault of parents who turn their children’s education into a painful, constant struggle. It’s the fault of education theorists and government regulators who are tasked with deciding what information, from the entire store of human knowledge, should be crammed into a little over a decade of schooling. It all adds up to create a negative, dragging, shitty attitude to learning anything. You Don’t Have To Let Yourself Graduate. 7/13

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

I have a bread machine. Ingredients cost pennies. The recipe is 5,000 years old. The machine does everything with one button. I've used it 3 times in 3 years. Americans still buy 10 million loaves of pre-baked bread every day. Which is why SaaS isn't doomed. And Basecamp, etc will be fine. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-bread-paradox-why-convenience

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

Most people reach the end of their school journey, go through graduation, and then stop learning. They stop seeking out new information and new lessons because they’ve already been there, done that. They literally have a certificate. And so the entire period in which they were at school being required to learn something that would improve their lives or equip them for the real world, that becomes their only education. 4/13

We replaced God with the Gross Domestic Product. But we kept on feeling guilty about resting and virtuous about toiling. The religious veneer faded, and the moral weight of work never left. Rest shouldn't require an excuse. But here we are. https://youtu.be/8fsnsuiTZvc?si=ThVzMIz39nVCE8uR

Don’t ask: “What niche should I choose?” Ask: “What can I see because of where I’ve been - and who else desperately needs help seeing it too?” That question will give you a body of work. That’s a lot better than a “content” category. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/dont-pick-a-writing-niche-find-the

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

Sure, they can go to university or college and extend their formal education, but they’re back in the same sprint that they ran in high school. They’re trying to get through a track as fast as they can, and jump every hurdle. But they’ll eventually reach another graduation ceremony and gain another certificate that says they’ve ticked the boxes and learned enough. It is complete. 5/13

The focused learning just stops. They might be forced to learn some new skills at work, or go through a mandatory course. But they won’t try to learn something just because they want to improve themselves on their own. 6/13

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

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

Sun Tzu ranked strategic outcomes, best to worst:

• Thwart the enemy's plans
• Break his alliances
• Fight his army
• Besiege his cities

Notice fighting comes third.

The whole point is to win without it. https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailygeneral/p/subdue-your-enemy-without-fighting?r=53ll86&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer

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

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

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

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