Do you want to start something of your own—something that fits your lifestyle, aligns with your beliefs, and would make you happy to work on—but you’re not sure what to start, or how?

Have you been trying to come up with an idea—a blog, an online business, a side project—but you struggle because you’re into all kinds of stuff, you don’t have one true passion, and you don’t see yourself as an expert in anything?

And each time a promising idea drops out of your brain, do you mostly think and talk about it, while doing very little to make it real?

If you answered “yes” to any of these…

…it looks like you’re not moving forward—you’re kinda stuck. You keep dreaming but make no real progress.

You jump between ideas, you overthink, you second-guess. Fear and self-doubt are in the way, and procrastination has become your best ally.

Instead of acting, you talk yourself out of it: I’m busy. I’m tired. My idea isn’t original—someone’s already doing it. I’m not ready, I need to learn more.

But the more you learn, the more overwhelmed you get. There’s always one last thing before you’re ready—so you never start, because you never feel ready.

And if you don’t change your approach right now, you won’t start anything meaningful any time soon.

You’ll drop your big ideas, bury your dreams, and go back to your routine feeling angry and lost.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Let me explain.

Start with “you”

Most of our ideas are fed to us now—whatever’s trending shows up on your phone sooner or later.

See what’s happening with AI?

On one side, the fearmongers and the people fed up with it. On the other, the early adopters—the ones offering the creative solutions and the hacks. Which group will you join?

You’ll sieve it all through your knowledge, your experience, your logic—and your gut. The logic tells you one thing. Your gut, another.

And you know what? AI doesn’t care. The market doesn’t either.

So stop thinking.

Experiment.

Dig into the topic, test it yourself, go deeper than 99% of people out there.

And while you learn, externalise it.

Turn your thinking, your internal arguments, your tests—turn all of it into learning in public.

Two reasons to do it:

• First, you’ll learn for real—because you’re testing your own thesis, not borrowing someone else’s. After a while you’ll know what’s what for yourself. You won’t need anyone’s logic or gut telling you what’s good or bad. You’ll know better.

• Second—and this is the part that matters—the whole process is yours. The testing, the arguments, the dead ends, the practical applications—everything you went through is something nobody can ever take from you.

It’s unique to you.

Your conclusions might overlap with someone else’s—same problems, similar doubts—but you got there your own way, and that’s what counts.

And if you externalise it—if you let someone see inside your head, your heart, your thinking—it can be found by a person who’s now exactly where you used to be. They might find it useful, eye-opening, motivating. And they’ll set off on their own journey because of it.

That person might feel a connection—to you and to your work. And through it, you could become friends, support each other—maybe even build something new together.

And if it doesn’t work out?

You move to the next rabbit hole, learn something new, tell that story. That’s how you build your body of work, gradually, one rabbit hole at a time. And that—that’s a success.

That’s why I’m learning to write, and why I became a beginner again on Substack. To explore myself, and to build my own body of work—in the second half of life. In midlife.

You see, most people stop learning when school stops.

They think education was the thing that ended. But the most important learning—the self-directed kind, the kind that builds something—only starts when nobody's making you do it anymore.

Here’s to learning together.

Have a great day and do your thing,

Jack

It was later than it should have been, and it was my fault.

Yesterday, I lost track of time while working on my Substack post. I scrapped the first version and came up with my own little framework for writing Substack articles.

I wanted more consistency—but also to improve my writing, and to feel in control of the process instead of staring at a blank page each day.

The whole thing took much longer than usual, and for a moment time ceased to exist—I was so in the zone.

I was giving it a last polish—reading it aloud for the rhythm, just before hitting publish—when Alex came in. He had his favourite dinosaur mascot and the book we read before sleep, and he started pulling me towards the bedroom. It was past his bedtime.

The last thing I did before sleeping was set the alarm earlier than usual—an hour’s advance, to gather my thoughts, prepare mentally, and do some worry-free writing in the morning.

Then it hit me

Early in the morning today—it’s day #8, and the article you’re reading now—I started writing in my notebook and it hit me. I can’t just live my life as normal and then squeeze writing into every free moment—every window where I’m less busy or have nothing specific to do.

I have to reorganise each day around my priorities and make writing a locked-in part of it. Yesterday, Substack almost won priority over my son. That made me feel bad, to be honest—it was a red flag for me.

And here’s the hardest part of starting anything new in adult life. Whatever you want to begin for yourself, you have to wedge it into a life that’s already full.

If you’re around my age—early 40s, verge of midlife—you know exactly what I’m talking about, especially if you live in a big city like me and you have kids.

Most days are a conveyor belt moving you through the day on autopilot, while you juggle several things at once.

From the outside everything looks fine—you work hard, the bills get paid. And yet the curiosity and energy you once had, to build, learn, start something new, get harder to reach.

And right in the middle of all that, I decided to challenge myself and add daily Substack writing.

But writing a post takes effort, clear thinking, time—and the right mood. It can’t be done right there and then, whenever a gap appears. Writing requires that you consciously direct your attention only to the writing itself—and the more relaxed you are, the more enjoyable the process and the better the result.

Otherwise, everything becomes rushed. Your attention is dragged in so many directions that you feel everywhere and nowhere at once.

That was the chaos I felt sitting down to almost every post these past seven days. At the back of my mind, always chasing myself—I have to do this now, because soon I’ll have to go and do something else.

Most of my posts were rushed like that. You can compare the feeling to the last ten minutes of a hard maths test at school—the harder you try to reach the answer, the harder it gets to think straight.

That shakiness, the pressure, the chaotic thoughts—almost every 40-something Londoner knows it. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi gave it a name: psychic entropy.1

So what is psychic entropy?

Psychic entropy is a disorder in consciousness—attention scattered across too many inputs at once. In simple terms, it’s what happens when your mind is being pulled in so many directions that it can’t settle on one thing long enough to think clearly or work deeply.

When attention scatters, something shifts. You start choosing what’s manageable over what matters—postponing ideas, lowering the bar, and eventually stopping the writing altogether.

That feeling is the opposite of flow2—one clear task, full absorption, and little awareness of time passing.

But here’s what most people miss: writing isn’t just the act of putting words on the page. It’s the conditions that make writing possible—gathering your thoughts, getting into the right mood, and creating enough inner quiet for the work to begin.

Flow doesn’t come from hunting for a clever idea and then rushing into the doing. It comes from a settled mind, clear constraints, and enough attention left to stay with the task.

So you cannot magically slip into the state of flow. It can only be reached, not summoned. Your mind has to arrive before the writing can—and that happens in two stages.

First you need space to think and reflect, which is exactly what a chaotic day with no breaks steals from you: you never slow down enough to think, and when you do sit down to write you’re not fully focused on the task at hand.

When you sit down at the desk, you should be relaxed and ease into the process slowly, rather than rush against a clock like I did at first. Flow tends to show up once you’re already moving, not at the blank page. So if you’re new to this and it never seems to come, you’re not short on talent or skills. You’re just not fully present with your writing.

How to build the conditions

So if you want to write regularly—and this applies to me as much as anyone—start by observing yourself. Not your writing but your day. Look at it from the outside, the way another person watching you would, and take notes.

The goal isn’t to find spare time. It’s to find the right time—the moments when you’re not drained, not rushed, not pulled in various directions. You’re not just finding time to write. You’re building the conditions so your mind can actually be on the writing when you sit down.

Here’s where to start:

1. Watch yourself for a few days and take notes. When do you wake? When do you go to bed? Where in the day are you busiest, most stressed, most scattered? Write it down. You can’t carve space until you can see the shape of your day.

2. Optimise for energy, not time. A free hour when you’re exhausted is worthless for writing. Find the windows where you’re rested and in a decent mood—those are the ones that count.

3. Cross out, rearrange, carve. Look at your week and consciously lock in your writing time. Protect it. These are the moments that are only yours—treat them that way.

4. Give your mind room before writing anything. A walk with nothing in your ears. Time in the park. A bit of movement. The breaks I never gave myself those seven days. You can’t write with a clear head if the head’s been in chaos all day—space to think is what makes space to write.

5. At the desk, keep it simple and ease in. One task. Phone out of reach. And don’t cold-start—reread the last paragraph or rough out a sentence to warm up, rather than staring down a blank page against the clock.

6. Stop while you still know your next move. Don’t write yourself dry. End the session while the next sentence is still clear in your head and you’re happy with the progress—even a bit proud. Tomorrow you’ll sit down and walk straight back in—no cold blank page waiting, and that good feeling you left with should come back.

7. Don’t outsource the thinking to AI. Do that and you skip the thought-gathering stage, the mood, the quiet, and ask the machine to produce what only a settled mind can. I believe AI can be a great writing coach and a partner that helps you become a better writer—if you use it like a writer would, not like a machine for mass-producing content. You first have to become a good writer to train AI to help you shape your piece.

Here’s the key takeaway from today: you don’t find time to write—you build yourself into someone whose life is shaped around it. Otherwise you give up. It has to become part of who you are.

How today actually went

This morning I woke before the alarm even went off, and that one thing changed everything. I wasn’t rushed. I started slowly, fresh, with the whole day still ahead of me—and I already felt better before I’d written a single word. I was in a good position, and I knew it.

I wrote for a while, dropped Alex at school, then went for a walk. No earphones. No phone. Just me and the morning. And my mind kept doing the work on its own—surfacing thoughts, drifting back to the text, pushing it forward while my legs moved. By the time I got home it was still early, so I made a few more notes before work.

Now it’s evening, and I’m finishing this.

It was a good writing day. And the difference wasn’t more time. It was a settled mind, given room to think.

Take it easy and do your thing,

Jack

References:

The reason most people quit writing online isn’t because they lack clever ideas.

They do know what to write about. The problem is they start each post from zero—a blank page, day after day—and that’s not sustainable. It breaks you. You get lost in the complexity, drowning in your own thoughts, because as a beginner you don’t have a writing process to hold on to.

And that was pretty much me yesterday.

My internal voice was screaming.

After a day at work and a visit to the hospital with my son, my internal state was chaos. Racing thoughts. My mind was going to every topic under the sun but not to writing.

I was staring at the page like a student staring at their teacher when they don’t know the answer to a tricky question. Just me. A blank screen. A pile of messy notes. Stuck.

Time was ticking. It was already close to 5pm I didn’t even start, and at 8pm. I was supposed to take my son to bed. And the more desperately I tried to force myself to write, the more my brain just shut down.

Then today, the same thing again

On post #7—an even busier day—it was me and a blank page again.

Internal chaos. Hundreds of mixed feelings. I’m starting from scratch, fighting myself and the blank screen, the clock ticking. And it’s not the lack of an idea—it’s the effort of starting from zero. Again. After a full day’s work, it was just too much.

The result?

I end up with a post that sounds rushed. The text doesn’t flow, and I can always feel it when I re-read it the next morning.

I feel like a dog chasing its own tail, and it takes a lot of brainpower and effort to straighten the whole thing and shape it into a post with arms and legs.

So I stopped and asked myself a question

How the hell do established creators do this every day? Because there’s no way they work like I do—start from scratch with a chaotic mess, then tighten it, break it into pieces, and put it back together again. It would be unbearable—like assembling furniture with no instructions and half the screws missing.

There has to be an organised way of doing it. Some surgical operation. Planned in advance, then carried out fast. A tactical centre where you plan the writing operation, breach the door, execute the plan surgically, and leave.

And that’s what a writing system is. A frame that holds the finished piece—simple and intuitive enough that you don’t need a manual to use it. Something I set up before I write a word. Then I just fill in the blanks, segment by segment—and once it’s down, I can shape it: rhythm, flow, logic—instead of lurching back and forth like a mad scientist who’s lost a screw in his own lab.

So for a moment I dropped writing, took out a piece of paper, and retraced my thinking process—breaking it into parts, separating it into core segments, then putting it together into a fixed plan I’ll now use for my posts.

A post used to cost me three hours and leave me wrung out. The sketch takes five minutes.

I hate to admit it—because the internet is already full of clever frameworks—but I think I’ve just built my own little one. It’s built around the way I think, because the moment I start writing, I get lost. So the whole purpose of it is to keep me in lane, the way a sprinter has a track. Stay in the lane. Don’t drift left, don’t drift right. Just run the line.

Follow the plan. Don’t lose yourself in some uncontrolled ramble. See how your readers react—and maybe, as your writing evolves, the structure changes with it.

And if you’re a similar writing nutter who battles chaos, racing thoughts and distraction, and hits a wall against the blank page every day—I feel you, and this is for you.

Let me walk you through it—what each part is, why it’s there, and how you can run it yourself. A fair warning: I built this for me. It’s still a thesis. I’m testing it, and I’ll change it. But it sticks in my head easily, because I didn’t invent it—I just retraced the path my own thinking already takes and gave each step a name I’d remember.

The general idea

Every post takes the reader on a short journey. It starts with something I noticed—a problem, or just something useful that caught my attention—and ends somewhere they can actually use. I want every post to be worth the reader’s time, in a real, practical way. The first couple of sentences bring them in. Then four stages carry us through it together. I call them Notice, Realise, Learn, Do.

HOOK (the invitation)

The first sentence your reader meets. Two sentences, max.

You don’t open with a clever idea. You name a pain or a friction so clearly that the reader thinks “that’s me.” That’s all the hook does—it offers them a reason to come and look. It’s not one of the four stages. It just opens the way in.

NOTICE (you noticed something)

You don’t need a smart idea to begin. You just need something you noticed.

Something that grabbed you. A friction, a problem, a thing that annoyed you or even made you furious—yours or somebody else’s. Something you saw and identified with, that felt worth digging into. That’s the bar. Not “be original.” Just “what caught me?”

REALISE (you start digging)

You don’t leave what you noticed sitting on the surface. You follow your curiosity and look under the bonnet.

And once you’re under there, you realise there’s more to it than you first thought. So you keep digging—connecting things, going down, trying to get to the bottom of it.

LEARN (what the digging turns up)

The digging turns up things. Underlying concepts. Universal truths. The real reasons behind what you noticed.

This is where you lay those out—the dots you connected, the principles you uncovered. The stuff that’s true beyond your own situation. This is where the reader actually learns something.

DO (what you do with it)

This is the most concrete part of the post.

The learning handed the reader the concepts. Now you tie them into something they can actually use—a step, a method, a thing to apply in their own life tomorrow. Not “go and reflect.” A real takeaway they can copy and run themselves. You take everything you learned together and turn it into the answer—the solution to the problem you opened with. I believe that a good post is experienced. It means it leaves the reader with something practical.

Why this order isn’t random

Here’s the part that surprised me. When I dug into it, I found my four steps weren’t really invented. They were borrowed—from the way curiosity works in the brain.

Back in 1994, a psychologist called George Loewenstein described curiosity as an information gap: the space between what you know and what you want to know.1

Curiosity, he said, is what you feel when you become aware of a gap that could be filled. And the trigger is small—a little bit of information acts like a priming dose that sharply sparks the urge to know more.

That’s NOTICE and REALISE. You spot something, a tiny crack opens— wait, there’s more here—and it pulls you in.

Then the digging takes over. Researchers at UC Davis found that curiosity recruits the brain’s reward system, and that the link between that reward system and the hippocampus puts the brain into a state where it learns more and remembers more.2

In their study, curious people not only recalled what they were curious about—they also better remembered unrelated things they happened to see while in that curious state.

That’s LEARN. The digging doesn’t just feel good. It’s the state where what you find actually sticks.

So notice → realise → learn is the path your brain already takes when something grabs it: a gap opens, curiosity fires, you dig, and what you find gets locked in. I didn’t design it. I just gave it names and learned to write on top of it.

The brain hands you those first three for free. DO is the part I bolted on—because a post that doesn’t end in something you can use is just entertainment or what James Clear calls a “what-to post”. I want my posts to be “how to actionable posts.”

And honestly, it’s just how I work anything out: something nags me, I dig, I find the thing, I use it.

So here’s how you actually use it

Before you write a single paragraph, write one sentence for each section—just one. One line for your hook, one for NOTICE, one for REALISE, one for LEARN, one for DO. That’s your sketch. Five sentences, and the whole post is mapped before you’ve started.

Then write the post. And every time you feel yourself drifting—wondering what comes next, rambling, going back and forth—you look at the one sentence for the section you’re in, and it pulls you back into lane. That sentence is your track. You stay on it.

That’s the whole trick. You’re not holding the entire post in your head anymore. You’re holding one sentence at a time.

And to show you it works, here’s the exact sketch behind the post you’ve just read—five sentences, one per section. This is what the template looks like filled in:

And here’s the power move—if you want to speed up your brainstorming, sharpen your arguments, or find an angle you couldn’t quite see on your own.

Take the template, upload it to Claude or ChatGPT, and tell it about this post. Then give it the one thing you noticed today and ask it to walk that idea through the frame with you—notice, realise, learn, do. Let it help you dig.

Take it easy and do your thing,

Jack

Footnotes

Yesterday I almost didn’t publish.

Didn’t feel well.

Felt kind of all over the place.

My mind was racing with thoughts and the last thing I wanted to do was sit down to write.

On the other hand I didn’t want to post a zero because I knew how it would make me feel.

With the last bit of energy I had I decided to do the smallest thing closest to writing a post—go through my notes and try to make something out of it at least.

I guess I was hoping for some eureka moment or a miracle.

But one thing led to another and from just looking through notes I started scribbling. Scribble to scribble and the final result?

I managed to publish my fifth Substack post in a row. It felt chaotic. It felt “unfinished” and “rough”—but it was there, out in the open.

I thought I didn’t do a good job. Then a comment popped up that made my day:

“This was an intriguing article. The idea seems good to try. I will try it tomorrow morning. Thank you for this idea.”

So today, I want to tell you about the little trick I played on myself—how it got me to do the thing even when it was the last thing I wanted to do.

Let’s start with a question

What do going to the gym and writing have in common?

Both only pay off if you keep showing up. And both are hardest to show up for on exactly the days you don’t feel like it.

When you’re starting out, missing one day is easy. The next day it’s easier still. Miss a third and the excuses compound—and we both know what happens next. You give up, and feel like a failure.

So here’s the exact deal I made with myself that day:

“OK, if you’re not writing, at least open your notebook, read through the notes, and do something related to writing so the day isn’t a complete loss.”

So I opened my notebook and started flipping through the pages. Then I took a piece of paper and started scribbling. From scribble to scribble, more scribbling—and something started to happen.

Like that Swahili proverb—little by little, a little becomes a lot—I managed to publish.

Say what?

What just happened?

I somehow managed to trick myself into writing a post. How did I do that? And what if I could learn to do it on purpose—so next time I don’t feel like it, I do the thing anyway and spare myself the failure and the guilt?

I had to talk to someone about it—and as usual, my buddy Claude was there for me.

So I quickly Wispr Flowed it (aka dictated) and learned a few things that’ll help you trick your brain into doing your thing next time—even when you don’t feel like it.

I genuinely think my brain reached for this because I’d been through a similar experiment before—with working out and losing weight.

Once you understand the concepts and can see what’s happening, you can pull through—from hesitation to action. Which brings us to the first one.

Activation energy (from chemistry to behaviour)

In chemistry, activation energy is the minimum energy needed to start a reaction. Once it begins, it often continues with much less effort.1

In everyday behaviour, it maps cleanly:

• Starting a new task has a high energy cost.

• Continuing one has a much lower cost.

Once you’re moving, you’re in it—you go with the flow.

The accidental setup yesterday helped me more than I realised. My notebook, my loose notes, and my laptop were all sitting on the kitchen table.

I walked past that table all day—breakfast, lunch, coffee, and every “romantic walk” to the fridge to snack on something. Each time, I passed the laptop and the notes, and each time it nudged me to think about my Substack.

Those few steps didn’t just save seconds—they removed the decision.

That’s why trivial setup changes matter so much.

Shawn Achor calls it the 20-second rule.2When he wanted to practise guitar daily, the guitar lived in a cupboard—and he almost never played. So he moved it onto a stand in the middle of the room. That’s it. Now it was only a few seconds easier to reach. But those few seconds were the whole game: the guitar was right there, in his eyeline, asking to be picked up. Practice went from a decision to a default.

And it cuts both ways. Make a good habit 20 seconds easier to start and you’ll do it more. Make a bad habit 20 seconds harder—remote batteries in a drawer in another room—and you’ll do it less. Achor’s point: we overestimate willpower and underestimate friction. We don’t fail because we’re weak. We fail because the thing was 20 seconds too far away.

So my accidental writing setup makes sense:

• Laptop = hidden, needs setup, invites distraction → high activation energy

• Notes = visible, immediate, low-stakes → low activation energy

I’ll be leaving my laptop out every day now—both as a reminder of the 100-day commitment and to make it dead easy to just sit down and start.

First takeaway: if you’re committed to something, design your environment to do two jobs:

1. Remind you of the thing you’re meant to do.

2. Make starting easy.

Not writing but planning to run every morning? Lay your shoes and kit out the night before, so the first thing you see when you open your eyes is a nudge to drag yourself out the door.

The less energy it costs to get going, the better your odds you won’t talk yourself out of it. Act fast—because otherwise your brain will offer you an excuse or something comfier to do.

Make the first step so small and so close you can take it before your brain wakes up to argue. James Clear calls this making it easy—and his two-minute rule says to scale any new habit down to something you can do in two minutes, so starting is never the obstacle.3

Commit to the gateway, not the goal

This is the reframing trick I played on myself without realising.

Instead of shrinking the goal (”write 200 words”), I changed the entry point entirely: “just sit down and read my notes.”

The key idea:

• Goals trigger resistance—they imply effort, evaluation, and the chance of failure.

• Gateways feel neutral. Non-threatening.

“Write an article” set off a whole alarm system in my head:

• effort—”this’ll take ages”

• identity pressure—”it should be good, I don’t want to ship something crap”

• ambiguity—”where do I even start? I felt rough, my mind was racing, and I had no plan—just rough notes”

“Open the notebook and read one line” sets off none of that.

So instead of negotiating with the resistance, I sidestepped it.

What’s subtle is that I didn’t make writing feel easier—I started something other than writing. I sat with my notes. But once I was in, momentum carried me forward anyway.

• Goal: “Go for a run.”

• Gateway: “Put on trainers and step outside.”

You’re not committing to the whole behaviour—just crossing the threshold. Shrinking the distance between doing nothing and doing the thing.

Action creates motivation (behavioural activation)

This flips the usual intuition.

Most of my life I assumed motivation led to action. But it often runs the other way:

action → momentum → motivation

Behavioural activation—a technique from cognitive behavioural therapy for low mood—is built on exactly this:4

• A small action can shift mood and energy.

• Waiting for the “right feeling” usually leads to paralysis.

And yesterday, at the plain thought of writing, I felt paralysed. Couldn’t act. The friction was too high.

Why going through my notes worked:

• The action gave me feedback—progress, clarity, a small reward.

• That feedback cut the uncertainty and made me willing to keep going.

• It was like my heart texted my brain: this isn’t as bad as you thought.

You don’t feel like writing → you write one sentence → it’s tolerable → you write another → now you’re engaged. Huh. Not so bad. Why not keep going?

The lesson: motivation is usually a consequence, not a prerequisite. Trick yourself into starting—or just kick yourself into it—and the wanting catches up. Once you’re moving, you’re golden.

The 5–4–3–2–1 rule (interrupting autopilot)

I didn’t use this one yesterday—but I love Mel Robbins, I read her book years ago, and I’ve used this method plenty (giving up cigarettes, for one). It works like a charm.

Mel Robbins’ technique is less about motivation and more about interruption.5

Here’s the problem it solves. The moment you think “I should do this,” a tiny window opens—and your brain races to fill it with a reason not to. Maybe in a minute. Let me just check one thing first. I’ll do it after coffee. That’s not laziness, it’s a loop: cue → hesitation → excuse → avoidance. Left alone, it completes every time.

The countdown hijacks it. Counting 5–4–3–2–1 does three things at once:

• It forces conscious attention—you can’t count backwards on autopilot, so it pulls you out of the loop.

• It starts a clock—a short, finite window that ends in action.

• It beats the saboteur to the punch—you move before your brain finishes building the excuse.

Robbins frames it as a launch. Hit zero and you go, like a rocket—no debate. A manual override for hesitation.

I’ve used it for years. It’s how I stopped reaching for a cigarette: 5–4–3–2–1, and I’d put my hands to something else before the craving could talk me round.

The four, side by side

So you can think of the four like this:

• Activation energy = the barrier

• Gateway = the entry point

• Action-first = the engine

• Countdown = the ignition switch

Putting it together

Say you want to write consistently:

• Lower activation energy: keep a notebook open on your desk, laptop somewhere visible.

• Use a gateway: don’t “write”—”just open the notebook and read one line.”

• Act first: write one sentence without waiting to feel ready.

• Use 5–4–3–2–1 when you hesitate—break the stall, go straight into the damn sentence.

Each move beats a different failure point. I put all four on one page you can save to your phone—pull it up on the days your head is fighting you.

That’s the whole method. None of it is willpower. It’s just lowering the cost of starting until starting becomes the easy choice.

Remember the rough post I almost binned? A stranger read it and said they’d try the idea the next morning. I nearly gave them nothing to read.

So on the days you don’t feel it—don’t aim for a good day. Aim for the smallest thing that gets you moving. Open the notebook. Count 5–4–3–2–1. Ship it.

You never know. It might make someone’s day. It might even make yours.

Take it easy and do your thing,
Jack

References

If you’re a beginner writer, a substacker, or a blogger, one of your biggest problems is clarity. You don’t know what to write about, who it is for, and why anyone should care.

If you pair it with perfectionism, procrastination, and you sprinkle on top some impostor syndrome, you get a perfect recipe for giving up.

Today, I want to show you a very simple way of coming up with ideas for articles, which I discovered by accident on day 5 of my writing practice. And you know what? My brain actually handed me the idea this morning.

If you want an easy way to come up with ideas and never run out, this might be for you.

It started with a thought I couldn’t switch off

I’ve committed to a little writing experiment: 100 articles in 100 days. On days 3 and 4, I noticed the question “What am I going to write about?” had become the first thought of the day. Literally, my brain handed it over the moment I opened my eyes.

It was usually paired with two or three other thoughts, like dad and Father’s Day, and then I had an idea: why not connect them and write about that?

So I wrote the ideas down and looked for something useful for a reader, and that’s how I got “How Do You See Your Dad?” and “Dear Substack, Meet My Dad”—the articles on days three and four.

Today is day 5, and I had a similar story. First thought after waking up: writing and Substack. Same pattern. So I started to question and think: is this normal? Am I turning this Substack into some unhealthy obsession? Why is this the first thing in my head every morning?

So I had a heart-to-heart with Claude to get to the bottom of it, and what I learned turned into a system for coming up with ideas and never running out again.

I’m writing this to systematise the process and solve my own problem as a beginner writer—a solution my own brain handed me in the morning. First, I need to explain how our brains wake up.

How your brain wakes up

Sleep inertia

To me, it’s mind-blowing that our brains don’t just switch on in the morning. It’s a process—they boot up in segments, like our computers. The grogginess lifts in fifteen to thirty minutes, but all systems running takes about an hour, depending on your sleep phase and how rested you are. I’m simplifying, but that’s the shape of it.

We wake up in stages. Here’s the sequence.

Your brain wakes up in four stages, in this order:

1. Brainstem arousal—the ignition.
This is the base layer. Basic wakefulness, alertness, heart rate, breathing. It fires first because everything else needs it running underneath. Think of it as the power button and the cooling fan spinning up.

2. The emotional and memory centres—the limbic system.
This is where feeling and memory come online:

• The amygdala, which tags things by emotional weight: threat, importance, what matters.

• The hippocampus, which handles memory.

These wake up while the editor is still asleep. And here’s the kicker: the part of your brain that weighs things by feeling is awake before the part that reasons about them. So the thought you’re handed in the morning isn’t the most important one. It’s the one with the most emotional charge.

3. The broader cortex—the world comes into focus.
Sensory processing kicks in, the world sharpens, and your thoughts start forming into something more than fog.

4. The prefrontal cortex—the editor, last to arrive.
This is the planner, the filter, the part that says “this isn’t actually worth worrying about.” It’s the one with the hardest evidence behind its lag, and it’s the hero of this whole story. Right after you open your eyes, it’s still offline. You’re running an emotional brain with no supervisor.

Running underneath all of it: cortisol. The cortisol awakening response is a sharp rise in the first 30 to 45 minutes after waking. It’s normal and useful — cortisol mobilises energy for the day. But it also amplifies the emotional weight of whatever you’re focused on. The same thought feels manageable at noon. At 5am, editor offline and cortisol climbing, it can feel very heavy.

So my morning thoughts — “What am I writing today? Dad, Father’s Day” — arrive in the window where the emotional and memory centres are up but the editor is down. The limbic phase, before the prefrontal cortex has booted.

The amygdala is tagging by emotional weight, the hippocampus pulling up memories. What surfaces is charged and personal. And because the editor isn’t at his desk yet, nothing filters it, softens it, or talks you out of it. You get the raw version. That’s why the morning thought is more honest than the noon one.

The open loop

Bluma Zeigarnik, a psychologist in the 1920s, noticed that waiters could remember unpaid orders in detail but forgot them the moment the bill was settled.

She tested it and found the mind holds unfinished tasks in a state of low tension, keeping them active until they close.

Finished tasks get filed and released. Open ones keep pinging. A daily writing commitment, which by definition never closes, became my permanent open loop. That’s why my brain keeps surfacing it every morning.

You’ll recognise your own open loops by watching your thoughts. Keep a notebook by the bed, or record them into your phone with something like Wispr Flow. Here’s a list to get you started:

• an argument never resolved

• a text or email you should have replied to

• a bill, or a debt that grows every month

• the side project, the book, the garage you half-built

• a difficult conversation you keep avoiding

• a medical result you’re waiting on

• a decision you keep postponing—the job, the move, the relationship

• a worry about a child, or a parent getting older

• a cliffhanger in a series you can’t stop thinking about

• a GTA mission you couldn’t finish on the Xbox

Put the two together

Every morning, sleep inertia delivers raw, unedited, emotional thoughts. Zeigarnik decides which one surfaces—the most charged open loop. Stack them and you get a daily readout of what matters to you most, served right before you can talk yourself out of it.

The writing loop is why writing shows up for me—it’s my unfinished thing. Your other loops—debt, grief, kids—are your subjects.

The loop is the fuel, not always the topic.

And the morning brain generates—it doesn’t edit. Catch the thoughts raw now, shape them later. Most beginners fail because they ask a half-booted brain to finish a polished piece on the spot.

One thing this is not: it’s not journaling for its own sake. Morning pages drain the clutter out of your head and get thrown away. This does the opposite—it mines that same raw morning material for something you actually ship.

You just write the thoughts into a list, then start the process I call drilling down—finding the connections and working out how to turn them into something useful for a reader.

The example—how I drilled one morning thought

Friday evening, at 40 years old, I took my son to Currys and bought an Xbox, GTA 5, and Battlefield 2. I went back to one of the things I loved when I was younger: playing games. The next day, Saturday, I spent three or four hours on GTA, having fun like a kid. I loved it.

Then I had a FaceTime call with my sister. I shared my excitement about the Xbox. She said: “Aren’t you too old for Xbox? I don’t know anyone your age who plays. You’re already 40.” That stung. It made me think—am I having some midlife crisis, buying an Xbox at 40?

But I loved playing. It was refreshing—the last time I’d played GTA 5 was on my first Xbox, the one I bought at 23, when I moved to the UK and started university.

The next morning, the first thoughts that surfaced were: GTA, Xbox, and—as usual—writing. Three loops.

• GTA: I had open missions, wondering whether to play.

• The nagging question about the Xbox purchase.

• Writing on Substack.

I wrote down three tags: Xbox, GTA mission, writing—plus the fact that I’m 40. Now, how do you drill down? You go to Claude, like I did, and tell it the story: “I had three thoughts resurface the moment I woke up—GTA, Xbox, open missions, writing. Help me work out why.” You give the background only you have. Why did I buy the Xbox? What’s underneath it? Then you let it ask questions, and you drill until you hit something useful—or uncomfortable—for a reader.

[H3: The questions that drill it down]

Here’s a list of questions that will help you go through the drill-down process.

1. Surface it—get the bare thing onto the table.
These pull the raw thought out before you start judging it.

• What was the thought? Just name it.

• What’s the feeling attached to it?

• When did it start? What happened just before?

• What’s the story behind it? (This is the one only you can answer — give the background.)

2. Find the charge—locate where it actually hurts or pulls.
The charge is the signal. These find it.

• Why did this stick with me?

• Why did it sting / excite / unsettle me?

• What part of this can’t I let go of?

• If I’m honest, what’s the bit I don’t want to look at?

3. Drill down—go under the surface thought.
This is the core move. You keep asking until you hit something that isn’t just about you.

• What’s underneath this?

• Why does that matter? (Then ask it again of the answer. And again.)

• What am I really reacting to here?

• What belief is sitting under this? Who decided that belief? Is it even true?

• What’s the thing I’m assuming without questioning it?

4. Widen it—turn private into shared.
This is the turn. These questions test whether it’s an article or just a diary entry.

• Is this only about me, or do other people feel it too?

• Who else has this exact problem and doesn’t have words for it?

• What’s the general principle hiding inside my specific story?

• So what? Why should a stranger care?

• What could someone do differently after reading this?

5. Pressure-test—make sure it’s true and useful.
Before you write, check it holds.

• Is this actually true, or does it just sound good?

• What’s the strongest argument against it?

• What’s the one sentence a reader should walk away with?

[H3: Watch it turn]

So I did exactly that. I gave Claude the three tags and the story, and we started drilling. Here’s roughly how it went.

Why did my sister’s comment sting? Because a part of me wondered if she was right.

Why would she be right? Because somewhere I’d absorbed the idea that a 40-year-old man playing Xbox is a bit sad. A bit stunted.

Where did that idea come from? Who decided 40 is too old to play? Nobody decided it. It’s just in the water. We’re told that past a certain age, play is something you supervise your kids doing, not something you’re allowed to do yourself.

So what is this actually about—is it about Xbox? No. It’s not about Xbox at all. It’s about permission. About the quiet shame we’re taught to attach to play once we’re “grown up.” And about what we lose when we hand all our fun to our children and keep none for ourselves.

And there it was. That’s the turn—the moment it stopped being my story about a console and became everyone’s story about growing up and forgetting how to play. “I bought an Xbox at 40” is a diary entry. Nobody cares. “Why do we feel ashamed of play in midlife?” is an article—because a lot of 40-year-olds feel exactly that and have never put words to it.

That’s the whole move. You take the private thing and drill until it becomes a shared thing. The moment it turns, you’ve got your piece.

A quick word of caution before you run off and do this. Not every charged thought belongs on the internet. Some are too raw, and some involve other people who didn’t agree to be in your writing.

Part of the skill is knowing which loops to drill in public and which to keep in the notebook. Charge is the signal that something’s there—it’s not automatically permission to publish.

The system, start to finish

Here’s the whole thing in one place, so you can use it tomorrow morning:

1. Before you touch your phone, catch the tags. The first one or two charged thoughts. Don’t develop them. Just name them.

2. Capture them raw. Notebook by the bed, or speak them into your phone with something like Wispr Flow. Do it before the editor wakes up and tidies them away.

3. Bring them to Claude with the background only you have. The thought is the seed. The story behind it is yours alone—give it.

4. Let it ask why. You answer. “Why does that matter?”—asked again and again of each answer—is the question that does most of the work.

5. Drill until something turns. Keep going until the private thing becomes a shared thing. That turn is your article. If it won’t turn, bin it. There’s another one tomorrow.

6. Generate now, edit later. Get the messy draft down in the morning state. Shape it when the editor’s back at his desk. Two brains, two jobs.

And this is why you never run out. Your loops refill overnight, every night, for free. There’s no morning without at least one charged thought waiting for you. You’re not hunting for ideas anymore—you’re catching what your own brain hands you, and drilling until it turns into something a stranger can use.

This article you’re reading? It came from exactly this. Day 5. Three tags: Xbox, GTA, writing. One morning, one drill. That’s it.

So tomorrow—before the phone, before the day floods in—catch the tag. See what your brain hands you.

Take it easy and do your thing,

Jack

A dinosaur of dinosaurs—in the good way. He knows the world pre-calculator, and when I was a kid he’d always tell me to check the calculator, because it might be wrong.

That dinosaur speaks four languages—and not “can I have a beer, por favor,” but the underlying grammar, etymology, phonetics, literature, and history of the countries where they’re spoken.

A true fanatic, with a passion for learning and discovery. For as long as I can remember, he was either teaching at school or hidden in his office—more of a lair, really, full of old books, notebooks, papers, and dust.

A mad scientist. An eccentric. Good-hearted underneath, with good intentions, though he might not show it unless you’ve spent years with him. He taught me chess. He taught me my first maths. He taught me English, French, German, Latin, and Polish. A teacher at heart—my first teacher. Without him, I would never be the person I am and I am forever gratefult to him.

He turned 72 this year, and last time I was in Poland, he insisted he could still do five pull-ups.

He’s also the man who taught me the headstand and the handstand when I was a kid. He loves walking, and would take me on long walks.

The same man once went toe to toe with a lifeguard—told him he couldn’t really swim. They decided to test it. The lifeguard nearly drowned, and my dad swam back, dragging him to shore.

The same man who, during communist times in Poland—when the militia was at the height of its power—dragged a militia officer out of his seat in the cinema. The seat was my dad’s, by the booking. The film was Jaws.

When I was about to start secondary school, my dad was adamant he had to speak to one person and one person only: the English teacher. He believed that if the English teacher was no good, I’d pick up bad habits and a bad accent—and that would be a real shame.

The same man played his own maths teacher at chess because he thought his end-of-year grade was too low. And you know what? He won.

My dad is many people in one. If I had to choose one, I’d say he’s a born teacher—and a gloriously mad language scientist who stops and talks to anyone, always finding some common thread.

What’s your relationship with your dad now?

I believe everyone has mixed feelings about their parents—and those feelings shift with the season of life we’re in. When we’re young, we often don’t think well of them, because they ban us from things, they’re strict, they impose their way of seeing the world, and we don’t see the good intentions behind it.

It’s worth remembering that our parents did things to the best of their knowledge and ability. They’re not ideal—they’re the same flawed human beings we are. They lived a different life, a different reality. Different jobs. A different world. It’s easy to sit and judge them now, from a distance. I only came to understand this with time.

I also believe parents change. The same dad who was strict 20 or 30 years ago might be a different person now. My dad is still stubborn as hell, but his approach to me today is nothing like it was when I was fifteen. I can’t say it’s right—it depends—but at 40, and a father myself, I see it more clearly.

When we’re kids, our parents look after us. Then, as they get older, something flips—they start to behave a little more like children themselves. I don’t know if you’ve had the same impression. It probably depends on how old they are, and how old you are.

And finally, the most painful one.

How often do you see your dad?

Most people don’t think about this day to day. I don’t either—I’m too occupied with the everydayness of my own life.

But right now is the moment to think about it. Because it’s Father’s Day.

How close you are to your parents when you’re a kid. How they’re there for you, any time you need them. And when we’re young, we don’t always appreciate that.

At what age do we realise how important they’ve been—looking after us, shaping us, making us who we are?

How much time do we actually have left with them? And how often do we really see them?

My dad is 72 and lives in Poland. I live in London. My son is here too, and I’m tied to his school schedule, full-time work, flight availability, and the rest of it.

If I stay stuck in my own everydayness, and ignore the fact that time flies, and see my dad only once a year—then I might see my dad eight more times, if he lives to eighty.

And that breaks my heart. Because when you see your parents in person rarely, you notice how fast time passes — you watch them grow weak and fragile, and that’s one of the most painful things to face as an adult.

Now, what can you do about it?

This idea—counting how many times you might see your dad before he’s gone—I got from Jesse Itzler. It’s a good reminder to live in the moment, and to take the time to appreciate every one we have with our dads.

The second thing: before you everjudge your dad harshly about anything, remember that your parents lived in different times. They weren’t ideal. They had their own problems, their own shit to deal with—like we do now. And even if they weren’t the best parents in the world, they were acting to the best of their knowledge, with good intentions.

Let’s use moments like Father’s Day to recall the best times we had with our dads. And if you don’t have many, try to see them as a learning experience—use your dad as the anti-example that helped you become a better father yourself.

And if you carry any pain in your heart caused by your dad—I’m truly sorry. I’d like to leave you with this.

Final word

There’s an old Buddhist teaching called the Sallatha Sutta — the Arrow. It goes like this. When something painful happens, we get struck by an arrow. That’s the first arrow, and we can’t always avoid it. Illness, distance, ageing, losing the people we love—that arrow lands on everyone.

But then most of us reach down, pick up a second arrow, and drive it into ourselves. The second arrow is everything we add on top: the dread, the replaying, the resentment, the suffering. And that one is optional.

The pain is real. The suffering we pile on it is a choice.

So feel the first arrow. Let it land. Let it hurt. But try not to fire the second one into yourself. Whether it’s the years you won’t get back with your dad, or the hurt he caused you that you still carry—the first arrow has already landed. You don’t have to keep shooting the second.

One last thing.

Dear Substack, say hi to my dad.

I changed the name of the publication—an idea that came from the thing my dad lectured me about my whole life. He always told me to “question and think”. About everything people tell me, and everything around me.

Happy Father’s Day to every dad that might read it.

Take it easy and do your thing,

Jack

So why not celebrate the day by thinking about your father for a moment, and asking a few questions that might help us learn something?

Honestly, what do you think about your dad?

Stay with that question for a moment. Observe your thoughts. Watch the answer resurface in your mind.

I’m not sure if you noticed, but whenever you’re asked a question about something, your mind goes straight to good or bad. The same applies to people—and in this case, to your dad.

The moment I asked, you were already thinking either good or bad things about him. Which is fascinating—but also unfair. It’s worth keeping in mind how quickly we jump to conclusions about another human being and label them. It’s surprising how fast we simplify something as complex as a lifelong parent-child relationship and smack “good” or “bad” on it.

Zero or one? Black or white? As if there were nothing in between. I love my dad, and I believe he’s a good person—but he has his bad sides and his good ones, as we all do.

I’m not sure which classification surfaced for you first. But if it was negative, remember that’s just how your brain operates—and it’s worth taking a moment to look under the bonnet of that good-versus-bad mechanism.

Binary thinking

When asked “what do you think about your dad?”, you might think my old man was good because he paid the bills and never left, even though in reality he was emotionally distant. Someone else, like me, might say my dad was bad—because he was harsh and strict most of the time, even though his intentions were always good. He just wanted to teach me discipline.

The reality is that our brains take many mixed experiences and compress them into one simple label, because that’s easier to hold.

So the same father can be loving, strict, absent, protective, disappointing, and admirable all at once—but when answering a question like this the little voice in your head can reduce him to “good” or “bad.” The result? Your brain one, your dad nil.

Memory about your dad is emotion-weighted

You may barely remember the ordinary weekday moments with your dad, but the one time he shouted in anger has stayed vivid for years. (I have moments like that with my Dad too.)

At the same time, a single good memory can become emotionally huge. My dad could shout like a madman sometimes—but he also spent a lot of good time with me. He took me to table tennis practice, played football with me, even spent a whole day with me and my mates building a little football pitch in the back garden.

So when you think of your dad, remember your brain isn’t recalling a full archive. You’re seeing a few emotionally charged scenes layered on top of each other, and whichever feeling is strongest in the moment tends to win.

Questions act like search prompts

When I asked “what do you think about your dad?”, your brain searched for a summary word: good, bad, strict, loving, cold.

But if I asked, “what was it like being with your dad when you needed help, or when you fell ill?”—your brain would go somewhere more specific.

And that could completely change your answer, and put your dad in a different light. A broad question invites a broad judgment. A narrow question invites a memory—and that memory might change everything.

Dads are loaded symbols

For you, “dad” might mean the man who taught you to drive, bought you your first Nike shoes, and felt like a great guy. For someone else, “dad” means criticism, silence at dinner, tension in the room when he came home—or worse, things I won’t get into here.

The truth is, “dad” is never just a person in the present tense. He carries your old childhood feelings, your family’s rules, the kind of love the people around him expected, and the approval you might still be hoping to win.

What can we learn from this?

This question lands even closer if, like me, you’re a parent. Because what I learned is this: most of us think of ourselves as good parents—most parents do—when really we should focus on the experience we give our child, day to day.

So rather than asking whether I’m a good or bad parent, when I’m with my Alex—who is six right now—I ask myself: does he feel safe with me, at all times? Am I confusing the living hell out of him? What can I do better, so that his experience is a positive one?

The more positive experiences he has with me, the more he’ll remember me in good and warm terms.

And if you still see your dad in a negative light—and don’t get me wrong, I’m not discounting your lived experience with your old man in any way—I just want to point out one last thing.

The eternal battle of good and bad

Nothing is either good or bad. We love to judge and classify—people, experiences, decisions—as good or bad, right or wrong, wins or fails. But neither is ever quite true. Even Shakespeare summed it up in Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Picture a piano. Joseph Nguyen, in his book Don’t Believe Everything You Think, explains it well. A piano has 88 keys. You can’t point at one and say “that key is good” or “that key is bad.” A key only sounds wrong inside a particular piece of music—outside that context, there are no bad keys, only notes that combine in infinite ways. Just as there are no wrong keys on a piano, there are no right or wrong decisions in life. Only different paths.

Sometimes your dad, or my dad—both only human beings—takes a different path. Years later we label it right or wrong, but his intentions may have been good all along. So before we’re harsh on our dads, let’s keep that in mind.

So next time someone asks what you think of your dad—or you catch yourself answering—pause. Notice the word your brain reached for. Then question it. Ask a narrower question. Pull out a different memory. You’ll almost always find a fuller, fairer man than the label suggested.

That’s the whole point of this place. Question, then think.

Tomorrow is Father’s Day. So tomorrow, I’ll introduce you to mine—the man who taught me to question everything, including him.

Take it easy and do your thing,
Jack

It felt great when I hit that publish button on my first Substack post yesterday.

But today, it’s a completely different story.

For some reason I woke up at around 2am. I couldn’t fall asleep again. And I felt like a miserable zombie.

After lying in bed, at around 4am I finally decided it was high time to drag myself out of bed.

I drank some water and went for my usual morning walk.

I didn’t want to lie there like a vampire in a coffin, staring at the ceiling and listening to the sob stories of my inner bitch complaining about today’s to-do list and how tired I’d feel later if I didn’t go to sleep.

The funny thing is, the more I thought about having to go back to sleep, the more awake I felt. I couldn’t stand it, so I just decided to get up and break this ridiculous inner bitchery and nagging—put on clothes and shoes, didn’t even wash my face, just walked out.

I wanted to leave that inner voice behind, but it echoed in my mind for a good few hundred metres as I walked:

“Today you’re running the trading desk on your own, you’re working from home—you should have slept longer.”

“It’s Friday! You deserve a longer sleep.”

“Alex is staying with Sheila, you didn’t have to get him ready for school. Relax.”

“It’s a work-meeting day. You’ve got the bank. You have to be rested—go back to bed.”

“It’ll be a long day. You need to food shop later—Alex is with you this weekend, remember?”

“You need to cook, too. And don’t you dare eat pizza—you’re fat, pizza isn’t healthy, you’ve just lost 20kg and you’ll kill all your progress.”

“Plan a nice father-and-son weekend while you’re at it.”

“Short sleep tends to raise cortisol.”

“It’s going to be a long day—why the f*ck are you not sleeping?”

Arrgh!

Just a few more steps.

The voice was finally gone.

I won the first fight.

But the war was far from over.

As I carried on towards Colindale—my regular morning running route—and passed the shuttered Colindale station, the inner bitch came back. Double strength. This time from a different angle.

It went straight for my weakest spot: my Substack, where I’d just posted my first article.

I’ve committed to free-writing and publishing every day for the next 100 days, and I intend to stick with it.

But on that walk, I couldn’t stop turning the commitment over, and I had a fiery argument with myself that nearly talked me into quitting.

How the heck am I going to stick to an article a day?

I’ve got enough on my plate—work, bills, co-parenting, the lot.

I started doubting myself.

And worse, the whole walk became one long internal row with that inner bitch, trying to talk me out of my little writing dream.

I was almost ready to give up. But when I got home, took a cold shower, brewed coffee, opened my laptop and muttered let me just open Substack and start a new draft—something shifted.

I started flipping through my notes—my Daily Journal, and a notepad titled Writing & Concepts where I jot down ideas I like as I read or watch things.

And as I gathered my thoughts—whoosh, an idea.

Why not put the spotlight on that inner bitch? Drag the voice of doubt into the open, break it into pieces, and look at it properly.

So if you’re going through the same thing—that little voice starting to whisper, trying to drag you off your Substack, your writing, your small dream—let’s fight it together.

Today I’ll do my best, with my ambition and my beginner’s toolkit, to work through three questions:

What is self-doubt, really?

Why do you doubt yourself as a beginner?

How do you get past it and just do your thing?

What is self-doubt, really?

When I sat down to write this after an hour-long scrap with self-doubt—my mind reached for a lesson from Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen.

Nguyen draws a sharp line between a thought and thinking. A thought is something you have—it’s a noun. Thinking is an act—a verb—the act of engaging with that thought.

When you’re inspired to do, achieve or try something, it arrives as an inspiring thought. Then you overlay your own opinion and judgement, and the energy changes.

Let’s try it.

Stop for a moment.

What’s something you’ve dreamed of doing but haven’t done?

Pause. Let the answer surface. Sit with that first thought—notice how it feels.

Now dig deeper.

What would it take to make it real? Why haven’t you done it yet? What’s holding you back?

Look at what just happened. The first question pulled up a thought—an inspiration, something exciting. But the follow-ups, the ones about what’s stopping you—did you feel the shift? Heavier. Flatter. Maybe frustrated, maybe afraid. Your answers turned negative and judgemental.

For me, Substack is something I hold close. It’s my little experiment to reconnect with a childhood passion.

Now I’m trying to turn that inspiration into something real. But I didn’t manage it for years — back when I was younger, a student with fewer responsibilities, no kids, switching jobs like gloves — and I still never sat down and posted regularly. So with a track record like that, what are the odds I pull it off now?

Thought = a neutral observation, or an intuitive prompt.
Thinking = the negative story you wrap around it.

The takeaway: our small dreams arrive as thoughts of inspiration. The more we ruminate instead of act, the more reasons we manufacture to talk ourselves out of them. We overthink ourselves out of starting.

Why you doubt yourself as a beginner

You have your dream. You’re inspired. You’re trying to make it real.

And right now you’re a beginner who, frankly, doesn’t know much yet.

You see other Substackers—thousands of followers, essays you couldn’t have written, a rhythm you can only imagine.

You see where you are. Between here and there is a gap. A scary one. It can’t be jumped in a single leap. It takes work. Sweat. And fighting that inner bitch every day she crawls out to bite you exactly where it hurts—in the dream.

That gap is normal. Your taste is already sharp — sharp enough to see how far your writing falls short of it. The skill just hasn’t caught up yet. That’s not a reason to stop. It’s the reason to keep going.

If you’ve got a small dream—like me, to write on Substack—don’t think. Execute. The longer you ruminate, the less likely you are to start.

As Steven Pressfield puts it in The War of Art:

“It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write. What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.”

And the only way to prove to yourself—and to her—that you’ll get what you want is through action.

How to get past it: seek momentum

Now you’re thinking: “easier said than done, Jack.”

Fair. So here’s the practical bit.

The only way to pull the dream off is to start. Action gets you rolling, and once you’re rolling you build momentum. That’s why I free-write—no blueprints, no Substack-guru playbook, no “10 steps to your first 1,000 subscribers”.

Most advice hands you a tidy step-by-step path. A safe one. Where you don’t actually act—you just call reading about it progress. You proudly label studying as moving forward.

Think about it. Who gets results first—the person who reads about lifting for six months, planning diets and dreaming about the perfect trainers, or the one who starts today with ten sit-ups, showing up whether they’re a sleepy zombie or not?

Thought so.

So how do you practise showing up?

Two ideas help, and they’re not the same one.

The psychologist B.F. Skinner called the first shaping—you don’t wait for the whole behaviour to appear and then reward it. You reward the small steps that point towards it, one rough approximation at a time, until the full thing takes hold.1 For a writer that doesn’t mean “write a brilliant essay”. It means “open the laptop”. Then “write one line”. Then “publish something — anything”. Each small step is the win.

James Clear comes at it from the other side. His third law of behaviour change is simply make it easy: cut the friction until starting takes almost no effort.2

If you want to be a writer, you have to write. To write, you have to show up—regularly—until it’s just what you do.

And to make showing up easier, cut the friction. Make the habit as small and effortless as possible. I cut my own friction by telling myself: all you have to do is open the laptop. Then I write—freely, no topic, no title, whatever comes, go with the flow, don’t worry, just write and publish. You’ll be fine.

Free-writing is how I practise showing up, in the easiest possible way. My laptop sits in the same room as my bed. My running shoes are right next to it—all I have to do is put them on and walk out. If they were in another room, I probably wouldn’t bother. The extra few steps would be enough of an excuse.

So—did I win the war this morning? You’re reading the answer. The inner bitch had me for most of the walk. She nearly had me at the laptop. But the gap between losing and winning turned out to be one small action: opening the lid and starting a draft. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. Tomorrow she’ll be back, double strength, from some new angle. And tomorrow I’ll open the laptop again. One more day. That’s all this ever is.

So next time, if you ever doubt yourself:

Recognise the fact that doubt is just a product of your thinking and you don’t have to listen.

Do the absolute minimum, but don’t throw up a zero—show up.

Show up, until you feel that wind of momentum.

Take it slow—one day at a time.

Do your thing,

Jack

We live in a world full of blueprints.

Silver bullets.

Fast, creative solutions.

And best advice.

You can look up almost anything you struggle with, and you will find a smart way of dealing with it.

If it’s not on Google or YouTube — and AI doesn’t know about it — chances are it doesn’t exist.

Want to lose weight?

No problem — Google offers a wide variety of diets and workout regimes to choose from: Keto, OMAD, HIIT, low carb, you name it.

Want to design a website?

Awesome.

You can vibe-code pretty much any website in any style you want, and there’s a step-by-step guide for that. You can get an Apple-style website, with the same fonts, colour palettes and what not.

Whatever the new problem or trend may be, it’ll pop up in your social feed sooner or later, you’ll tap on it, and you’ll go for it. And you’ll find someone sharing or selling a detailed blueprint that takes you from zero to solved.

The more detailed the solution, and the more complex or painful the problem the prettier the penny you pay for it.

And my problem?

Bloody Substack.

Since I can remember I always loved to write as a kid. Starting from first letters and practising calligraphy, to putting words together into sentences — first in my native Polish, then in English, French and German.

If you talked to my Dad he would tell you that when I was a kid I’d take his books, open them up and flip pages for hours — even if these were dictionaries with no illustrations.

The world of words was simply fascinating to me. Maybe it’s because my parents were reading a lot of books to me since I can remember. (I even knew the whole Red Riding Hood kid’s book, verbatim by heart. Hard to believe, but that’s what my mum claims.)

I loved putting words together, reading and writing, and I really enjoyed grammar — especially English grammar. For me it was fun — like solving language puzzles. Fill in the gap with a word in the right tense, and so on. It was a fun challenge. Why? I have no idea. Go ahead and call me a weird kid — no offence taken.

Looking back, it surprises me I was never any good at school essays.

I reckon that’s because I have never been great at planning the arguments, and I hated the school reading lists. Reading and writing never seemed appealing to me if it was a school assignment. But I loved reading and writing about the stuff I was curious about. If I got interested in something new, it would become an obsession of mine for some time, and I would lose myself in it until it stopped being exciting.

And unfortunately, school didn’t give much freedom of choice over what I wanted to read and write about. There were a few exceptions, like Greek mythology. I loved the stories about Heracles, Hades, or Hermes.

Apart from that and a few others, school reading and writing assignments were a chore for me — a pain in the proverbial that I had to do, which distracted me from doing what I liked. Something I had to force myself to do — not something I would enjoy doing.

So, as you can see, it was a difficult relationship. On one hand I loved writing and reading; on the other, I couldn’t practise it the way I wanted. I had to do it in the form the school system prescribed — which I think is a shame.

I had to follow a plan, go with a topic that was imposed, while I liked to simply go with the flow and write how I felt it should be — natural, easy, relaxed — following my own rhythm. School focused on the outcome: the specific arguments, sticking to a prescribed type of writing and framework, that required a specific language and a given approach. Only then would it be praised by the teachers, rewarded with good grades, which naturally led to your parents being proud. If you’ve been to school, I’m sure you know the spiel.

And as time passed, with age, my interest in writing evolved into copywriting, direct-response copywriting, writing for the web, web design, typography, conversion optimisation. All of it out of my own interest and independent study. I jumped from one thing to the next naturally, following my own path of personal interests.

Quite a few of my interests — in general — originate from writing and communication, mixed with some other thing I got hooked on by simply following curiosity while I gained more life and work experience.

Since my early years, I had a little dream: to write a book. To become an author. But I never wrapped my head around getting it done.

First, I thought, let’s start a blog — when blogging was still a trending thing. I went into the blogging rabbit hole but got distracted by my blog design. I got romantic about the logo, rounded corners, blogging platforms, etc. I signed up for courses, devoured knowledge.

Instead of going for the first and easy one and starting to write, I started researching. Website themes. Blogging platforms. Various content management systems and what not.

And this is how I finally learned about WordPress and WordPress themes and self-hosted ones. That distraction led me into the design world. It was fascinating to learn how to create your logo. How to pair fonts and lay them out so the website is nice and easy to read. And there was a beauty in it — in the finished thing, once you’d pushed the site onto your own server under your own domain.

In the process I learned how people read online (they actually skim, not read) and how to make your content scannable. Then it was conversion optimisation, SEO, keywords — a never-ending story.

There was always something to learn before I’d be ready to start.

But I never started, because I was never ready.

And between all that, life stepped in. A beer in the pub. University. Work. Then girlfriend. Relationship. More work. More beers in the pub. Then kids. Fatherhood. Pandemic. Excess kilograms. Giving up smoking. Promotion. More work. Losing weight. Gaining it back. Giving up the ciggies again…

And the years passed by, while my little writing dream got swept under the carpet called “the treadmill of modern London life”.

Always chasing, never arriving.

And when I hit 40, and pressed a bit of a reset in my life, I decided to drag that little thing called love for writing out from under the rug, dust it off, and check if that love really still exists.

And because I’m 40, a professional, a precious metals trader, a part-time Dad, and I live a busy adult life like most people around my age mark nowadays, carving out time for writing has never been more difficult. But my heart tells me it’s the right thing to do now, so I decided to give it a shot and reconnect to one of the fun things I always loved as a kid: writing.

Why Substack?

I decided to start on Substack because it’s free. It’s pretty much ready to go the moment you’ve signed up, and it’s free of any distractions. All you have to do is sit down and write. You don’t have to mess around with designs and layouts. I mean, you have a few options, but not to the same degree as running your own website. You just register, fill in a few details, and off you go. Easy, right?

Well, not so much.

Substack is a bit of a problem for me.

In fact, it’s a big ass of a problem.

Writing vs. typing

Writing — where you hold a pen or pencil and write by hand in a notebook — feels so much different to typing for me.

Standard, old-school writing (as in journalling) feels calming and relaxing. It just goes. It’s just you and that piece of paper, and you can write freely.

Nobody is looking and nobody sees. You unload whatever’s on your mind and you stop whenever you feel like it.

I journalled for 100 days in a row as part of my reset experiment at 40, and I absolutely loved it. It’s part of my daily routine now — daily writing, just before sleep, when I’m in bed.

But typing?

And on Substack? For some reason that’s a different beast for me. A totally different one, to be honest.

When I open up Substack, it’s a completely different feeling. You have to come up with a title, a subtitle. A topic for your piece, a plan — the whole shebang.

Also, because the idea of Substack is that at the end of your writing you publish your thing, that changes everything.

It changes you from a writer into a performer. You put on the “professional”, wanna-sound-smart cloak. You’re forcing yourself to think too creative, too smart. You subconsciously become a wise-ass Substacker, which… I believe makes you sound artificial no matter how hard you try.

And that causes a lot of friction. It sets my ADHD mind racing, rather than calm.

And automatically, at this point, Substack starts to remind me of that school essay. The title. The planning. The structure. It changes from a nice, calm, flow-like activity into a damn chore.

Which brings me to another thing.

If you’re desperate to say something smart, you tend to focus on the outcome. You do additional research, looking for these smart ideas and good points, wise writing quotes, etc. And the internet is full of these.

But that’s a trap. Because you want to sound smart, like everyone else, like every writer out there. And it’s not only you on the lookout for wisdom — it’s thousands, if not millions, of people doing the same thing. And it all simply boils down to you and the rest of the writer bunch potentially regurgitating the same trendy ideas.

The most original ideas come from within you — from your own thoughts and feelings. But to find them, you need to be calm, relaxed, in the mood for reflection. And you’re doing the opposite: trying to find as much stuff as possible, sieving through all of it, piecing the good bits together. At the end of the day you burn out, you become overloaded, and the process stops bringing you that good feeling.

For me, writing means relax. It means something good. It’s not a chore. It offloads tension and pressure, and I release these onto the paper as I write.

At the end of the day, isn’t writing just expressing your feelings, translating them into words, and letting the reader feel what you feel? And see what you see — but through the eyes of their own soul and imagination?

That is the whole power of writing and communication. Good writing makes the reader feel you, in a way.

I believe that can only be achieved through what we call…

Free writing

The free writing concept isn’t mine. I didn’t invent it. The idea’s been around for decades.

Peter Elbow wrote about it in the 70s — keep the pen moving, don’t stop, don’t cross anything out, don’t judge1. Dorothea Brande was onto it in the 1930s — write first thing, before the critical part of your brain wakes up2. Julia Cameron calls her version Morning Pages: three pages, longhand, every morning, whatever comes3.

They all landed on the same trick — separate the writing from the editing.

When you try to do both at once, produce and judge in the same breath, you freeze. The judge kills the writer before the writer’s got a sentence out. So you split them. First you write — freely, no stopping. Then, later, you shape.

And there’s actually science under this.

A psychologist called James Pennebaker spent years studying what he called expressive writing — people writing about their feelings, fast, without worrying about grammar or spelling.

The ones who did it got measurably calmer and healthier4 — less anxiety, fewer doctor’s visits. The instruction was the same one I’m giving you: don’t worry how it reads, just get it out.

The not-so-obvious part isn’t the technique. It’s using it here — on Substack — as the thing you do instead of cracking the next blueprint. That’s the bit nobody’s selling. Because it’s too simple, and too obvious.

I believe that if you want to write a book, you need to become a writer first. And to become a writer, you need to write. You need to write, and the writing has to feel good in order to become second nature.

So why not simply neglect the topic? Neglect the framework. Neglect all the writing blueprints and the best advice the internet is full of, and practise some free writing?

How it works on Substack

You simply open up a new post, or a new note, and start with how you feel. Start with whatever comes to mind. With no title. Unload your thoughts — about anything and everything.

If you don’t know what to write about, and you’re experiencing a writer’s block, just start typing and have a heart-to-heart with your reader — as if you were talking to your best friend.

Tell them how it is you’re feeling right now. Explain what the problem is and why you think it became a problem for you. Then question these ideas.

Have you noticed anything surprising about them? What’s the source of these?

Tell the whole story. Don’t think about how to write it. Don’t think about punctuation or question marks — just let the words flow. The less you think about it, the better. And no — don’t go back re-reading or polishing. Once you feel you don’t have anything else to say, simply stop.

How did it make you feel? How was the experience?

And you know what?

For me, personally, the most fun part of writing is going back to read everything, from the very beginning, piecing together the imperfect flow of words and readjusting the whole thing, word by word, sentence by sentence, to make the text read and flow well.

I call it shaping — the writing’s already out; now you’re just shaping what’s there. You go back and sculpt the rough text into something that flows. You smooth the edges. You delete, you add. Then you read aloud to catch all the bits that don’t sound right, or that are difficult because they’re too long and you have to hold your breath.

That whole process makes me feel good. It makes me forget what time it is. It makes me feel the same way writing and drawing made me feel when I was a kid. It makes me smile. And the final effect makes me feel kinda proud.

Which brings me to another point.

Writing is human to human.

The power of writing is in the transfer of energy. Transfer of feelings. Transfer of “that little something” from you to the reader — the person, or the group of people, who feel that vibe of yours.

You can never achieve that by outsourcing your writing to AI, just as you’ll never feel it by outsourcing it to anyone else doing the writing for you — no matter if it’s a ghostwriter, a team of writers, or a machine — no matter how well trained they are, or how much of your writing they’ve studied, processed and digested.

When you write, you give a bit of yourself to your reader. You high-five them remotely. You meet in that common place where you’re both friends, where you both have similar enemies and problems, where you share jokes and exchange opinions and feelings. That part of the world where you meet cannot be taken away by anything or anyone. No matter if your reader is in prison, at home, or in outer space — you establish a connection.

And the fact that you can establish such a connection is powerful.

And it can outlive you.

Isn’t that amazing?

If you feel that outsourcing it to someone else is worth it — maybe you simply don’t like writing, and you don’t feel it, and writing doesn’t give you that special feeling. Maybe you see it only as a means to an end. As performance. And in that way, outsourcing makes absolute sense. But can you call yourself a writer then? Well… that’s a question you need to answer yourself.

So… going back to Substack.

How do you start growing on Substack in a way almost nobody's bothering to?

In a world full of marketers who break shit, a world of blueprints and solutions, forced creativity and regurgitated flop, I’m planning to practise free writing.

I’ll write how it feels right for me, for as long as I like, from my heart to yours — if only you’re feeling my vibe — without outsourcing it to AI, for as long as I want.

And where will it take me? I don’t know, and I don’t really care — it’ll be my little writing experiment, my daily therapy, my writing yoga.

One free writing session per day, one day at a time.

So… if you want to try this, here’s how it goes:

• Open Substack.

• Start writing — no topic, no framework, no plan.

• If you have a block, write about how it makes you feel and why you feel what you feel.

• Don’t stop until you feel like stopping.

• Don’t re-read until you’re done.

• Go back, delete, add, rephrase until it reads well aloud.

• Publish, smile and let the pride sink in.

• Rinse and repeat — until you love it so much you can’t stop, and don’t want to.

How does it feel to be a writer, huh?

If you try it, let me know how it feels. It should feel great — you’ve just published, and you’re one step ahead of the rest of the pack, who are still somewhere deep in the guts of the 17th YouTube video, cracking the next best Substack blueprint, analysing another method, instead of doing the obvious.

If you want to become a runner, watching running videos and reading about the best running shoes isn’t going to cut it. Pelé played football barefoot for ages before he became the Pelé we know. Humanity ran barefoot for hundreds of thousands of years.

The same goes for writing.

Write with your feelings. Stay human. And do your thing.

Take it easy,

Jack