02 Jul 2026 #writing #bookwriting
Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham using only 50 words.
Amazon limits team size to what two pizzas can feed.
Virgil Abloh challenged himself to tweak only 3% of an existing design.
Inspired by these examples and by this David Epstein’s YouTube video, here’s my 10-idea list of writing constraints—pair them with these fun blog post challenges:
- Write a book first draft in one month
- Share only 10 main ideas, one idea per chapter, in a book
- Spend no more than one hour writing and editing a post
- Write a book backwards: start with a cover, sales page, and one-liner
- Reuse the same material more than once
- Finish a book in half the time it took your last one
- Write a book only using your notes
- Challenge yourself with an impossible deadline, like a book in a weekend
- Finish your daily writing before lunch
- Limit your book to under 50 or 100 pages, or maybe just one page
Constraints make you more creative—and more productive. Without them, you’ll keep tweaking and perfecting forever.
01 Jul 2026 #wellness #selfgrowth
From Derek Sivers’ Useful But Not True, you can always choose your next thought or reaction.
But yesterday, I failed to choose my next reaction after a frustrating purchase over the phone.
Then I hit a roadblock with a coding task.
I felt how my energy was depleted.
To change my mood, I switched to writing, something I enjoy.
Hoping to find something to steal, I opened my RSS reader and checked my favorite blog aggregators.
But scrolling only made things worse.
It ended up draining the remaining energy.
Screens don’t energize me.
Until it was time for my daily walk.
Fresh air, the outdoors, and oxygenated blood always lift a bad mood, just like finding a health package in a video game.
A walk can fix almost anything, by giving you fresh eyes to approach it.
30 Jun 2026 #misc
My sister showed me her phone with some hotel Instagram accounts.
“They all look the same. I wonder if it’s AI,” she told me.
She was visiting profiles of two small hotels in our city.
Same colors. Same layout.
No way to tell one from the other.
The day before, a friend showed us a thank-you note from a community campaign.
It looked just like the hotels’ Instagram posts.
It’s not just Instagram or our friend’s picture.
Open LinkedIn and you’ll see the same infographic all over the feed.
Same colors. Same layout. Same cartoon style.
Open Amazon and you’ll see the same books.
“Become rich with ChatGPT” or the 100,000 ways replicas.
AI makes you faster.
But it will make you look and sound the same.
In today’s fast-moving… or “In the world of…“
That’s why I don’t use AI for my writing.
What’s the point of AI if it makes you forgettable?
What’s the point of generating content if people scroll past it?
“Don’t use AI,” I told my sister, speaking about growing her small business online.
If AI can do it in minutes, it’s not special. It’s forgettable.
That mantra works for coding and all other skills.
If you’re into coding or self growth, visit my books page. Books that respect your time and don’t sound the same. #madebyahuman.
29 Jun 2026 #coding
“How many tables did you use?”
“One or two…I don’t know.”
A coder said that while demoing a feature to a client.
C’mon! You wouldn’t forget that detail unless you had memory issues.
While screensharing, I noticed he had Codex open—another coding agent.
It wasn’t a memory issue after all.
Someone has been prompting, right?
I remembered that quick exchange when reading Yegor Bugayenko’s Couriers, Not Coders.
He wrote,
Working code is now the minimum. We expect discipline, speed of delivery, clear and detailed communication, and readiness to re-work. Above all, we expect you to understand our rules and obey them.
I loves his take.
When code is almost free, the edge isn’t in lines of code.
The genie in the bottle can grant coding wishes to anyone, with enough tokens, credits, or whatever.
AI isn’t taking our jobs yet.
And even if it does, there’s still work to do.
But our job descriptions are already different.
The real edge has never been writing syntax.
It’s thinking like a product owner.
It’s knowing what to build.
Now it’s doing what AI can’t.
We can’t just be coders, but couriers—or street-smart coders, as I prefer to call it.
If you’re curious about going beyond syntax, check out Street-Smart Coding Manifesto. Because real impact comes from skills outside your IDE.
28 Jun 2026 #writing
In 2025, his book sales dropped by 46%.
That’s what Tim Ferriss discovered when he looked at his spreadsheets.
The smoking gun: ChatGPT’s release around 2022, when his sales started to decrease.
And that’s the landscape for a best-selling author.
Now imagine being a mere mortal without Tim’s reach.
Here are some of the changes Tim is making—and how I’m stealing them:
Rely on personal stories
“For my books, at least, the secret sauce is in the sequencing—the logical ordering of things—plus the deeply personal stories that actually catalyze people to change long-standing habits.”
LLMs can spit out facts, but they’ll never create personal stories.
As Maria Popova said, “AI can’t suffer.”
It can’t have human experience.
Love, hate, pride, resentment…
That’s how we can fight back.
With my books, the best reward has been reading comments like “it feels like a conversation” or “refreshing, given how much AI slop has populated the internet.”
Those are the reviews that make my day.
As a guideline, if AI can write it, rewrite it.
Stick to written words
“I’d rather write books for 10,000 people who are genuinely changed by them than crank out short-form videos for 10 million people who forget about them within days or minutes.”
The other day, a fiction author I followed on LinkedIn shared her new strategy:
Going to TikTok or BookTok.
Just like Tim, I’d rather write books for a few than dance on TikTok.
Maybe I’ll start a YouTube channel to go over my posts.
But writing is my way to go, even if only one person reads.
The best place is the one you can sustain over time.
Build a tribe
“Find your 1,000 True Fans. If you started off doing this well but have meandered, it’s time to revisit. Get very clear on who those 1,000 people are.”
1,000 fans? That sounds distant.
And followers aren’t true fans.
To build my tribe, I’m writing for one person: my past self.
I’m writing the books I wish I had.
I’m leaving breadcrumbs as I document my life.
For anyone just like me years ago.