Daniel Clayton

December 2024. A hotel room I was temporarily calling home. Pain had finally cut through everything I'd been avoiding. I could see the exact version of myself I had to become. 122 days later a new voice emerged. Literally. 🧵

4 issues in to my newsletter I've got a workflow I'm pretty happy with for writing and distribution. I doubled my subscribers last week, the system I've built is starting to pay off. Monday I start the outline, at least have the idea, and sometimes a rough first draft. Trying to make it so that finishing the writing on Friday ready to publish only takes a few hours. Then create the thumbnail and any media. Send it. It's getting slicker each week. Newsletter writers, what's your process? What have you found works or doesn't work? What's the hardest thing in your process? How long did it take you to refine it, or is it constantly evolving? What tools are you using?

A key determining factor in your success, that isn't talked about enough, is the extent to which you can remain delusionally optimistic in your conviction against the friction of people telling you to be 'realistic' (including yourself).

May the 4th be with you 🖖✨

The full story is in this week's newsletter: newsletter.danielclayton.me/p/show-up-unti…

December 2024. A hotel room I was temporarily calling home. Pain had finally cut through everything I'd been avoiding. I could see the exact version of myself I had to become. 122 days later a new voice emerged. Literally. Pain as a pattern interrupt For years I had become detached from a lot of emotion. Too many ideas, too busy. Never stopping to process the day-to-day. Avoiding real decision making. Something breaks. The pain is amplified. The floodgates open. It forces attention onto exactly what you've been avoiding. The real starting point is becoming conscious of your patterns. You can't change what you're not truly aware of. Identity before behaviour I've tried every system and method. I've tried all the protocols Andrew Huberman talks about on his podcast. They all worked. Nothing ever persisted. I never persisted. Because I was trying to act like a different person while still seeing myself as the old one, subconsciously. I saw myself as someone who 'thrived in chaos'. Your brain filters reality through your self-image. It finds evidence for whatever you believe about yourself. Everything changed when trying to believe turned to certainty. Simplicity as the system I made every system too complicated, it collapsed under its own weight. It was fragile in its complexity. Easily derailed by one missed day or a shiny new idea. So I made the system ridiculously simple. Stripped it back until only the essential remained. Anchors as trust repair Self-sabotage isn't a character flaw. It's a broken trust loop between you and yourself. Every time you don't follow through your brain updates its prediction: you probably won't next time. The fix isn't motivation. It's non-negotiables. 122 consecutive days of them, and counting. Simple daily actions done without exception. Each kept promise updates the prediction. The brain starts expecting you to follow through. One small kept promise at a time, you're becoming. The flow threshold You can't force a breakthrough. But you can do the reps until it becomes possible. Flow states, real ones, only open up once the skill is sufficiently internalised. The brain stops managing the execution and starts creating. You don't produce the breakthrough. You create the conditions for it to emerge. You get there by showing up every day regardless. Day 122. Stuck on writing the newsletter. Too many ideas. Forcing it. I stopped. Picked up the guitar. After months of playing the same song the same way, I went off script. Doubled the strumming pattern. Sang it without trying to sound like John Legend. For the first time, my own voice came through. Literally. A moment where you stop doing and start being. What was your most recent breakthrough moment?

@marclou Who has the biggest tower??

I met this founder yesterday, and he's working on an awesome project called TheGitCity.com It's a city where your building gets higher and higher with your GitHub contributions. He's making $2K/month from sponsorships which is really nice so I wanted to share this!

@Tim_Denning Especially if it’s sudden and rapid, because the bounce back is the same energy 📈

There is no better teacher than rock bottom.

@0xgaut @zachpogrob Nice. I’m early on in the game but at the point where it’s becoming addictive enough to want to go on an afternoon run after the morning run some times

good week

@x_kamranaziz 🤝

@Daniel__Clayton Thank you so much Daniel. I'm trying to fix them one by one and so far I can see very good results for me. Amen, and I wish the same for you brother. :)

I started my new newsletter ~3 weeks ago on beehiiv. I have 5 subscribers. Primarily using X as the platform for growth via CTA after posts and threads. Have you recently started a newsletter? How's your growth going, and what platforms have you been posting on?

@LewisHowes It's powerful when you find it. The hardest thing is clearing enough noise away to get the signal with clarity. I got that in November! I've been building and growing ever since.

Purpose isn’t found. It’s practiced daily.

I spent too long self-sabotaging, making the battle even harder! Not even in grand ways. Just in subtle stupid ways. Watching too much NFL on a Sunday night, ruining sleep. Loads of things like that adding up. That's all changed. I hold the virtue of prudence keenly. Set myself up to actually do well, make things easier. After a big shift in November I've now had 124 consecutive days of consistency with daily non-negotiable 'anchors'. Showing up every day. I've refined the system, not losing any more years.

Every day you face battles—that is the reality for all creatures in their struggle to survive. But the greatest battle of all is with yourself—your weaknesses, your emotions, your lack of resolution in seeing things through to the end.

Thanks Max. I'm just interested as I had some livestream ideas. I think it's a great approach for growth. Seems like too much leverage not to. YouTube views/growth, sell your product, accountability, to name a few! Initially I'll be streaming to nobody at all, if I do. So more just me... working, on stream, haha.

@Daniel__Clayton I have streamed a little bit but I would average 2 viewers myself and my mom / dad. I was also streaming myself building hardware through

I started an insane experiment. live-streaming myself vibe coding everyday. I’m on week 2, here is what happened so far : > 100k views on YT > +700 subscribers on YT > 90% complete with 1st project > 40 person waitlist for the project > discord community on day 7 ( 56 members ) > newsletter on day 7 ( 14 signups ) > on Friday I had 75 viewers watching me ( this blows my mind ) > did 80+ pull ups one day The most important thing to happen : My doomscrolling is GONE and I spend five hours completely locked in each day building. Mental health is best in a long time. Not sure why exactly. I DO NOT think live-streaming is for everyone. I have received a ton of hate and you need to have an insanely thick skin. X BIP is a safe zone, YT is not lol. However it is the most powerful form of build in public right now if you have the guts.

@GuptaSayujya What's your approach? What have you learned so far?

@Daniel__Clayton Yeah like, you won't figure it out in 90 days haha It took me 120 days just to get to 100 followers Painfully slow process but required me to skill up

The intriguing thing (and what most don't realise), is posting on X is a skill! You can learn about it, get better at it. That's the reframe. Most importantly, you can have systems for it.

A bit late to this party. I've just started with MCP and... Oh hell! 🤯 This opens up some insane possibilities. It's the wrong time of the week to be unlocking this! Imagination just exploded. Claude putting my tasks into TickTick off the back of my weekly review from my second Brain in @obsdmd is just the start!! What have you been creating and doing?? Some next level workflows are being cooked up, for sure.

You do see a lot of 'studies' floating around on X. This whole clips makes me winder how much of what we believe is true is false. Worse than that how much of our decision making, habits, actions, and state of mind, even relationships are impacted by these false beliefs or incorrect information. With the Placebo effect though, we know things that are not 'true' can still affect the physical body. Wild. So really, can some of these things become 'true', jsut for believing them. I guess they are, to you at least.

"My new default is whatever this person's about to say is complete bullshit." @george__mack

@Tim_Denning That is, precisely, where I'm at. Precisely.

I don’t know who needs to hear this but you must f*ck around and figure it out. Chase an obsession. Network like a psychopath. Use AI to answer hard questions. Throw your phone in a draw. Avoid dopamine addiction. Work in a flow state for 8-10 hours. Your life is the result of the shots you take, not the dreams you have. Stop overthinking and just make the next 6 months count. Take more action than seems rational.

You’re not where you want to be because you’ve not yet taken responsibility for where you are, right now. 1. Take responsibility, increase agency 2. Decide, clearly, what you want 3. Do actions towards that ☝️ Am I missing anything??

If you have a @beehiiv newsletter there's some good insights in this thread about growing your newsletter. Join the conversation and tell us about what challenges you've faced or what's worked for you...