Taylin John Simmonds

Your anxiety is excitement with no where to go. Give it a purpose.

You don't have ideas. Ideas have you.

Knowing isn't enough. Being smart isn't enough. Being well-read isn't enough. Your value is the change you can make in the world. The bigger the change, the bigger the value.

Overthinking is what thoughts do when they have nowhere to go.

Printing press: "printed poison." Trains: "the human body will melt at 30 mph." Telephone: "the instrument of the devil." Internet: "it's rotting our brains." AI: "it's making everyone stupid." I'm starting to see a pattern.

Do life your way.

Create first thing. Lock yourself in a room and build the thing you keep putting off. If you don’t protect your creative hours, someone else will steal them. Don't let other people’s urgency stand between you and the work you want to make.

Read more books. Read to learn. Read to relax. Read to escape. Read to challenge your thinking. Read to connect with history. Who you become tomorrow starts with what you read today.

I'm not building a business to get rich. I'm building it so I can fund my creative life and eventually write fiction novels full-time. That's the reason. It's specific. It's mine. What's yours?

Don't let your creative life become a hobby you feel guilty about rarely making time for.

Look, I don't like pure AI content as much as the next guy. But I also don't want to read your 50,000th post about how bad AI content is. At some point the complaining became its own slop. Write something useful instead

Imagine you have a daughter. One of her teachers pulls you aside and says: "I'd like your permission to put ideas into your daughter's head. They'll control her for 30 years. She'll never notice. Trust me, they'll be good for her." You would be disgusted. That is exactly what happened to you. And to me. But we defend those beliefs with our lives. As if we chose them.

You need more philosophy. AI can help you do almost anything. But it can't tell you what is worth doing with your life. Philosophy is the oldest tradition we have for figuring that out.

The internet is outliers teaching people who will never be outliers how to become outliers.

AI can teach you how to do almost anything. And yet people I talk to every week say the same thing: "I don't know what to do with my life. I just feel overwhelmed with all the options." The thing that's missing isn't how-to. It's what-do. Read more philosophy.

For years, I believed work had to happen at a desk between 9 and 5. When I finally questioned it, I started working on walks, meditation cushions, the floor. Some of my best work came out of those sessions. The corporate work model was never designed for the kind of work I do.

You don't have to be a McCarthy or a Nolan or a King or a Picasso or a Da Vinci or a Seuss or a Tolstoy. You don't have to be a freak, creative genius. You don't have to be born special. You just need the intimate habit of creating two hours a day. For years.

You need more selfish hours. Hours where you don't ask for permission, don't explain yourself to anyone, and don't produce anything of "value" for society. Without them, you end up living someone else's life.

If you've made any money from your creative work, even a single dollar, you've done the hard part.

Everyone needs a weekly creative practice. Something to reanimate your spirit from the mundane bullshit of regular working life.