Here is a classic pattern: you try really hard to do something GOOD, then you fail, or you make something silly. And it is the failures that people love, or the thing that was just a silly thing. So try to set yourself up to failure, to not doing the thing that is right, but the thing that just sort of happens when you are not trying.

I wanted an audience, but I also knew that having the wrong audience would be worse than having no audience, because they'd constrain me with their expectations, forcing me to focus on one tiny niche of my worldview at the expense of everything else, until I became a parody of myself.

It was clear to me that the only way to resist becoming what... See more

Remember The New Yorker . You subscribed because you liked it. Then it taunted you with its endless words, pages and pages demanding to be read. It reminded you of all the time you didn’t have to spend reading The New Yorker . Whenever you glimpsed the growing pile, you felt mild panic. Every time you recycled an unread issue, you felt like a... See more