Of all the questions I'm living right now, this is the one I've been most humbled by.

For the last decade, I've tried to thread the needle between my soul work (aka what feels most alive and resonant), and my desire for financial security. I've hustled and pushed and forced my way through the land of internet business, trying to crack the code of how I can make my art pay the bills. And truthfully, I'm fucking exhausted. I don't think I can do it anymore.

What I'm starting to see is that my efforts to achieve financial stability from soul work have corrupted both goals. For a decade, I've been treading water with money. I've made enough to keep myself alive, but never enough to feel anything resembling safety. All the while, I've put so much pressure on my art, trying to force it into a shape that will please the Capitalist Machine, that in many cases, it's ceased to really feel like my art at all. Worst of both worlds.

Another question I've been sitting with this year is around what it means to be an adult, which is downstream of a lot of the 12-step recovery work I've been immersed in. And one of my working definitions of an adult is someone who does what's required to take care of themselves, so they can show up for the people they care about. An adult knows what their needs are, and does what they have to do to meet them. I’m starting to see how when we don't take responsibility for our needs, we become more of a liability to the people around us, rather than a source of strength.

In my case, I have a legit need to do my soul work. If I just got a fancy tech job that stuffed my bank account with VC money, but I wasn't giving my gifts and pulling the threads I've been put on this earth to pull, then I would fucking die inside. That said, I also have a need to feel financially secure. I'm deeply tired of the ways money anxiety has hijacked my enjoyment of life, and my sense of self-worth, and want to do something different in the coming decade.

So as I step into this new era, there are a few questions I'm living here. How can I experiment, and try new things to meet these two needs, given the old ways aren't working? How can I show up as an adult for myself in the realm of money and art, rather than stubbornly clinging to adolescent stories that no longer serve me?

Right now, my answers are pretty simple. For money, I'm aiming at serving the tech world with my writing. Ghostwriting for founders. Writing manifestos for startups. Doing storytelling/brand strategy work to help companies differentiate and matter. A lot of the "1,000 true fans" stuff I've explored for years is more relevant than ever in that domain, and I want to be of service to founders and companies drawn to that path.

And on the art front, I'm feeling stoked about writing this publication, with zero expectation of it paying my bills. I'm exploring the frontiers of writing personal manifestos, and using them as a vehicle for self-renewal and transformation. I'm writing poetry. Playing a bit more guitar than I used to.

It's early, and I've still got a lot to figure out on the money and work front. But I will say, giving myself permission to decouple art and money feels like a tremendous relief. I've been playing the game of money on hard mode for a decade, and it hasn't served me well. Grateful for this new chapter of learning how to truly take care of myself.

Onwards.

So, uh, I totally overhauled my Substack last week.

When I set out to write a manifesto for Lightpage back in April, I wasn’t expecting to emerge from the process with an enlivening new vision for my personal writing. But here we are.

Somewhere around week three of my exploration calls with Kasra, we stumbled into the age old question: given the uncertainty of the world, how should we choose to live? That thread, once pulled, gave us the beating heart of the finished manifesto.

Here’s the final version we landed on.

How do you want to live today?

Not tomorrow. Not someday. Not when you’ve finally “figured it all out.” Today.

This is our fundamental freedom as humans—the power to choose our response to life. To decide what matters, then act on it, here and now.

But the environments we’ve built keep us numb to this power.

Our digital worlds keep us scrolling, consuming, reacting. Stuck on the hamster wheels of information hoarding or endless introspection.

So many seductive substitutes for life, while the real thing slips away.

Lightpage is a living notebook.

A notebook for those who cherish the gift of being alive.

A private space where you can hear your own thoughts and instincts, away from the noisy feeds and sycophantic chatbots. A quiet refuge where you can think for yourself and decide what matters.

Write, dictate, or chat. Pour in your grocery list, your grief, your goals. Use it as a dream journal, to write cheesy love poems, try out new recipes, or think through a tricky project at work.

Anything related to your pursuit of living well belongs in Lightpage.

As you fill it, your notebook gets to know you. It comes alive, too.

Each morning, it surfaces art, quotes, essays—connecting you to the wisdom of others who’ve walked similar paths. And every Sunday, it sends you a personal letter reflecting on the ups and downs of the past week, and how you might live more fully in the week ahead.

You can chat with the AI in Lightpage any time. It knows when to encourage you, and when to push back.

This isn’t another tool to optimize you. There’s no quick fix, no dogma to follow.

Lightpage is not the answer. It’s a place to dance with the question.

How do you want to live today?

I've been writing morning pages on and off for years, and I’ve been doing them near daily since I scuttled off to France in 2023. But for the last five weeks, I’ve started using that question as the focal point of my daily writing.

Every morning, those are the first words I type.
How do I want to live today?
I’ve come to refer to this as “the living question.”

And holy shit. It’s hard to over-emphasize how meaningful this small shift has been for me. As someone who habitually escapes into grandiose daydreaming about my future, or wallowing in the mistakes of the past, this practice of directing my attention back to humble daily aspirations has felt so grounding. As I work to put my life back in order after two-ish years of falling apart, this practice is helping me accept my life as it actually is, with full honesty, and take small, imperfect steps towards where I want to go.

In many ways, this is the most effective thing I’ve tried for softening the pernicious perfectionism that derails me in so many areas of life. I always thought the idea of “progress, not perfection” was lovely on paper. But only when I started reflecting on this question each morning, and trying to live into my answers as best I could, did I feel like I was truly practicing it.

Like a lot of people, I’ve fucking adored this Rilke quote for years.

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Whenever I read this, it strikes some deep and resonant chord in me. But until the last few months, I don’t think I’ve ever actually understood what it meant to “live the questions now.” Some part of me—that scared little boy who learned that love is conditional on being seen as perfect—was always too desperate for certainty and control to really live into an ambiguous question. It was always safer to hide and theorize and dream than let imperfection fill my days.

One other thing that’s begun happening as I reflect on the living question each morning is that more questions are showing up. Questions I can’t easily answer. Questions that can only be engaged with by living them imperfectly each day. Questions like:

• How can I balance the work my soul calls me towards with my need for financial security?

• How can I come into right relationship with the internet, and with media more broadly?

• How can I be more in conversation my life, rather than trying to dictate what it should be?

• How can I stop dreaming of saving the world and be more of service to the people right in front of me?

• How can I live a more spiritual life, instead of intellectualizing spirituality?

• How can I let go of my need to control how people perceive me?

• How can I find worth and dignity in something deeper and more enduring than intelligence?

That last question feels like a big one. Not just for me, but a whole lot of us. We're on the precipice of a wildly disorienting era of history, as our collective answers for "how to live" come undone. For the past 150 years, humanity has placed material intelligence, and having concrete Scientific Answers for everything, at the center of our stories about human and economic value. AI is eating those stories alive, and hollowing out the institutions and cultures built from those stories. Shit’s already weird and unstable. But I suspect we’ve barely seen anything yet.

As the narrative fabric of our world unravels, and it becomes clear that the old answers aren’t workable anymore, we’re going have no choice but to dance with the questions again. Individually and at scale. Questions of who we are, what we most value, and how we want to live in this world, today. That strikes me as simultaneously terrifying, and also the most beautiful opportunity.

So yeah, that’s what this publication is about now. The questions that call to us. The questions that, should we accept the invitation into their ambiguity, might just help us come alive.

Onwards.

I’ve been on a John Steinbeck kick of late. Started with Cannery Row (an all-time favorite), moved on to Tortilla Flat (also delightful), and last week, I blasted through Of Mice and Men in one sitting. That one devastated me. Goddam.

It’s funny how when I’m immersed in a work project, as I currently am with writing the Lightpage manifesto, whatever I happen to be reading becomes part of the larger conversation. Inspiration ends up coming from places I’d never expect. In this case, I’m finding a ton of resonance in Steinbeck’s slices of life from depression-era California, as well as some cool parallels that deepen the themes Kasra and I have been circling around in our conversations.

There’s a deep loneliness that pervades every character in Of Mice and Men. The social structures in this world (economic, racial, marital, etc) and physical environments reinforce that isolation at every turn. It’s every man for himself in this little corner of the valley.

That’s part of what makes George and Lennie so special. Unlike everyone else, these two genuinely have each other’s backs through thick and thin. They stick together. It’s the only real friendship that can be found anywhere in this world, which makes the book’s ending all the more tragic.

Another thing that stood out to me is that these characters talk about their dreams, but in wistful or bitter ways. Most of them would love to own a lil piece of land. Tend it themselves and reap its fruits. And for Lennie, it’s all about dem rabbits. None of their dreams are particularly wild or unrealistic. Nothing that couldn’t be accomplished with a few years of intentional work and saving.

Yet no one seems able to move towards what they want. Not really. They’re caught in perpetual inertia, where instead of taking concrete steps to break free, they turn habitually towards creature comforts. They drink. They go to the whorehouse. They gamble. And when the money runs out, they come back for another month of working the fields. Over and over. It’s some wheel of samsara shit.

But there are glimmers of hope. In the rare instances where these dudes open up to each other and share their dreams earnestly, something in the system shifts. New possibilities arise. Alone and isolated, their dreams feel like escapist fantasy. But working together, pooling resources, they feel plausible for once, like that lil plot of land might actually be within reach.

This is a big part of why I’m so bullish on personal manifestos btw. When you clearly articulate your desire, your vision, and put it out into the world, you tend to attract people who want the same things as you. You create the conditions for connection and cooperation. You make it possible for your dreams to unfold in a way you could not orchestrate by yourself, in isolation.

Last week, I stumbled across a big feature story in The Atlantic called The Anti-Social Century, all about how our modern environments and cultural norms reliably lead to isolation and loneliness. The world we live in isn’t the Salinas Valley in the depression. It’s so much safer, more prosperous, more abundant. Yet by every available measure, our communities, institutions, and sense of social wellbeing are swirling down the drain, fueled by the pull of creature comforts that we pursue in isolation. We’ve engineered vast swaths of our economy to capture and hold attention, to pull humans out of participation in the physical world and into the seductive glow of screens.

In one of our calls, when I asked Kasra what the biggest ripple he hopes Lightpage makes in the world, he said he hopes it helps people build deeper relationships. For it to help people feel more connected to their real world partners, friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc.

That’s it. Full stop.

It’s funny. I reflexively expect tech founders to wax poetic about the grandness of their visions, and how they want to reengineer complex global systems at scale. So it struck me as quietly revolutionary to say “no, this tech is meant to help you slow down, and connect you back to the people in your life.”

None of us knows what’s coming our way in the next decade. The only thing anyone seems to agree on is that economically, politically, and culturally, shit is only gonna get weirder and more chaotic and unstable.

In my own life, I’ve been spending less time on screens these last few months (and way less time on twitter in particular). I’ve been making friends locally here in Tucson. Doing lots of in-person recovery meetings and playing pickleball and such. As someone who’s traditionally been Very Online, and who's spent a lot of his life isolating himself, it hasn’t been easy or comfortable to break out of my digital cocoon. It’s like those muscles have atrophied, and building them back up is taking real work.

But the more I focus on my small handful of real world connections, the more I feel a sense of groundedness and stability that I never felt online, even when things were going well with dozens of digital friends and thousands of followers and email subs. Even though the news leaves me feeling unsettled and freaked out about the future, the more I invest in local relationships, the more it feels like we’ll all be okay, regardless of how batshit insane things get in the years ahead. As long as we stick together and have each other’s backs.

After a week of struggling to write something new, I just said “fuck it” and recorded this update as a voice note/podcast without any script or editing.

Anyhow, there’s a cleaned up transcript below if you’d rather read than listen. Enjoy!

transcript

What's up, homies. I'm doing this next installment of the Lightpage Chronicles as a little voice note podcast because I'm stuck in a self-imposed perfectionist hellscape. It's wild how the more I care about a project or the more I'm invested in getting a piece of writing "right" (whatever that means), that self-created internal pressure becomes this latent form of anxiety in my body. It creates this somatic sense that if I do anything that isn't perfect, I'm literally going to die.

Which is really suboptimal because a big part of this whole process is exploration. My whole thesis on writing manifestos is that if you try to write the perfect version you see in your head, it's going to come out flat. You have to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, see what actually resonates, see what all the raw ingredients are. That's how you find those pieces that resonate deep inside you and are therefore more likely to resonate with audiences as well.

It's really interesting that I know this about the manifesto writing process, but there's still something in me that resists showing the messy inner workings. So I'm just doing this voice note version to share where we're at.

Last week, Kasra and I did another deep dive exploration call. We went into it hoping to explore the new story aspects of Lightpage—what is the world that Lightpage is trying to bring into being? That's very much about creating the flip side of the old story coin: what is Lightpage pushing back against? What are the conditions, problems, and forces creating this layer of pain, anger, and frustration that this tool can hopefully help us resolve?

Funny enough, we didn't end up exploring that new story much. Instead, we got into the messy territory in between what I call "bridge territory"—how do we as imperfect humans live into and toward a new story, step by step?

The thing that emerged that feels powerful (though I don't know if this is the final language we'll use) is this idea of a "dojo for strengthening our humanity." Because the villain or compelling old story we identified is that the digital environments we inhabit make us less human. Or rather, they bring out the worst aspects of our humanity—they make us more anxious, rigid, fearful, angry, extreme, and black-and-white in our thinking.

In turn, that makes us less capable of navigating a complex world. It makes us less capable of showing up wholeheartedly in our relationships, less able to show up compassionately for ourselves. The environments we inhabit are degrading our ability to be human.

Kasra and I outlined a series of qualities—human muscles that serve as counterbalancing forces to these digital environments. Things like curiosity, play, compassion, presence, and expression. You can't just snap your fingers and be a fully, perfectly integrated human who magically expresses all these things. But you can strengthen them bit by bit. You can return to this practice of being present, being attuned to your curiosity, taking small playful steps without all-or-nothing thinking.

This is at the core of what Lightpage as a tool and its AI are programmed to do, which brings us back to that analogy of the dojo.

There's something really powerful about this distinction between a gym and a dojo. When we talk about strengthening certain muscles, the obvious metaphor is the gym. But gyms reinforce a lot of the old story energy we're pushing back against. Gyms are very transactional—you go there to solve a specific problem in a solo, isolated way. You go because you're feeling insecure, you want to feel better, you want to be sexier.

A dojo, on the other hand, is more of an integrated environment for physical and spiritual development. It's a place where you're in community with people. You're on your own journey, but you're on a path with a teacher, with a community, with a sangha. It's about a holistic approach to human growth, being part of a tradition, moving toward virtue.

That word "virtue" is interesting. While discussing human muscles (curiosity, play, presence, etc.), we also struck upon the classical virtues—prudence, fortitude, justice, and others. Those aren't quite the same as the human muscles we're after, but they're downstream of this dojo metaphor.

Something else that's been coming up for me: each of us has a choice in how we relate to the digital world, how we relate to the environments that shape us, and how we choose to shape the environments that will subsequently shape us.

One pushback I've heard is that our digital environments are so omnipresent. The problems they create are so large at a systemic level that a tool like Lightpage isn't going to come sweeping in and save the day. It might be a small part of an interconnected web of solutions, but it's not going to solve system-level problems with the snap of a finger.

But at the end of the day, what Lightpage is really pushing back against is individual helplessness in the face of these large systems that are degrading our humanity. Because while they might be doing that at scale, every individual still has a choice in how they relate to their environments and what environments they create.

That's one of the core aspects of being human—we create tools, those tools allow us to shape our environments, and our environments then shape us. There's an intriguing recursive loop there. We can take on learned helplessness, or we can recognize that the defaults aren't serving us and start shaping our environments differently. We can choose to live a more human life, to step into the dojo day after day, and to strengthen those muscles that help us live just a little bit more humanly than if we accepted the default.

I think that's the heart of what we keep circling around—that choice matters. The choice to build those muscles.

One recurring theme through every conversation we've had is that relationships are at the heart of what it means to be human. Whether friendships, partnerships, or romantic relationships, they give our lives deep meaning and help us develop into better versions of ourselves.

So there's this interesting layer where if you think of Lightpage as a dojo for being more human, what it's actually doing is strengthening the muscles that allow us to be better at relationships—and relationships themselves are the real human dojo.

We don't want to build an AI that substitutes for human relationships. The AI is not your friend or romantic partner. It's there to serve you, guide you, help you strengthen those muscles, and set out the path for being a better embodied human in the real world—to be in relationship with yourself, with others, with everything you do in a way that's more open, grounded, curious, playful, and present.

Nothing enriches human life more than being part of an interdependent web of relationships.

So there's something profound here about this lifelong practice, this path of stepping further toward the best aspects of our humanity, little by little, in this metaphorical dojo. So that we can grow our capacity to be in relationship with each other. That's at the core of what Lightpage is after.

In the context of the manifesto we're writing, I don't know that the word "dojo" or "human muscles" will end up being the final language. But it's directionally very exciting for both of us because it feels true to what we're both trying to do as we develop ourselves.

I'll leave it there for now. Thanks for listening. Catch you in the next one, which may or may not also come in voice note fashion. Later, friends.

Sup homies! Welcome to the first installment of the Lightpage Chronicles, where I'm documenting the messy process of writing a spicy manifesto for Lightpage in real-time.

Manifestos gain their emotional power from the interplay of three ingredients: the old story (what's broken), the new story (what's possible), and the bridge (how can we, as imperfect humans, move from one to the other). These will all get fleshed out more as we go, I promise.

This past week, Kasra and I kicked things off by digging into the old stories of tech, productivity, self-improvement, and human flourishing. We’re looking to answer to questions like: How does the modern world hold us back from being fully human? What systemic forces or trends are we standing against? Who/what’s the enemy in the larger story we’re telling? The goal is to articulate what’s broken about the world that Lightpage is entering, framing this status quo in a way that makes it feel both undeniable and unacceptable.

In other words, the old story is about tapping into challenging emotions—pain, frustration, anger, fear, hopelessness, etc—and trying to put words to them. So I went into our first convo hunting for emotional triggers and polarities, those places where Kasra himself gets riled up at the state of the tech industry or wider world. But nope. What I found instead was a dude who’s remarkably grounded, thoughtful, and committed to seeing nuance in every situation. What a scoundrel!

Despite that curveball, the conversation was still full of potential old story ingredients. So my next step was combing through the transcript while paying close attention to my own emotional reactivity. I was looking for things that stirred up my felt sense of frustration, anger, or despair. There are problems my intellect gets excited about, and there are problems that feel like a tight clench in my chest, and that make me want to hide. For manifesto-writing purposes, the latter tend to have an order of magnitude more power.

After highlighting the moments that got me activated, I wrote out a few initial "sketches" around what Lightpage might stand against. I say "sketches" because that's all these are meant to be. Not commitments, just possible directions that we could use as jumping off points. We'll likely weave elements from all of them into something more cohesive later.

Anyhow, here are some quick sketches of what Lightpage is fighting back against:

Sketch 1: The subtle hostility of our digital environments

We’re inevitably shaped by our environments, and the digital environments we inhabit systematically undermine our humanity. They…

• reward and amplify our most reactive, fearful impulses while atrophying our capacity for presence, nuance, and compassionate action.

• position themselves as tools of personal liberation while nudging us into predictable consumer patterns in a thousand barely noticeable ways.

• become the default places we retreat to when anxious, which usually just inflames said anxiety even more.

• promise connection but deliver shallow, commoditized substitutes that leave us more isolated.

• channel the human experience into separate apps, feeds, and interfaces, which leaves us feeling compartmentalized and less aware of the interconnected ecology of everything.

Sketch 2: The memetic virus of extremist thinking

Our chaotic information landscape makes simplistic, binary thinking increasingly seductive. This pattern of extremism...

• provides the comforting illusion of control and certainty in confusing times, while actually narrowing our perspective.

• gradually seeps into our inner dialogue, reducing our capacity to hold multiple truths simultaneously, and making “the war within” far more violent.

• makes saying "I don't know" or "I'm still figuring this out" feel increasingly vulnerable in a world demanding instant certainty.

• follows us into our relationships, where we categorize, label, and dismiss rather than connect with full humanity.

• drives us to swing violently between extremes in our personal growth journeys rather than finding sustainable middle paths.

• transforms us into unwitting hosts for extreme ideas that replicate through us, leaving us feeling hollowed out and used up once they've spread.

Sketch 3: The ideology of human optimization

We've all inherited a worldview, born of the industrial revolution, that treats humans as machines to be improved, upgraded, and optimized. This mindset...

• frames messiness, inefficiency, and uncertainty as problems to be solved rather than essential aspects of being human.

• teaches us to distrust our bodies, intuition, and personal experience in favor of culturally-prescribed "best practices"that rarely seem to work.

• encourages us to chase wellbeing through abstracted metrics, KPIs, and data points rather than through the depth of our connections, contributions, and care for what’s in front of us.

• subtly communicates that we are broken or inadequate in our default state, especially if we’re feeling any type of negative emotion

• creates the persistent feeling that we're falling behind, and that there's always some better version of ourselves just around the corner that will finally be contented.

These sketches aren’t the full story, of course. The real magic happens once we start juxtaposing all of this against a resonant vision of what we're moving toward—rather than just railing against what’s broken.

What’s been emerging in our convos so far, both with each other and with the AI in Lightpage itself, is a vision where Lightpage isn’t viewed as another app for self-optimization, but as a kind of dojo—an environment designed to counteract these hostile old stories, where we can practice a more integrated way of being human. More about what that might look like coming your way next week.

For now though, I'm curious if any of these sketches hitting close to home for you? Would love to hear about how you experience these problems, or if they’re not clicking in the way they’re framed now. Drop a comment or shoot me a message. Your input will def help shape where we go next.

Thanks for reading and catch ya next week! 🫡

Rob

I’m pretty sure The Universe is conspiring to put weirdly-aligned manifesto opportunities in front of me.

About a month ago, I was anxiously scrolling twitter (as one does) and got a notification that a dude named Kasra had followed me. His bio said something along the lines of “building Lightpage and exploring how AI can help us be more human.”

Lately my feeds have been clogged with doomer takes about how AI is sloppify-ing the culture and destroying livelihoods and making it impossible to think critically. But personally, I keep having cool experiences with AI that leave me feeling more curious, more creative, more compassionate with myself and others. That possibility of AI making us more human feels real to me.

So yeah, I downloaded Lightpage, which turns out to be a simple notebook app with some cool AI tricks under the hood. And from the first moments I used it, something about it felt different. In a good way.

Over the last year, I've become weirdly sensitive to certain cultural stories. Whenever I encounter anything rooted in the story that humans are machines that must be optimized in specific ways so that we can feel okay about ourselves, I get a bit of an ick feeling in my gut. My intuition is like “that’ll be a nah from me, dawg.”

That story—that you’re broken and it’s your job to fix it—underpins all of the self-improvement world, hustlebro productivity culture, and vast swaths of the psychological and spiritual growth landscape. Many of us have it shoveled into our brains from the day we’re born by parents and school and church. It’s the water we swim in, like we built a world that constantly conspires to convince us we’re broken, so that it can sell us a repair manual.

Which is to say, I feel this energy literally everywhere, and have my guard up against it. This is a big part of why I wrote The Source last year. Because I’m fucking done with the idea that I’m broken and need to be fixed. That idea has wreaked a lot of havoc on my life, so writing that manifesto was kinda like performing a personal exorcism. 10/10 would recommend.

Anyhoo, after messing around with Lightpage for a bit, I was struck that it never set off my internal alarms. I’ve tried a handful of AI journaling apps over the last year, and most left me with an uneasy feeling that they wanted me to Optimize My Inner World or some shit. Not Lightpage though. Lightpage felt warm and inviting and non-judgmental from the jump. So I started using it. A lot. I wrote my morning pages in there, along with my daily gratitude list, and other riffs and rambles. I made voice notes. Tons of voice notes. It became kind of a catch all container for whatever was top of mind.

One of the delightful features of this app is that each day it surfaces art, quotes, essays, etc that are tailored to wherever you’re at. So after brain dumping some stuff about repressed anger and re-parenting, it recommended a lovely personal essay on that topic. After riffing on how manifestos and poetry serve similar purposes, it recommended an epic manifesto poem from Wendell Berry.

Then I saw a tweet from Kasra saying that he was looking for help with marketing and growth. Felt like a wink from the universe, so I shot him a DM that was basically “Yo, I dig your app and would love to help.” We set up a call.

I spent the next few days pouring thoughts about how I’d market Lightpage into Lightpage itself (very meta, I know). On the morning of our call, it recommended none other than the non-coercive marketing manifesto. That’s right. This app, which had like five day’s worth of context about me, surfaced a manifesto that I had written, specifically about the type of marketing that I would want to do for Lightpage. Pretty freaking weird and cool. Another wink from the universe.

So yeah, once Kasra and I met and hit it off, it was clear I needed to write a manifesto for this app. Feels like one of those rare products that actually embodies and perpetuates a wholesome new story of the world. Which brings us to this series.

This is the first entry of the Lightpage Chronicles—which is meant to be part manifesto case study, part earnest exploration into what it means to reclaim our humanity in an age increasingly defined by AI.

Over the next six weeks, Kasra and I will dig into the four phases of my manifesto discovery process:

• The Old Story: What's broken in our relationship with tech, and with ourselves? How does the tech landscape subtly reinforce the "you're broken and need fixing" narrative?

• The New Story: What becomes possible when we shift the paradigm? What does technology look like when it's truly in service of our humanity?

• The Bridge: How do we get from here to there? What are the practical ways this shift shows up in design, functionality, and business models?

• The Heartbeat: What's the core story, metaphor, or language that makes all of these ingredients cohere? How do we give the manifesto a strong emotional core?

Unlike this opening essay, the rest of the series won't be some polished, sanitized thing. I’m working on breaking the habit of writing as if I have all the answers already. So this'll be free-flowing, raw, and rough around the edges. Possibly a bit chaotic at times.

Besides, my best manifestos always seem to emerge through a period of exploration, where I’m attuning to resonance. Where I’m pulling a bunch of threads and paying close attention to what feels alive. Where I enter into a conversation and let it take me somewhere I never could have imagined at the start. That’s what we’re doing here.

I want to share the messy middle of this process—the dialogues, the half-baked ideas, the moments where we feel lost, and the moments where something clicks. All that unseen emotional and intuitive labor that goes into writing something that feels surprisingly alive. Because it almost never comes from a linear progression, like an assembly line, but in spirals and detours and unexpected breakthroughs.

So yeah, welcome to the chronicles, my friends. Hope you enjoy the ride. And while you’re here, do give Lightpage a look. This lil app is still early in its development journey, but it’s got good bones.

That's how many manifestos I will write.

Why? Because it’ll be fun. Because it scares me senseless. Because I’m on a mission from God. Because I’ve been hiding in a labyrinth of perfectionistic over-planning. Because for ten months I’ve been yap yap yapping about how I wanna be The Manifesto Guy™ while barely writing any actual new manifestos.

Come on, bro. It’s time to live the new story. Leap of faith, baby. It’s time to write.

One. Hundred. Manifestos.

This quest might take six months (unlikely), two years (very likely), or a goddamn decade (oh lord). I don't know. It’ll take as long it takes. All I know is that I’m in it now. This is my covenant, consecrated here before this court of my dearest parasocial internet comrades. But mostly I’m declaring this for me. I’d sign it in blood if I could.

One. Hundred. Fucking. Manifestos.

I will write the manifestos I need to read. Manifestos that grab me by the shoulder and shake me free of the seductive copes of modernity, that shatter the comforting lies I’ve clung to, that make me giggle like a schoolgirl and roar like a dragon. I will be patient zero for the idea that manifestos are magic spells that, when cast with earnest zeal and a sly smile, help us remember that we are gloriously human and powerful beyond measure.

ONEHUNDREDMANIFESTOS.JPEG

I will write manifestos for startups and founders who strive to stand tall in this sterile world of spineless, focus-grouped brand promises. So too will I write manifestos for those ideal clients who haven’t paid me cash money (YET). Along the way, I will write manifestos for friends, for her, and for the causes, communities, and cats I love. Hell, maybe even for my avowed enemies. I will be an equal opportunity manifesto artisan.

*whispering seditiously in your ear* psssssssst. one hundred manifestos

I will write teeny tiny tweet-length manifestos and overwrought novella-length manifestos. I will write manifestos that are dreadfully serious and manifestos that are utterly ridiculous (possibly in the span of a single paragraph). I will uncork the stew of manifesto energy that has long bubbled beneath my fears and insecurities and let it flow freely. I will write in fits of revolutionary ecstasy, and let my work go before I feel ready. I will ship ship ship. Even when it scares me. Especially when it scares me.

Let’s fucking go. The Era of Manifesto Rob is officially upon us.

ONE HUNDRED MANIFESTOOOOOOOOOOS!!!!

Rob Hardy
April 1st, 2025
Tucson, AZ 🌵

There’s an essay making the rounds called The Age of Average. It’s worth your time to read it, but here’s the quick version.

Across our creative landscape, from media to fashion to architecture, there’s an inescapable, pervasive sense of averageness everywhere you look. **And it seems to be accelerating. Creative works that inspire awe, and that speak to the depths of the human spirit, feel like an endangered species. It's so rare to spot them in the wild anymore. Instead, most everything we encounter is predictable, safe, sterile. Perhaps you’ve noticed it, too?

As writers, most of us are well aware of how the digital world pushes us to conform. For the past 10 years, centralized platforms and their algorithms have visibly rewarded writing that adheres to a narrow set of rules. We’re told that if we want to succeed, we have to write skimmable pieces with catchy headlines. We’re told we have to optimize for search engines and social media virality. We’re told to niche down, add value, and create a personal brand.

In the Age of Average, we’re led to believe writers get ahead not by caring about the subtleties of our craft or voice, but by transforming ourselves into industrialized assembly lines, so that we can churn out commodified work at scale.

It may not feel like it yet, but the Age of Average is nearing its climax. Generative AI will be the nail in the coffin. These new tools will produce average writing better, faster, cheaper. They will do it at a scale none of us can fathom. Soon our social feeds and search engines will be engulfed beneath a tidal wave of mechanistic mediocrity. It’ll be impossible to sift through it all. People will begin tuning out and retreating into quieter, safer corners of the internet, populated by the small handful of humans they trust.

In this fragmented digital landscape, the old playbooks for how to succeed on centralized platforms will stop working. Average writing will cease to spread, and producing it will no longer be profitable. In this new world, the only writing that will reliably cut through the noise, and reach people in their isolated corners of the internet, will be writing that’s thoughtfully crafted and unmistakably human.

To some, the word artisan feels antiquated, like an artifact of a bygone era. It brings to mind blacksmiths and butchers, sculptors and stonemasons, professions that seem to offer little guidance for our complex modern world. At Foster, we don’t believe in scrapping modernity for some naive, nostalgic return to the past. Instead, we believe the best way for writers to navigate an uncertain future and flourish—creatively, economically, and communally—is to combine modern tools with an artisanal approach.

We call this path The Artisan’s Way

Artisans root themselves in tradition, building on the great works that preceded them, yet aren’t afraid to innovate. They use the right tools for the job, including those on the cutting edge, yet don't allow trends or hype to cloud their vision or divert their path.

Artisans strive to produce singular work that could never emerge from anyone else, let alone a factory. They create work that’s durable, and that’s meant for humans to cherish. Artisanal writing, for instance, is worth revisiting again and again, because it gets deeper and richer with time.

Artisans don’t pander, telling people what they want to hear, but instead speak their truth and trust their taste. Artisans strive for mastery and sweat the details, but don’t chase perfection, because perfection is the domain of machines. In fact, like humans, it’s the small imperfections and inconsistencies that make a piece of work feel charming, captivating, alive.

Above all, artisans care about connection. Connection to themselves, to their craft, to their traditions, and to the places and people they serve. They don't treat themselves, their collaborators, or their customers as impersonal, economic units. Artisans understand that a creative life is a long game, and the only way to win such games is by honoring the humanity and dignity of everyone in the ecosystem.

In a world of atomization and disconnection, where the Age of Average surrounds us and dampens our spirit, we believe this approach is how we reverse the tides. We can choose the path of less, but better. We can reject the incentives nudging us to behave more like machines and factories. We can reclaim our humanity, approach our work as artisans, and focus not on shouting louder, but mattering more.

We can choose The Artisan's Way.

There's a part of me I've come to know as Experty McExpertman. He’s that critical inner voice who’s desperate to be seen as intelligent, as having it all figured out, and who’s built a self-appointed career around managing other people’s perceptions of me. He's been in charge of my creative output for the better part of thirteen years.

It is high time for Experty McExpertman’s reign of terror to come to an end.

It all started back when I was still in film school, when I was hired to write for my favorite filmmaking blog. In my mind, I was wildly unqualified to write about film for a website that was reaching millions of people each month. I mean, I was just a lowly film student! So, our boy Experty McExpertman showed up and was like "bro, let me take the reigns here." And so began my decade plus of striving to be perceived as intelligent on the internet. Under his tutelage, I began to read voraciously, and became quite good at regurgitating information in ways that sounded somewhat novel.

Experty took even more control once I launched my first online/creator business. In this new chapter, the stakes felt so much higher. It wasn’t enough to write smart sounding stuff. Now I actually had to sell something if I wanted to keep a roof over my head. I was awash in advice from other professional bloggers and course creators saying that the surest path to traffic and sales and riches beyond measure was to Be An Expert, just like they were. I didn’t see the pyramid scheme nature of the Bullshit Industrial Complex back then. So in response to this onslaught of cultural messaging, Señor McExpertman said "Oh fuck yeah, amigo. Let me take the wheel here. I was BORN FOR THIS."

The truth of the matter is that I've rarely known what I was doing. Not as a filmmaker. Not as a filmmaking commentator. Not as a marketer. Not as... well… anything, really. But I believed, with every fiber of my being, that no one could ever see just how clueless I was. That would surely spell my ruin. No, I had to be seen as intelligent. As an expert. As someone whose authoritative sounding opinions could hopefully Add Value and cement my status as a niche internet microcelebtrity such that I build a business that might finally allow me to feel a modicum of security in the world.

It’s hard to overstate just how miserable it was to live this way. Marinating in a constant stream of “I’m a complete idiot, but I’ll lose everything if anybody finds out” and then wildly overcompensating by consuming ever more information and regurgitating it. I wonder if this is what it’s like to be an LLM. Never having real experiences of your own, because you’re trapped in a story that says if you just combine bits of abstracted information in the right way, then people will accept you. Oof.

That's another thing about Experty McExpertman. My impulse is to ridicule him. I mean, why else would I give him such a stupid name. But the truth is that Experty has only ever wanted the best for me. He's an amalgamation of survival strategies for a scared little boy trying his best to feel safe in a transactional world that massively overvalues performative expertise. The longer I stay in this game, the more I realize that the only winning move is to shower Experty McExpertman with compassion and acceptance, even in spite of all the harm he's caused with his wayward strategies. The move is not to exile him, but to invite him into the conversation.

This is the heart of conversational creativity. To be with what is, exactly as it is, and exactly as you are. To express what’s true in your lived experience, however imperfectly, and then listen for what comes back. When I listen to Experty—like, deeply listen—I can’t help but soften, to grieve, and to laugh a little bit at how absurd the whole charade has been. And even though he’s uncomfortable admitting it, Experty agrees that the old ways are no longer working, and we need a more conversational path forward, together.

All the best manifestos I've written have been birthed during a moment of personal frustration and turmoil.

The Ungated Manifesto came after hitting yet another wall with the promises of the "creator economy." The non-coercive marketing manifesto was a desperate reckoning with my relationship with marketing. And The Source was about making peace with my endless capacity for self-sabotage during a particularly challenging season of life. These manifestos helped me make sense of some underlying distress I could no longer ignore, then chart a path away from it. They were all written, first and foremost, for myself, to satisfy my personal hunger for self-renewal.

As it so happens, all three of those pieces resonated with a ton of other people, too. They’re easily my most “popular” and widely-read pieces of writing. They’re the ones people routinely tell me meant something to them, even years after publishing. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

There are two reasons I bring this up. First, I think there's a conception that writing a manifesto is something you do after you’ve figured it all out, when you want to convince other people of the answers you've arrived at. Frankly, I think if that's your starting place for writing a manifesto, you've already lost the game. A manifesto is an energetic transmission more than some kind of rhetorical trick. Your pain and frustration and desperation are core ingredients that charge the manifesto with vital energy. If you feel that you've solved your problems, and have all the answers, your manifesto won't carry the energy required to reach people who are stuck in those problems themselves. Being in the game yourself helps you speak in a way that resonates. It helps position you not as a guru with answers, but as a leader. Someone who’s in the mess with you, instead of above it.

The second reason I'm on about this is because the "conversational creativity" manifesto that I'm setting out to write in public is Very Much one that I need for myself at this moment in life. For the past decade, perfectionism and self doubt and imposter syndrome have whooped my ass to such a degree that I often wonder if I should give up on writing and creativity as a vocational path. Maybe just get a job at a coffee shop or bookstore or something. But alas, I know I wouldn't be able to live with myself if I didn't keep doing this work. Something in me has to write. Has to keep exploring the frontiers of these ideas and stories that spark me to life.

I've had a few glimpses of the conversational creativity paradigm over the last year or two. Moments where I was able to tune into some larger spark of inspiration, and just flow with it as if it were a conversation, rather than a performance where I had to “do it right” in order to prove my worth. Moments where the self-doubt receded into the background, where the rigidity and fear melted away, and I was just able to deepen into relationship with something.

There was spell of about eight weeks where I wrote a new poem every single day. Most of them weren’t good, but they were sincere expressions of something that was (and still is) alive for me. The other example is writing The Source a few months ago. When I surrendered what I thought that manifesto should be, I encountered a voice deep within me that led somewhere unexpected and beautiful. Conversing with that voice for six weeks, back and forth, led to a piece of writing I’m more proud of than anything I’ve ever written.

All of this is to say, I want and need more conversational creativity in my life. I know it's possible for me. I know the wisdom for how to do this, how to embody it, lives inside me right alongside all of my self-doubt and fear. The purpose of writing the manifesto, therefore, is to help me remember what I already know, and act on it more often.

So yeah, I'll be unpacking more of what conversational creativity is in coming posts. Gonna flesh this thing out, piece by piece, conversation-style. But for now, just wanna emphasize this point again. There's a heck of a lot of power in getting intimate with your deepest frustrations, then writing the manifesto you need to read yourself.

There’s a manifesto I've been dreaming of for the better part of three years. But I’ve never felt "ready" to write it. Still don't.

So over the next week, I'm going to write the first “living draft” of this manifesto in public. Piece by piece. Along the way, I’ll be stress testing my own framework for how to write manifestos that are bursting with transformational energy. Basically, I’m “dogfooding” my own process, as the tech folks would say. It's hard to overstate how nervous and anxious this makes me.

The manifesto in question is about conversational creativity. The core idea is that our job as creatives—and as humans more broadly—is to pay close attention to what sparks us, then step into conversation with it.

A conversation by its nature is unpredictable, alive. It consists of two or more parties, each with their own will, each with their own lineage and root system of unfathomable depth and complexity. A conversation is more than the sum of its parts. The magic lives in the space between participants. In the dynamic tension and spontaneous synthesis that emerges when we truly listen to one another. Sure, you can try to control a conversation and steer it towards a specific outcome. You can make rigid plans and close yourself off and be all transactional about it. That’s how most of us were conditioned to approach creative work. But usually that approach drains the life out of you, the work itself, and whoever happens to consume it.

When we step into the conversational paradigm, our job is no longer to be an Expert, monologuing in a way that conveys our Unimpeachable Authority. It's not to Create Content that competes for mindshare in the attention marketplace. Our job is to notice what stirs our spirit a little bit, piques our curiosity, and then breathe life into it through intimate dialogue. Our practice is speaking what’s true or interesting or scary, however imperfectly, then listening for what comes back. Notice what this new information arouses, and then speak the truth again. Repeat. My hunch is this is how we reclaim our humanity in the age of machines. Not through exerting ever more white-knuckled control, but by surrendering to the natural flow of conversation.

Conversation is the atomic, indivisible unit of relationship, and relationship is the balm that begins to heal the wounds wrought by our incessant drive to control everything. Conversational creativity, therefore, is as much a tool for dissolving blocks and doing meaningful work as it is a philosophy for living in more harmonious relationship with life itself.

As you can probably tell, there’s a seed of an idea here. A big one. But it is anything but fleshed out. Definitely not ready for primetime yet.

So this week, I am going to follow my framework. I will excavate raw material from the old story of creativity, the new story, and build a bridge between them. And finally, I will fit these puzzle pieces into the first draft of a manifesto that that I hope will not only resonate with others, but resonate so deeply in me that I’m continuously inspired to step into deeper conversation myself.

That’s why it’s taken so long to write this manifesto. The ideas have been there all along. But I haven’t been ready to embody them. I’ve been too scared. Too locked up. But the longer I do this work, the more I realize that waiting to feel ready is a trap. The moment you feel totally and completely ready to create something, is likely the same moment that the inspirational spark leaves you. It was never asking you to control it. It was inviting you into conversation.

And the truth is, I have no idea where this manifesto will end up. But I’m tired of not being in the conversation. It’s time to surrender to it and see where it all leads.

The best manifestos share a common energetic signature that makes them feel utterly and viscerally alive.

Compared to normal essays or “brand vision documents” or whatever, which try to convince you of something in logical fashion, a manifesto crackles with a sense of emotional vibrancy that transcends the actual words on the page. Upon reading such a document, you don’t just feel logically convinced. You feel intrigued and animated at the possibility carrying this energy forward into your own life.

After plenty of pondering—probably too much tbh—I’ve got a working model of what this energy is, and the three elements that make it such a distinctive emotional experience.

First, there’s the energy of the old story. It’s animated by a clear-eyed awareness of the injustice and suffering woven through the status quo. Old story energy is fire, anger, urgency, compassion. It’s what emerges when the veil is lifted on the inner workings of our disquiet, and you see what you’re fighting against. You’ve met the enemy, and are no longer willing to turn a blind eye to it.

The second energy is that of the new story. It’s animated by the human capacity to create, to dream, to believe what lays beyond the horizon is more beautiful than what lays behind us. It is the energy of possibility, hope, airiness, and faith. It's what emerges when we drop the protective shield of cynicism, allow our hearts to act as compass, and let our imaginations run free, like children. Where might we end up if we're courageous enough to follow those heartfelt directions? What kind of world might we build?

The old and new stories are diametrically opposing energies. Like yin and yang. You can get lost in them, swept up into their totality. Many manifestos—and humans, for that matter—end up consumed by one or the other as they grasp at certainty and control. Pulled completely into the old story, you become consumed by despair and bitterness and rage. You focus endlessly on what’s broken, and so end up manifesting more brokenness. If you’re fully captured by the new story, you live in the clouds, in a naive sort of escapism that distracts from the very real problems before you. Some might call it spiritual bypassing.

Bridge energy, therefore, is the capacity to hold the old and new stories simultaneously, then choosing to dance between them in the present moment. Bridge energy is pragmatic, grounded, earthy, gracious. It's a sense of responsibility. When we embody bridge energy, we acknowledge that every breath we take, every action, every word, is a chance to solidify an old story of life or affirm a new one. Perhaps the greatest power we hold as humans is the ability to choose the stories we live, and to break the ones no longer serving us. Step by imperfect step.

These are the three alchemical elements of manifesto energy. Old story, new story, bridge. Fiery, hopeful, grounded. The process of writing a manifesto helps you cultivate and balance these energies within yourself. Reveling in the dynamic tensions between them provides fuel not just for creative work, but for bringing a more beautiful story of life to fruition.

Anyhow, this first episode is about one of my favorite books, John Gardner’s Self-Renewal, which I picked up after wouldn’t stop raving about it. This lil book gets at the heart of why I love manifestos so much, and why I see them as an essential tool for breaking from the stagnant, rigid energy that pervades so much of modern life.

Also my cat makes several appearances in this one. He was a feisty boy this morning.

P.S. This podcast format is inspired by ’s new show where she records impromptu voice notes about what’s going on with Sublime. The first few episodes have been great, and you should listen to them right after listening to mine.

Sup friends.

Just a heads up that I'll be using this Substack to publish a lot of new stuff about manifestos in the coming months. Like, A LOT of new stuff.

There will be riffs, rambles, solo podcasts, essays, conversations, etc. It’ll probably feel a bit relentless and overbearing if you have no interest in watching me unspool my Grand Unified Theory of Manifestos in real time.

That's why I've split this Substack into two lists. If you want to opt out of the Manifesto Mayhem but still receive Regular Rob Reports, you can unsubscribe from the former below.

However, if you’re a fan of my old writing on marketing, creativity, and self-renewal, then I think you will dig this new era. It's the synthesis of everything I've already done, while taking it all into wilder, more esoteric territory. Shit’s gonna get weird.

So yeah, that's all for today. Just wanted to offer a tsunami warning before your inbox floods. Rob's Manifesto Musings are coming soon to an internet device near you. Please unsubscribe if this does not interest you.

Catch ya later.

When I hear the word manifesto, I imagine an epic piece of writing that codifies a new worldview, culture, or system of thought. Something grand and totalizing. Something seismic that shakes your entire being down to the core.

Don't get me wrong, I freaking love those types of manifestos. But part of what I want to explore with this newsletter is how the manifesto genre can be functional. I'm curious about how manifestos can move individuals and institutions forward in meaningfully concrete ways.

And for that, thinking of manifestos as inherently big, dramatic, and all-encompassing will likely get in the way. There's a risk of trying to write one giant piece that encapsulates everything you are and want to be, then subsequently getting stuck in the mud for months or years. For the last two years I've been trying to write my magnum opus manifesto about what the word "Ungated" has come to mean for me, and let's just say it has not been going well (understatement). We're all multifaceted, ever-evolving beings, and if you're anything like me, attempting to define yourself in one fell swoop is going to feel like trying to nail jello to the wall.

So I'd like to propose the concept of mini manifestos. These are evocative pieces of writing that address one narrow slice of your life, or one element of your organization, where you'd like to stage a revolution. Doesn't even have to be a major revolution, either. Could be a tiny one.

You could write a mini manifesto about your work life. Your health. Your creative work. Your spirituality. Your relationships. Or you could get even more granular. A manifesto for how to be the product marketing manager you want to be. A manifesto about going for more walks and being present to all of the cute dogs and pretty flowers you encounter. A manifesto about eating more salads and enjoying the heck out of them.

Same line of thinking applies to organizations. Sure, you could write a manifesto that defines an entire startup and acts as its north star. But you could also have a manifesto just for the customer service reps, or UX designers, or engineering team. You could have a manifesto about a practice everyone else in your industry does to chase short-term growth, but you refuse to do at your company because you're focused on long-term games and relationships. Lots of possibilities here.

As for me personally, I'm in the brainstorming and outlining phase for these mini manifestos, each of which address some area of my life that I'm actively working on:

• The perfectionist's manifesto, in which I codify how I want to relate to my deep seated perfectionist tendencies, and reframe them as a gift instead of a curse.

• The loverboi manifesto, in which I declare how I want to show up in romance and partnership.

• The conversational creativity manifesto, in which I shift my framing of creative work away from Expert With Answers™ towards "regular guy who's in conversation with the worlds around and within him."

• The vitality manifesto, in which I move away from a punishment/discipline model of nutrition and fitness, towards one in which feeling fucking amazing in my body is the chief aim.

• Rob's money manifesto, in which I unfuck my relationship with making and spending money by addressing underlying issues of shame.

Your mileage may vary, but I'm finding that writing manifestos for individual aspects of my life feels super empowering. It takes some of the pressure off to Figure My Shit Out at a high level, and instead focus on how I want to show up in these localized areas. And by focusing more specifically, it helps me be more concrete, more direct, and more clear when I'm in integrity with my stated aims or not. Specificity is its own form of power, I'm learning.

So yeah, that's the question I'd leave you with today.

What's one area of your life or business where the conditions are ripe for revolution? An area that would yield disproportionate reward if you clarified the future you desire, and how you'd have to show up to create that future?

P.S. I'm kinda proud of myself for not using the word "minifesto" in this post. Please clap.

Hi, my name is Rob, and I am obsessed with manifestos. Reading em, writing em, thinking all day about them. Can’t get enough tbh.

Here’s my thesis on why this genre feels so alluring and alive for me, and why I’m keen to keep exploring it.

Writing a manifesto for yourself, your community, or your startup can set in motion a chain of events that transforms your inner and outer worlds in powerful, often unexpected ways. In other words, manifesto writing is a bit like casting a magic spell. Approached with intention and heart—and yes, a bit of faith—a manifesto can open the door to new possibilities that wouldn't otherwise exist. It sounds a tad hyperbolic, perhaps. But I've experienced it myself enough times to know the magic firsthand. There's untapped alpha in manifestos for those who take the form seriously.

The process of writing a manifesto, at its core, is the process of clarifying your desire. In a world that's constantly distracting us with digital noise and shiny objects, keeping us running on a mimetic treadmill of manufactured desires, getting clear about what you want, deep down, is a radical act. Exploring and articulating what matters most, then committing it to writing, is a bit like waking up to your own humanity after a deep slumber. It kicks off a journey of coming home to yourself.

Writing a manifesto isn't just about desire and vision, though. The process invites you to explore who you must become, what principles you must embody, and how you must act in order for your desires to come to fruition. It brings you face to face with your shadow, and forces you to reckon with the reality of where you are today. To sit with the status quo. To diagnose why things feel so distressing. One of the most impactful things you can do in a manifesto is to articulate a problem so vividly that its solutions become self-evident, both for yourself and readers. That, in its own way, is a form of magic.

The final step, and the most alchemically consequential, is the publishing of your manifesto. Birthing it into the world. Injecting it into the slipstream of the internet. When you share your manifesto, it acts as a magnet. It pulls people towards you, helping you find the others, attract new allies and opportunities, and open yourself to untold future serendipities. But more importantly, publishing your manifesto magnetizes you towards your own ambitions. It raises the stakes of your life, thus increasing the likelihood that these words will not be empty. No. When you hit publish, you are far more likely to strive valiantly towards your deepest desires, and live in accord with the values you committed to the page.

The process of earnest striving, and living in integrity with your words, only feeds the fire, and attracts ever more people and opportunities into your world. Writing and publishing a manifesto begins a virtuous cycle where you accelerate the process of becoming who you want to be. And I believe this is true for individuals, communities, startups, movements, or anyone with deep ambition to create a more beautiful, transcendent experience of life.

In the coming months, I'll be sharing my own experiences with manifestos, as I've been writing them in one form or another since 2015. This practice has shaped my life in so many unexpected ways, and continues to lead me in magical new directions. I'll also be dissecting and studying the manifestos I most admire—from individuals, artistic and political movements, and companies—to weave a deeper understanding of this craft.

Lastly, I'll be using this space to document case studies of new manifestos I write for myself, for startup clients, and people I work with as a writing coach. It's funny, this thread of focusing on manifestos feels fresh and fun, while also being the synthesis of so much of the marketing/creator work I've done over the years. It's like all of the threads of my professional life are coming together all at once, and I can't wait to explore with y'all.

Dear Rob,

Four months ago, I set out to publish a manifesto about perfectionism. My goal was to write something bold, powerful, transformative. You can probably guess what happened next. All of my own perfectionistic patterns came out of the woodwork, derailing the process at every turn. The harder I tried to write something smart, something that would inspire others, the more the entire project felt fake, forced, fraudulent. In a fit of frustration, I tossed my overwrought first draft in the trash. I gave up.

Somewhere within me, a voice said softly, “Try writing yourself a letter. Tell yourself what you need to hear. Trust me.” The voice felt wise and warm. Even though its suggestion scared me, it felt like the most honest path forward. With nothing left to lose, I started writing the letter, every morning, by hand. The more I wrote, the more the voice returned with new suggestions, each one truer and more frightening than the last. I kept writing. Kept trusting. After a month of following these inner trails, I’ve arrived somewhere unexpectedly beautiful. A valley. A glacier. Two jagged peaks. A raging whitewater. A choice.

The last 18 months have been the most turbulent and painful of your life, Rob. You lost your business. You lost a job and community you cared about. You lost anything resembling financial stability. You lost your best friend. You lost your health, putting on nearly 60 pounds. And most painfully, you blew it with the love of your life. You met the woman you were supposed to marry, and after you tried and failed to get your shit together, multiple times, you lost her.

It's somewhat true to say the world has beaten you down this year. Life has thrown you some curveballs. But it's more true to say you've beaten yourself down. You’ve performed one magnificent act of self-sabotage after another. And now here you are, living in your mom's RV, your relationship with her in tatters, as you struggle each day to put the scattered pieces of your life together again. If this moment were a crime scene, it would have your fingerprints all over it.

This thing we call perfectionism has played a central role in your downfall. You’ve tied yourself in knots trying to manage how people perceive you, especially the women in your life. But that’s not the whole story. No, your patterns of self-sabotage run far deeper than your need to appear perfect. They stem from your addiction to control, and your incapacity to hold true to your humanity when confronted with your own powerlessness.

I have some wisdom I'd like to offer as you navigate beyond this dark wood. But I want you to know this is your wisdom, your story. It's been buried in you all along. My role is simply to help you remember what you've always known, at the source of it all, beneath the fears that led us here. You should also know this letter wouldn't exist without the wisdom below. In order to write this, I've weathered turbulent new storms, including a near-death experience and an eviction notice. Through it all, I’ve worked daily to stay grounded in everything you're about to read. It hasn’t been easy, and I haven't been perfect. Far from it. But I kept moving, kept trusting, and that's been enough to get this transmission to you.

So if you're reading this, Rob, please know that you've already succeeded. Whenever you lose faith in your ability to live wisely, sanely, joyously amidst turmoil and heartbreak, I want you to remember, remember, that you already have. Whenever you feel yourself backsliding into shame or escaping into grandiosity, I want you to remember that you've already proven that you can honor your humanity, even in the darkest of moments. This letter exists as a cathedral to your experience, your strength, your hope. You can always return to this place to remember the truth of who you are.

There's one last seed I'd like to plant before we embark on this journey together, a mantra I’ll be returning to again and again. You are not broken, and the world is thirsting for your gifts. I know you don't believe that statement right now, and that's okay. All I ask is that you keep your mind and heart open, and that you trust me, just as I trusted that inner voice, as we put one foot in front of the other, step by step, crossing the stream, as the valley opens wide before us.

II - Patagonia

Remember that school trip we took to Chile, junior year, and those 10 days spent hiking into the depths of Patagonia? For years, you’ve told people about the strange connection you felt to that place, and how you yearned to return. Let's revisit it together.

Remember how you crossed a stream, barely up to your shins, to enter that sprawling valley, green and lush. Remember the four days and nights you and your fellows followed the river flowing through that valley, imposing mountains and evergreen forest surrounding you on all sides. How you slept outside one night beneath a shimmering blanket of stars. Remember how you awoke early on the fifth morning, and hiked to your final destination, the source of the river, that grand old glacier, nestled between two striking, snow-capped peaks.

Remember how underwhelmed you felt upon your arrival here, how restless. It was literally just a giant chunk of ice? We hiked all this way for… this? Others in the group seemed to be having a nice time, but your attention was pulled towards those jagged peaks high above. You wanted so badly to climb them, to get an eagle-eyed view of this place, this valley. With an epic destination in sight, standing on this glacier felt like a consolation prize.

Remember how the guide called the group to gather around him at the spot where the glacier ended and the river began. The source of the sprawling web of life through that valley. He proceeded to give a speech—one that he'd clearly given many times—about the water flowing from this spot. He said this is the purest water on earth, frozen for thousands of years, untouched by the hands of man and machine. He then invited each of us to dip our bottles in and drink.

Remember how you hesitated. You’ve been told never to drink untreated water from the wilderness. All week you’ve been using iodine tablets to purify river water for drinking and cooking. You feel your anxiety and restlessness spike, and you look around to see your fellows feeling the same. The guide sees this too, and he laughs deeply and warmly, without any hint of condescension. "Don't worry you guys, it's safe," he says, as he dips his own bottle into the clear blue runoff and takes an enthusiastic swig. The group relaxes. So do you.

You grab your Nalgene and plunge it into the water. Upon taking the first sip, something shifts in you. Remember. You can feel this ice cold elixir moving down your whole body, bringing each tired cell back to life after the challenging morning hike. You drink more, practically chugging now. You've never tasted something so delicious, so pure. You feel restored, alive, present. As you fill your bottle for a second time, you notice that your restlessness is gone. You look around and you’re struck by how beautiful this glacier is, this moment, this group of fellows. You no longer feel the need to escape to higher ground, and you’re grateful to be here. The journey up the valley was worth it.

Deep in yourself, you sense this water wasn't merely glacial runoff, but the source of life itself. Remember. You smile, eat a chocolate chip cliff bar, and get ready to hike back to the previous night's camp site.

III - The Peaks

If self-sabotage were an Olympic sport, Rob, you and I would have a shelf overflowing with medals and trophies. How many times have we had the ball on the five yard line, having made significant progress towards what we desire, only to fumble, again and again, in the most predictable of ways. The binge eating and compulsive spending, the perfectionism and procrastination, the ways we habitually go into hiding. Against our better judgement, we dig holes for ourselves instead of moving forward, and leap in. Again and again. It's why you believe you're broken. You have ample historical evidence.

Remember that glacier, how restless you felt in its presence. Remember how you yearned for something grander, to escape this uncomfortable, mundane moment, to climb those peaks. Those summits were steep, icy, and clearly dangerous, yet they called to you, seductively validating the story lurking behind your restlessness. Staring up at those frosted fortresses, daydreaming about the view from above, you began to believe the only way to feel okay in life is to seek the highest ground, to take as much control as possible. You felt so small in that valley, so vulnerable, with its limited visibility. The unease in your chest grows stronger as you move closer to the glacier. Once there, in that frozen place, you feel possessed by an irrational and urgent need to flee.

Those two peaks are shame and grandiosity, and they beckon when you believe you're broken. When you abandon the glacier to climb the peak of shame, you assert control by confirming and reinforcing the story of your brokenness. You say “Yep, I'm broken all right. No doubt about it. Might as well double down. I don't have much power in this world, but I always have the power to degrade and destroy myself while having a bit of fun. Now I am going to assert that power, and prove my brokenness beyond a reasonable doubt.”

And boy, Rob, you and I sure have collected a number of effective tools for self-destruction over the years. The binge-eating, those inhuman portion sizes of fried food growing ever larger and more sickening by the year. The binge-spending, your bank accounts dwindling and credit cards swelling, much like your bloated belly. The days, weeks, months lost to binge-watching Netflix to feel “alive,” and binge-scrolling twitter to feel “connected,” all while knowing, deep down, that what you’re really doing is hiding from life. You don’t believe yourself worthy of genuine aliveness and connection, so instead you overwhelm your senses with cheap, mass-produced facsimiles, all to make your stay on shame mountain slightly more bearable.

It's a good thing we never got into alcohol or heroin or whatever, because chances are we would have perished up there on the peak of shame. That's what happens to everybody who sets up camp there, eventually, regardless of which tools they use to destroy themselves. If you keep climbing it, you will die, for it is the most inhospitable place on earth. When you believe you're unworthy of life, and set out every day to prove it, it's only a matter of time before life takes you at your word.

Then there's the peak of grandiosity. When you choose to climb this peak, you believe the same story as before—that you are broken. This time, however, instead of seeking to validate the story through self-destruction, you now declare, “Sure, I might be broken, but I can fix myself! I have the power to make myself perfect. In fact, I must make myself perfect, because that's the only way I'll ever be worthy of this life. If I fail, it will only confirm that I am irreparable and irredeemable. So I have to give this everything I’ve got.“

How many times have we announced to ourselves and the world that we are finally going to get our shit together—with food, money, fitness, business, creativity, relationships—before embarking on some wildly over-engineered program of self-improvement, where you chase the explicit goal of being impeccable in every domain of life, all at once. When you climb the peak of grandiosity, you get to LARP as God for a little bit. And boy, you feel so fucking powerful up there, like you've finally figured it all out. But then one day, you lose your footing and the facade of perfection comes crumbling down. Life slaps you in your all-too-human face and reminds you that you are not God, and that no matter how hard you try, you never will be.

When this inevitable realization snaps the spell of delusional grandeur, you reliably retreat right back to the peak of shame and resume your self-destructive proclivities. You wallow in despair for awhile, applying the balm of brokenness to your whole being, before beginning the cycle anew. In a few weeks, or months, you hit a deeper rock bottom, and then decide, once and for all, that you are going to rescue yourself by attempting to be God again. “Last time was just a test run,” you say to yourself, unconvincingly. "But this time—this time—I’m going to do it right.” So you begin another tenuous trek up the opposing cliffside, before slipping upon a loose, icy rock and tumbling back down. Again and again. So it goes.

It's become a rather predictable cycle, Rob, riding this pendulum from shame to grandiosity, from one extreme to another, back and forth, back and forth. Truthfully, you and I have both become bored of it. The seductive allure of either climb has worn thin through the years. Besides, there’s something in us that wants to live, truly live, and we both know there’s no life to be had up on either peak. For we have ample historical evidence of this, too. Remember. Yet we keep finding ourselves there. We keep fleeing and hiding out of habit, all while hoping, praying, that we'll one day find a new path forward. Tick tock.

IV - The Valley

Six weeks ago, several days before scrapping the initial draft of the Perfectionism Manifesto™, my body staged a coup against the status quo. It’s 6am on a Saturday morning, and I’m making coffee in the RV when my chest begins to tighten. It starts around my heart, like a hand reaching up from the depths and giving a good squeeze. Just a nibble at first, enough to get my attention. But over the next half hour it slowly, violently clenches. The tension spreads from my heart to my entire chest, then my neck, back, and shoulders, ending in my jaw. It dawns on me this might be a heart attack, and that my life could end today, at thirty three. Tick tock.

I ask Perplexity what to do in such a situation. If I’m going to perish from this earth, I’m not going to spend my final moments scrolling through SEO spam hell. “Get your ass to the emergency room, bro,” the AI chatbot chides. “And whatever you do, do not operate heavy machinery in this state.” Ugh. Fine.

I skulk over to the main house and ask my mom to drive me to the ER, my chest tensing tighter still as I sit in her dining room, waiting to leave. After an EKG and X-rays and bloodwork and a bevy of biomedical tests, we await the prognosis. My mom hovers anxiously around the hospital bed, eyeing the monitor with my vitals. It feels as if she’s searching for physiological evidence of why her adult son has become so defective this year. Why is he so broken? She makes a comment about how surprisingly healthy I seem. The doctor arrives as an act of mercy. “Your heart is fine,” he says, “but we’d like you to stick around for another hour just to be sure.”

You tell your mom she can go home and get some breakfast. When she leaves, you notice a bit of the turbulence in your chest leaves with her. You spend 90 minutes scrolling twitter before the doctor returns and, once again, gives you a clean bill of health. You ask him what the hell you just experienced, and he shrugs. Cool. You choose to walk home. After a string of unseasonably hot days, winter has arrived in Tucson, and you delight in the cool October air, the sun on your face. You’re grateful to be alive.

Upon returning to the RV, you make another cup of coffee. Your mother walks in, carrying with her the same heavy-handed energy of concern. Why is he so broken? You feel your chest clamping down again, and blunder out something inarticulate about how her presence is stressing you out, and you can’t have her around right now. She’s clearly hurt, but she leaves you alone. You two hardly speak for the next six weeks. But a badly drawn boundary can still be an effective one. In the weeks ahead, you realize what’s happened here. Your immune system has rejected the story of brokenness, and created an opening for something new to take root.

Between the peaks of shame and grandiosity lies the valley of humanity. Through the valley flows a river, nourishing all life there. Trace the river to its source and you will arrive at that great glacial mass—a lifetime of wounds layered atop each other and frozen in place. This, more than anything, is what binds humanity together. From the moment we're born, we each begin accruing wounds, which will shape us in ways we’ll never fully understand. Some wounds are tiny, leaving but a pockmark in the glacial landscape, while others are seismic, creating a crevasse that will swallow anyone who steps there. No human, no matter how sheltered or steadfastly safe, makes it out unscathed.

Somewhere along the way, Rob, we learned we were broken, and that love is conditional. We learned that our brokenness is no one's fault but our own. We learned that the only way back into the grace of belonging is through the assertion of control–over ourselves, and over how we’re perceived. We even learned that powerlessness itself is a source of shame. In school we were praised for our sharp writing and insight, those delicious little morsels of validation becoming a source of fuel for the life ahead. We honed our craft of coping with these wounds through the application of intellect, building the edifice of our life on a shaky foundation of sounding smart on the internet. We even learned the trick of speaking about our wounds from a safe distance, our perceived “vulnerability” sparking more fires of validation. Hell, we’re in danger of doing the same thing right now, in this very essay. Oh the lengths we’ll go, you and I, to never have to feel, truly feel, the pain locked away in that glacial mass.

Can you be with your wounds, Rob? Can you give them the gift of your presence, without compulsively fleeing or fixing? Can you stay in the valley? Take a deep breath.

This morning, as I chip away on the first draft of this letter, I'm not feeling great. My throat is scratchy. I didn't sleep well, on account of our cat being an asshole. There's a dull ache in my temple that won't subside. I don't feel as if I have any wisdom for you today. I feel small, inadequate, helpless. If I can’t write something smart, what’s the point? Sitting here on this faux leather couch in my mom’s RV, the peaks of brokenness beckon. The inner critic says I should just give up, maybe go get some McDonald’s, while the voice of grandiosity urges me to go read three books about Jungian individuation and personal mythology before returning to the page.

I sense these voices in my body, how uneasy they are with the imperfection of the present moment, and my powerlessness to fix it. But I resist their provocations. I take a deep breath, sinking further into the couch, into myself, into the heartrending piano of Max Richter's score from The Leftovers. I feel my feet on the ground, the sun on my face. Putting pen to page again, I write the next imperfect sentence. Then the next. I take a sip, and feel okay, if only for a brief moment. I realize this draft is a chaotic swirl of ideas, unpublishable in its current form. But the goal isn’t to get it right on the first try. The goal is to keep moving forward, keep trusting, sentence by imperfect sentence. For this is my initiation into valley life, and the only way I can fail is to choose hiding over progress.

Two weeks later, I’m back in the dojo of the valley as I edit this messy, sprawling draft. Each subsequent section I revise feels more unwieldy and overwhelming than the last, and I frequently consider chucking it all in the trash. But in rare moments, I marvel at the startling clarity and poetic precision of the words on the page. Remember. It renews my trust that there’s something transcendent here. So I take my chisel and chip away the cruft with care and patience, and I see more of its final form, slowly revealing itself. Sun on my face, feet on the ground, deep breath, revising one sentence at a time.

That’s how we’ve arrived here, Rob, at this cathedral to your spirit. Through trust and continued movement. Stone by sculpted stone. Tomorrow I’m sure I'll wake up and once again feel the impulse to flee this mess, this whole shameful season of life. But just as I’m learning to trust my inner voice, so too am I learning to trust future Rob. He will surely be tempted by those peaks, just as I have been. But I trust he will catch himself in a moment of clarity, and choose to stay present to his humanity for just one more minute, one more hour, one more day. I trust he can do it, because I am doing it right now. Take a deep breath.

I wish I could tell you, Rob, that the path of staying in the valley was easy and painless. But that hasn't been my experience. Dwelling in this place feels like a series of small deaths. For to be human is to be wounded, and to be wounded is to reside in a state of ambient grief for the parts of ourselves, so pure and full of hope, that were once betrayed and now lay frozen beneath the surface. There’s no avoiding pain or discomfort in this life. Any path you choose—whether peaks or valleys—will come with its own flavor of anguish. But you get to choose. Maybe it’s the only real choice we have. All I can offer is a reflection from my experience this year. When I choose the heartbreak of being human, life moves forward in tiny, imperfect ways, whereas when I choose the agony of avoidance, I get the brief thrill of control, all while life stalls and eventually calcifies.

In the years ahead, there are three things my heart desires above all else. To be a writer, a husband, and a father. In none of these domains is perfection possible, and in all of them, the only surefire way to fail is to believe that I'm broken and act accordingly. The day of the heart attack scare, my body closed the door on the latter option. Three days later, that inner voice invited me to start writing this letter. I see now that a power greater than myself has been guiding me down into the valley, up the river, and to the source. When I was afraid to stare my wounds in the face, it said “trust me, you’ll be okay.” And when I was afraid to drink, it said, “don’t worry, it’s safe.” The more present I become to my humanity and its limitations, the more grateful I feel to be here, in the mess, instead of up on those peaks. Tomorrow I’ll have to make the choice to stay grounded again. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. One day at a time.

The inner voice, however, has been suggesting something new of late. It says we can’t stay here on this glacier forever, communing with our wounds. Soon we must make the return journey home, back to the land of the living. It won’t be easy, the voice warns. Grab your raincoat.

V - The Return

As you hike back from the glacier, remember how the clouds start crowding out the sunny blue skies. A light drizzle begins as you arrive back at camp, then later that night, a downpour. You awake to the sound of pitter patter atop your tent, alerting you to the dreary day of hiking ahead. You don’t realize it yet, but these rains will not subside for the duration of your departure from the valley.

Remember how you trudged across that terrain whose ground had once been so firm, so supportive. But now each step requires three times the effort. Your foot sinks into the soft squishy grasslands, and you heave it forward with a muddy plopping sound. Left foot, right foot, left. One sludgy step at a time. Plip plop. Remember sitting around the fire at night, shivering, attempting to dry your socks and boots, only for them to be soaked through again five minutes into your hike the next morning. Remember how despondent you felt, how irritable, like this misery would never end.

Remember how you escaped into your head on those sullen slogs. How you directed your attention away from the landscape, away from your fellows, and gave it fully to your imagination. Remember how set you were on applying to the University of Denver's music conservatory. How you dreamed of a double major in jazz composition and music production. Oh how you delighted in this vision of becoming a guitar god with studio skills to match. Double trouble. Sure, jazz was still a foreign language to you, and you couldn’t read musical notation. Nor did you possess concrete plans to learn either. But those details didn’t matter as you conjured images of yourself shredding sophisticated bebop lines on an exquisite semi-hollow guitar you wished you could afford. You envisaged yourself behind a vast studio mixer, headphones around your neck, displaying the same technical prowess you’d seen from producers in documentaries about your favorite bands. Jazz virtuoso and studio wizard. A vision for the ages. This path is possible, even practical, if you apply yourself in the years ahead. But for today, its primary purpose is to help you escape.

Remember how, after three days of unrelentingly wet walks, you and your fellows arrive back at the stream. The one you’d initially crossed to enter the valley. What had once been a playful shin-deep romp is now a raging whitewater, waist or even chest deep in places. The sight of that ferocious threshold, standing so firm between you and the life ahead, snaps you awake. There’s no sleepwalking or daydreaming through this. Remember how the guide informs you that you’ll have to hold your backpack overhead as you cross, lest its buoyancy aid the rapids in sweeping you off your feet. You’re instructed to cross the river three at a time, with the strongest person upstream to break the current for those behind. It’s too dangerous to go alone, the guide says.

You cross the stream with two other boys, both named Will. A foot taller than either, you're the natural choice to lead. You want to lead. With your backpack and head held high, you wade in, water up to your knees, waist, chest. Remember how powerful you felt, that current working ceaselessly to knock you off center, while you stand resolute. Your biceps burn from holding thirty pounds awkwardly above, but your attention flows downward as you make one carefully considered, firmly placed footstep after another. Remember the visceral sense of aliveness as the three of you, lives bound together, the weight and responsibility of each step multiplied threefold, make the perilous passage back into the land of the living. The wild smiles on your faces as the water starts to recede. Remember. The sense of camaraderie, of accomplishment, as you and The Wills drop your packs on the other side and hug one another. Remember. You cheer on your fellows, trio by trio, as they cross the same threshold. That evening, as you all arrive back at basecamp—soaking, exhausted, laughing, happy—the rains stop. The stars come out again. Your socks dry completely around the fire that night.

Rob, you’re a gifted guy. Maybe that’s a weird thing to say in a letter to yourself that you’re publishing on the internet, but it’s true. Your ability to inquire inward, and articulate what you experience there, is a gift. So too are your vivid imagination, your ability to tell stories, and your heartfelt desire to make life better for all around you. When you get out of your head, and stop trying to manage or control the world beyond you, even your presence is a gift. When you’re at your best, not mired in a web of self-sabotage, these gifts flow naturally, like a river. Journeying to the source, drinking deeply, and returning to the world with dispatches from frontlines of your lived experience. That’s how you lead, how you inspire. Not by writing Flashy Manifestos™ with a bunch of smart-sounding jargon, but by going first, wading into uncertain waters, and softening the current for those who follow in your footsteps.

Like all gifts, however, yours come with a shadow side—those predictable patterns where they become self-defeating and inert. Like when you remove yourself from life to gaze inward, stuck in an endless solipsistic swirl. It’s a generational echo of how your mother eyed your vital signs in the emergency room, an anxious search for clues that might give you some semblance of control. Why is he so broken? You’re like an athlete who has a bad game, then gets way too obsessed with studying film, locking himself away in the dark, when he’d be better served by forgiving himself and getting back on the field. Likewise, when life gets hard, and the waters turbulent, you have the tendency to retreat into recesses of your mind, using the vividness of your imagination not as a source of fuel, but as form of cheap escapism. Whenever you do this, you become a ghost to the people around you, just as you were to your fellows on that soggy return journey, and just as you are to your mom right now. The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

You never did become a jazz virtuoso, nor a studio wizard. That vision of the future forever remained a daydream, requiring more legwork, more tedium, than you were willing to endure. After two months of learning to read music and studying jazz theory, you got bored. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t fun. So you scrapped the plan to study music and pivoted to film. Nothing wrong with that, by the way. It was one of many stepping stones that brought us here. But it’s a pattern worth noting nonetheless.

Lately I’ve been catching myself daydreaming here in this RV. I’m imagining my new business taking off, with founders and startups hiring me left and right to write unreasonably spicy manifestos for them. And how delicious it would be if this business grew beyond me, beyond my lone-wolf paradigm, into a boutique agency of sorts, where I work alongside a handful of talented homies and we serve the largest, most ambitious startups in the world. Like before, this path is possible, even practical, if I apply myself in the years ahead. Step by step. Stone by sculpted stone. I can also use this vision to escape this season of life, this moment where everything has gone wrong. With rains pouring and resentments building, I can escape into fantasy, or I can stare reality in the face, then take one sludgy, imperfect step after another. The choice is mine. Take a deep breath.

On July 1st, 2024, I drive to an Episcopalian church on the east side of Tucson. I sit out in the parking lot for a solid dozen minutes, second-guessing myself, until I work up the gumption to walk into the annex building behind the chapel. In the center of the room are eight chairs, upholstered in rough red fabric, placed in a circle. This is my first ever meeting of Overeater’s Anonymous. The same inner voice that guided me towards writing this letter also led me here. Remember. I’m greeted warmly by a trio of elderly women, along with a middle-aged dude who will later become my sponsor. Earlier that week I’d gone off the rails with food, taken a brief trip up shame mountain, and found myself back in a familiar position. As I stare up at grandiosity, I know it is time for something new. Tick tock.

In that first meeting, and the many I attend in the months ahead, I’m struck by the candor of the shares. Here are people from backgrounds that could not be more different from mine, yet they can perfectly describe the topographical drama of my own inner landscape. These people know intimately the peaks of shame and grandiosity, the seductions of self-destruction and godliness. They detail their daily struggles, recount their rockiest rock bottoms, celebrate their small wins and steadiness amidst life’s choppy seas. Like me, these rooms contain ample historical evidence of brokenness. Yet there’s so much hope here. A joyful persistence pervades the atmosphere. And above all, there’s fellowship in these rooms. This is a place where our wounds, those frozen layers of pain, finally see the light of day, and where we experience genuine acceptance not in spite of our imperfections, but because of them.

At the end of the first meeting, we hold hands and recite the OA Promise: “I put my hand in yours, and together we can do what we could never do alone,” followed by an endearingly cheesy, “Keep coming back. It works if you work it, and you’re worth it!” There are hugs, large and warm, much as I embraced The Wills after crossing that raging whitewater. There’s no sleepwalking or daydreaming through this, Rob. It’s been raining hard for weeks, months, years. The most important task before you now is to return to the land of the living, and you can’t go it alone.

VI - Renewal

You are not broken, and the world is thirsting for your gifts.

Two days before Thanksgiving, as I’m writing the first draft of this essay, my mother marches into the RV unannounced. Outside of a few formalities, we’ve barely spoken in the month and a half since the heart attack scare. She hands me two pieces of paper, folded and creased, says "you’ve left me no choice," then walks away. It’s a letter. I read the first page, and it’s filled with one example after another of how broken I am, how I’ve destroyed my life by being financially irresponsible, and why I should be ashamed of both past and present Rob. Why is he so broken? Why won’t he let me fix him? It goes on to say, on the second page, that this living situation is no longer tenable. The letter ends with a formal eviction notice. I want you gone, she says.

As you read this letter, you feel your body bracing for the tsunami of shame that’s surely headed your way. You've spent years internalizing negative stories about yourself, accepting any and all evidence of your own brokenness, no matter how circumstantial or flimsy. And now you have it in writing—signed, sealed, delivered—from the very person whose love and approval you've always strived so diligently to be worthy of. Surely this wave will overtake you, and in the coming hours, days, weeks, you'll have to numb yourself into oblivion just to feel a spark of control. You have ample historical evidence. Take a deep breath.

To your surprise, the towering wave of shame never materializes. You feel steady, centered, and unambiguously okay. The seas are calm as you reflect on the many transgressions outlined in her letter. You acknowledge the blunders you’ve made and accept their consequences, while seeing clearly, for the first time, that your mistakes do not define you. You look back on the 46 days between the heart attack scare and this eviction notice, and you feel a sense of genuine self-respect. Though your mother assumes you’ve been holed up in her RV destroying yourself, you see that it’s been the exact opposite. You’ve been choosing, day by day, step by step, to dwell in the valley and build a life there.

You’ve been attending a 12-step meeting every single day. You’ve prayed, meditated, and talked to your sponsor daily. Instead of isolating yourself and hiding, you’ve been choosing connection and exposing your wounds to the light. You’ve been taking a walk every day, without headphones, to be present to yourself and the world around you. You’ve played a whole lot of pickleball. You’ve been working for a startup that hired you to write its whitepaper. Your finances are headed in the right direction, and both your physical and emotional health are sound. All the while you’ve been writing again, daily, after a year of creative stagnation. You’ve been trusting the inner voice, and penning a letter far more truthful than any Perfectionism Manifesto you could have conceived. One imperfect sentence at a time, you’ve been writing a new story of your life into being.

You are not broken, and the world is thirsting for your gifts.

On Thanksgiving Day, 2024, you complete the first handwritten draft of this letter. It feels oddly fitting that it should happen on this day. You send your mom a text saying that you’re grateful for all she’s given you, that you’ll be out of the RV by her deadline, and that you love her. She doesn’t respond, but that’s okay. Thanksgiving also happens to be day 60 of abstinence for you. 60 days without a single trip up shame mountain. You hold the shiny blue chip in your hands, and reflect on how grateful you are for this path of recovery, these fellows, and for every step and misstep that led to these 18 months of confusion and heartbreak. You’re genuinely grateful to be here, now, on this faux leather couch, sun on your face, pen in hand. A hummingbird flutters outside the window. You smile, and drink deeply from your bright blue Nalgene.

Rob, I won’t pretend to be some spiritually enlightened guru type over here. I’m still a fucking mess, and these last two months of valley dwelling have been a rainy slog. In years past, I would have suppressed or sidestepped the challenging emotions that accompany seasons like this. But now I have no choice but to feel everything, to face it head on. There’s anxiety, grief, anger, sadness, and heartbreak. In quantities I’ve never experienced before. Some days, it overwhelms me, and I’m lucky if I take a single step forward. On those days, I count it as a victory if I make it to bed without indulging in a bit of recreational self-destruction. But it’s getting easier to withstand these emotional torrents, and to stay grounded. It helps when I take a deep breath and remind myself that I don’t have to be perfect. I just have to take it one day at a time, and keep putting one foot in front of the other. Step by step, slowly.

I’ve been thinking a lot about water these last few weeks. The way it moves through the world—soft, pliable, yielding. Water never seeks approval or control, instead gracefully making its way around whatever stands firm in its path. Yet water is powerful beyond measure. Through its relentless flow, aided by time, it can turn mountains to sand. Water always flows from the heights of the heavens to the lowest depths of despair, nourishing all life it meets along the way. That is its nature, and perhaps mine, too. In my lowest season of life, the water has somehow, miraculously found its way to me. And now it feels like the most natural thing for me to flow around all obstacles, so that I may reach you with the same gift.

I have every reason to feel broken as I write this letter. But I don't. Mostly what I feel is a sense of serenity and acceptance. I am here, now. I am okay. Because I keep making the choice to be human. No matter what's happening in your life, Rob—no matter the turmoil, the confusion, the despair, and no matter the extent of your self-sabotage—I want you to remember that you are never more than one deep breath away from the truth. The water is safe to drink. Trust me.

In recovery meetings, we don’t share advice. Instead, we share our experience, our strength, our hope. I’ve tried my very best to do that here. The journey ahead will challenge you, Rob. But if you follow the river to its source, stay present and patient with your wounds, and keep making room in your heart for fellowship, then I have zero doubt you will be the writer, husband, father, and leader you were always meant to be.

Take a deep breath, and remember. Remember. You are not broken, and the world is thirsting for your gifts.

Rob Hardy
Thanksgiving Day, 2024
Tucson, AZ

Two years ago, I took my first stab at articulating a new approach to marketing that’d been simmering in my consciousness since the early days of the pandemic. I called it non-coercive marketing, and my essay/manifesto about it struck a nerve. It rocketed through creator economy circles, and then startup marketing circles, eCom and even B2B circles somehow. I’m still shocked at how far this piece travelled into the worlds of traditional marketing, given how unflattering it was to said worlds.

Since then, I’ve been working on implementing this philosophy in my own business, and I’ve worked with a handful of startups to apply the principles to their early marketing efforts. It hasn't always been pretty, and I've barely scratched the surface of the implementation details, but I can say that there’s something real and valuable here. And I want to keep exploring.

Another thing I’ve found, again and again, is that the term non-coercive marketing confuses the hell out of people. Which, yeah... totally makes sense. Turns out choosing that name was terrible marketing and branding on my part! And I hope to fix that mistake today.

We’re in the early stages of a sea change in how businesses act in the world. The old, control-based models are losing steam. Mass media is dying, and the internet is fragmenting into infinite dark forests. My belief is the companies who feel most human, trusting, and trustworthy will win decisively in the markets of the future, while companies doubling down on the game of “treat customers like transactional units that we can control at scale” will find themselves going bust at an accelerating clip.

My hope is that non-coercive marketing can play a role in driving this new story of business forward. But it’s unlikely to gain memetic traction if the name itself baffles people.

So today, I’m rebranding non-coercive marketing as trust-based marketing. And what was referred to as “traditional marketing” in my first essay, I’m now referring to as control-based marketing. Trust vs Control. That’s the new paradigm. Think of it as a spectrum on which we can assess our marketing efforts. With any given strategy, campaign, or tactic, are we acting from a foundation of trust, or a place of trying to control people?

I like this name for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it’s clear. It’s simple. Just from the name alone, I know what this paradigm stands for. Instead of being against “coercion,” it is for trust. As for what we’re trusting in, there are four pillars the philosophy rests on.

First, trust-based marketing is rooted trusting your prospects to be the central authority in their own lives. It’s about respecting the sovereignty and dignity of every human who comes into your world, and trusting them to make the right decisions for themselves, even if that means not purchasing from you. When you try to hijack their emotional lives, or exploit their cognitive biases or whatever, to get them to purchase your thing regardless of whether it suits them, you are not in trust mode. You’re in control mode.

Second, it’s about trusting yourself. It’s about being secure and rooted in who you are, what you offer, and what you’re bringing into the world with your business. When you find yourself exaggerating claims or hiding inconvenient truths about your offers or yourself, that’s a clear sign you’re in control mode instead of trusting. In the trust-based paradigm, we tell the truth, and trust that it’s enough.

Third, it's about trusting in the organic nature of relationships. Control-based marketing tries to funnel everyone through the same linear steps toward a standardized outcome. But relationships don't work that way—they unfold naturally, in their own time. Some people are ready to buy the moment they meet you. Others might marinate in your world for years before the timing is right. Trust-based marketing creates space for relationships to unfold in their own way, and their own time, without forcing specific outcomes.

Lastly, it's about trusting in something larger than ourselves. Any business that grows organically is tapping into forces far beyond its control or comprehension. When someone discovers you at exactly the right moment in their life, when your message spreads through networks of trust, when synchronicities pile up and the right people find you at the right time—that's not something you orchestrated. It's emergence. It's grace. Trust-based marketing acknowledges that we're part of a vast web of connection and interdependence that we can meaningfully contribute to, but never fully control. And it works a lot better when you trust in this mysterious power, and perceive it as beneficial, rather than fighting against it so that you can maintain the illusion of control.

Welcome to the era of trust-based marketing, friends. If you’d like to follow along on the journey of unfurling this, consider joining me in The Forest.

One sentence at a time. One imperfect sentence at a time. Don’t stop. Keep it flowing.

This is basically my motto now. My mantra. Not just for writing, but for every area of my life where perfectionism shows up, which is all of them. One sentence at a time, one step at a time, one meal at a time, one conversation at a time, one 25 minute work session at a time. It's all the same idea, and this practice is starting to unfreeze me from my perfectionist patterns after a long period of being paralyzed.

But I want to talk about writing specifically, because it's one of the foundations of my life. When the words are flowing out of me, other things in life tend to flow as well. So for the last month or so, I've been channeling a lot of energy into unfreezing myself as a writer, because I know how it tends to ripple outward.

When it comes to writing, my patterns of perfectionism are pretty clear. Usually it looks something like this:

I get inspired. An idea pops into my head. An insight. A surge of energy. Holy shit, this is going to be amazing. I'm going to publish this and everyone will see how smart and cool I am!

Then I sit down and start writing and it quickly dawns on me that what's streaming out of my fingers is... not all that cool or insightful or unique, as my initial wave of excitement thought it would be. I run face first into the wall of reality, which is that writing something good is challenging. Right on queue, my inner critic kicks into high gear. You're not that smart bro. You gotta try harder.

From the moment my inner critic enters the convo, one of two things generally happens next. Either I go into relentless editing mode–where I try to make what little I've written sound good–or I go into hyperdrive idea generation mode, where my brain kicks into high gear and starts spitting out new ideas at a rate that my fingers can't keep up with, and I end up with a draft full of little shards and fragments that don't string together or make sense.

Usually, I do some combination of both, which is why my folder of drafts is a veritable graveyard of “writing” that's really strong for a paragraph or two, before devolving into a torrent of half baked and half finished sentences that don't really amount to much. Once a draft gets to this stage, there's really not much I can do with it. Turning it into something coherent feels like an insurmountable headache, so I just abandon the draft and sweep it under the rug and pretend like nothing ever happened.

This is my pattern of perfectionism in writing, and it's why I feel like I've published so little of what I've wanted to share over the last few years. There have been so many ideas I've been excited to share, but the vast majority of them have been consumed by the above patterns of avoidance.

As for what I’m avoiding, I think this is my ego desperately trying to avoid looking stupid. I don't want people to think I'm a dummy, because somewhere along the way, most likely in school, I picked up the idea that self worth and intelligence are correlated, and I internalized it. I've expended so much energy over the years trying to appear intelligent and control people's perceptions of me, because I thought that was the clearest path to belonging and being accepted and loved. So when I go into either obsessive editing or manic idea generation mode, what it really is beneath the surface is an avoidance of feeling dumb, and a fear that people might perceive me that way and then I'll be alone and poor and die. Seems kinda funny to write it out like that, but that's the pattern.

Enter a practice that I've come to call the Writing Dojo™. Quite simply, when I sit down to write these days, I set an intention to focus, and keep writing the next sentence that feels correct, even if it's imperfect. I'm not letting myself go into editing mode or idea mania. I'm sitting with the feelings of discomfort and dread as they arise, and just writing the next sentence anyway. Then the next one. And the next. Until the timer goes off. That's the writing dojo. And the more I practice stepping into it every day, the more I feel myself softening, melting, and getting into states of flow with writing that just a month ago would have felt impossible.

It's funny. I got pulled into the direction of non-coercion and not using force against myself for several years. The idea being that force applied internally was counterproductive to living well and flourishing. And while I think that season was a necessary counterbalance to the many years I spent idolizing guys like David Goggins and such, I'm happy to be finding my way back to a healthy middle path. I'm glad I'm applying a bit of force to get myself into the writing dojo each day. Partly because it's freeing up ideas that feel like they've been frozen for years, and partly because it's rippling outwards into other areas of my life.

One sentence at a time. One imperfect sentence at a time. Don’t stop. Keep it flowing.

For the past two months, I've been attempting to write a manifesto to help me work through my perfectionism, only for said perfectionism to laugh at my intentions and derail the process at every turn. It’s the most predictable predicament ever.

Truthfully though, this has been a useful exercise for me, despite the emotional turmoil, as I've begun to see just how deep perfectionism runs for me. I’m seeing clearly how these patterns of self-sabotage sit atop a deep subterranean lake of shame and unworthiness. The label I give to these patterns of behavior is perfectionism, but when I look more closely, it's more than that. It's like a dozen different existential fears in a trenchcoat. And when I reflect on my life over the last 18 months, and how challenging it’s been, I’m seeing how this bundle of fears has been showing up everywhere. Work, creativity, money, romance, food, fitness, health, and so on. Perfectionism is fucking everywhere for me.

One of the reasons I love manifestos so much—and wanted to write one about this topic—is that manifestos have a latent transformational magic within them. When we dig into ourselves, into those subterranean depths, and tell the truth about what we desire, who we’re becoming, and then we commit those words to the page, we set the stage for magic. When we do the Don Miguel Ruiz thing of being impeccable with our word, and attempt in every waking moment to live up to the heartfelt words we committed to the page, we begin to transform, inside and out.

I've lived at the mercy of these perfectionist impulses for too long. I'm ready to begin living my life fully, beyond the box that the trenchcoat of fears has kept me tucked away in, comfortable and safe. I’m ready to come out of hiding. Hence the reason I've been feeling so called towards this particular manifesto. This is one essay that, if I wrote it, would potentially start freeing me from the paralysis that I've been living in these past 18 months.

And so I've been trying and trying, day after day, for two months, to find the *right* words, to put them together in the *right* way, to work up the courage to keep moving forward even as my inner critic has been getting louder and meaner, and I hit a wall. In round one of writing this manifesto, my perfectionism got the better of me. Big time. I’ve had to take a step back to recalibrate. But now it's time for round two.

I had a realization the other day, about how I was desiring for this manifesto to just be finished already, and for it to be glorious, and for me to re-emerge into the world with a piece of writing that would astound and delight my readers.

In many ways, that's what writing the Ungated Manifesto and the Non-Coercive Marketing Manifesto was like. For each, I went into hiding, for upwards of a month or two at a time, and then emerged all at once with something polished and profound. Those two manifestos rocketed around my corners of the internet, and praise was heaped upon me for my brilliance. It felt great, and in many ways, I’ve continued to optimize my creative process around that pattern of hiding and re-emerging with something that rocks people's socks off. I enjoy the illusion that what I do is effortless and it just comes together all at once and then I hit publish. But it's not the truth. Not even close.

The truth is that this type of writing—in which one bares their soul and lays the foundation for alchemical transmutation—is extraordinarily fucking challenging. In the background, while I'm out of sight of the public, I'm wrestling around in the mud with ideas and trying to commit the essence of my struggles and hope to the page. And like 90% of that writing has been hot garbage.

For every hundred good words I publish, there are probably a thousand incoherent or shitty words that I wrestled with to get there, which will never see the light of day. And it's always been like this for me. Outside of the few times I've tried publishing daily, I've always thrown away the vast majority of the words I commit to the page because they feel deeply mediocre and uninspiring to me. My inner critic, my wide-eyed perfectionist within, shouts at me that I will suffer some kind of tragic ego death if I'm stupid enough to publish this heap of nonsense. But I’m starting to question that.

There have been numerous points in the journey of writing this perfectionism manifesto where I've had the thought to let people into the process, and to start sharing all the lil tidbits and insights and reflections that I'm working with. There’s some really good stuff in there, which I think would be useful to fellow perfectionists. But then that same voice of fear comes back in for me. If you publish all this raw messy nonsense, people will see that you're not really that smart, that insightful, that cool. They'll see you struggling, wrestling in the mud, and generally getting your ass kicked.

It's pretty funny when I type it all out like that. I personally enjoy seeing into the worlds of the writers and thinkers and makers I admire. I don't think less of them when their process is messy and a bit incoherent. I don't appreciate their polished works any less for knowing how much of a struggle it was for them to get across the finish line. If anything, seeing deeper into their worlds does the opposite. It humanizes them. It makes me respect them and their work even more. It inspires me, and shows me that it's ok to be messy and to struggle. It's ok to be human.

It's ok to be human. Fuck, that resonates. As I sit with that, I'm realizing it's more than ok. Being human is all we have. Being human is what matters more than anything else.

For years, I've noticed this pattern in myself where I swing back and forth between believing that I am radiantly special and powerful and believing that I am uniquely broken and unworthy. Like a pendulum swinging back and forth, I always catch glimpses of the human world between these two dehumanizing poles, but I'm always in such a frenetic hurry back to my habitual residences on either poles that I never really consider that it's possible to live in the land between. I've never allowed myself to consider the middle path.

But as I sit here today thinking about perfectionism, the more I think that pattern can only be broken by choosing to be human. By choosing to stay in the middle, as best we can, imperfectly. And for me, deciding to be human means allowing the outside world into the mess that I experience every single day as I strive to write things that live up to the visions in my head.

Here’s one of the most important ideas in this forthcoming manifesto about perfectionism. Lowering one’s standards doesn't generally help perfectionists feel more alive, because there's something life-giving and invigorating about shooting for something beautiful and transcendent and revolutionary. What fucks perfectionists up, and freezes them, is the underlying belief that they're worthless unless they achieve the vision of perfection they see in their hearts and heads. It's not the vision that's the problem. It's the unworthiness. When these two things are treated as separate, some profound things become possible, such as shooting for high standards while being deeply compassionate with yourself.

So from here on out, as I step into round two of writing this manifesto and driving towards the glorious vision I see in my head, I would like to invite readers into the mess with me. I would like to try on being a messy human in public for once, and stop perpetuating the myth of effortless creative work that just comes out of the abyss perfectly polished. Even though it's satisfying to my ego to my ego to perpetuate that myth, it's not the truth, and it’s not how I want to live. So here's to starting fresh. Here’s to coming out of hiding before I feel ready. Here's to being human.