A Retrospective on 30 Days of Daily Blogging + Updates
Onwards
If you're reading this on Substack or over email, you probably thought I took the month off. But you would be wrong!
November was actually my most prolific month of blogging. Before November, I published 13 posts in total. I published 30 blog posts in November alone, over double what I had achieved over the course of the previous nine months.
Logistics
All posts are live and available on humaninvariant.com. You may have seen some posts already on MR and HN.
Across the next month, I will be posting select posts from the past 30 days to the Substack mirror and the mailing list. Others will be published to the Substack mirror without a post notification.
Retrospective
I published 28,427 words by posting every day over the course of November. Some topics I covered include:
- Third derivative work (building off of No One is Really Working)
- The negative externalities of agency-maxxing "you can just do things" posts
- Blame as a Service
- Prediction markets
- the lowercase aesthetic
- Why are conversations and my productivity better late at night?
- The market microstructure of YouTube
- Observations from in person interactions with successful bloggers
- Understanding the scale of the internet
To be sure, not all posts I wrote during this stretch are good. Some days I really did not want to write, and likely would have quit without external pressure. But I learned just how good of a forcing function publishing a post every day is. It enabled me to explore more ideas than a typical month of one or two posts, and now I have many more ideas I'm excited to explore.
Many of these posts were specifically enabled by being in person and talking with other people I had never met before. I spent the month with people who have been thinking about prediction markets for years, including someone who ran internal prediction markets at Google in 2017 and an academic who was an early author of many prediction market papers.
I also learned what some of my favorite bloggers are like in real life. Many are true to their online selves and are incredibly generous with their time. I am extremely grateful for each and every one of them.
November was also my most productive month of reading. I don't have stats on this, but I read more books and blog posts than I ever have, by an order of magnitude. I discovered new blogs and posts from old blogs I hadn't yet read, enabling me to cross-pollinate ideas and connect previously invisible dots.
Updates
I'm extremely happy and grateful for the audience I've attracted. I've received countless instances of thoughtful feedback and emails from people, including many people I did not know, with zero negative externalities thus far. Readers are not fungible, and the audience this blog has attracted thus far consists of the exact type of people I'm targeting.
To preserve what's working and advance the blog into its next phase, I'm implementing the following:
- Exploring a single topic across multiple posts
- Spending more time offline to derive truly novel insights
- Increasing idea velocity by getting more feedback
- Turning off subscriber notification emails and blocking access to my analytics dashboard
Many of my posts up to now have been quick takes, especially during the past month of posting every day. While I want the blog to have diversity in topics and post formats, I want to write more well-formulated, research-driven posts that generate novel insights and push the idea frontier forward.
I won't be posting every day going forward, but I'm not going anywhere.
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