Experiments, Poetry, Stripe, Laying Flat & More | #290

March 9th, 2025: Greetings from Texas! This week I’m sharing a bunch of links and good things I’ve found over the last month or so.

#1 Tiny Experiments

My friend

Anne-Laure Le Cunff

has a book out, Tiny Experiments. If I were to describe it in a fun way, it’s like if Atomic Habits decided to blow up its life and embarked on a pathless path.

My favorite part was the intro, where she brings alive her journey from leaving the default path to a false start, founding a company, and her unique journey of combining writing online with a neuroscience PhD.

This passage especially resonated:

Separated from San Francisco by thousands of miles, I finally let myself realize how I actually felt. Work wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great, either. I was burned out, but that was just a symptom of a deeper problem: I had become so consumed by the relentless grind that I no longer thought about what I truly wanted from each day or my future. Despite this relentless grind, I was also finding myself bored. While I had spent my younger life guided by a genuine yearning to learn and grow, I was now following a prescribed path trodden by so many colleagues before me.

Realizing how I felt was like an electric shock. Many people are able to build a rewarding, balanced life on the foundation of a job at Google. I was not one of them.

On my first day back in the office after the holiday, I quit.

While the beginning is very personal, it shifts more to the practical throughout the rest of the book. She breaks down what an “experimental mindset” really means, including how to question the scripts in your head, come up with short-term experiments, and rejecting traditional goals. Here’s her 2x2:

My writing tends to lean on the poetic “have trust in the universe” which doesn’t seem to help most people, so I’m glad she wrote this.

I’ll genuinely recommend it to many people.

Here’s a link to her book if interested.

#2 New Book Protocols

I love when people try out new stuff with books.

Elle Griffin

is crowdsourcing an “advance” for her next book, with a startup crowdfunding site and giving 40% of (lifetime, I think?) profits to backers.

As the number of authors continues to increase, we’ll see more demand for alternative publishing paths. I hope by the end of my life that giving lifetime rights + 85 years to a random company in NYC will not be the default option for authors. Fingers crossed.

#3 Stripe Insights Into The Digital Economy

In Stripe’s annual report, they highlight a trend of “vertical SaaS,” or businesses that are powered by unique digital stacks. They talked about how it has become much easier to start Pizza restaurants because of off-the-shelf software and other similar businesses:

We think the rise of vertical SaaS is at least partly responsible. From a platform like Slice, dedicated specifically to the needs of pizzerias, new businesses can get a logo, website, payment system, ordering system, marketing toolkit, and branded boxes—basically everything else they need to operate their pizza business (except an oven and the perfect sauce). They can remain independent while still benefiting from a franchisee's economies of scale.

When I first used Stripe in 2018, it was one of the biggest imagination bombs I felt from using a piece of software. Immediately I saw that I was no longer stuck with the complex backend jujitsu needed to get Paypal to work and could now integrate this slick, smooth, and simple payments option in Stripe. Many of my early experiments, like my first cohort-based course “Solopreneur Shift”, some podcast ads, and the templates I sold, wouldn’t have been possible only a few years earlier.

We’re probably still underestimating how infrastructure like it will shape what’s possible in the future too.

For a couple charts from the report that might indicate where we are headed:

#4 Dana Gioia On Writing

Dana Gioia is a successful poet who maintained a successful dual life as a corporate executive at General Foods while pursuing his art. His perspective on life was delightful to absorb in this three hour podcast. It was my favorite episode of How I Write so far (in addition to my own, of course). I will likely re-listen many times.

Here are a couple of lines that hit me:

On the challenge of writing: “The pleasure of getting it right”

On novels: “A novel is a way of feeling the joy of being alive”

On a really good poem: “you should feel it physically”

On Art: “Most of us go through our life half awake. The cultural technology of art used properly is to awaken us to experience and feel our situation “

On Writing Well: “If you want to be a good writer…you have to read, you have to write, you have to re-write. And you have to do all those in a social context.”

And I got a kick out of this poem reading:

#5 Creative Reflections

This video from

Yancey Strickler

is a must watch for any creative person. He has tons of experience from his journey and seeing others during his time at Kickstarter and now at Metalabel. He’s also just in different worlds that most people reading this newsletter, which is a plus.

A couple of ideas I resonated with:

1. Thinking about the cathedrals versus practices: Practices are the things like this newsletter. A way to keep writing, a way for me to keep going. Cathedrals are the things I decide to aim for 100% (or whatever that looks like on my terms). It’s sort of what I’m planning on doing with an upcoming special edition of the pathless path (stay tuned).

2. The purpose of a creator is to release things: I think most modern creators default too much to the algorithm. This part led to kickstarting a small potential project with the pathless community to produce a print magazine in 2025.

#6 Laying Flat In China

I’ve been digging more into work norms around the world, especially in China. This essay was interesting, though I’d love to find more first-hand accounts instead of an older academic’s perspective. Here is what he said about today’s youth in China:

“Today, we are witnessing a similar shift. Those born in the 50s and 60s still have a kind of polis mindset. They watch Xinwen Lianbo [China’s state-controlled daily news programme] and discuss current affairs in group chats, including topics like the Russia-Ukraine war, the Israel-Palestine conflict or the US elections. These discussions give meaning to their lives. In that sense, they can never “leave the polis” [离开城邦]. But the younger generation is entirely different. Young people are indifferent to such matters, caring only about things directly related to their own lives and things which affect them in the moment [当下自我有关的事]. They have completely disengaged from the polis [完全去城邦化了], and have become a generation of Epicureans, living for themselves and pursuing their own happiness and well-being.”

Xu Jilin on Sexuality, Boredom and Political Apathy Among China’s Youth (Part 1)

#7 AI Agents Preview

This preview of AI Agents from Manus was impressive

#8 Join Me On Notes

I’m having a fun time on subtack notes. It’s becoming an interesting space and a good way of finding good writing. Some good reads and notes to get you to join!