My First Weekly Update!

Until now, I’ve been lobbing individual essays into your inbox whenever I finish them.

Starting this week, we’re doing things differently. You’ll get one email from me each week. In it, I’ll share what I’m obsessing over, the best links I’ve stumbled across, what I’m reading and writing, and anything // everything I’m building behind the scenes.

Why the change?

Two reasons.

First, I’ve been asking myself: what actually makes an email worth opening? None of us need more digital clutter. Is a single standalone article the best use of your attention, or is it better to send a curated brain-dump of the most useful stuff I’ve found all week? I’m betting on the latter.

Second, and more importantly, I realized I’ve been hiding.

I’ve been holding back in my writing. I’ve “battened down the hatches,” kept things neat and tidy, and edited myself out. I’ve been giving you the polished ideas without any of the messy reality behind them.

And I think, as a reader, I’d get a little bored of that myself.

If you’re going to give me a few minutes of your eyeballs every week, you deserve to see the actual human banging away on the keyboard, not just a content-generating robot. So, consider this me pulling back the curtain on who I actually am, what I’m screwing up, and what I’m doing with my life when I’m not staring at a blinking cursor.

Let’s get into it!

What I’m thinking about

• Optimism. On 12 October, on the train from Barcelona to Madrid, I decided I’m getting… tired of my own cynicism. I want to let go of the doom. I want to be a wild-eyed optimist for a while, and to cut out the media and the people that keep telling me the world is doomed. I felt better than I had in months.
• Fear. This morning I asked myself what I would build if I worked without fear of losing clients or revenue. I don’t have a full answer yet. But it’s on my mind.

How I’m doing

Mostly good.

Getting home from Europe last week was an absolute shitshow. My flight out of Madrid left three hours late, which meant I got a zero-expenses-paid, 22-hour purgatory sentence at Dubai Airport. By the time I finally walked through my front door, I’d been traveling for 42 hours. Weirdly, I didn’t lose my mind. I stayed way calmer than I’m used to. I think I’ll call that personal growth…

I’ve been back for a week now, but I’m still rather wiped out. Part of it is the lingering jet lag. But if I’m being honest with myself, part of it is a deeper, existential burnout I’ve been shoving under the rug for months…

On the bright side, I’ve officially decided to quit stress-spiraling.

(I know - insert laugh track here!)

I recently realized I’ve spent years overreacting to problems just to prove, to myself and everyone else, that I was taking them seriously. As if freaking out is some kind of badge of honor. It’s not. It’s just exhausting. Case in point: I completely slept through a 5 a.m. call on Saturday. Old me would have spent the entire day flagellating on the Altar of Professional Guilt. Instead, I sent a quick apology and moved on. Zero panic. Which didn’t mean I didn’t feel awful about missing the call, but I’m trying to keep my response proportionate.

Lastly, I do think this weekend helped reset the system. We didn’t do shit. We stayed home, cooked, ordered Thai, and melted into the couch watching Supernatural, Slo-Pitch, Yaga, Visionquest, Celebrity Traitors, and Stop! That! Train!

All in all, I’m ready for my first full week back in the trenches.

What I’m saving

• How to be more ambitious: A tutorial for humans with models, by Felix Rieseberg, who works on Claude. It’s a practical guide with prompts for setting bigger goals when you have AI models to help.
• Five Geek Social Fallacies. An old essay about the beliefs that cause drama in geek social groups. Worth reading, since we’re all getting a bit too… polarised.
• Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city. The long-time NFL coach spent twelve years on one Minecraft build. Kind of inspiring, even if you don’t mess with Minecraft much yourself.
• A post by Tim Denning on Threads I enjoyed. The idea: to keep “obsession-maxxing” and to ask people to buy your stuff every day. Seems like a smart call, if you can let go of your own cringe and your need to protect your ego.

What I’m reading

My recommendation this week is ’s new book, Good Work: Reclaiming Your Inner Ambition. It came out in February. It’s his second book, after The Pathless Path. Millerd left a career in strategy consulting. In this book, he describes what came after: traveling with his wife, losing his motivation, leaving money on the table, and losing his connection to writing after he became a father. He asks what good work is beyond a job, and whether the most ambitious path is external or internal.

The first line I highlighted is “Coming alive over getting ahead.” I also marked his point about freelancing. He says it’s a useful first stop, but if you make it your whole identity, you end up building a job with everything you wanted to escape. As someone who runs a consultancy, I felt that one somewhat keenly…

What I’m working on

I shipped SeditionDAW last week. It’s a browser-based music production tool, with no install and no sign-up. You open it to a loaded demo project: five tracks (drums, bass, chords, lead, and percussion), two return tracks, five scenes from Intro to Drop, a drum rack, and a glue compressor. You launch clips to build a song. A Sign In button sits in the corner, but you don’t have to use it.

On a phone, it switches to a performance view: a four-by-five grid of clips, a column of scene buttons, tempo controls, and an A/B crossfader. You can make something that sounds good within a few seconds. The Share menu gives you a song link, embed code, and Collaborate Live, which lets another person play in the same session with you. The Help menu has a Listening Session, a way to mark a glitch, and a way to connect an AI assistant.

I still have to decide who it’s for, but I think I already have a lead. Students on school Chromebooks can’t install software. SeditionDAW needs no installation. Bedroom producers send each other zipped project folders and stems over Discord, then find out the other person has a different version or lacks a plugin. A link that opens a playable session removes those steps, which is exactly what I wanted when I was producing more myself.

The other project is my next book, Heretics for Hire. It’s about operators who refuse the consensus in their industry and keep refusing for years, until the market catches up. The idea started with Howard Schultz, who left Starbucks when the founders wouldn’t sell espresso drinks, then came back and bought the company. The book follows founders who wouldn’t take coaching, brands that grew because they refused to market, categories that exist because someone refused to compete in the old one, agencies that grew by firing clients, and consultants who tell founders they’re wrong.

The argument has four parts: the conviction (who heretics are and what their industries do with them), the position (the refusals that build a category), the market (how these operators reach customers without the usual marketing), and the model (how they keep the refusal going as a business).

A few months ago I scrapped most of the first draft. It covered the right ground, but it was dry and had very little of my personality. The new draft is, I think, much closer in spirit to who I am off the page. Which is one of the trickiest parts of being a writer: keeping who you really are in sync with the text you produce.

I’m planning to open pre-orders for it soon.

Last week’s essays

Thanks for reading. If one of these essays was useful, forward it to a friend.

Joan