The Writing Founder Project

As a goal-oriented person, for many years, I’ve lived in “goal hell”:

My life had become an endless to-do list that served to achieve the list of goals — business goals, health / fitness goals, intellectual goals, etc (you know how it goes) — that I had set for myself.

Add to that a big dose of insecurity about how far behind I was, and how little time I had left.

Anything “fun” I did felt like adultery, cheating on the to-do list that was my life. In fact, I wasn’t doing anything fun at all.

Worse, adultery is addictive. So the more goal-oriented I was, the more unproductive I became, falling into destructive behaviours like late-night anime-bingeing. (Thankfully I don’t do any physical substances like alcohol or drugs).

I had trouble getting out of bed in the morning to pursue the very goals that were supposed to excite me, and at the end of each day, after failing to complete the to-do list that no sane person could finish in the first place, I reinforced the sense of inadequacy and the numbness of wondering what my life even was anymore.

The reason it happened is very clear to me now:

Most of the work required to achieve any of our goals is tedious and boring. It’s our job to make it fun, because nobody else will do it for us.

I finally had a revelation recently when I saw a popular online creator say that the goal of all his projects is actually to create books. Physical books. All the work he does, funnels into that ultimate format. It is the end product, and everything else he creates or publishes on the side is an ancillory activity.

“…the core purpose of this program (and all the work I do — the pop-ups, the videos, everything) is to produce books.“

– Craig Mod

Interestingly, books aren’t even the thing that makes him the most money — that mostly comes from his content’s paid memberships (something like Patreon that he runs himself).

I was really struck by this, and it’s the right message at the right time.

As a writer myself, I’ve long felt a sense of guilt whenever I spent time doing it — “I could be working and making money instead!”

But writing and sharing what I’ve learned is what brings me the most joy. That’s what most of my writing is about — doing something I found interesting, and then sharing what I learned with others.

What drives me is stories.

I see myself mainly as an explorer or a scientist on this planet, and even entrepreneurship is simply a lifelong experiment in “what ifs” and “wouldn’t that be cool.”

And that brings us to what I call The Writing Founder Project:

WHAT IF the final output of all my activities was to write about the experience?

From now on, my core purpose of building SANPRAM will be to create media.

Here are the formats this content will be in:

1) Written word

I’ve played with all the major written formats: books, long essays, and short posts.

Books (physical books) are the hardest, but also the ultimate form, because ) they are timeless and 2) paper is a wonderful creative medium that allows you to do things that digital never can.

And I just realized that they don’t have to be long. You can write a very short book.

The one drawback is that they cost money to read and take up space for the reader, so it better be something they’ll want to collect. A printed book should either be worth reading again, or be used as a constant reference, or be seen as a travel companion. I’m happy that my first book, Tech Fluent CEO, met these criteria.

Essays and short posts would be the bulk of my writing. I’ve found that consistent high-quality essays are great for building a following.

Here’s the different kinds of posts I’ll be writing as an output:

1. Sunday Reports — not monthly, because a 7 days is a more tractable unit of time (it’s hard to mentally grasp how long a month really is and be conscious of it). Deadline: every Sunday.
2. Daily Work Logs — whatever I happens that day. Deadline: every day.
3. Rambles and reflections — these will be about whatever is on my plate at the moment. The core of my codex.
   • Format: take a company goal, and as you go through the process, document the process in front of the whole world. Simple.
4. Periodic Tech essays — this is how I got my start in writing. I take a technical topic, and write a deep explainer essay.

The whole workflow should go like this, each step starting and ending with a piece of writing:

• Ramble: I set a goal for what I need to do at the moment, and a timeline for it.
• Ramble: I write my plan for how I intend to do it.
• Rambles and Reflections: I start working the plan, and write about each step.
• Weekly report: I share the results / progress being made.

2) Video

Video is a great form of documentation, and it has certain advantages over text (being able to SHOW things, and share live emotions)

I’ve decided that video will best be a companion to my writing, as opposed to its own medium. I will use video to enhance the meaning of my written essays, as a communication aid.

It would fit mostly in the rambles and weekly reports category.

For livestreaming, I’ll use StreamYard.

3) Audio

I already host two podcasts, using them mainly as a networking tool for building more relationships with other founders. I intend to keep doing them, but further reduce the effort that goes into production. (Not that I was putting a lot of effort to begin with)

Q. What to share, and what to keep private?

I just had a long conversation with Gemini about this one, because I neither want to be so secretive that nobody gets value, nor to overshare so much that I come across as a clown / it’s boring / I give away strategic secrets.

To figure out where I fall on the spectrum, I looked into the sharing habits of Warren Buffett / Charlie Munger, and for an outlier opinion, Elon Musk.

Here’s the edited consensus, which I also feel comfortable with:

What to share:

⁃   Visions of the future I want to build
⁃   Monumental challenges that apply to the whole industry (“manufacturing is hard”, “full self-driving is hard”, etc) — highlight the difficulty of the process.
⁃   Product announcements (often very early)
⁃   Positive Outcomes: deliveries, good customer feedback, things that are really cool
⁃   Negative Outcomes (after they've been overcome): what happened, how we overcame it, and how our creative process / intellectual method has been changed or reinforced because of it.
⁃   The intellectual process / beliefs and philosophy behind decisions, and insights gained.

What to delay or keep private:

⁃   Core IP / secret sauce / technical details of solutions we develop.
⁃   Fundamental / existential doubts about the viability of whatever I’m doing. (Hey, I'm human, they come up from time to time)
⁃   Real-time suspense of a process that is in motion.
⁃   Anything that affects other people / makes someone lose face / reveals others' secrets.

This article is from my codex.

初めまして。 I’m Aman, a founder based in Tokyo, Japan. We’re building a 1,000 year company.

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