8 Lifelong Lessons of 2023

Digital Minimalism, The Sirens of Twitter, Pedestals, Status, Taking Advice, and more

Baxter Blackwood

Dec 28, 2023

2023 was a year of massive exploration.

Today, I want to share the top eight lessons I learned this year. Many relate to writing, human nature, and technology.

This is a choose-your-own-adventure type of piece. Jump around until you find a banger.

1. Don’t Put Anyone on a Pedestal

You are worthy of talking to anyone—no matter their age, wealth, or followers.

This year, I got in touch with authors and people who had Twitter audiences of over 20,000 people! I used to put them on a pedestal. But followers and fame could have prevented a friendship and mentorship.

When we put people on mental pedestals, we make an assumption: this person is better than me for some external reason. But they’re just another human. They eat glucose, crave coffee, and have their own worries, just like you.

Reach out to everyone. Send cold emails. Send DMs. There is no downside. It is a powerful privilege to be able to reach almost anyone on the planet.

Just don’t waste their time with stupid questions. What’s a stupid question? Always flip the scenario: if you got asked the question you were about to email someone, would you want to respond?

This is the most important lesson I learned this year. Read my full essay here.

2. To-Do Lists Don’t Work

If you really want to do something, don’t put it on your to-do list. Instead, block out a time in your calendar. This year I wanted to read more books, but putting it on an orange sticky note did nothing for me. Unless I scheduled reading for 12 pm, it wasn’t going to happen. Put it on your calendar until it’s a habit.

3. Be Skeptical of All Advice, Even From Your Family

Don’t take advice from someone who isn’t where you want to go or who you want to be. In other words, people who are less happy, wealthy, or healthy than you.

Conversely, just because someone is older, wealthier, or healthier doesn’t mean that they can’t learn from you.

Listen to every single person’s advice, but also question it. Make your own decisions. Just because they are your family or older than you doesn’t mean that their advice is right for you.

4. The Sirens of Twitter

In January, I discovered Twitter. Not for politics or sports, but for rich ideas and my type of people.

I also found out that people were making money online. Some of them were health coaches and ghostwriters. They ran a one-person business out of their Twitter accounts. The prospect of making $5,000 a month on the Internet while living in Bali and still stacking cash was super sick.

I had a good mindset: being useful. I thought I wanted to be a health coach or a Spanish tutor. But narrowing myself into one category clamped my own curiosity.

I learned that just because you love learning about something doesn’t mean you’ll like teaching the same things. Similarly, just because copywriting is a valuable skill to know doesn’t mean you should be a copywriter.

Looking back, I also realized I was playing the wrong game. I was motivated by likes, engagement, and followers. I was caught up in status numbers games. I followed “advice” like commenting on 50-100 posts daily, or picking three topic areas to niche down into for my personal brand. Some said to schedule tweets three times per day.

But this burned me out!

All that time I could’ve spent reading or writing, I was sending shallow shitty comments and Tweets to get more traffic. I wasn’t focused on what actually mattered—the craft of writing.

At one point I was so worried about Twitter metrics that I wasn’t reading books at all. For good ideas and writing, you need to be spending most of your reading time with long-form text, not Twitter.

In a Twitter Spaces Q&A, Write of Passage founder David Perell was asked about audience growth businesses. There’s hella hype around growth growth growth. But as Perell said, there’s only a finite number of audience growth gurus.

In other words, where you shine is at the intersection of your unique domains of knowledge. Your knowledge could get you hired at a company. Your online presence could connect you to someone just like Palo Alto connected Wozniak and Jobs.

So for me, it’s about following my true curiosity and sharing what I’m learning. But this is surprisingly hard.

The conclusion I reached: I want to build an audience, but I don’t care if it takes ten years. Alex Hormozi once said, “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” And to me, that’s doing high quality writing fully aligned with my interests. It might take longer to build, but it will be authentic to me and what I want.

I think Twitter engagement is deceptive. As Sahil Bloom said on David Perell’s podcast, he’d rather share a valuable piece of wisdom that gets no engagement than a platitude that gets a million likes. I agree.

You have to validate yourself. Ask: if I couldn’t share this work with anyone, would I love what I’ve created? This helps escape status hierarchies and looking for other people to approve your work.

I’m not saying that social media marketing or followers don’t matter.

As Dr. Andrew Huberman said, it’s about getting the order correct and not being ambitious for ambition’s sake: “putting love of craft first, and letting ambition stem from that."

You don’t have to take advice that drains you. If it’s something you can’t sustain for 10 years, don’t do it.

5. Tyranny on Technology: 7 Steps to A Better Life

I’m not against technology, but I’m against not questioning default settings.

After reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, I implemented a few changes to my technology habits. I’ve been called a “psycho” for doing these things, but when people say that, I’d rather listen to Paul Graham when it comes to modern technology addictions.

As he wrote, there’s an increasing divergence between statistical norms and what’s best for humans:

“Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.”

Here’s 7 tests I tried:

To focus on reading and writing, I deleted all social media on my phone. I now only use my computer to check Twitter and email. And I can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner! I don’t even miss Instagram. Reels were cool but such a waste of time.
I treat emails as if they don’t require an immediate response. And that’s almost always the case. I’ll probably never use email on my phone again. Checking it once a day on my MacBook is a massive level up in my life.

“Your email inbox is a to-do-list other people write for you. Task length and importance are not related to recently received.” - Balaji Srinivasan

I turned off all notifications except from my VIPs. To constantly decline spam calls and clear notifications was annoying and unhealthy. Now, I just schedule a few minutes to respond to my texts.
I also started cultivating a mindset of what Newport calls “conversation-centric communication,” where I steer texts to phone calls. Worst case, I’ll send a voice message or a few texts. Why? Because texting doesn’t really count for maintaining human relationships. Also, texting is confusing.
To avoid the inefficient back-and-forth texting of setting up calls, always give someone 3-5 combinations of dates and times. Even better: set up a free Calendly account and send them a link so somebody can book a time on your calendar.
I stopped checking my phone first thing in the morning. I don’t check it until I’ve finished the most important task of my day.
Remove the phone from your sight. When I’m reading and I see my phone in my peripheral vision, that black screen is still distracting. Throw it in a desk drawer or leave it in the other room.
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This all reminded me of myself a few years ago: when I stopped drinking regular Coke, I felt like I would really miss it. It felt extreme to quit sweet soda. But now it disgusts me! My taste buds have adapted—high fructose corn syrup is way too sweet (and clearly horrible for my health). I never would’ve thought that I’d love Waterloo sparkling water.

I’m so glad I gave up something I “loved” to see what life was like without it. Likewise with technology, I will never sit down to watch the news or NFL again. There’s much healthier information in books. Books are salad for the mind, and so many people have intellectual insulin resistance.

6. People Are Busy - Give Them a Reason to Read

As a writer, marketing your ideas is important. How will people see your writing unless you tell them about it?

Early this year, I tried Instagram stories with a simple link to my blog post. First off: Instagram isn’t as tailored to ideas as Twitter. Second: you need to give small pieces of wisdom from the article itself. The content that people read needs to engage them.

As writers, we have so many enemies: Netflix, TikTok, Youtube, Snapchat, Instagram. You have to get their attention.

Put yourself in someone else’s shoes and give them a reason to want to read your stuff. Most people are really busy and won’t just click a link. As Alex Hormozi once said, “attention is the new oil.”

Also, start on a platform with an existing audience rather than a personal website. Substack has a broad user base, and Twitter is where lots of founders, CEOs, and other high-value people digitally reside. I think using both is a power move.

7. Designing A Website Doesn’t Make You A Better Writer

It’s so easy to deceive yourself with “productivity.” Especially when the things you’re doing don’t actually help you get to where you want to go.

For the first six months of my Substack newsletter, I pasted my articles on my personal website. I thought there would be an advantage to SEO. But that didn’t matter. Why? Because posting my stuff on a website took around 30-60 minutes a week to tinker with. I could’ve spent all that time on writing.

In other words, I was focused more on designing the website than the writing itself.

Designing a website was fun but did not help me become a better writer. It made me a marginally worse writer because I was trying to do both at once.

You have to ask yourself: what is your priority and is being “busy” actually helping you achieve that?

8. We Are Signaling Creatures

I constantly think about this question I once heard: do you love yourself for who you are or what you do?

In an advertising psychology book called Ca$hvertising, I learned that humans are biologically programmed to want social approval and superiority.

We signal. We want to look good for others. Morgan Housel’s “Man in The Car Paradox” explains this perfectly: most people don’t care about the engine specs of a Ferrari. They bypass admiring you in the car, thinking about how they would look cool to other people.

The car is really just a proxy for telling people you’re respectable. But the irony is that nobody cares about you—they care about themselves.

In a similar vein, I learned about the concept of mimesis: it’s in our human nature to imitate other people. We want what other people want. Not by coincidence, but because desires are contagious. If everyone owns a pair of white Nike AirForce ones, you might think you’re missing out and maybe should get some. You almost feel like you’re lower status just because of some external object.

It’s common for prestige to drive us—not true desire. This points back to the question: would you do it if you could tell nobody about it?

This applies to content, jobs, careers, and basically everything. Worst case, imagine how your best friends would react to whatever you’re doing. It feels impossible to be an individual and escape the culture, but you must do it to be you. Because when you’re you, you don’t have competition in the long-run. As Naval Ravikant once said, “escape competition through authenticity.”

Happy New Year!

- Baxter