A peaceful heart is built from ordinary days lived gently.
I can't make anything anymore without calculating what it's worth.
I don't mean that as some philosophical thing. I mean I sat down last week to write something for no reason. A short piece about my dad. Something I'd been carrying around in my head for months. The kind of thing I used to scribble on napkins in the back of my warehouse office at 2am when nobody was watching.
Got four sentences in and my brain went: this could be a thread. This could be a lead magnet. This could open a product launch email. I could test this as a hook and see what the open rate does.
Four sentences about my father and I was already running conversion math.
I closed the notebook. Went surfing instead. Couldn't even enjoy that because I kept thinking about the thing I didn't write and what I could've turned it into.
That's the trap. You build something that makes money from your ideas and your voice, and slowly every idea gets filtered through what it could sell. The creative instinct that made you interesting in the first place gets hijacked by the business instinct that made you successful. And after long enough you stop having ideas that aren't products. You stop making things that aren't assets. Your imagination becomes inventory.
I grew up in a house with eight siblings. There wasn't a lot of money for activities. What we had was a garage full of junk and time. I used to draw. Terrible stuff. Comic book characters fighting each other on the backs of grocery bags. I made little books out of stapled printer paper and wrote stories in them. Gave them to my mom like they were gifts. She kept every single one.
I know because I found them in a box when I was 35, living back in that house, delivering burritos for a living. I sat on my old bed and flipped through those stapled pages and I could not remember what it felt like to make something with no thought of who it was for.
When I ran my logistics company, I wasn't creative. I was operational. Spreadsheets and route maps and phone calls that lasted too long. But there was this weird side effect of being completely consumed by work I hated. The rare moments I made something for no reason felt sacred. A sketch on the back of a receipt. A voice memo to nobody. A long rambling email to a friend that turned into four paragraphs about nothing. Those were the moments I was most myself. Because no one was paying for them. They existed only because I wanted them to.
Now I make my living from what comes out of my head. Twenty to twenty-five grand a month from ideas turned into products. And the machine eats everything. Every stray thought gets weighed. Every observation gets auditioned. Nothing is allowed to just be a thing I noticed. It all has to perform.
You've felt this. Maybe you started a podcast because you loved talking about the thing and then the downloads started mattering and you started choosing topics based on what performs instead of what you actually care about. Maybe you used to paint and now you sell prints and somewhere in there you stopped painting the weird shit nobody wanted to buy. The stuff that was actually yours.
Maybe you built a following around your taste and now you're afraid to like anything your audience wouldn't expect. So your taste slowly flattens into a product. Curated. Predictable. Dead.
It happens so gradually you don't notice. First you're making things and some of them make money. Then you're making money and sometimes the things are good. Then you're just making money and calling it creative work because your name is on it.
A buddy of mine back home plays guitar. Works at a hospital during the week. Plays in a band that rehearses in somebody's garage on Thursday nights. They've got maybe forty followers on Instagram. He played me a recording last time I was home and it was rough. Timing was off. The mix sounded like it was done on a phone. But he played it for me the way someone shows you a picture of their kid. Like it was the best thing he'd ever been part of.
He's the happiest musician I know. Not because he's talented. Because nobody's buying it. It belongs entirely to him.
I started doing something small a few months ago. Once a week I make something and delete it. Write it, sketch it, record it on my phone, whatever. Then it's gone. No publishing. No audience. No measuring. The whole point is that it goes nowhere. It's not content. It's not an asset. It's just a thing I made because I felt like making it.
Felt stupid the first time. Felt like wasting a morning. Which told me everything I needed to know about how far gone I was. That I couldn't spend forty-five minutes making something worthless without my brain screaming that I was losing money.
If everything you make has a price tag, you stop being someone who creates and start being a factory that runs on your own imagination. Factories don't make art. They make units.
The best things I ever made were the ones nobody asked for.
— Best, Jose
