The Creative Advantages of Ignorance

The peak of my writing career, in terms of productivity, likely occurred in the summer of 2012. I don’t remember the reasoning, but I wrote four different 20-25 page PDF guides in a single week. For you college kids out there, that’s like four different 5000-word term papers all in the same week. About a month later, I wrote my (now-retired) long-term travel course (about 200 pages) in three weeks flat. I was a machine.

The topics were: Happiness, Courage, Wealth, and Dating. Much of the material has been adapted into the four PDFs I send out to subscribers today.

Looking back, I’m kind of in awe, not just of the sheer hours or output, but rather my ability to just unabashedly lay out my thoughts without any second guessing of the validity or utility of those thoughts.

In hindsight, I’m less impressed by my own work ethic and more impressed by my audacity to assume that I could somehow be an expert on all of these topics at once, in such a short period of time.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell has a quote that I like that goes something like, “The problem in the world is that the …

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