Two questions that don’t seem related, but are:

1. Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed, like there’s too much to do?
2. How many people do you need before two have the same birthday?

The birthday problem is a paradox because the solution is unbelievable. The way we get that solution shows us why you have more on your to-do list than you could ever hope to get done.

To be sure of a birthday match, we’d need 366 in a room – one for each day of the year, and one additional person, whose birthday will be the same as at least one of the rest.

The really surprising answer comes when we ask how many we need for a 50% chance of a shared birthday. Intuitively, we want to solve this problem linearly. So if we draw a line from zero people, with zero chance of a match, to 366 people, with a 100% chance of a match, it seems that for a 50% chance, we’d need half that – about 183 people.

The actual path to the solution shows us why each thing we take on adds more to our to-do lists than we expect.

Is it just “one more thing?”

If we start with two people in a room, we have one potential for a match – represented below by a line connecting them.

Notice that if we add just one more person, the number of potential matches triples – from one, to three.

If we again add a person, the number of potential matches jumps again – from three, to six.

Now think of how this rapid increase in connections applies to your life. If you have your home life, your day job, and you start a podcast, there are three different ways these areas can conflict with one another.

For example, you can only record your podcast when it’s quiet in the house. But it’s only quiet in the house when everyone else is at work or school. But when everyone else is at work or school, you are, too.

Suppose you also want a social life with friends. Now there are not only three ways areas of your life can conflict, there are six.

You can’t work on your podcast during your Monday night dinner with friends, so that eliminates one block of time. You also have to watch the kids during your partner’s night out, so that eliminates another block of time – and you still need it quiet in the house to record your podcast.

The answer is what!?

Every time you add a person to a room, you add not just their birthday, but how that birthday potentially connects to the birthday of each person already in the room.

That’s why, to be half-sure there will be one shared birthday, you need far fewer than 183 people. You don’t even need half that. Heck, you don’t even need half that.

Because the potential connections rise so rapidly, you’re nearly certain to have a shared birthday with just 50 people in a room. From then on, the odds barely rise, until we get to 100%, at 366.

For a 50% chance at least two people in the room share a birthday, you need only 23 people.

At that point, you have 253 potential connections.

The solution to the birthday problem is unexpected. Heck, it’s shocking. Our brains are not good at understanding how the odds increase. That’s why it’s a paradox.

Of course, life isn’t even this simple, and each area can conflict with each other area in multiple ways, so reality is even more complex.

Your kid wants to take ballet lessons? When can you drive her, and can you still garden on Saturday mornings?

You’re thinking of getting an extra degree? How is that going to affect time with your partner, and the mental energy to do your job?

Just as adding a person to the room creates a potential connection between them and everyone else in the room, each time you add something to your life, you aren’t just adding “one more thing.” You’re adding how that one thing can conflict to every other thing.

The good news runs backwards

So what can you do about it? As I was finishing my latest book, I looked at my life and business, and realized I had added “one more thing” so many times, there wasn’t time or energy for writing.

It hurt to cut things, but I reminded myself of the birthday paradox, and turned out pleasantly surprised.

I figured by cutting out my weekly movie and occasional TV show, I could gain a few hours a week. But then something unexpected happened: I had more space to think about my writing, and when I wanted to entertain myself, I found myself picking up a book.

After the snowballing connections shown by the birthday paradox unraveled, I started to see them working in reverse. Thanks to all that reading, it was easier to write. It also turns out reading with your partner is much better quality-time than watching a movie.

The hidden interconnections exposed by the birthday paradox seem like bad news because you have to find the strength to resist taking on “one more thing.” But they also mean the things you keep have more power to feed one another than you ever expected.

Have a comment? Chime in on the original post on Maximum Reverie »

In 1513, Raphael was making a fortune essentially as a more-reliable Leonardo. At thirty, Raphael had already done his best work. Leonardo, in his sixties, was just across the courtyard, still working on the Mona Lisa.

Were it not for Michelangelo’s ceiling down the hallway, Raphael’s giant murals in the pope’s apartment would have been the undisputed greatest accomplishment in Renaissance painting. While completing those, he had also been painting dozens of portraits for the pope and his closest friends.

Raphael was incredibly prolific. Leonardo would only finish maybe a dozen paintings in his lifetime, and his most-famous Mona Lisa was only the size of a serving tray.

Raphael had at this point been steadily employed for years at the Vatican. Leonardo had just arrived, and wouldn’t last long. He would soon leave all the noblemen and clergy in Italy that might have served as his patrons and make an arduous trek 700 miles over the Alps, to find work. He would never return.

Perhaps there is a Raphael you compare yourself to. Someone who cranks out one thing after another, while you struggle to achieve a vague vision of a masterpiece. Someone younger and faster, who you watch achieve rapid success while you toil in obscurity.

On the surface, it may seem they are more talented, disciplined, or focused. If you look closely, you may find you’re merely more curious.

The economist David Galenson wondered, At what point in painters’ careers do they produce their best work? As you might expect from an economist, he started by tracking paintings’ values at auction. He then measured influence by tracking how often each piece was cited in art history books.

Galenson expected to find a neat pattern, such as that more- or less-experienced painters did more valuable and influential work. Instead, he found two distinct trajectories: One group peaked early, the other peaked late.

Two archetypal examples are Picasso and Cézanne. Picasso did his best work at twenty-six, then lived into his nineties, never matching that significance. Cézanne did better work as time went on. He did his most-valuable and influential work the final year of his life, at sixty-seven.

Galenson has noticed a similar pattern in other creative disciplines. Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane at twenty-six, Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick at thirty-two, and Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial while she was still in college. Meanwhile, Alfred Hitchcock released Psycho in his sixties, Fyodor Dostoevsky finished The Brothers Karamazov at fifty-nine, and Frank Lloyd Wright began the Guggenheim Museum at seventy-six.

Leonardo never officially finished the Mona Lisa. It was still in his studio when he died in his late sixties. Raphael finished The School of Athens well before his thirtieth birthday.¹

How was Raphael able to be so prolific at such a young age? The answer tells us why curious people like Leonardo peak late.

Leonardo is the quintessential “Renaissance man”: painter, engineer, botanist, architect, and more. He even has an inaccurate reputation as not really being that interested in painting – used as an explanation for why he rarely finished.

Raphael was himself a Renaissance man. Besides his incredible output in painting, he became the chief architect of the Vatican, pioneered the field of archeology, and was an innovative entrepreneur.

But look closely at the differences between these pursuits. Raphael was driven to build upon and organize what other humans had already made. Leonardo was interested in understanding nature through direct observations.

When Galenson looked closer, he noticed that the career trajectories of creatives didn’t depend upon whether they had formal training, what time period they were working in, nor what country they were from. What mattered was how they approached their work.

He found that artists such as Raphael had what he calls a conceptual approach. They would seize on an idea, then execute it. Artists such as Leonardo had an experimental approach. They would tinker and through a long process of trial-and-error eventually, maybe, sometimes arrive at a solution.

In other words, they were more curious.

For example, Cézanne would work out his paintings on the canvas. He rarely finished and almost never bothered to sign a painting, even leaving them in the fields where he painted. The work was itself a vehicle for satisfying his curiosity. By contrast, Picasso would often work out a painting in his mind before executing it. He would sign, date, and sometimes even record the time of completion.

Notice that Leonardo is famous for his many thousands of pages of notes and sketches. He was constantly making observations about the world – conducting dissections, creating detailed illustrations of plants and animals, theorizing about astronomy, or developing a library of machine mechanics.

Meanwhile, Raphael seemed more interested in what other humans had already done. While Leonardo was pioneering the field of paleontology – studying and documenting the fossils nature had left behind – Raphael was pioneering the field of archeology – studying and documenting the ruins of ancient Rome.

One human whose work Raphael was especially interested in was that of Leonardo.

The composition of Raphael’s Girl with Unicorn was directly influenced by the Mona Lisa.

Raphael saw the Mona Lisa during what art historians call his “Florence Period.” That’s when he was spending a lot of time in Florence, studying the work of various painters. They might as well call it his Leonardo Period, because that’s when his work started to look more and more like Leonardo’s.

What makes the Mona Lisa such a special painting is the way Leonardo represented light and shadow. Everything in it is a carefully-modeled shape. There are no outlines – only surfaces that curve away from the viewer.

Leonardo devised a system of so-called “pyramids of light,” in which light bounced off every point of every object, eventually converging in the eye of the viewer. Historian Martin Kemp has compared it to modern-day ray-tracing software – the kind Pixar uses to generate its animations.

To develop such a detailed system, Leonardo needed to deeply understand light and shadow. That deep understanding goes hand-in-hand with why he was able to make prescient observations about the light and shadow of the moon.

At the time, many were mystified by why the shaded part of the moon wasn’t completely dark. Leonardo correctly theorized that the moon was not its own light source, as many thought, but that the shadow was illuminated by sunlight reflecting off the earth – what’s now known as “earthshine.”

Leonardo put all this knowledge into his paintings, and we can see that in the Mona Lisa. Notice, for example, that the shadow under her chin is not completely dark. That’s where light is bouncing off her neck, chest, and shoulders.

From just a few years before Raphael saw the in-progress Mona Lisa, we can see a very simple chin-shadow in his first recorded commission.

But in his Girl with Unicorn, we can see him imitating Leonardo’s use of light. (In fact, he kind of overdid it.)

Leonardo da Vinci’s innovative approach to painting was put together through thousands if not millions of observations, driven by his curiosity of the world. As historian Francesca Fiorani wrote:

”When [Leonardo] eventually delved into geology, botany, zoology, optics, and the study of water, he did so because all these fields also pertained to painting. At times, these other subjects took over his life entirely. Others were lifelong interests to which he returned intermittently. All, though, were subordinate to painting.“
—Francesca Fiorani²

Leonardo’s painting was just the tip of a gigantic iceberg of knowledge about the world. Raphael didn’t have to build that iceberg – he merely had to work from Leonardo’s conclusions.

It’s not that Raphael wasn’t innovative, talented, or deserving of the respect his work got. But while Leonardo cared about painting every bit as much as Raphael, his output was different, and his path to success was different, because he was curious. He didn’t accept what others had already figured out. He instead developed his own approach from many direct observations.

Every artist will build upon what they learn from those who come before, but with artists like Raphael (or Picasso), building upon existing innovations dominates their process. As Galenson told me, “It’s what conceptual innovators do, it turns out.”

So if you can’t figure out why others are more prolific and achieve success faster, look closely at their processes. Is your friend writing in a well-defined “niche” while you’re opining about the nature of existence? Are they mimicking their heroes while you’re piecing together your own approach? Then of course they’ll achieve success faster. But when you finally peak, your work will probably be more original.

It may not be that you’re any less talented, smart, or motivated. It may be that because you’re so curious, it takes longer to build your foundation.

Maybe your creative career is like one of those construction sites: There’s a wall around it with the project logo, and people walk by for months, wondering, What are they even doing? Then the next time they pass, there’s a twelve-story building.

Have a comment? Chime in on the original post on Maximum Reverie »

1. Art history buffs might notice that Raphael died at only thirty-seven. But by that time the quality of his work had declined. Galenson has found that conceptual innovators tend to be comfortable letting others execute their ideas, and Raphael was no exception. Notice also that even if you counted The Last Supper as Leonardo’s most significant work, he was older than Raphael ever lived (his forties).
2. From The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint

The man who published 500 left 150 unfinished – and that’s just the beginning. His unique paper trail provides clues on how creative works get done (or don’t).

When Niklas Luhmann¹ began his professorship at the University of Bielefeld, he stated an ambitious plan: “My project: theory of society. Time to complete: thirty years.”

He went on to publish a 1,200-page magnum opus. Its topic: theory of society. Time to publish: thirty years.

That’s the kind of planning and foresight we imagine having when we take on creative projects. You begin dreaming about a seven-book epic fantasy series, or a chain of innovative learning centers strewn about the country. But somewhere around 10,000 words or page seven of the business plan, something happens.

It looks like you just lose motivation, higher priorities get in the way, or life throws you a curveball. But what if it’s something simpler than all that?

What if you don’t finish what you start because it makes perfect sense?

Luhmann’s book, Theory of Society, covers in great detail every aspect of society, from law to commerce, from politics to love. On the surface, it’s incredible someone could state such an ambitious plan that spanned decades, then carry it out perfectly. But when we look closer it seems almost like what Bob Ross would have called “a happy accident.”

More than a quarter century after Luhmann’s death, his writing and research process is still itself the subject of ongoing research. Most famously, Luhmann left behind a couple cabinets² full of 90,000 paper notes.

The University of Bielefeld has been digitizing these notes, aiming to publish all of them online. You can browse through each, but as you can see from the sample below³, you better understand German. Not to mention Luhmann’s handwriting looks like a car designed by members of the Vienna Secession, wrapped around a light pole.

Lucky for us, the lead researcher on the project, Johannes F.K. Schmidt, has examined these notes and published a series of papers. What he’s found shows us Luhmann’s life’s work was anything but perfectly planned.

500 publications (that’s just what he got around to)

If you are or have attempted to be a writer, designer, entrepreneur or other creative, you know finishing what you start rarely goes as planned. Somehow Luhmann was able to make that part of the plan.

Maybe this sounds familiar: You get an idea for a project, then a burst of energy. At some point – whether it’s thirty minutes, three hours, or three weeks – something gets in the way. The project lingers in the back of your mind as you address more pressing matters. It unofficially becomes another rusted chassis in the boneyard, forgotten until the next Big Idea.

That’s when it resurfaces as a reminder: Why bother? It will just turn out like the last one.

Luhmann didn’t state a thirty-year project goal then disappear into a cave to carry it out. His magnum opus was just one work of many. In fact, he published 500 times: something like seventy books and over 400 articles.

Perhaps less intimidating and more comforting: He also left behind 150 unfinished works.

Schmidt and his colleagues are able to learn about Luhmann’s creative process because of the unique way he organized his notes. They weren’t sorted top-down, like the folders on your hard drive. Instead, Luhmann arranged the notes in what he himself described as like a “web” – decades before the World Wide Web.

Exactly how he organized his notes is more germane to the cultish followers of his method, known by the German word, Zettelkasten – a pretentious-sounding way of saying, Paper in a box. Suffice to say he branched his notes by codes compiled of alternating numbers and letters, created links amongst notes, and kept a directory of hundreds of keywords covered by the notes.

Within the limitations of physical paper, Luhmann did whatever he could to develop a system with no hierarchy. He described it as a system with “a combination of disorder and order.” From any one note, he could follow links and keywords to any other note in the system. He basically made his own paper Wikipedia, starting in the 1960s.

Because each note has its place, along with subtle clues like how worn a given note is and what’s on the back side of the scrap paper it was written on, researchers have a pretty good idea what Luhmann’s process looked like.

This helps us see how smaller works transformed into bigger works, and bigger works into smaller works. For example, he would stack notes together to write a presentation, and in the process of writing the presentation put additional notes back into his collection. Then he would expand the presentation into a book.

His system also gives us some sense, beyond the 150 unfinished works he left behind, just how many dead-ends and unexpected detours make up a creative career.

As Luhmann said:

“There are sets of ideas that were anticipated to become major complexes and are never elaborated; and there are secondary ideas that came to mind that gradually become more enriched and inflated.” —Niklas Luhmann

Stating a thirty-year project plan up-front then actually carrying it out seems superhuman. The actual story is more relatable. Even in the process of publishing 500 works that built up to his magnum opus, Luhmann in some sense started countless projects he never finished.

By the time he began his professorship in 1969, Luhmann had been compiling notes as he read for decades. He had experimented with methods such as keeping notes within the books he was reading or organizing them into folders before finally settling on his Zettelkasten method.

In 1969, he had been compiling his current collection for seven years. Before starting that collection, he had kept another collection for a decade. He apparently had to start over because he wasn’t satisfied with how the first collection was organized.

When he had started his second collection, his goal hadn’t been to form a theory of society, but an entire other book on administrative theory – which he never wrote. Researchers can see from his collection that his notes on a theory of society were filed deep within the system.

The lesson is useful to any creative who has struggled to finish what they start: What seemed would become his major focus turned out to be nothing. What had been a minor interest grew to define his career.

Not finishing is a part of finishing

When you take on a new project, there’s so much you don’t know. You haven’t built your fantasy world and your new teaching method hasn’t been proven. That you run out of motivation or other things take priority shouldn’t be a surprise. You don’t actually have information that confirms you’re on the right track or that the struggle will be worth it.

As Luhmann’s process shows us, grand visions are rarely carried out from plan to execution. They more often emerge from an improvisational process consisting of a combination of many projects – from tiny notes, to small articles, to big books, to grand theories. Many don’t become anything at all.

So instead of letting those rusted chassis in the boneyard discourage us from trying again, we should accept them as part of the process, and keep in mind Luhmann’s explanation for why he started organizing his work around tiny works that either fizzled out or blazed new trails: “It was obvious to me that I would have to plan for a lifetime not for a book.”

This article originally appeared on Maximum Reverie »

Footnotes

1. Image Credit: Universitätsarchiv St.Gallen | HSGH 022/000941 | CC-BY-SA 4.0 ↩
2. Image Credit: Niklas Luhmann Archive ↩
3. Image Credit: Niklas Luhmann Archive ↩

1. Why the Curious Peak Late: When you’re curious it takes longer to build your foundation.
2. Not finishing what you start is actually pretty smart: The unique paper trail of the man who published 500 – and left 150 unfinished – tells us a lot about how creative work gets done (or doesn’t).
3. 47 lessons from 47 years: self-explanatory.

What’s up with the Substack?

This flurry of Substack articles is part of what Finish What Matters Preview Edition readers will recognize as a period of “coming up for air.” After years of inductively writing a book, I’m deductively revisiting the concepts in various mediums – Substack articles being one of them.

The goal is not only to iterate on the ideas so they come out more crisply, but also to get a feel for viable marketing channels for when the book launches.

If it’s confusing to decide whether to stay subscribed here or subscribe on Substack, I apologize! I myself am a little confused where to put my work in this world of so many walled gardens, and Substack may be a promising channel to get my work in front of more people.

If you’d like to help, I’d appreciate you subscribing to my Substack publication, Maximum Reverie.

Perhaps these articles will all be syndicated here on the blog at some point, but for this moment Substack is the focus of my experimentation.

(I’ve also published this over on Substack, where I’m doing a short (for now) publishing experiment you might want to subscribe and be a part of.)

1. Whenever possible, act now.
2. You’re worth so much more than your eyeballs.
3. What you think is “all in your head,” may actually be in your body. Find a good doctor.
4. Trust your subconscious. It knows your path better than you do.
5. Get therapy.
6. You’re bombarded with mediocre opportunities.
7. Thus, it’s your challenge to ignore mediocre opportunities.
8. You’re bombarded with mediocre friendships and relationships.
9. Thus, it’s your challenge to ignore mediocre friendships and relationships.
10. Most people are dying to distract themselves from their own thoughts.
11. There is a lot of money to be made in distracting people from their own thoughts.
12. Thus, everything around you is built to help people distract themselves from their own thoughts.
13. So, ignore most everything, and make space for your own thoughts.
14. Nobody reads the whole article before commenting.
15. Nearly everybody is “juicing.” They’re making themselves sick trying to catch up with one another.
16. Thus, your challenge is to catch up with your self.
17. You can only know so much.
18. And, your brain is ruled by biases.
19. Thus, you can hardly trust what you think you know.
20. And, you can only know so much about a person.
21. So, if you feel jealous when comparing yourself to someone else, you’re wrong.
22. Take improv classes. It will get you out of your head, and into the moment.
23. Take voice lessons. It really is possible to improve your singing.
24. Only sing in a key that is comfortable for you.
25. Take lessons in a social dance (Salsa, Swing, Tango, etc.) You’ll learn to cooperate, and you’ll have instant community anywhere you travel.
26. Traveling sucks. It’s much better to live in different places for short bursts.
27. What you think is a personality flaw may just be the bad influence of the place where you live.
28. What you think sucks about where you live may just be a flaw in your perception.
29. If you merely suspect something is holding you back, it’s not. You are.
30. When you dream of something, that thing seems impossible.
31. When something you dream of feels impossible, it makes you unhappy.
32. Thus, be comfortable with where you are.
33. But still, dream, while being comfortable with where you are.
34. When you use a bookmark, you invite yourself to forget what you’ve read.
35. Thus, don’t use bookmarks.
36. Smart people do dumb things when the pressure is on.
37. When you’re 29, you’ll feel 28. When you’re 39, you’ll feel 28. When you’re 47, you’ll feel 28.
38. When you meet someone 28, they’ll think you’re 100.
39. Life can get super shitty and nobody wants to hear or talk about it.
40. Losing a parent is good for your art because now you aren’t worried what they’ll think.
41. You think you need to be a complete person to find a partner, but you never will be. You can be “fixed.”
42. When someone’s behavior seems stupid, they probably just value something you don’t.
43. You’ll never “efficient” your way out of a lack of time.
44. Instead of delegating, just don’t do the thing. Being a master is being a slave.
45. The most mundane observations are one step away from the most profound.
46. You think you need to live where the “action” is, but the action is mostly a distraction.
47. Even though it’s cliché to end a list with something pithy, it ties it up nicely. Clichés are clichés for a reason.

Surprisingly I don’t take back any I published when I turned 37, only additions. (If you remember any of those, Wow, am I grateful for you.)

To listen to an audio version of this report, join the Patreon »

Revenue for the first quarter of 2026 was:

• January: $6,269
• February: $2,918
• March: $1,967
• Q1 Total: $11,155

Q4 2025’s revenue was $11,883.

Q1 2026 profits were:

• January: $5,386
• February: $2,217
• March: $478
• Q1 Total: $8,081

Q4 2025’s profit was $7,724.

First quarterly income report

I’ve talked in past reports about my doubts over how much time these reports take to compile, and whether the juice was worth the squeeze. As the months of 2026 went by, I decided to try a quarterly report.

This compresses the time investment both in bookkeeping and report writing. Doing three months of books does not take thrice as much time as one, and writing a quarterly report doesn’t take much longer than a monthly one.

For data consistency, however, I’m still recording each month’s numbers separately.

There’s also the question of how big a ship I am steering. While the ship isn’t currently “big” in terms of revenue, it has certainly gotten bigger over the years in terms of complexity. More books to track means more complicated to collect data.

Yet after years of writing these reports I have a better idea of what my business does and I feel I’ve improved my focus and decision-making. So it’s not as advantageous for me to think things over on a monthly basis as it once was. So maybe quarterly will suffice?

Records

In past months I’ve been breaking lots of record lows in revenue and profit. In fact, March marks a record-low twelve-month income, at $49,474.

But, that record low was on a five-month streak which was briefly broken in January, at $52,221.

However, profit has trended back up to $31,888 at the end of March, from the record-low of $25,771 in December.

That’s because expenses have been lower. March marks the end of a four-month streak of record-low twelve-month ad spend, with $10,528. The streak started in December with $17,599, the lowest since December 2019, when it was $18,214.

(If there was advertising that clearly worked, I would be buying it!)

Direct sales of books bounced back up to 30% of book revenue over the six months ending in March. At the end of December, that was only 8.7%.

Finish What Matters Preview Edition complete!

The big focus in Q1 was the Preview Edition of Finish What Matters. In a primary launch and a secondary launch, I sold over $5,700 in the various levels of the Preview Edition.

That just edged us above the stretch goal at which all Preview Edition customers will get a copy of the audiobook.

I’ve broken up the numbers below to separate purchases of the book portion of the Preview Edition from elements of the more premium levels. There was a three-lecture series, and a three-session small-group workshop.

There were 124 total customers:

• 98 Basic Customers @ $20: $1,960
• 15 Lecture Customers @ $89: $1,335
• 7 Lecture Recordings @ $59: $413
• 4 Cohort Students @ $500: $2,000
• Total Earnings: $5,708

For a point of reference, I earned $4,220 from the Preview Edition of Mind Management. However that was purely from $20 equivalents to the “Basic” package – 211 sales.

So from one perspective, I converted a smaller number of Preview Edition customers. From another perspective, I made more money, and in the process built lectures and a small cohort course that should make the contents of the book better, and that can be future sources of revenue.

I locked into “devastating focus” mode for the quarter, and just delivered the final chapters of the Preview Edition (ahead of schedule!)

If you missed the Preview Edition, or want to be sure to get the Kindle edition, Finish What Matters is available for pre-order!

Media experiments for FWM

As I let the Preview Edition manuscript incubate a bit, I’m currently in a sort of “coming up for air” period in which I’m doing various media experiments for repurposing some of the ideas within FWM.

The purposes of these experiments are twofold: 1) Get a feel for what channels might be a good use of my energy when the launch comes around and 2) Experiment with repurposing the ideas to various mediums, which should in turn make the book better as I edit.

The past two weeks I gave myself permission to spend my mornings working on reels for both TikTok and Instagram. I once again find I’m able to get pretty solid views on my reels, but it continues to be difficult to convert those views into anything.

For example, I’m trying to give away a chapter of the Preview Edition as a lead magnet, and I’ve gotten about 18 email addresses on Instagram and one on TikTok.

Part of this process is also anticipating podcast questions and pontificating about what might be the most effective way to answer them. That process also informs some reels, but of course the medium is the message and what’s good for a podcast isn’t necessarily good for a reel and vice versa.

Migrating email to Kit + BigMailer

My focus in the afternoons, evenings, and sometimes late into the nights of the past month has been migrating my email marketing from ActiveCampaign to a combination of Kit + BigMailer. And I’m really excited about it!

I think we’re entering a new era in email marketing. Automation platforms like AC and Kit are getting really expensive, and how much of your list is in a sophisticated automation at any given moment?

Meanwhile, platforms like Kit have recommendation networks that can help creators grow (as do Substack and Beehiv).

And LLMs have made it easy for those who are merely somewhat-technical to use more sophisticated tools like Amazon Simple Email Service, which costs like 10¢ per 1,000 emails sent, and has excellent deliverability (so long as you can stay below their maximum unsubscribe, complaint, and bounce thresholds).

These recommendation networks fill creators’ lists with low-quality leads, which can’t be good for the sender reputations and deliverability rates of these platforms (Substack in particular I’ve heard a lot of complaints about).

So, my new email marketing stack will look like this:

• Kit: Processing new leads through lead magnets, email courses, and the recommendation network, while nurturing existing Shopify customers through their integration.
• BigMailer: A front-end for Amazon SES, for sending the weekly newsletter, these blog updates, and other bigger blasts.
• Zapier: For keeping subscription preferences synced across platforms.

I’ve yapped a few times in recent years about why I still think RSS is an awesome technology, and I think that’s increasingly true. If you’re a content creator more interested in getting your work to readers than squeezing every last dime out of them, it makes sense to have a more decentralized or “federated” email strategy.

So Love Mondays is still powered by RSS, and the blog updates via email are, too. But I’ve realized Substack publications have RSS. So I’ve considered making that where I publish – for the growth potential – which would push the email updates to my existing list (you as a subscriber wouldn’t know the difference). By the way I syndicate LM to Substack if that is your platform of choice – I could use the subscribers.

But, RSS support isn’t great on the ESPs. ActiveCampaign’s is alright, but it got buggy recently and they don’t care about it. Kit’s templating is wonky for RSS. But BigMailer’s is perfect.

So if you are reading this report via email, you may be in the portion of subscribers already getting email via BigMailer instead of ActiveCampaign.

I’ve long had my eye on Kit, but the difference never felt urgent enough or the timing never felt right for what I knew would be an arduous migration process.

But ActiveCampaign has sent some signals lately that I interpret as them surrendering the creator market and focusing on enterprise. Along with that they have made some low-integrity moves that made me want to be less dependent on them or any single ESP.

It does feel great to have the automations set up on Kit. The user experience is so much faster and easier than AC. Their automation builder isn’t as “do whatever you want” as ActiveCampaign, but with some creativity you can do most things. It’s genius how versatile they’ve made such a simple interface.

I’m also excited about their Shopify integration, which will allow me to create follow-up sequences based upon customers’ purchase behavior. I think AC had something like that available, but it was on a much more expensive plan.

If you’re interested in sending email blasts for cheap, please use my affiliate link for BigMailer (it’s so cheap I won’t make much, but it’s so cool – just ask an LLM how to link it with Amazon SES).

It seems anyone who might be interested already switched to Kit long ago, but I have a link for Kit, too. And if you’re in charge of big enterprise email-marketing initiatives ActiveCampaign is still powerful.

Spotify payments now quarterly

Sometime last year, Findaway Voices split off into Spotify and InAudio. That’s been pretty confusing and I haven’t paid much attention to it, but I did eventually figure out that Spotify is now only paying on a quarterly basis.

You won’t see the breakdown in these reports, but it definitely got my attention when I got my latest payment from them.

Okay so I guess that’s only like $166 a month, but the way things have been going lately this has me considering trying some Spotify ads or other ways of promoting my audiobooks there.

ActiveCampaign affiliate revenue (almost) disappeared

I had thought going into 2026 that I still had another year of collecting revenue for my ActiveCampaign referrals. But it turned out they had some sneaky language in their agreements migrating affiliates to the new system.

So something like $15,000 of revenue I was anticipating for 2026 pretty much vanished. There’s a couple hundred dollars in my PartnerStack account that I haven’t transferred over yet – still considering whether maybe I should start counting that revenue on an accrual basis.

As you can imagine, this accelerated the switch I already had planned after they increased their prices without sufficient notice.

Digital Zettelkasten in Spanish! ¡Zettelkasten Digital en Español!

Amazon has made automatic translations available to some authors, and one book they made it available for was Digital Zettelkasten. So I clicked a couple buttons and literally within an hour there was a Spanish version available on the Kindle store.

My wife is a native speaker and I’m functionally fluent, so we read it together, and it’s a good translation! There wasn’t one part that was weird.

The only limitation is that words within graphics aren’t translated, nor, strangely, is the table of contents. However, they don’t allow you to edit any part of the translation. But I did upload a custom cover.

Spanish is definitely a sweet-spot language for automatic translation like this because the market is huge, yet you have to be selling really well to get a translation deal.

I once commissioned a translation of How to Write a Book, and I’ve made like $750 off the $250 translation in eight years – and there was a fair amount of extra translation and work I hadn’t anticipated.

This one has been out not even a month and I’ve sold 11 copies and made less than $5, so it remains to be seen that it contributes meaningfully to revenue.

MMT, HTS, and HSB are all eligible for translation and I’m putting it off – I don’t know exactly why. It would be cool for my wife to finally be able to read my books. Looks like you can also translate into German.

January Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

January Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting

February Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

February Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting

March Income

Book Sales

Misc. Products

Affiliates / Advertising

Reader Support

Services

March Expenses

General

Advertising

Hosting

This means that every Preview Edition customer will get the audiobook (when it comes out).

I’ve been making arrangements to produce a top-notch audiobook (read by me) with The Block House (Tim Ferriss, Ryan Holiday, Paul Millerd), so I’m very excited we have reached this goal and I hope you are too!

As I write this, there are about 5 hours left to join (closing 7 p.m. Central Time). Six of the ten chapters are available for reading right now.

Join the Preview Edition now »

You can get instant access to most of the Preview Edition (6/10 chapters ~27,000 words) by joining right now.

I’ve even re-instated the stretch goal, which you can see on the page.

Notice that you can also gain access to the recordings of the series of classes I’ve delivered over previous weeks.

The rest of the chapters will be delivered on the schedule, as listed, well before the first-edition release.

I’m very excited to be even closer to finishing, with readers already benefiting from this book. I hope you will join, and be a part of making it a reality.

What’s the harm in taking on one more project? We can get some idea by asking the question, How many people need to be in a room before two have the same birthday?

The answer is counterintuitive, and sheds light on the hidden complexity that holds us back from finishing what we start.

To be totally sure at least two have the same birthday, you’d need 366 people in a room (assuming no leap birthdays), but it gets really interesting when we ask how many it takes to have a 50/50 chance.

Using rough intuitive math, you might figure, There are 365 potential birthdays, so maybe about 180 people for a 50% chance two have the same?

If you have two people in a room, you have one potential shared birthday.

When you add just one more person to the room, the number of potential shared birthdays triples.

When you go from three to four people, the potential shared birthdays jump from three to six.

To have a 50% chance two people have the same birthday, you only need twenty three people. By that point, there are 253 potential shared birthdays.

The birthday paradox is a paradox because it is hard for our brains to grasp this rapid rise in connections. Now try to apply this to your creative projects, and everything else in your life.

Let’s say you have your day job, your home life, and your podcast. These areas can conflict with each other in three different ways. For example, you can’t record your podcast at work but your house is only quiet enough to record while everyone is at work or school.

Add a social life with friends, and potential conflicts jump from three to six. Add one more project, say a rock band, and now you have ten potential conflicts.

When you get an idea to add on another project, you aren’t just adding one more thing – you’re adding that one thing and how it affects every other thing. You can very easily find yourself overwhelmed.

This idea is borrowed from Chapter 3 of Finish What Matters. It will debut in a couple weeks, explaining how to turn Shiny Object Syndrome into a shiny object strategy. But the Preview Edition closes in just a few days! Join now »

I’ve cooked up a very cool stretch goal: Free audiobook for all (Preview Edition customers).

I’ve already been in talks with The Block House in Austin about producing the audiobook – to be read by me (they do audio for Ryan Holiday, Tim Ferriss, and Paul Millerd). If I can reach $5,500 total proceeds from the Preview Edition, I will give the audiobook to all Preview Edition customers, at all levels.

The audiobook will be delivered in the BookFunnel app, available on your favorite device, and available for download on MP3 – estimated delivery: September 2026.

If an additional $2,500 with only a week left seems like a lot after it took three weeks to get to $3,000, consider:

• The last day of campaigns are the biggest (sometimes 40–50% of my sales come in on the last day)
• There are still seats available for the small-group finishing cohort. At $500 each, they can get us close, quickly. Sign up to get a project done in Q1.
• More of the book is available than before (Chapter 2 was just released, ahead of schedule)

Learn more and sign up for the Preview Edition »

I hope to be in your ears in an audiobook, soon.