Cultish Creative Weekly Recap (3/1/2025)

Great writers are great thinkers, and great thinkers can become great business people (of all stripes!), if they apply the same mental attack to getting clarity from their thoughts, as they do to getting clear about what they want to work in the world.

But there’s also one more wrinkle about people walking this line: sometimes they burnout. Sometimes they burn out bad. Because if you are trying really really hard to make stuff happen, sometimes it catches up with you. And until you have a system for avoiding burnout, for not self-destructing your own ability to think, you’ve got nothing.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff is the founder of Ness Labs and author of Tiny Experiments (out next week, pre-order it, I got a sneak peak and it’s fantastic). Chris Mayer is a well known investor and investment writer (100 Baggers is great), with a heavy philosophy streak too (How Do You Know and Dear Fellow Time Binder are two of my favorites on the topic of general semantics). And you know what? They’ve both learned to deal with burnout.

This is all about experiments, finding out where and when to go deeper, and how to have fun along the way - only on Just Press Record (look for it wherever you get your podcasts):

Over on Excess Returns, the always fascinating Mike Green returned for a whirlwind tour of markets, economics, and yes, policy decisions. He expands my brain in unexpected ways every time we talk.

And, speaking of mind expanders, Jack Forehand and I went back through prior episodes and clips of Warren Pies to discuss, in case you need more tools to think about the world today.

Personal Archive entries this week were maybe a little extra personal:

I kept thinking of this Magnetic Fields song leading up to my wife’s 40th. You should play it now too. It’s so good.

I’m deep in the weeds of thinking about how my work-work connects to my less obviously connected to work-work work. The exercise I’m going through is one I take other business owners through all of the time. It starts with understanding the core emotional transformations you create with where you put your effort (here’s mine), and it continues with stepping back and finding ways to communicate “this is why I’m predisposed to be good at these transformations” (here’s my riff on that too). Stay tuned for more on this.

I was going back through old notes and realized this quote never showed up in the Personal Archive before. It’s from Geoffrey Miller, and it’s all about how he thinks marketing is the most important invention of the modern era. If you believe in the power of stories, as I most certainly do, this quote will haunt you for years too (in a good way).

Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s idea that you can transform burning out into burning up with a (healthy, productive) phoenix-worthy fire is one I expect to share a lot in the future. Her choice to ask people to “learn with me” as opposed to “learn from me” on her public writing journey hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s such a simple reframe, but for anybody attempting to work on something new, to find community around a new set of interests at any transition point in life, this makes for great advice.