In many ways, it appears that the age of the dilettante is upon us. This creative cataclysm, inspired by the death of old-guard gatekeepers seems inevitable. Music labels, agents, newspapers, and even movie studios are becoming increasingly irrelevant as the world constantly tilts towards less professionalism. People like Mr. Beast and Charli XCX appear to demonstrate that anyone who starts early can write fantastic music, publish the next American Novel, become a YouTube Star, or more generically, become world-class at anything. The thought being that if gatekeepers get out of the way, that the next wave of media revolutionaries will sweep the globe, revitalizing and taking over everything.
I’m here to tell you that appearances are deceiving, that the revolution in an important sense is a lie. That for most degrees of success, you’ll need to work with incubators to truly push the envelope in anything in a meaningful sense. You might see people like Gary Tan, or the business coach industry say that anyone can become an amazing leader, but the subtext, or the part that’s not said out-loud is that every successful person must be humble, they must appear democratic, egalitarian, neutered. Our culture, despite a couple of notable counterexamples preaches that one must keep their ego from sight. Taking the red-pill, becoming woke, or more generally seizing control of one’s one destiny is a process where you begin to recognize the difficulty of fighting inertia takes time, a bit of insanity, and a will-to-mission that needs to be able to hook you for years before you can really start to ‘make it’. While it’s certainly aspirational to invoke survivorship bias, and to look at those who make it big, being big is anything but mainstream in the circles that push people to that level of success.
My first publication was in 2019, which may lead to the impression that I’d learned to write a little bit before that. That impression would be wrong. I started learning persuasion in early-middle school where I struggled to be coherent. I spent the years between middle and high school persuading people towards contrarian ideas, learning to debate, writing deeply personal college essays, trying slam poetry, improv comedy, and generically discovering myself. By 2019, I had begun to internalize frameworks for convincing people, and wanted to try my hand with written word publications.
In 2019, I started a libertarian club. I began regularly columning for the school newspaper where my articles would often be among the most clicked, despite not being especially relevant to the political climate. I began to be known as the contrarian on staff (despite not getting paid), and I grew into talk radio as a natural supplement to my anemic media presence. At this point, I wanted to supercharge my trajectory and began publishing my work in the political review, campus reform, professional economic blogs, NGO publications, and wherever would take me.
From there, I worked my way into a Leadership Institute training program, an America’s Future Foundation Writing Fellowship, and several other training programs to really build out my skills. Despite that, I didn’t feel that I had much mentorship, aside from a few professors who really sought to improve my persuasive skills in the realms of economics and history. Show up to office hours, folks!
When it became clear that my writing was inflammatory enough to the point where my publications starting getting spiked by my college’s editorial board, I figured it would be a more valuable use of time to begin my own blog. Towards the end of college, I was writing a lot, but I wanted to focus on my career.
Once I started my career, I decreased my output significantly until I realized how unhappy I was at my first job. Why would I give up something that gives me joy, and had been part of my lifelong project since I was twelve? I tried several startup ideas, but primarily focused on daily writing. I wanted to know that I could see the words I’ve written pile up. I wanted to be able to visualize the tomes and ideas that I’ve put out into the world.
Since early 2024, I’ve been writing almost every day, oftentimes multiple times a day, occasionally for separate outlets, to ensure that I remain tuned in, thoughtful, and engaged.
Most of the work I write is not up to professional quality, and I don’t try to make it so. Instead, I see constant writing and revision as a process that allows me to better become myself. Much like how Bryan Caplan has taken essays he’s previously written and published them into books, I figured I’d build up my ouvre before doing the same.
The other part of great writing is great reading. I’m constantly absorbing bloggers, classic literature, and other thinkers that I believe have a strong grasp of English language, persuasion, and philosophy. I often try to emulate the parts of style that works for them, and fit it to my own voice.
In short, I’m a better writer than you because I write a lot more, read a lot more, and have devoted large parts of my life to it. While it’s certainly possible that you can become a good writer, the odds are you won’t care about it as much as I do.
Isadore Johnson's Website 