Tessera

Listening to a podcast at 2x speed while answering emails isn’t "learning." It’s just noise with a productivity badge. If you want real leverage, turn off your phone, sit in silence, and read a damn book.

Read More. Read Often. Read Every Day.

Stop Looking for Productivity Hacks. Pick Up a Damn Book.

joanwestenberg.com

Budget is never your ultimate advantage. You can build the best product, hire top-tier talent, and raise millions; but strategy without belief is dead on arrival. Why the "3-to-1 Rule" decides who wins in business and in war: open.substack.com/pub/thedaily...

US AI labs: "Scraping the entire open internet without consent is fair use! It's transformative!" Also US AI labs when someone distills their models: "Wait no not like that, that's intellectual property theft" New post on why distillation is just the industry looking in the mirror:

The Great AI Double Standard

Distillation Is a Mirror; the US Labs Just Hate What They See

joanwestenberg.com

If your data is bad, adding more compute just helps your AI learn the wrong things faster. Before you buy more GPUs or double your model parameters, ask: Do we actually need more compute, or do we just need better data?

Julius Caesar didn’t conquer empires by waiting for 100% certainty; he moved at 80% and adjusted on the fly. In a world of slow committees, speed is an unfair advantage. open.substack.com/pub/thedaily...

If OpenAI doesn’t submit their Hugging Face "exploit" in the Disruptive PR category at Cannes Lions this year, what are we even doing here

(Free download) Everything is seamless. Frictionless. Immediate. You can summon a meal, a driver, a dopamine hit, or a partner with the slide of a thumb. The world has been engineered to demand absolutely nothing of you. And it's making us soft, uncreative, and fragile. onfriction.com/

"Growth hacking" and hustle culture are a series of stolen victories. Are you building a legacy, or just chasing numbers? open.substack.com/pub/thedaily...

Sun Tzu ranked strategic outcomes, best to worst: - Thwart the enemy's plans - Break his alliances - Fight his army - Besiege his cities Notice fighting comes third. The whole point is to win without it.

Subdue your enemy without fighting

July 20, 2026

open.substack.com

The reason humans don’t want to generate personalized AI movies is the same reason humans don’t talk about their dreams: Nobody else gives a shit

Humans Don't Want Infinite Content. We Want Common Ground.

In summer 1999, a kid could whisper “I see dead people,” and every person in the room knew exactly what he meant. That is what a movie actually is. It’s not ...

youtu.be

Developers have GitHub contribution graphs to track their consistency. Writers deserve the same. Kerouac automatically tracks your publishing frequency across Substack, Ghost, & Medium. Streaks, gaps, and all. Finally, proof of work for your words... www.kerouacapp.com/

Don’t ask: “What niche should I choose?” Ask: “What can I see because of where I’ve been - and who else desperately needs help seeing it too?” That question will give you a body of work. That’s a lot better than a “content” category.

Don’t pick a writing niche. Find the one only you can own.

How to build a niche from first principles

joanwestenberg.com

The best ideas hit you in the shower, then vanish by the time you open a doc. Kerouac’s Inbox captures half-thoughts the moment they arrive. Drop them into the drafting board when you're ready. Everything from idea to published. $8/mo. 30 days free. No credit card. www.kerouacapp.com/

The AI industry has confused abundance with value. More drafts. More images. More summaries. More angles. More options. But “more” is not a product. It’s often the product refusing to do its job. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/infinite-c...

great, now I can chase them via email to get them to look at the portal

"Link in bio" for writers is usually a mess of random URLs. Kerouac syncs everything you've ever shipped on Substack, Ghost, & Medium into one clean profile. One URL. Put it in every bio. Let people find your work without a scavenger hunt.

KEROUAC // The studio for pro bloggers

Sync everywhere you publish, capture every idea, move it down the board, and watch the graph fill in. The one place to run a serious blog.

kerouacapp.com

In a sea of thousands of VC firms, differentiation is the only thing that matters. Acting like a commodity makes you a commodity. You need a public identity that separates you from the thousands of other checkbooks. You need to write.

The VC who writes wins | SELF

Three kinds of investor exist right now: the silent, the ones who outsource their thinking to AI, and the ones who publish their own unfiltered, messy, human brains. The third group beats the first two every time.

thisisstudioself.com

New on Kerouac: link in bio tools that let you add up to 15 custom links to your writing profile. Shipped and ready: www.kerouacapp.com/u/joan

The unexamined life is fine, actually. It's the over-examined life that never ships anything.

Your writing workflow shouldn't be: - Ideas in Apple Notes - Drafts in Google Docs - Schedule in Notion - Tracked on 3 different platforms Kerouac is one studio for the whole job. A kanban pipeline from spark to shipped. No more scattered docs.

KEROUAC // The studio for pro bloggers

Sync everywhere you publish, capture every idea, move it down the board, and watch the graph fill in. The one place to run a serious blog.

kerouacapp.com

I have a bread machine. Ingredients cost pennies. The recipe is 5,000 years old. The machine does everything with one button. I've used it 3 times in 3 years. Americans still buy 10 million loaves of pre-baked bread every day. Which is why SaaS isn't doomed. And Basecamp, etc will be fine.

The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn’t doomed

No, you're not going to code your own Notion

joanwestenberg.com

RIP Lindsey Graham. You taught us all that it's never too late to abandon every single thing you claimed to believe in as recently as 60 seconds ago. Brave. Iconic. Unhinged. We'll miss you.

We replaced God with the Gross Domestic Product. But we kept on feeling guilty about resting and virtuous about toiling. The religious veneer faded, and the moral weight of work never left. Rest shouldn't require an excuse. But here we are.

The performance of business is the dumbest Ponzi scheme of all time

How often do you answer “how are you?” with a sigh and a rundown of your packed schedule? We’ve built a society where exhaustion is a currency of social stan...

youtu.be

Tech millionaires dropping fortunes on longevitymaxxing are repeating the exact same psychology as ancient kings eating mercury pills. They view death as a technical problem waiting for a technical solution. It's a desperate refusal to sit with the discomfort of finitude.

Given the alternative, I find myself quite ready to die

On longevitymaxxing and the tide

joanwestenberg.com

A blog is the only employee you have who works for you 24/7, sells your ideas while you sleep, and never asks for a raise.

The true metric of strategic genius is never the accumulation of battlefield laurels or the bodies left in your wake. It’s the preservation of the state. The ultimate victory is a battle rendered entirely unnecessary. open.substack.com/pub/thedaily...