The Creators

Most people lead a life of doing stupid syntactic stuff that other people tell them to do. I’m sure you remember the TPS reports from Office Space. Filling out forms, forms, and more forms, putting part A into slot B, you’re a cog in the machine, and then you go home and have beers and watch some shows. This is, literally, 99% of the population. And it’s not just confined to low- or mid-wage jobs. Investment bankers fall into this category, as do most consultants. Whether you’re an admin in a doctor’s office or you’re cranking on spreadsheets, you’re simply making the doughnuts.

So very few of these people have the capacity to create. And I’m not talking about organizational creativity in an organizational capacity, where you dream up a fancy bond covenant for a new issue, in a corporate structure where it’s all laid out for you—I’m talking about real unstructured create-it-from-nothing achievement, which is an entirely different animal. Writing books and painting paintings, but also creating a business from scratch with a radical new idea. You have people who rise to the highest levels of government, the military, and corporate America, and yes, those are achievements, but not in a creative sense. It takes skill, yes, in navigating the politics of an organization. And these are achievements. But they are not creators. So few people in this country have created anything worthwhile. When they leave this earth, there will be nothing to remember them by.

Take books, for example. How many times have you heard someone say, “I have always wanted to write a book.” Let me tell you how to write a book. Turn on the computer, open Microsoft Word, and start typing. There is no secret. There is no secret formula. Yes, I have some talent in writing, but the difference between me, with four books, and you, with none, is that I actually fucking did it. I did the hard thing. There is nothing special about writing a book—lots of people have done it. I have people send me their janky self-published books with Fischer-Price covers and ghastly formatting, and you know what? It’s still a book. They did it. The created something from scratch and offered it to the world. So what if only their fifth grade teacher and step uncle-in-law read it? It’s still creating. The foregoing is also true for any work of art or music.

The same applies to business. As I am fond of saying, you just do the hard thing. You solve one problem, then another problem, then another problem, and at the end of it you have a big pile of money. This is scary to some people, because most people aren’t problem solvers, they’re just good at doing the stupid syntactic thing they’ve been doing for years. I ran into an old friend last night who is thinking of starting a motorcycle repair business. He knows how to fix motorcycles. He knows nothing about business, but he will figure it out. “Figure it out” are three very powerful words. Let’s say you wanted to open a bar. Well, you would have to find a location, remodel it, get a liquor license, order furniture, hire staff, all that shit. Nobody knows how to do these things other than people who have opened bars before. You just figure it out. You wanted to know what I did before I started The Daily Dirtnap? I looked up every financial newsletter I could find, and wrote to the editors, asking them about their business, what they liked, what they didn’t like, what kinds of problems I could run into, etc. Some of them wrote back and said that I should abandon all hope, that I had zero shot at success, which served as a powerful motivator. But the point is, I did the hard thing. I figured it out. There is no secret formula—you just have to do it.

You hear the word grifter being thrown around a lot these days, especially on Twitter. What does it mean? A grifter is someone who is selling a secret formula to people who want a shortcut, like most crypto guys, real estate speculators, gurus, furus, yogis, and some priests. People find shortcuts to be irresistible. Follow these seven easy steps. Anyone who has subscribed to my newsletter will know that I have never said it is easy. In fact, if you’re doing it right, it’s really hard, and you have your ass in a jam about two-thirds of the time. Always beware of someone selling easy solutions, because there are no easy solutions. There is only the hard way, the way filled with pain and struggle.

I get hate mail from time to time, or at least unkind mail. These people come from all walks of life, but they all have one thing in common: they have never known actual achievement. If you have never known actual achievement, then you can be critical of the achievements of others. These people are fucking turd burglars. I actually sat down to write an entire essay on this two months ago—the mark of a good person is a man who allows himself to experience joy at someone else’s achievement. There are seven deadly sins, but envy is the worst of them. I mean, this is basically the entire premise of Atlas Shrugged. I outgrew that book a long time ago, but if you zoom out, you will see that society is perpetually engaged in a pitched battle between people who can, and people who can’t, or won’t. Entire nations have been destroyed by envy. 100 million people have been killed by envy. On a smaller scale, it’s DMs from randos telling me that my wife is uglier than a dog (this happened) and that I can peddle my grift in hell (this also happened). The definition of a turd burglar is the person who hates success. They are everywhere. They are in finance, they are in law, they are in academia, and they are in government. If you become successful, there will be a horde of people who want to take you down. That’s human nature, it’s ugly, and I come face-to-face with it every day.

Usually when I talk like this, I get accused of being an elitist, which is a funny thing to call someone who grew up in a 1,200 square foot house on a $10,000 income. I am not unique—there are people like me everywhere, people who grew up under difficult circumstances who overcame great obstacles to achieve success. These people tend not to be very sympathetic to other people’s bullshit excuses as to why they can’t do something. They are the last true conservatives, not the faux populists like Tucker Carlson, the “men of the people,” unless those people approach his table at Per Se, when he will call the maître d’ to have them removed. Nobody talks about personal responsibility anymore, not since the early 1990s. Let’s bring it back. Let’s reintroduce the idea that where you are today is the sum total of all the decisions you have made in your life, good and bad, and you are responsible for them. Where you are is the product of all the choices you’ve made, and you are in control of the choices you will make in the future. If you ordered NO WORRIES, thank you—the first chapter is going to blow your head off.

People spend way too much time thinking about politics. Politicians are destroyers, not creators. The most well-known creator today is Elon Musk, and as you have probably noticed, he is up to his ass in alligators. Elon is flawed—most great people are, in one way or another, but one of the most disheartening things I’ve seen online in the last ten years was the gaggle of otherwise right-thinking finance people who participated in $TSLAQ. They tweeted about Elon and Tesla for years, trying to destroy him. Imagine spending that much time and energy trying to destroy another human being. That is a turd burglar, right there. Terrible people. Oh, I know the motivation—Elon was a fraud and they were protecting the small investor in the name of truth, justice, and the American way <salutes flag>. No, they were taking up about 80% of their brainspace with hatred of another person. Screw these people. Life being what it is, I don’t like everyone, but I have never, ever rooted for someone else to fail.

Creating is an act of love—love of self, love of man, love of man’s achievements. I spend my time thinking about how to spread joy. I have selfish motivations, sure—I want to sell a lot of subscriptions and books. But isn’t that what capitalism is about? Each, working for our own benefit, which results in benefit for others? I don’t waste a second thinking about the opinions these achievement-less people in their stupid syntactic jobs. When you write a book, then I will listen to your opinions on how to write a book. Funny, people who write books don’t criticize other people’s books. Ever. Wonder why.