What Abundant Systems Feel Like

Sometimes it can be hard to explain, but you know it when you feel it.

When it comes to writing, I tend to intellectualize everything - I think about a topic from lots of different angles, I break it down into specific pieces, and I push out the words in structures that fit those pieces. I see the world in systems, data, and numbers. If you like those things, you’ll enjoy the majority of my writing.

But today, I wanted to explore things from a different angle: feelings.

We just wrapped up a month-long cohort of Foster, which is a writer-editor collective that embodies the ideas of abundant systems.

My goal for the cohort: to become a “professional writer”. I’ve been writing online for the past 4+ years. I’ve been doing Foster cohorts for the last 6 months. I’ve written on different platforms, with different goals, and with different ideas. But mostly, I had one overarching goal: get the ideas out of my head and into the world.

I’ve gotten to the point I can do that pretty effortlessly. I’ll write what I’m thinking about and I’ll do it without letting resistance stop me. Except, I’ve realized something: I’m really bad at promoting myself and my work. I’ve been hiding behind hitting the publish button on a blog, or dropping a tweet, and letting that be it. I even know why.

It’s because I’m afraid. Not of the external world, but of myself. I saw what the idea of self-promotion could turn into when I turned into a monster back in 2020, throwing my words everywhere online, injecting myself into conversations, and using my words to spark fights.

The worst part is that it worked. When I first started writing online during the pandemic, I had no issues with sharing what I was writing. A month in, I was enamored with the numbers, the analytics, the data. And I wanted them to go up. I had visions of what the numbers going up would mean, and I took that vision of the future and combined them with some strong emotions in the moment, and unleashed myself on the world. Or at least the internet, because that was all I saw in front of me.

1 weekend. 200K views. Dopamine flooding my brain as I refreshed and refreshed, watching the numbers go up. On social media, throwing my link all over the internet. Watching the armies online clash because of me - one on my side and one the enemy.

Except, something wasn’t right. Something was off. After the rush wore off, I didn’t feel like myself anymore. It was hard to notice though, because I didn’t know who I was. I had started on a journey of self-discovery after realizing I had lost who I was in a sea of work, medication, and the expectations of others. Writing was helping me figure out who I was, who I could be, who I wanted to be. So when I started to think about the people behind the numbers, the impact I was having, it didn’t seem to align with who I wanted to be. My writing had shifted from self-discovery to self-promotion. And that took me down a path I wasn’t interested in being on.

I also started to realize that it didn’t matter which side anyone was on. Nobody was truly reading what I had written. There was nuance there, but that was all lost in the inherent tribalism of the moment. The words didn’t matter; the blog post was simply a battleground for the armies that were already fighting. As were the social media sites.

Turns out, I didn’t matter at all. I was simply a match that was lit and dropped into the gas can. The ignitor, but insignificant to the end result. Once it was lit, I had no control over the blaze I had started.

Imagine my surprise when the online went offline and I suddenly received physical hate mail about a week after the blog was published. Turns out, the internet and the real world weren’t as separated as I believed they were. Have you ever had to call the cops about receiving suspicious mail? And then explain to them that you wrote stuff online that people got mad about? Watched as they opened up a couple of cards containing threats and nasty messages?

After a weekend, the excitement faded. I no longer found fun online. My social media was still burning. Every day, getting notifications about what a terrible person I was, finding out I was added to lists for people to more easily harass me, just seeing nothing but hate. I was fielding attacks constantly. My boss let me know that there were calls coming in, trying to have me fired. I didn’t do anything actually wrong, so they weren’t going to do anything. I had simply written about a fight I got into with my dad over politics, and it seems like that hit some exposed nerves. I ended up getting rid of social media entirely, because it just wasn’t worth it anymore. Unless you’ve been the subject of an internet dogpile, it’s really hard to know what it feels like. I’ll tell you: it sucks. It’s terrible for your mental health. And it’s made me refuse to join in when I see people banding together to attack the latest person online.

I realized something as I looked around at the aftermath: that wasn’t the person I wanted to be. And it wasn’t the person who started writing online and trying to share his personal journey of self-discovery in the hopes that it would help someone else that was earlier in their journey.

So who was it?

I think the best way to describe it is that I was possessed by the algorithm. The algorithm started driving the bus and I became a passenger. I saw the numbers going up and understood how those numbers could map to future income. I read all of the success stories about how people went from nothing to making a great living writing online. I went from seeing a salary that was barely growing each year to imagining an abundant future that had unlimited growth potential. That’s the first time I saw the curve, truly saw it and understood what that could mean. You know the one.

I saw that curve, and I wanted to have it. I was tired of working harder and harder while not really moving. It was a glimpse of a future of freedom, where the work I put in actually compounded over time. Where the stuff I did actually had an impact on my future.

One that I didn’t have to ask for. One that didn’t have people holding me back, telling me I hadn’t been in a position long enough to move up, telling me I didn’t have enough experience while neglecting the experience I had in doing the work without the title, telling me I wasn’t a good fit.

In a nutshell, I recognized that the internet had given us an abundant future, and I wanted to be part of that, instead of a line item on a scarce budget.

The first thing I did when I envisioned that abundant future was to delve into the forces at play, the ones that altered my behaviors into something unrecognizable, and the amplifiers into which I projected my messages. And I realized something incredibly important: there was a disconnect in the incentives between the people with the data and the people without the data. When you are looking at the data and the money you make is tied to that data, you end up losing track of the humans that data represents. When you are paid on views, you don’t care about the emotional state of the viewer. It’s all about getting that data point added to your graph.

I took those ideas and packaged them up into something I thought the people above me at work would appreciate. I got buy-in from around the organization, and then I hit some brick walls: “that’s not how we do things here” and “if you build it, we’ll own it”.

Then, once I realized corporate life was no longer for me, I looked to the horizon, the other side of the corporate world, and saw the Promised Land: startups. I quit that corporate grind and “launched” a startup. By that, I mean I did the things that I thought a founder should do. I tried to move fast and break things. I tried to raise money. I tried to change the world with a vision.

And none of it worked. Just more rejections.

Six months into my startup journey, I shut down that startup and went back to the drawing board.

While on my own journey, I had been following a startup that was building in public. They had made it all look easy. They were sharing their progress. I could see the love they had for their users and the love their users had for them.

And then I got the opportunity to join them. I jumped at the chance and began to learn about how startups actually worked.

It was like a dream. A month in, I was in San Francisco to work with the team in person for a few days. We got invited to the house of one of the company’s investors. I got to look at the Golden Gate Bridge from a hot tub/pool. It was a completely new experience for me. Blew my mind.

I felt like I was in a new world. It didn’t feel like work at all. The team worked so hard, and the focus was on the user. Users loved the product, which wasn’t something I was used to. There was only one thing I noticed that felt odd: occasionally, people would suddenly be gone. Not in large numbers, but I was always surprised. But I assumed it was simply part of the life of a startup. Overall, we were growing more than we weren’t, so I didn’t think too much of it. I saw what top performing teams could do.

And I wanted to contribute as much as I could to the team and their mission. I wanted to share not only my skills as a software engineer, but also my expertise in different areas. I’d been studying the future: I saw where things were going. I identified areas we could leverage trends before anyone else saw them. Multiple times, I tried to expand my role into a more strategic one. I knew I could do so much more if leadership incorporated my knowledge and ideas. I knew where things were heading and I was trying to help steer the ship. So much information in my head, so many experiences beyond just writing code.

And I was told over and over that leadership only needed me to write code. They didn’t need me anywhere else.

I didn’t let it phase me. I was still going to continue down the paths I was on. Exploring the ideas I had. Continuing to write about the ideas I had and build other products on the side so I could contribute even more to the company. Side projects were embraced by the company as a way to develop skills and even use our product to help. Which made it feel even weirder to me that the extra skills I was developing weren’t being used to help the company.

Then, I finally had a breakthrough in my thinking. I understood the economics at last. I wrote to the CEO and tried to get him to understand what I was seeing. And I never got a response.

And then, a couple of months after that email, I saw a meeting popup on my calendar. A 15-minute “check in” for the next day. My stomach dropped and I started to panic. I began by brainstorming ways that I could stop it from happening. And then I decided to start writing. I poured things out onto the page. Suddenly, I didn’t feel as bad. I noticed the same patterns that I had working at a large company. I wasn’t allowed to deliver the value for the company I knew I could. They put me in a box with limits. They didn’t actually listen to what I was saying. They brushed me off. It just took me a lot longer to notice because the box I was in was a little larger, in a nicer neighborhood, with a bit of interior decorating. But it was still a box that was holding me.

After that, I knew I wouldn’t ever let myself get put into a box again. Finally, I was free. I could pursue the work I was obsessed with. I could do the things I was compelled to do. I could write, I could code, I could interview, I could be on camera.

I could do anything I wanted. I was unleashed. But….

Turns out, there were a few issues I didn’t consider. First of all, it was a bit harder to get people to adopt a new way of viewing the world and the idea of work. I had some connections I was able to chat with, and they kinda saw what I was doing. But in the end, the stuff I was building wasn’t converting users. I went through a couple of different versions, developed a method of training AI so they could be pretty accurate for very little time/cost compared to traditional methods, and continued to write.

And yet, none of that actually paid me anything. You don’t get paid for theoretical research unless you are in a role for it. And I continued to simply post about it on Twitter, create Youtube videos, and write the occasional blog post. But I didn’t push it. If it were meant to happen, it would happen.

Eventually, something did start to happen, and someone noticed bits of what I was talking about. We chatted and started working on a product together. My AI architecture was put into an actual product.

It takes time and iteration to build something meaningful. We’ve created a world that is obsessed with speed and the appearance of value. And in doing so, we’ve lost sight of the things that truly matter. We’ve stopped listening to the people around us, instead focusing on the things we can see, the things we can measure, the things that are obvious.

So I really don’t want to be the one who pushes my ideas out into the world. I’d rather just build and focus on the parts that I know: the long-term vision. But as part of this Foster cohort, I’ve realized something very important: it’s ok to share my ideas when they are helpful. And I’m not the naive writer throwing words down on the page and pushing them out into the world anywhere I can. People are finding value in the ideas, they are connecting to them, seeing the broken systems and the possible solutions.

The better I get at explaining the ideas to people, the easier the ideas are to spread. And I don’t need to push ideas on people. There are people out there who want them. I just need to do a better job of sharing them as I write them down (or record them, or build them, or anything else).

Unfortunately, when we are trying to build something new, it takes time to ramp it up to the point that it does start paying the bills. So now, I’ve had to think a lot about exactly where I’m spending my time. Am I trying to find clients I consult with to help them see the future I want to ensure? Am I looking for freelance jobs where I can simply write code? Am I writing about my experiences in order to share my vision with the world? The reality is that, no matter how much I want to, I can’t fully predict the outcomes of my actions. All I can do is take actions that seem right at the time, and go from there.

The scarcity thinking still pops up from time to time. I still worry about things more than I should. I still wait for permission to build or create things that others would find valuable, permission that isn’t needed or even truly possible to grant. It just shows up as ideas without actions. And I’m not as brave as I could be with reaching out to people when I think there’s potential value in our connections.

But I’m getting better. And now that I’m becoming a professional writer, I can see how things have been improving. I can see how my words have an impact. I share them within Foster, and the feedback I get there helps me share them with the world. Foster is a great example of an abundant system in action.

I can come in with my own goals. They provide the mechanisms for me to improve what I want to improve on my own terms. And the same mechanisms for others. I’m not taking resources from anyone by pursuing my goals. And they are saving future resources, in terms of future time. They help me improve faster so that the ideas can move faster in the world, and therefore having a faster impact. And they do so not by flooding the internet with a million shares so people can’t help but see them, but by helping me make sure my words are worth sharing.

When I’ve got a system like that at my back, I feel like I can accomplish anything. And that’s an incredible feeling to have.

---

Huge thanks to Danver and Simoun from Foster for editing this piece.

If you think I can be helpful in any way, I’ve got an outline of the ways I think I can be helpful here:

But I’m also not limiting myself to those options. So feel free to schedule a time to chat to see what comes up as a possibility.