Creators Should "Move Fast, Break Things"

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In January 2019, the Harvard Business Review wrote, "The 'move fast and break things' era is over. 'Minimum viable products' must be replaced by 'minimum virtuous products'".

My bullshit detector is beeping more than a cop's radar gun on New Year's Eve.

"Minimum virtuous products" is the reason why we make fun of Harvard MBAs in my circle. Startups need to move fast and that means you need to break things. 

The same goes for creators. 

Mistakes are unavoidable. There is no "move fast and don't break things." 

Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction the "process of industrial mutation that revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one." 

Schumpeter could've easily been talking about writing a book or a script. Every essay I write, I go through a constant cycle of writing, editing, and deleting. Comedian Alan Zweibel wrote, "Tearing [a script] apart doesn’t make it disappear … I’ve never forgotten that and always tried to work that way on any other projects I’m doing". 

That's not a bad thing, it's just a fact of creation. You make shit, break shit down, and then remake it — hopefully better.

Your goal should be to make mistakes as fast as possible to figure out what doesn't work ASAP. And the only way to figure out what doesn't work is to try a bunch of shit.

Failure is not an option, it's a must.

I've been grinding on the internet for 10+ years. Failure after failure.

1. YouTube channel: at 15, made funny videos with friends. Stopped because our crew was fighting a lot and couldn't stay consistent.

2. Selling stickers: at 17, sold $40,000 worth of Grateful Dead stickers online then got copyright violation and couldn't get sales running up again.

3. Personal blog: at 17, started a blog in college and wasn't sure what to write about so I wrote about my frat. Kid in frat mocked me and I switched to writing music blog.

4. Music blog: at 17, interviewed musicians like Bad Suns and SonReal. Stopped because I didn't see how I'd make money. Not like Rolling Stone or Complex exists lol.

5. Selling bracelets: at 18, started e-commerce shop with girlfriend. Grew a small following via Instagram and made sales online. Stopped when we broke up.

6. Amazon FBA: at 18, tried finding stuff to sell online, but gave up before starting.

7. Album art design: at 19, used Photoshop to design album artwork for independent musicians I found via Twitter. Got my art into an art fair and made a whopping $25.

8. Start newsletter: at 20, started a newsletter like Tim Ferriss's 5-bullet Friday and then gave up because I didn't know how to grow it. Wasn't on Twitter grindset yet.

9. Facebook ads agency: at 21, orchestrated Facebook ads for small businesses. Was up to $2-3k/mo. but stopped after iOS 14 update rekt Facebook.

10. Start using Twitter: at 23, started tweeting everyday and making friends on Twitter.

11. Start Cyber Patterns: at 23, started this newsletter. At 24, built brand around Cyber Patterns and have published 1-2 newsletters per week since April.

12. Start freelance writing: at 23, started getting freelance opportunities. Built up reputation on Twitter. By 25, ghostwriting for prominent startups and VCs.

All throughout that time I've kept on moving fast, creating shit, breaking it down, and building new things.  I can't tell you how many fricking websites I've made at this point.

If I stuck with some stuff like the music blog, it probably would've been successful. But at some point for each of them, I started moving slow. I started losing momentum. The friction to start again became too much and I stopped for good. 

That's why I write and tweet everyday. To keep the momentum flowing.

Moving fast builds momentum.

Like a moving object, the faster you move and press publish, the less resistance you face. Momentum on a side project is better than sex.  Keep going until you hit momentum and then double the fuck down.

Danny Miranda came on my Cyber Patterns Podcast me this week and told me how he grew his podcast. "It's a combination of consistency and compounding, and I was doing 3 episodes a week," he said. "It's hard to see when you're just getting started with it, but if you build it fast, you can hit your first 10,000 listen month pretty quick."  He's up to 60,000 monthly listens now.

Moving fast as a creator requires you to overcome the tension Steven Pressfield aptly calls Resistance in The War of Art. "Resistance is the enemy within. The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it," he writes. "The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day. Resistance has no strength of its own. Every ounce of juice it possesses comes from us. We feed it with power by our fear of it. Master that fear and we conquer Resistance."

The more you do, the less you wait.

"I started making money in 11th grade when I realized the more you do the less you wait," rapped Mac Miller on Rush Hour.  Ali Abdaal is a doctor and creator with 3.5M YouTube subs. Here's what he said about getting his business and YouTube channel up and running.  Hint: it wasn't precise and methodical like you'd expect a doctor to be.

Moving fast builds new plotlines.

One good conversation leads to another and sooner or later you're working a new job and talking to famous people. That plotline never came true for me in music, but it's happening now in tech.

One tweet led to a DM which led to a call which led to a DM and sooner or later I was DMing with people I listened to on podcasts. To get there took thousands of failures. If I moved slow and didn't tweet off-the-cuff dumb ideas, send impulsive DMs, or press publish on imperfect articles, I wouldn't be where I'm at.

When you're doing cool shit online, you end up meeting cool people.

My friend Brett Dashevsky sold a newsletter and now works with creators at Workweek. "I’m big on creators just getting something out there and iterating continuously," he told me. "No one expects your first piece of content or even your first few to be anything spectacular. But the more you publish, whether it’s newsletter, tweet, video etc, the more comfortable you get and the better your content gets. Publish over perfect".

Publish over perfect

If you hesitate to publish, you're delaying the potential of your article going viral or even just getting a reply back from a friend that makes you smile. If you sit in fear of sending a DM, you're delaying a potentially life-changing friendship or career connection. It's the butterfly effect. All of these micro-decisions create new plotlines that alter your life.

This is what your creative life looks like. You can consistently publish cool work online, meet interesting people non-stop, and jump through any of these portals to the unkown.  Or you can walk through the boring arch. You decide.