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Modern Creator Essayists · 8

Contemporary · Modern Creator Essayists

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online

Perell's essay reframes online writing as a compounding asset rather than a broadcast tool: instead of sitting down to write with a blank page and hoping for inspiration, Writing from Scarcity, the sustainable approach is Writing from Abundance — building a habit of capturing ideas as raw material, from books, conversations, and stray thoughts, the moment they occur, so that by the time you sit down to write, you're editing and assembling pre-existing notes rather than generating ideas from nothing.

David Perell · 2019 swipe · next · J/K

Contemporary · Modern Creator Essayists

The 4 Types of Luck

Drawing on neurologist James Austin's 1978 framework, Bloom breaks luck into four escalating types: Blind Luck, pure chance — where you're born, acts of God, entirely outside your control; Luck from Motion, generated simply by moving and acting, meeting people, trying things, increasing the number of possible collisions you could have; Luck from Awareness, spotting opportunities that only someone with deep domain expertise would even recognize as opportunities; and Luck from Uniqueness, a distinctive enough combination of skills and identity that opportunities seek you out rather than you chasing them.

Sahil Bloom · 2023

Contemporary · Modern Creator Essayists

Interstitial Journaling

Interstitial journaling, a technique Le Cunff adapted from Tony Stubblebine, replaces both the rigid forward-looking to-do list and the exhausting end-of-day review with something simpler: writing a timestamped note, a sentence or two, every time you finish one task and move to the next, capturing what you just did, any lingering thought or anxiety, and what you're about to start.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff · 2020

Contemporary · Modern Creator Essayists

Networked Note-Taking

Most people organize their digital files like physical filing cabinets: putting documents inside folders inside folders. But what if a note belongs in two folders? Networked note-taking solves this by letting you link notes directly to each other, like Wikipedia.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff · 2020

Contemporary · Modern Creator Essayists

35 Things I Know At 35 I Wish I Knew At 25

"Nobody cares" is rule four. Not as cynicism — as permission. When you're winning, nobody cares. When you're losing, nobody cares. So the thing you've always wanted to do: go do it.

Sahil Bloom · 2026

Contemporary · Modern Creator Essayists

Imitate, Then Innovate

Johnny Carson tried to copy Jack Benny, failed, and won six Emmys. David Letterman tried to copy Carson, failed, and became one of the great television hosts. Conan O'Brien, looking at the same lineage, concluded that 'it is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique'. David Perell calls the opposite instinct the Originality Disease: the modern creator's fear that studying anyone else's style will contaminate their own, so they spend far more time straining for novelty than apprenticing to the people they admire — and quality is the casualty.

David Perell · 2022

Contemporary · Modern Creator Essayists

The 5 Types of Wealth

A friend once asked Sahil Bloom how often he saw his parents. About once a year, he said — they lived on the other coast and were in their mid-sixties. The friend did the arithmetic: so you will see them roughly fifteen more times before they die. Bloom moved back east within months. The story became the seed of a book whose claim is simple: we have been trained to treat money as the only form of wealth, so we run our lives on a scoreboard with one column and are surprised when winning on it does not feel like winning. Peter Drucker's line that what gets measured gets managed cuts both ways — a broken scoreboard produces broken actions.

Sahil Bloom · 2025

Contemporary · Modern Creator Essayists

Make a PACT, Not a SMART Goal

'Get 5,000 subscribers in 25 weeks' is a SMART goal: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound. It is also almost entirely outside your control, and for ambitious, long-horizon aims — learn to code, write a book, change careers — the framework quietly discourages you from starting at all, because you cannot know how long it will take or whether it is 'achievable'. Anne-Laure Le Cunff's replacement is the PACT: 'Publish 25 newsletters over the next 25 weeks.' Same ambition, but every part of it is an action you can take this week and mark as done or not done.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff · 2019