My Birthday Gift To You

This is my final newsletter here on Hey. It would truly mean the world to me if you'd please SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEW BLOG!!!

Here are 7 juicy highlights of 2025 (out of 100+ essays on the new blog) compiled just for you as a little party favor 🥳

There Is No Playbook - "There are playbooks for going to the gym... But imagine a gym where the machines magically transform into new unseen variations each day... In case it isn't clear, the magic gym I'm describing is life."
Preparing for Inspiration - "I recently got into an argument with a musician... His brain has been trained to constantly turn the world around him into song... If you force yourself to write a poem (or a piece of software) every day, inspiration finds you sooner than you'd think."
Money - "is simply a tool to organize humans around ideas... flows like water. It's not so much the static quantity that matters, but rather the velocity and the acceleration... My definition goes in reverse too. If you properly coordinate enough humans, money will follow."
Hijacked By Altruism - "It turns out altruism is almost always a trick. Asking people to exhaust their resources and families on behalf of nice-sounding programs to help others actively goes against the concept of sustainability, unless those programs can legitimately last for centuries."
Writing Clarifies Thinking - "if a thought doesn't get crystallized and explored in writing...it doesn't really count. It remains half-baked and therefore not consumable... You can't use a screwdriver well if it's missing a handle... Writing has evolved my brain to see reality sideways."
Done Is Better Than Perfect - "I don't recall learning a skill so intensively since chess in high school... thrashing down rabbit holes and perhaps a bit of yak shaving... Progress frequently comes from shipping good enough repeatedly rather than trying to overthink a path to perfection."
Speak - "I know from experience that folks are desperately waiting to hear from you... Choose to be un-paralyzed... Cultivate a posture of sharing by default. These are prerequisites to ship anything significant at all, let alone your art."

I'm grateful you'd journey with me into 2026 and beyond, to the Future.

Birthdays are arbitrary, but they are helpful coordination markers. I spent many hours thinking about what to email you, my lovely longtime subscribers. At first, I was just going to copy-paste my reflections on turning 30 from the new blog. But it was fun to compose this instead.

If I had to summarize the reflections in a sentence or two, it boils down to me learning my purpose: to live a specific question. The question is: why do I do what I do?

In studying me, I find some things generalize: why do any of us do what we do?

Saying "I don't know" is a valid answer. In fact, it's a profoundly good answer, when true. Especially if the culture is underdeveloped. Admitting a knowledge gap creates a turning point for yourself and those around you. We can try to learn the answer together, or we can drop the inquiry and do something else more useful with our time instead.

I don't know the best way to blog. All I know is that I enjoy blogging immensely. It takes time and effort, and there is little to no direct financial reward, but there's no work I'd rather be doing instead. Even on my birthday.

I'm still experimenting with the new format and ever-open to feedback. In the past few days, one thing I'm considering is Simon Willison's brilliant paid subscriber inversion:

"I write a lot of stuff. If you like you can pay me to send you less. At the end of every month I send out a much shorter newsletter to anyone who sponsors me for $10 or more."

If Andys.Blog resumes daily posts in February, how should I best do it to suit your inbox and win your continued engagement?

Your kind notes and thoughtful replies over the years have kept me blogging, for which I truly cannot thank you enough. I'd really love to hear back from you any notes on your new year ambitions, what resonates with you from my highlights above, or any thoughts at all you might have in reply to the new blog!

Happy birthday to me 😆