Am I a Thinkboi?

James Clear, Holly Whitaker, Julia Cameron, and more...

Jul 11, 2023

Good morning –

The other day I sat across from my mom at a coffee shop; she said she was worried about me.

“I’ve been reading your weekly newsletter, Matt. And you’re a little all over the place. There’s a lot of information going into your brain. I understand your writing is an outlet, but it might be helpful to hone your focus a little.”

Her comment was not apropos of nothing. I’d been telling her that I do feel all over the place. That lately I’m more scattered than I like. More tired. I’m doing many new things at once while trying to maintain long-time commitments and projects that I love. I’ve known for a while (my whole life?) that if I were to scrap some ancillary creative pursuits, I could possibly experience faster growth with other, more financially viable endeavors. However, up until this point, I’ve not been willing to focus all of my attention on only one thing at the expense of cutting off parts of my life that have been vital to my well-being.

Last week I saw the push/pull of a wide net of pursuits versus a singularly focused one through the words of two newsletters I read.

In the July 6th edition of his wildly popular 3-2-1 Newsletter, James Clear writes:

“Highly focused people do not leave their options open. They select their priorities and are comfortable ignoring the rest. If you commit to nothing, you’ll be distracted by everything.”

Two days before I’d read the opening few paragraphs from Holly Whitaker’s Substack:

“One of the things I’ve discovered from writing this newsletter is I have absolutely no clue how to predict what will resonate with a large swath of you, and what will fall flat. Some of the pieces I’ve loved the most have been met with relative silence, some that I hated were, by objective measure, the most successful.
It just goes to show we can be terrible judges of our own work or how people are going to engage with it, what they need to hear. It also goes to show that nothing will ruin the fun of the craft more than writing for an audience, at least in my experience. It’s funny how much I can love something and then feel awful if no one notices it; it’s also weird how I can dislike something I wrote so much, and feel a kind of discomfort when people resonate with it and think it’s great—I want to tell them not to like it, the same way I tell my mom she’s very wrong about how good she thinks loose curls look.
Both the disallowance of other people’s experience of my work, and my inability to separate my own judgment and my own satisfaction from what everyone else thinks, ruins the whole thing. I am at my best when it’s me I’m trying to impress, when it’s me I’m writing for.”

I’ve known for a while now that my weekly writing is as much for me as it is for anyone reading it. For nearly one and a half years, I’ve sat down every Saturday morning to crank out a draft of something that I hope will resonate with at least one other person. But what really keeps me going is the sense of fulfillment I get from a) having sat down to write and organizing my current thoughts into something coherent and then b) sharing it with the world. And as a coach, it’s important for me to demonstrate to my clients that I’m on the same path they’re on–I’m working to discover what my innermost hopes and desires are and taking baby steps to nurture them. As someone who says he wants to write a book, a scripted podcast, a TV treatment (all things I’ve drafted and spent considerable time working on, sharing/pitching but not enough to make any of these my main pursuits), I take solace in writing this letter because I’m generating something new each week, even if it’s not yet “the thing” I really want to share with the world.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron encourages readers to say this prayer before writing: “Okay, Creative Force, you take care of the quality, I’ll take care of the quantity.” I dedicated myself to going through the entire book’s 12 chapters over the course of three months on two separate occasions. During my first time through, I wrote out this prayer on a neon pink notecard; I still use it as a bookmark in my journal. It’s the first thing I read before I start my mostly-daily morning page. After Googling this prayer, I was pleased to see a recent article by Cameron sharing more about her thoughts behind it. In January 2023, she wrote this for Oprah’s online magazine:

“Although we tend to think of writing in secular terms, it is actually a spiritual path. We can consciously invite spiritual guidance. A simple prayer is relevant: ‘Okay, God, you take care of the quality, I’ll take care of the quantity.’ When I was first told this prayer, I thought it was far-fetched. I had trouble believing that the spirit of the universe could take an interest in my prose. But as I retired from my ego’s need to be a brilliant author, my writing became more clear. No longer aimed at being impressive and brilliant, it aimed instead to be forthright. I came to believe that ‘creator’ was another word for ‘artist.’ I trusted the Great Artist—in the words of Dylan Thomas, ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.’ I tried to think of myself like a flower, mysteriously blooming. I tried to be humbly obedient. I came to believe that honesty and authenticity could capture my reader’s faith.”

The Artist’s Way has sold more than 5 million copies. Two million people read James Clear’s newsletter each week. The traction on Holly Whitaker’s Substack each week (as measured through shares, likes, comments) is laudable. Hence it’s easy for me to get discouraged when, like Whitaker writes in her aforementioned post, “Pieces I have loved with my whole heart are met with crickets.”

It’s easy for me to ruminate about time and how best to spend it. I often wonder if the five or so hours I spend each week writing the newsletter, having Whitney help edit, the time I spend recording, editing, and posting all of it, would it be better spent on a pursuit that’s more prudent? Predictable? Financially viable? Especially in a world where countless people are writing and sharing content daily?

With these thoughts percolating, I laughed when I came across a slang term I’d never seen before in a column in the NYT called “Shop Talk” by Erin Griffith. She writes:

‘Thinkboi’

/thīnkgk-boi/

A slang term for wannabe experts, often without much expertise to speak of.

“There are two main paths to fame, fortune and followers in business. You can do a lot of work for a long time and hope you are someday rewarded with success. Or you can skip the grueling, boring part and tweet as if you already are a success. The first group — business influencers who have made it — are called thought leaders.

The second group — those who haven’t but post as if they have? Those are thinkbois. The road to thought leadership is littered with thinkbois.”

She compares and contrasts thought leaders (TED Talks, commissioned ghostwritten books, big corporate jobs, trips to Davos) and Thinkbois (podcasts, ChatGPT-generated blogs, start-ups, living in Miami), and distills two key factors that makes someone a Thinkboi: “They are quick to jump on whatever trend is getting the most attention; they inspire the world to hustle our way toward maximal optimization and reflect on our key wins at each turn.” While reading this, a part of me wonders if I should start to follow a bunch of Thinkbois so I can bring more attention to my work and optimize my time as I pursue my creative projects. That I should be hustling harder and tweeting and TikTok’ing and YouTubing and IG’ing my work each week so I can potentially increase exposure. In one sense I know that’s what it takes, but I feel overwhelmed by the amount of time it would take. I’m also afraid that, even after doing all of those things, there would be no difference in readership.

Which brings me back to the start: I love writing this newsletter each week. Enough people respond to tell me they like it or that they share it to let me know I’m not writing in a vacuum. If I were to abandon other pursuits, I could potentially devote some of that time to hustling harder to increase readership. But, at this time in my life, I do not want that. I love to write. I love sharing my writing each week. The fact that it doesn't need to be as big as James Clear’s blog in order to feel good about or keep going with it is monumental progress, for me. I credit some of this to the work I’ve done as a life coaching client and probably a little bit to do with being in my early 40s.

On the day I read Clear’s and Whitaker’s blogs, I received an email from someone I don’t know. This person replied to my most recent post, but referenced a newsletter from months ago. They wrote:

“Hi Matthew, the time you said forgiveness is not the absence of justice - this was life changing for me. I grew up around an abusive narcissistic father and everytime i think about him, I now I have a mantra to remind myself.”

Forgiveness is not the absence of justice. I shared with Whitney about the email as well as the phrase–I could not wrap my head around what it even meant. I thought: Maybe I am a Thinkboi after all? I had to look back and find the previous letter. Here’s what it said:

[An author named Catherine Pearson] relates a story of her child holding onto a small grudge and parlays this instance into greater notions of forgiveness in a short interview with an academic at Harvard named Tyler VanderWeele:
Pearson: “What does it mean to forgive someone?”
VanderWeele: “My working definition is just to replace ill will toward the offender with goodwill. Forgiveness is not forgetting the action or pretending it didn’t happen; it’s not excusing or condoning the action, and it’s not the same as reconciling or forgoing justice. One can forgive while still pursuing a just outcome.”
One can forgive while still pursuing a just outcome. I thought about how during my “trial period” – how I generally refer to the time when I dealt with various legal proceedings – that I felt better and more calm as I pursued a just outcome.

After rereading this, what made me happiest about the reader's comment was not that the person read my letter and took the time to write something back to me. It’s that the reader synthesized what I shared and created their own phrase, their own succinctly powerful thought which caused me to pause. Perhaps that’s the highest success I can hope to achieve with my newsletter, that it is stirring something in someone else. And that I am fortunate to have that stirring reflected back to me in an intimate and thought-provoking manner. I am grateful for that awareness and experience.

Who in your life shares ideas that get you thinking? With whom do you share your thoughts? Is there a way you can share one new idea this week in a way you’ve never done before?

Until next time,

Matt

Baron Creative: Writing & Podcast

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