It’s 9 pm. My daughters just went to bed, though I’ll probably still hear them chatting for the next 15-20 minutes before my wife or I have to remind them — multiple times — that it’s bedtime. I’m tired and would love nothing more than to sit on the couch and unwind from the day.
I can’t, though. I have writing to do. And despite wanting a productive evening, I’ve got nothing. No clean first sentence in my head. No thread to pull on.
I’ll sit down at my desk anyway, put my hands on the keys, and write. I may get no more than a few hundred words — most of them bad, none of them the kind you’d want to show anyone. But I’ll do the work.
At the end of the session, I’ll close my laptop and start winding down for bed, ready to get another session in tomorrow.
I have many evenings like that behind me. I remember almost none of them individually. They’ve blurred into one composite memory of my laptop and the cursor blinking at me until I wrote something.
Not one of those evenings was special. The unremarkableness is the whole point.
There’s an old rule among writers that Ryan Holiday is fond of repeating: two crappy pages a day. Not two brilliant pages. Not two you’d be proud of. But two crappy ones.
When I first started writing, I thought the job was to wait for inspiration and then catch it. Now I’ve learned that the actual work is to show up and produce a small, unglamorous amount. And then do it again the next day. And the day after that.
Most of what comes out will be bad — especially if it’s a first draft. That’s okay. That’s the process.
But take an evening like the one I just described and multiply it by a few hundred, and the output of those forgettable sessions becomes something you can hold in your hands.
The work accrues.
I didn’t magically write this book
I wrote it day by day, over a long period of time. I know that’s not a fun answer. The truth is that most of writing isn’t all that exciting.
Yet I showed up for my writing sessions, again and again. Last year, I wrote almost every day from April to September. I stacked enough of those days together to finish a complete manuscript draft. It was raw and full of holes. But it was done and ready to edit.
After taking two months off to drive my pre-sale campaign, I started rewriting in November. From then until March, I wrote, edited, and rewrote almost every day. The work kept getting a little better over time. Until one day, it was finally ready to go to my publisher for copyediting and proofreading.
That was the first thing I learned. There’s no magic pill. I just kept the writing window.
Any individual day amounts to almost nothing. Each session is too small to feel like you’re making any meaningful progress. But over time, they compounded into a book.
There’s a fitting observation buried in here — one I didn’t plan. My book is about systems thinking. One of its core concepts is emergence: how the parts of a system fit together to yield something none of them produce on their own. A book making that argument could only have been built one ordinary session at a time. The method produced the artifact.
And there’s the Stoic side of it — on a given day, I don’t control whether the words I write are good. I only control whether I’m in the chair, doing the work. So that became the only thing I bothered to measure — whether I kept my writing window consistently.
The cost of doing the work
The advice to “just show up every day” is good. I try to follow it throughout my own life and regularly praise its merits to my daughters.
But it’s also too simple. It skips over what we can’t do because we’re showing up.
Life is full of trade-offs. The biggest reason is time. Anything we spend it on means we can’t spend it on something else.
I wrote about this constraint in my book:
We often envision time as a flow—a steady river of minutes, days, and years that drift past us. Yet, when striving to achieve something, it’s often more effective to see it as a finite stock. We are each allotted a set amount, and the drain is perpetually open. Unlike money, which can be earned back, or weight, which can be lost, time is a stock with only an outflow.
Anytime we say yes to something, we’re saying no to something else. That’s the trade-off.
When I committed to writing a book, I needed to find the time. Even writing two crappy pages takes time. With a full-time job and family commitments, extra hours weren’t floating around.
Family time wasn’t on the table. My work hours were already spoken for by my employer. So the only thing left to cut was my leisure time. And I definitely cut it. Over the last 18 months, I reduced TV and video games by something like 80-90%.
That trade rarely felt heroic. Most days, it just felt like choosing to spend 60-90 minutes at my desk rather than on the couch.
It’s worth stressing the trade-off, though. There is no secret reservoir of time. Only a clean understanding of priorities and a willingness to sacrifice something.
Excited, and a little afraid
And now my official book launch is nearly here. I’m excited to share it. If I’m being honest, I’m also a little afraid.
I can’t tell you exactly what I’m scared of. Sure, there’s the normal fear of putting your work in front of people and letting them make of it what they will. It’s easy to be self-conscious — publishing something taps into a deep, vulnerable feeling.
Maybe I’ve also grown comfortable in this writing purgatory. There’s a particular kind of quiet that comes after finishing something you worked on for a long time but before sharing it with others. I haven’t written anything meaningful for the book since March, so the quiet has stretched. The work is done, but the response hasn’t started. A part of me wants to stay in it a little longer than I should.
I keep reminding myself that much of the fear is really fear of an unknown outcome. But how do I measure that outcome, anyway? Is it sales? Opportunities unlocked? Personal pride and a sense of achievement? The respect of others? And when do I take that measurement? After a week? A month? A year?
When you break it down, the worry starts to look a little silly. Whatever the outcome — how it lands, commercial success, what readers say — is out of my control.
Reminding myself that helps. It doesn’t make the feeling go away. I’m not sure it’s supposed to.
Who this book is for
When I first started on this project, the advice I kept hearing was to pick an audience to write for. As someone who came to writing later in life, I struggled with that initially.
My early drafts were all over the place. Some chapters read as overly academic. Others leaned heavily on opinion with too little research. I was wildly inconsistent with my integration of Stoicism and systems thinking. And there weren’t nearly enough personal stories.
Midway through writing my first draft, I grabbed a coffee with a friend who reminded me that my target audience — the reader I was writing for — could be one person. And that person could be an earlier version of myself.
That was the perspective shift I needed. From there, I hit a flow. I drafted chapter after chapter until my first draft was done. Later, when I moved to the rewrite phase, I made it through three full end-to-end passes. I kept doing the work, the whole time focused on a single target reader.
Me at twenty-five.
In the late 2000s, I started reading more consistently. Malcolm Gladwell's earlier books — The Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink — really resonated. They were my entry point to big-idea books, and the first time I felt that particular thrill of watching a writer take a tangled concept and make it click into place. I’ve been a sucker for good executions of these books ever since.
So I wrote this for the version of me, 18 years ago, who would have torn through it — and maybe been changed by these ideas a little sooner. If I had this book back then, it would have helped.
This is my final essay before the official book launch on June 16, when both the paperback and hardcover of The Stoic Systems Thinker will be available on Amazon.
I’ll see you on the other side.
Until then,
-Michael