Finding your unique crazy fans

There are no new ideas.

Instead there’s riffing and adding to existing ideas.

Austin Kleon lays this out beautifully in his book series, starting with, Steal Like An artist, which obviously steals its title from earlier references.

Part of the magic of ideas is taking them from multiples sources and placing them together in new ways.

This week I heard two ideas that I’ve started pulling together in my mind. Hopefully they’re as exciting to you as they have been for me.

Idea one: Be crazy

This essay from Adam describes the value of finding your unique crazy.

Seriously, you should pause now and go listen to it or read it. ¹

When people have a hard time figuring out what to do with their lives, it’s often because they haven’t unpacked

...

When you fully unpack any job, you’ll discover something astounding: only a crazy person should do it.

Adam shares how various professions might sound perfect for one person, but absolutely nuts for the rest of us.

We each have a unique crazy we can bring to the world—and we should embrace it.

There’s something that we’re put here to do, something that's especially suited to the way we operate and think.

For example, if every work day of my life involved one hour meetings, back to back, I’d lose my mind.

I know people that do this, and enjoy time talking to people and wrestling through ideas in person or on calls. I don’t. In the past I spent 3-5 hours per day on calls with team members. Individually I enjoyed talking to each person—solving problems, together, wrestling through ideas. But collectively I felt completely overwhelmed.

So what’s ideal for me? I work and collaborate with team members every day. But on most days I only have a single scheduled meeting to hash out ideas. Then, as needed, we jump on quick calls throughout the week to solve problems together.

The rest of the time is asynchronous.

I can’t spend all day in Zoom talking and discussing ideas. That’s not how my brain works. Instead I’d rather understand the problem, discuss where needed, then dive in and disappear into the details. Then, once I’m blocked, or have uncovered a direction, I resurface and seek out collaboration and feedback.

That’s not the only way to work, of course.

But it’s a way I particularly enjoy and I’ve intentionally shaped my career around being able to operate this way.

Some jobs sound crazy to one person, but perfect to another. This essay really got me thinking about whether I’ve found that right crazy for me, or if there’s more digging that I could be doing.

Idea two: Find crazy

The second idea I heard this week comes from Ben Thompson and Andrew Sharp on the Sharp Tech podcast.

During the Q&A part of the episode they fielded a question.

"If you both had to start all over again in 2025, how would you go about it? Would Stratechery start off as purely TikTok and Instagram accounts?"

For context, Stratechery is a paid subscription with podcasts and a newsletter. I’ve been happily paying for it on and off over the last half dozen years.

The value I get from it is immense, helping to shape how I think about tech from a business perspective.

This is a crazy thing that Ben does, and I’m a bit crazy for following it so closely every day (I’m also not alone, lots of other people pay for it too).

Over the years Ben has touched on how he built this subscription model, and I’ve always been curious if it could be replicated today.

Essentially he wrote pieces early on about tech, honing his craft from personal experience at various tech companies along with analysis on how things could be improved. Then, at some point, a few articles really started to take off and get noticed. This was partially because he’d done a great job at writing, and partially because he used Twitter to his advantage. His pieces regularly got picked up by readers, adding a constant stream of new subscribers.

Now I don’t know if Ben’s take here is the right one, but it’s worth considering. Here’s the start of his answer.

[I]f I were to start again, I would still want to own all my old stuff and my content would be dramatically more expensive. Because my assumption would be, I wouldn’t be able to amass the size of audience that I have today.

Ben and Andrew went on to share their experiences as aging millienials (something I can appreciate), and how the days of fast growth for written media are past us. However, diving deeper into niche topics that are valuable for a smaller number of people—that path is still open for great writers who understand a targeted market.

If Ben had to do it again today he’d charge 10x or 100x the price, and build up his subscriber base much more slowly. ²

Combining those two thoughts together I'd encourage you to take your crazy and share it with the world.

It probably won’t work, at least not right away.

But you’ve got something worth sharing, worth considering. ³

Does that mean everything that comes out of our brains is gold? Absolutely not, most is rubbish. But through effort, a bunch of luck, and refinement based on feedback, each of us have it in us to do something crazy. That crazy can both delight ourselves, and be appreciated by others.

^{1. Adam’s podcast episodes were an inspiration for me. He just records his written essays in a single take and puts them online. They have a few little verbal glitches here and there, but it’s his way of ensuring the AI doesn’t take his job.}

^{2. Thanks to James for pointing out a pretty obvious point I was missing. If I charge $100 for something, and you can get $150 in value out of buying it, that’s likely a purchase you’d make over and over again.}

^{3. Another part of all this is whether to create a product that’s a course of sorts, or keep writing on a topic that’s interesting, and charge for the value of the continued effort you put out to make something new each week. I’m more interested in the latter,  but see value in both.}