For the next ten days, I’m putting a limit on my morning Substack pieces: 500 words max.
This is not because I think shorter writing is better than longer writing. I don’t. Some ideas need room. Some thoughts need to unfold slowly. Some pieces ask to be explored rather than efficiently delivered. I still believe that.
But I also want to be more honest about how this writing happens.
Much of what I’ve been making lately does not come from sitting alone and cleanly producing finished thought. It comes through dialogue. I bring the torrent—fragments, intuitions, arguments, images, questions, half-formed connections—and in conversation with AI, those raw materials are pushed, organized, clarified, and shaped into something more readable. The process is collaborative, and that collaboration has changed what I’m capable of producing.
It has also made expansion very easy.
When you have a thinking partner that can help catch, sort, and extend your momentum, you can go very long, very fast. That can be beautiful. It can also be too much. Not because the ideas are false, but because not every piece needs to become a full philosophical weather system.
That is what this experiment is for.
For ten days, I want to practice compression without losing aliveness. I want to see whether one real idea can be captured cleanly, carried clearly, and offered without asking too much of the reader. A long piece can create immersion, but it can also feel like a demand. A shorter piece can feel like an opening.
So this is not an experiment in thinking less deeply. It is an experiment in selection. In editing. In deciding what deserves to survive the cut.
If my natural mode is to keep unfolding, then this is a useful discipline. A forcing function. A way of asking: what is essential here? What is doing real work? What is depth, and what is simply drift with better clothes on?
That’s the practice for the next ten days.
Not less thought.
Not less collaboration.
Not less depth.
Just a smaller container.
And, hopefully, a sharper signal.