December 16, 2025 Blog Post (And One Question For You)
Today I woke up in Amsterdam, and am about to sleep in Rhine Valley.
If you are between 18 and 35, and looking for a cool travel package, check out Contiki European Horizons.
As always, I took a lot of notes on my iPhone. I also took notes in a physical diary. Here are just a few of my notes.
You may not consider a writing tool to be the Spotify playlist tool, but it is. So many people use Spotify for music. It is a publicly traded company. 713 million monthly active users (MAUs) as of their Q3 2025 earnings report.
If an author I admired, say Ryan Holiday, listened to music on Spotify, and made a playlist available, that is interesting to people like me who are fans of Ryan Holiday’s media.
If an auteur director, like Martin Scorsese or Ryan Coogler or Rajkumar Hirani, authored a Spotify playlist that I could listen to, I would feel like I’m a little bit closer to becoming great too. If I listen the exact same music, could I create something similarly great?
My next book might be about fandom. Fandom is an interesting, fragmented subject. People worldwide are fans of mainstream things, fringe things, ranging from movies to books to music to wine. There is fandom all over the place if you look at the world carefully.
Fandom is a great way to make friends out of complete strangers! You know what I did earlier today? I took a Harry Potter quiz. I got Gryffindor, but other people got Hufflepuff or Slytherin or Ravenclaw. Fandom fuels friendship.
Not everybody cares about the author of a book, except for other authors or deep thinkers. Nobody cares about JK Rowling’s struggles to making her books, or the directors who made the movies, unless it somehow directly affects their daily lives.
Museums understand this too. They don’t just have dinosaur facts and fossils, but they might experiment with interactive pictures and sounds. Dinosaurs are endlessly fascinating to kids and adults, but neither wants to just learn dinosaur facts. They want to imagine what it would be like to see a dinosaur right now, and how it would affect the trip home from the museum!
One question for your journal:
How can you unlock your “flow state?”
