Room to create
In The Path of Least Resistance, Robert Fritz examines how we tend to follow patterns and structures that naturally guide us along the path of least resistance.
Live in a city that’s not walkable, and you’ll likely get fewer steps. Fill your kitchen with junk food, and you’ll find it hard to eat healthy. Leave out markers but no paper, and your toddler will turn walls and tables into their canvas.
If we can identify and change these underlying structures, we can create new outcomes, and direct the path from the default to where we want to go.
In the past few years, I’d been getting away from what was most important to me, and feeling a pull to create again. One of my most fulfilling avenues has been creating for myself, through personal projects.
Recently, I rebuilt my personal site to give myself room to create.
(At the time of writing, my site is built on Ghost, which manages all the content and hosting. For the front-end, I developed a custom theme that uses Tailwind CSS and gulp for the build process and GitHub Actions for deployment. It’s a joy to write in, easy to maintain, quite powerful, and most of all allows me to focus on creating. Fun fact: the entirety of openai.com ran on Ghost for several years.)
I’ve created a design system and oriented the site structure around various types of content I would want to feature, including short- and long-form writing, photos, and work samples.
I plan to use this as a space to
- share ideas,
- catalog photos,
- document learnings,
- reflect, and
- highlight projects.
I hope that by building a system that reduces the friction to write and publish, I’ll create more by default. And by building it in a way that’s easy to update and maintain, I can keep using it for many years to come.
Build structures around the outcomes you want, and let the rest fall naturally into place.