Energy-Aligned Writing
Write only what energises you, only what overlaps your job, and publish nearly all of it.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 92%
Larson has written roughly a thousand posts and three books over 16 years while holding executive engineering jobs. His system has three moving parts: write only what you have energy for (abandon the rest, including a half-finished book), choose topics that overlap the decisions you're already making at work so writing and job reinforce each other, and publish almost everything — using a pre-writing filter rather than a post-writing quality gate.
Origin
Larson's own practice across Digg, Uber, Stripe, Calm and Carta, adjusted after having a child (Saturday writing days became night writing). Lenny independently endorses the same energy rule from his own newsletter and podcast experience.
Core principles
- 01You can write far more if you write what you want to write. Energy, not discipline, is the throughput constraint.
- 02Writing about your own work problems is an alignment, not a conflict — it refines your thinking and improves your performance.
- 03The biggest risk to any content creator is quitting, not growing slowly.
- 04It's never too late. What matters is finding something you can keep doing for the next decade.
- 05Publish nearly everything; filter at the idea stage, not the draft stage.
- 06If your goal is career advancement, you don't need a blog — you need two or three great artifacts.
- 07Debugging strangers who send you silly feedback is a bad use of time.
How to run it
- 1
Decide what writing is actually for
Split the goal first. If you want to advance your career or position yourself as a deep thinker, write two or three genuinely great artifacts and spend a ton of time drafting, revising and getting feedback on them. Do not start a newsletter. If your goal is to write a lot consistently over time, continue to step 2.
Pro tip Larson is emphatic: there's no need to run a weekly blog just to look like a serious thinker. Two or three great pieces do that job.
Watch out Conflating the two goals is how people accidentally build a publishing obligation they didn't want.
- 2
Write only where the energy is
Write what you're actually thinking about, for yourself, with no target audience and no external deadline. Larson avoids commissioned pieces and schedules — a fixed topic you can't fix and a deadline you're missing is draining. When something isn't there, abandon it.
Pro tip Some people won't like what you write. That's fine — it isn't for them; it's for people who want to follow the ride.
Watch out Writing where there is no energy takes you 'really really negative' and is the direct road to quitting.
- 3
Pick topics that overlap your job
Find things to write about that directly relate to what you're working on, so one piece of thinking serves both. Senior roles are demanding not because of constant Slack pings but because they require making hard decisions well — and writing about those decisions is how you refine the thinking.
Pro tip The same overlap logic works for podcasters: interview people relevant to what you're wrestling with at work. It builds your network and tests your thinking against experts.
Watch out Writing about topics with nothing to do with your work is nearly impossible to sustain alongside a demanding job, because it purely subtracts from it.
- 4
Filter at the idea, not the draft
Before starting, run a quick check: is this something I can write and publish? If the answer is no, don't start. Then publish essentially everything you write. Accuracy of the pre-check improves with practice.
Pro tip Accept that some published pieces won't be that good. The purpose of the stream is getting ideas out and showing your evolution as a thinker, not maximising the reader's experience.
Watch out Hundreds of unpublished drafts is the classic failure state. The gate belongs before writing, not after.
- 5
Reserve polish for books
Do the perfectionism in a different container. Larson's books are a collection of thoughts accumulated over a couple of years, cleaned up and packaged — way higher quality than his typical writing. He also writes the entire book before engaging a publisher, anticipating their concerns so the content survives.
Pro tip Writing the whole thing before the publisher works for business-style books whose chapters can be resequenced. It doesn't work for tightly-built technical books where chapters depend on each other.
- 6
Ignore the silly feedback
Don't respond to bad-faith or low-quality feedback, and don't try to work out why the person sent it. Someone having a terrible day who channels it at you is not about you — you just happened to be there.
Pro tip The earliest phase is the least stressful time to write, because nobody is reading. Take all the crazy shots then; it only gets more stressful as an audience builds.
Watch out The realistic worst case is that someone looks for three seconds and doesn't care. Nobody has time to think you're a fool.
In the wild
Larson started an infrastructure engineering book a couple of years earlier. It just wasn't coming together, so he stopped and isn't writing it anymore — maybe he'll come back to it, probably not.
→ The energy freed up went to work he could actually finish. Across 16 years the approach produced roughly a thousand posts and three books alongside executive jobs at Digg, Uber, Stripe, Calm and Carta.
Writers chase what they think people want — crypto two years ago, AI now, or anti-AI. Larson's objection is twofold: everyone converges on the same topic, so it's hard to say anything novel, and it's almost certainly not what you're most knowledgeable about.
→ You can chase a trend a couple of times, but you end up creating a job you don't want and burn out. Sticking in your lane, and simply not quitting, is what compounds into an audience you can carry from platform to platform.
Common mistakes
Writing for the audience instead of yourself
Asking what people want, what's popular, what will go viral works a couple of times and then creates a job you don't want. Larson doesn't write for any audience — he writes what's interesting to him, which is exactly why he's still doing it after 16 years.
Believing you're too late
It's too late for Substack, too late for podcasts, too late for Medium — Larson calls this simply not true. If you keep writing good stuff you build an audience over time and can carry it between platforms. The real question is whether you can keep going for a decade.
Hoarding drafts
People accumulate hundreds of drafts and publish nothing, waiting for quality. Publishing imperfect work is the mechanism that produces volume, feedback and a visible evolution as a thinker; the quality filter belongs at the idea stage.
Is it for you?
Best for
Operators with demanding senior jobs who want to write consistently for years without burning out or manufacturing a second job for themselves.
Not ideal for
Writers with a contractual or commercial obligation to cover assigned topics on a fixed schedule, and anyone whose sole goal is a short-term career bump (write two or three great artifacts instead).
From the transcript
“I feel really strongly that you can write a lot more if you write what you want to write”
“the biggest thing that I found is finding things to write about that also directly relate to what I'm working on”
“I publish almost everything I write if there's something that I'm not going to publish I like don't start writing it”
“if you just want to write something that is going to help Advance your career you should really focus on writing like two or three…”
“the biggest risk to content creation of any sort is quitting”
From the episode
The engineering mindset
Will Larson (Carta, Stripe, Uber, Calm, Digg)