How to Make Something People (Actually) Give a Shit About

5 Rules for Creating Work That Leaves a Mark

Photo by Mario Gogh on Unsplash

🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.

While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.

You can buy my book Permissionless here.

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You could make something right now.

If you wanted to stop reading, grab a sheet of butcher’s paper and brainstorm ideas; you could probably come up with half a dozen ideas for apps, books, or products.

Ideas aren’t the hard part, after all  -  just ask Tom Haverford.

Or anyone with “Serial Founder” in their bio.

You could build a WordPress site and start harassing your friends to test the concept. You could start writing op-ed pieces on Substack and put “Founder” or “Author” in your Twitter bio within 48 hours. You could throw up a landing page, post the first chapter of a book, and start pushing it on Product Hunt.

Where things get tough is when you’re trying to make something that people genuinely give a shit about.

You don’t want your dream to die in the chamber, because nobody read it, watched it, used it, or listened to it.

Because the deafening silence surrounding your work can crush your soul.

You want people to care? Here’s how.

1.

Only Make What You Care About

If you want to make something that people actually care about, you have to care about it yourself. Because if you don’t, then try as you might, it’ll come out in the final product.

The reason for this?

Making something is hard. Making something you don’t care about is even harder.

The only way you’ll be able to consistently work when you don’t want to work, consistently try when you don’t want to try, is if you deeply and honestly care about your work.

This has never been more pronounced. AI seems to be making everything from software to the written word all but disposable; and the temptation that comes with it is to make as much work as possible, while caring as little as possible, and doing it at scale. I keep coming across creators who are obsessed with automating the work into a content farm; they want the glory of the written word, but they don’t want a single letter etched onto their souls.

Unfortunately - whether or not people can tell AI-written content from human-written content, I think most folks have an almost supernatural ability to sense whether a creator actually gives a damn. We know when someone doesn’t care. We know when someone’s phoning it in. We know when someone doesn’t give a shit.

The good news is this: being deeply invested in the things you make, say, and do is a moat that few will bother to build.

So, rule number one:

You want people to care?
You have to genuinely care yourself.

2.

Make Things For Real People

The best writing advice I have ever heard was to write specifically for someone I know.

It’s a genius idea.

Every time I go to create something, or build something, I think about who I know that would benefit from what I’m doing.

If you have something that you care enough about to make, you have to ask the next question  -  who are you making it for? What information do they need? What turn of phrase would stop them in their tracks? What is their single pain point that the product could solve, or their secret story that your novel would be able to touch and cultivate into a real emotional response?

Stop thinking about your audience as a vague concept, a collection of faceless people.

Believe that your audience is a real person with feelings, experiences and a story. It will change your perspective.

The mass appeal of social media makes this a good deal harder; the fact that every post has the (technical) potential to reach an audience of millions encourages us to believe that an audience of millions is within reach, that our target audience must be so broad as to give us the best possible fighting chance of capturing the multitudes.

This is a false idol.

Your audience is as small as the thing you care about, and as big as the things they care about. That’s it. The work of it all is finding out what those things are.

You want people to care?
You have to know what will make them care.

3.

Ask Yourself If You Fit The Project

You need to ask yourself whether you have the courage, the strength, the motivation, and the passion to make what you want to make.

Do you have what it takes to do this, specifically this?

And I mean really ask yourself.

When you first come up with an idea, you can get so caught up in it that you can’t see anything else. You can’t see the toil on your horizon.

It’s easy to mistake excitement for passion, motivation and ability.

When that feeling starts to die down, or you get used to it, you can realize that you don’t have the real raw power to be able to finish and follow through. The idea was grand enough to spark action, but the long tail of effort doesn’t and shouldn’t belong to you.

Fact: there is nothing wrong with recognizing that a project isn’t right for you.

Maybe there’s another project that is.

If it’s not this one, it’ll be another.

It’s not enough just to care about what you’re making  - it has to feel right.

You want people to care?
Only work on projects that feel right.

4.

Don’t Do Anything To Be Someone

Have you ever watched one of those reality TV singing competitions?

You’ve probably seen a hundred young people, eyes shining, clutching microphones and talking about their dreams.

They’ll explain that ever since they were kids, they wanted to be singers.

Note that: BE singers.

Be.

They hardly ever say they want to actually sing.

When it comes down to it, half the time it’s because actually singing isn’t the end goal. They want the trappings, lifestyle, and breaks of being a singer.

If the act of singing was really their end goal, they wouldn’t be on a reality TV show. They’d be out there every night singing anywhere they could, writing songs, starting bands, recording music.

The same is true for anything you could make.

Do you want to make X, or do you want to be the person who made X?

Because if you don’t care about the act of making something, and if you don’t want to get out there every day and try to make something, you might as well quit.

You want people to care?
Care about your work. Not your title.

5.

Work. Work Hard.

If you want to write a book that can break someone’s heart  -  work hard.

If you want to start a business that changes the world  -  work hard.

If you want to draw a comic book that expresses everything you are and dream about  -  work hard.

I think we’ve overindexed on being anti-hustle culture. And to be fair, hustle culture itself was mostly bullshit. But the way to push back against it isn’t to insist that hard work of any kind is something to be denigrated, mocked, and avoided at all costs.

The hands of a craftsman or an artisan are made rough by the friction of hours at their work. That’s not altogether a bad thing.

I am the first to say that the pursuit of burnout is a performative waste of a good life. But I have never achieved anything by embracing the admittedly attractive notion that hard work is simply too much to ask.

It’s not.

I wouldn’t call myself a particularly impressive or successful writer, founder, or anything else for that matter. But I make enough money from writing and working and building on the internet to support my family; and the only way that happens is by getting up every single day and putting in the hours, whether I want to or not.

You want people to care?
Work hard.