Access to knowledge has never been this widespread. We can just learn how to get good at almost anything by clicking a few buttons. What a time to be alive!

But it’s so easy to overlook the fact that what “good” means is also changing.

If everyone is good, nobody is.

In this era of such great abundance, the pursuit of being good, paradoxically, push us back into the average.

Huh! That’s not ideal.

Is there a way to break free from this self-defeating loop?

How to find your place in this rapidly changing world, create leverage, and make a real difference: that’s what this week’s newsletter is about.

For someone who was raised on an old farm up in the sticks near a small town called Kosciusko, Mississippi, Oprah Gail Winfrey had her sights set on much bigger things from a very young age. She had a flair for performing in front of an audience and quite naturally felt at ease around people. At just three years old, she was reciting poems and Bible verses in her local church. She dreamt of becoming a persuasive speaker and was always on the lookout for people whose voices could sway an audience, one of whom was Barbara Walters, a broadcaster on NBC’s Today show at the time. Walters’s composed and authoritative broadcasting style captivated her.

This admiration eventually got her her first big break when she entered the Miss Fire Prevention Contest in Nashville at just sixteen years old. When it came to her turn to answer the question, “What would you like to be when you grow up?” Oprah answered with a deep and composed accent, mimicking Barbara Walters: “I would like to be a journalist. I would like to tell other people’s stories in a way that makes a difference in their lives and the world.” Her words, and the tone in which she delivered them, certainly didn’t go unnoticed.

She won the competition.

To collect her prize, she went to the local radio station. While giving a tour at the station, a staffer would just casually ask her: “Do you want to hear your voice on tape?” Oprah agreed. As soon as she started to read, people started gathering around her, struck by her deep and soothing voice. She was hired on the spot as a reporter.

Only two years later, at just 19 years old, Oprah Winfrey became the first black female anchor in the city. Now, as a local news reporter, she was assigned to cover a whole range of local stories, including tragedies and their aftermath: house fires, funerals and so on. Her dream had finally come true.

But she soon came to realize that there was a fundamental mismatch between her personality and this job. Her aim had always been to influence people. To be a voice of compassion. And neither this composed, polished voice she had adopted nor her job reporting on tragedies gave her the freedom to do that. Soon, she found her job incredibly stressful. And it showed. “She was more concerned with the human involved than the story itself,” recalls the news director Chris Clark. After just eight months, on April 1, 1977, she was demoted from her job to cover short, early-morning news updates.

Oprah Winfrey had hit a dead end in a job that she had always dreamt of loving.

The situation that Oprah found herself in is as dangerous as it is commonplace. When we hit a dead end like this, it’s so tempting to jump to the conclusion that we are in the wrong career. So we change it. But over time, we may come to realize that the new one is even a worse fit than the one before. And so the vicious cycle continues in search of a “perfect career”.1

But, in reality, the way we are going about our job might be the real culprit, as Oprah’s story shows. She loved presenting to an audience. That’s what she wanted to do from a very young age. And evidently, she was good at it too. But the way she approached it didn’t align with her personality.

Like so, early stages of a career are often embarrassing in hindsight. We naturally try to imitate the ones we looked up to growing up. To quote jazz musician Miles Davis: “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.” Nothing particularly wrong with taking a few cues from our idols, of course. But if we don’t know how to control it, we risk losing ourselves in the process. No matter how much we admire our idols, at the end of the day, we are not them. Both nature and nurture have shaped our personalities in such unique ways that we can’t just expect to fit neatly into someone else’s mold. It’s never going to happen. We will eventually feel the strain of trying to squeeze ourselves into it.2

And the good news is, we don’t really have to. Because the world appreciates the complete opposite. People just want you to be yourself. In fact, if they sense that you are not being your true self, their interest in whatever you do slowly fizzles out, no matter how good you are at what you do.3 This is exactly the situation Oprah found herself in. She was a gifted child, the youngest TV news anchor in Nashville. Needless to say, she was an exceptional talent. But her talent got overshadowed by her attempt to be someone that she’s not.

Later that same spring, after Oprah was demoted from her job, Bill Baker, the station’s new general manager, was looking for a host for a new show: “People Are Talking”. He needed a host whose voice and personality were more open and warm than those of a typical news reporter.

Oprah Winfrey fit the bill!

But even after accepting this job, she struggled to find her own voice. She was still hemmed in by the rigid, authoritative style she had forced herself into at the beginning of her career.

But all that came to a halt during a live broadcast when she was reading out a list of foreign countries. Among them was the country Canada, which she mispronounced as “ca-NAD-a.” “I got so tickled,” she recalled of this live TV moment, “and then I started laughing. I realized that you can laugh at yourself and you can make a mistake and it’s not the end of the world. You don’t have to be perfect.”

From this moment forward, she made a point of being herself, and started to build her new show around her own personality. She wanted to talk to real people, not just to a screen. So she requested a live audience for her show, which was an unconventional choice for the time. Little by little, she became comfortable with being herself on television. “I realized that I can be a much better Oprah than a pretend Barbara,” she later said in an interview. And the audience picked up on this right away. Her TV show would soon expand into an hour-long segment. In September 1985, the show was renamed “The Oprah Winfrey Show”.

The show ran for 25 seasons and became the highest-rated daytime talk show in American history. It won 50 Daytime Emmy Awards, 12 NAACP Image Awards and four People’s Choice Awards. Oprah Winfrey was named one of the “100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century” by TIME magazine.

Reflecting on all the lessons she had learned throughout her long and triumphant career, Oprah Winfrey offered this advice to the graduating class of 2013 at Harvard University: “From time to time you may stumble, fall, you will for sure, count on this, no doubt, you will have questions and you will have doubts about your path. But I know this, if you’re willing to listen to, be guided by, that still small voice that is the G.P.S. within yourself, to find out what makes you come alive, you will be more than okay. You will be happy, you will be successful, and you will make a difference in the world.”

We’re all driven by the pressure to generate outputs.

But rushing things to completion isn’t a good strategy if you want to create something exceptional.

How to take things slow, be mindful about your career goals, and create exceptional outcomes: that’s what this week’s newsletter is about.

The late 90s were such an unpredictable time for the American tech industry. It was the time when people who got their hands on personal computers started to realize there’s this new thing called the “internet”.

And right at this time, the dot-com boom took off.

The resulting upheaval was like a tectonic shift. The tech giants started to merge small companies to build new ground. In the process, some companies got crushed. People were laid off en masse.

Andy Weir, a software engineer at America Online (AOL), was among this unfortunate bunch. But this was not the end of the world for him. His severance package and stock investments gave him about three years’ worth of financial security. Now having the money and the extra time, instead of applying for a new job right away, Andy Weir decided to do something he’d never tried before: write a book. As he had been a comic and science fiction fan all his life, this is something that he always wanted to do, but didn’t have time to do it. This layoff was the silver lining that he was looking for.

So he made a plan to finally get it done. He gave himself three years, with the hope that he’d be able to publish it right after. Things seemed to go according to the plan.

Well...almost

He finished the novel in time, but there was one big problem.

Not a single publisher was interested in it.

“I just couldn’t get any traction,” he recalls in an interview. “No one was interested. The nice agents were the ones who sent me rejection letters.”

His dream to get published slowly started to fade away, and so did the money he had saved for this venture. After finally coming to terms with this bitter reality, at the end of the third year, Andy Weir went back to his corporate job as a software engineer.

The novel, which he named “Theft of Pride”, would never get published.

Like Andy Weir, we all tend to plan things through and rush towards an output when taking on a new venture.

In fact, it is extremely hard not to do so.

We are constantly being rushed to generate outputs every day.

Everything is promised for outputs, and nothing is promised until you deliver them.

• As an office worker, you’re not going to get promoted for all the late nights, skipped lunches, and weekends spent at your desk, but for the clients you brought in and the projects you delivered on time.

• If you’re a photographer, an artist, or anyone who runs a creative business, now you have to put as much time—or even more time—into creating social media content as you’d put into actual work.

You just have to make sure that the algorithm would not “punish” you for not being relevant.1

The worst part is, deadlines and time pressure have become so commonplace in our culture that we now tend to believe that rushing to the finish line is a proxy for being creative.

But in reality, it’s quite the opposite.

It diminishes it.

This is exactly where Andy Weir found himself. His first priority was to set up a deadline, and work towards an output. Even if he is an exceptional writer, these guardrails held him back from creating something exceptional.

This is a great example of the fact that you can’t just rush exceptional work. Instead, it needs incubation. It demands that you wander around, slow down, and be patient. Research on creative thinking shows that taking breaks during a project to let your ideas incubate, intermittently focusing on something less demanding on the side, or even getting a good night’s sleep gives you a significant creativity boost.2

But the benefits of incubation have their limits too. You can’t just wander around avoiding the work for so long and expect good results. Taking things slow is important, yes, but you also have to be steady.

Cal Newport, a computer science professor and the author of Slow Productivity, explains how to sustain this creative momentum through three simple principles:

1. Do fewer things,

2. work at a natural pace, and

3. obsess over quality.

These principles help us stand out.

And they will eventually break through any corporate barrier or a social media algorithm.

Because in a world where people are rushing to create average outcomes, it is the ones who take their time to generate exceptional ones who get truly appreciated.

And that’s exactly the mentality shift Andy Weir adopted going back to his day job as a software engineer: be patient. Instead of trying to push deadlines, he just started writing: comics, short stories, and serials, the kind of science fiction that he grew up admiring. And instead of trying to find publishers for his work, he decided to publish it online on his website.

He never forced anyone to subscribe to read his work.

“Everything I posted was for free,” he recalled later in an interview. “There wasn’t even a registration on my site.”

But the enthusiasm with which he wrote his stories naturally attracted a crowd. Over about ten years, he’d gathered around 3,000 regular readers on his mailing list. Among the stories he shared was a new novel.

He named it The Martian.

This time, he’d publish the chapters of it as he was writing, getting feedback from his fans along the way. Once the novel was finished, the people who read it chapter by chapter wanted a more convenient way to read the entire book. So they asked him for an ebook. He made one available for free on his website.

But some readers then asked him to put it on Amazon so they could download it straight to their Kindles. So Weir uploaded the ebook and set the price at the lowest Amazon would allow at the time: 99 cents. Out of appreciation for his work, many of his readers started buying the ebook even though they’d already read it. This purchase spike created a sudden boost in Amazon’s sales ranking, and the book rocketed to Amazon’s science-fiction bestseller charts.

More and more people started reading it.

And before long, within four days of each other, he landed both a publishing deal and a movie deal. The movie adaptation would go on to earn more than $630 million worldwide and receive seven Oscar nominations. By 2017, a novel that started as just a hobby project had sold over five million copies worldwide, become a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and had been published in forty languages.3

After the massive success of The Martian, Weir eventually left his job to write full-time, and went on to publish two more bestselling novels: Artemis and Project Hail Mary.

In an interview for Writer’s Digest, Andy Weir reflected on his slow and steady process:

“It takes a lot of time and effort to get good enough at writing … and you just need to accept that.”

Engraving adapted from “Andy Weir in Livermore new” by JD Lasica, licensed under CC BY 2.0.