u/dmytro_omelian

Sharing a process change in case it helps someone, and curious how others handle the same thing.

I always outlined straight on my laptop. The problem was I could only see a few lines at a time, so I'd lose the shape of the piece and just keep scrolling. Structure was always my weakest part.

For my last long post I tried planning the whole thing on a single notebook page first -- title at the top, each section down the middle, side notes for the bits I wasn't sure about. Seeing everything at once made the weak sections obvious before I wrote a word. The draft came out tighter and I barely changed the order afterward.

The other thing that helped was "inversion" before drafting: instead of "how do I make this good?", I asked "how would I write a bad version of this?" and avoided those. Killed a couple thousand words I'd have wasted.

Two questions for people here:

• Do you outline on paper or screen, and has switching actually changed your writing?
• What's your trick for getting structure right before you're deep in a draft?

Sharing a process change in case it helps someone, and curious how others handle the same thing.

I always outlined straight on my laptop. The problem was I could only see a few lines at a time, so I'd lose the shape of the piece and just keep scrolling. Structure was always my weakest part.

For my last long post I tried planning the whole thing on a single notebook page first -- title at the top, each section down the middle, side notes for the bits I wasn't sure about. Seeing everything at once made the weak sections obvious before I wrote a word. The draft came out tighter and I barely changed the order afterward.

The other thing that helped was "inversion" before drafting: instead of "how do I make this good?", I asked "how would I write a bad version of this?" and avoided those. Killed a couple thousand words I'd have wasted.

Two questions for people here:

• Do you outline on paper or screen, and has switching actually changed your writing?
• What's your trick for getting structure right before you're deep in a draft?

I run a small newsletter and just finished a piece I'd been chewing on for a year, about Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Not dropping a link in the body since I know the rules here -- just wanted to share the actual ideas and hear what you think.

Went in expecting investing wisdom and mostly came out with life advice. The five that stuck:

1. The 20 punches -- Buffett says imagine you only get 20 investments in a lifetime. I read it as 20 real choices in life, not money. Makes every big decision feel heavier.
2. The partner -- Warren and Charlie ran separate firms for years and just called each other constantly before anything was official. Trust first, paperwork later. It lasted 60 years.
3. Mental models over facts -- a few big ideas from different fields do most of the thinking.
4. Learning machines -- go to bed a little wiser than you woke up. Buffett reads about half his waking hours.
5. Self-criticism -- Munger wouldn't hold an opinion until he could argue the other side better than the people who believed it.

The thread tying them together is humility: "the safest way to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want."

For the writers here -- when you write about people you admire, how do you keep it from turning into just a quote dump? That was the thing I fought with most.

Charlie Munger was an investor, not a philosopher, but reading him for a year I kept hitting lines that felt closer to this sub than to finance, and I wanted to check that with you.

The main one: "the safest way to try to get what you want is to try to deserve what you want." If you want a good partner, be one. If you want trust, be someone people can trust. It just turns your attention back to how you act, instead of the outcome — which is the part you actually control.

He also had this almost impossible rule for being hard on himself — he talked about getting good at "destroying your own best-loved and hardest-won ideas." Meaning the ideas you're most attached to are exactly the ones you should be testing hardest. I find that really hard to actually do.

And one more, on effort: he said they "succeeded by making the world easy for ourselves, not by solving hard problems." Less fighting uphill, more just avoiding dumb mistakes.

Honest question — do these feel actually close to Stoic ideas to you, or am I just seeing what I want to see?

The quote that got me: "I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most hard-working. But they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were that morning."

Buffett is the extreme version — supposedly reads five or six hours a day, told some students to "read 500 pages a day, that's how knowledge works, it builds up like compound interest." Inspiring, sure.

So I tried to copy that. Thought about a newspaper subscription, the whole thing. And honestly I couldn't even finish the one magazine I started. It made me realize my problem was never reading more — it's actually using what I read. I've kept notes since 2023 and they pile up way faster than I ever go back to them. Reading without going back to it is basically entertainment that feels like work.

So the habit I'm building now isn't "500 pages." It's read less, but go back and actually use one idea. "A little wiser than this morning" turns out to be a much smaller goal than the Buffett version, which is probably why it's the one I can stick to.

The last third of Mechner's journal (he made Prince of Persia in 1989) is the part nobody talks about. After he shipped one of the most famous games of the era, here's what actually happened:

→ 1990 - he spent the year doing odd jobs on student film sets in New York. He writes in the journal:"I now have a much clearer idea of what skill set and personality would make the best fucking gofer in the world, and I'm not it." (a gofer is the person who runs errands on a film set)

→ 1991 - he traveled around Europe. Italy, Germany, Switzerland. Started learning Italian.

→ 1992 - he moved to Paris and Madrid. Learned Spanish and French.

→ 1992 - he writes: "What, exactly, am I waiting for? I know what I want to do with my life. Why not just do it?"

He doesn't yet know that more games, screenplays, and graphic novels are all coming later. From inside those years, he just feels slow and a bit lost.

Most career advice skips this part. The end of a big project isn't the start of the next one. It's a quiet, slow stretch - the next thing finds you when it finds you.

P.S. He has much more stories I mentioned in one of my longer pieces if you are interested, would appreciate any feedback (first comment)

Was reading Jordan Mechner's development journal from 1985–1989. The breakdown of where every piece of the game came from:

-- Running and climbing animations: his 15-year-old brother David, filmed in white clothes in the Reader's Digest parking lot in Chappaqua, NY. Mechner traced the VHS frame by frame.

-- The opening sequence: the first ten minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark -- "an athletic hero in a dangerous environment."

-- The setting: One Thousand and One Nights.

-- The sword fight: six seconds of the Errol Flynn / Basil Rathbone duel from The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), rotoscoped frame by frame into 6502 assembly.

-- The soundtrack: his dad, who was an amateur composer.

Mechner's own framing: "In all creative fields, innovation comes from combining things that haven't been put together before. If you immerse yourself too single-mindedly in your chosen art form, your work can easily become just a reflection of what others are doing in that field."

Translation for game devs: don't look at other games for reference. Look at films. Books. Family members in parking lots. The 1989 game that defined the cinematic platformer was assembled from movies and a 15-year-old.

---

Wrote longer notes if anyone's curious: link in comments. The book gave me a serious push of energy -- sharing in case it does the same for someone here.

Just finished reading Jordan Mechner's 1985–1989 journals. He made the original Prince of Persia at 21, solo, on an Apple II.

Near the end he does the math: 3,800 hours over four years. About two years of honest work, spread across four calendar years.

The other two years were a screenwriting detour, an NYU film school rejection, weeks of staring at the code without touching it. For most of late 1987 he didn't open the game at all.

What got him back to it was one sentence over lunch. A colleague named Tomi Pierce told him: "Think of the game as an old car you're fixing up in your spare time." That was the pivot of the entire production.

I think we romanticize people who grind on one thing for years. The reality is messier. Most long projects have a dormant year in the middle, and the people who recover are the ones who happen to have a Tomi Pierce around to tell them, kindly, to pick up the wrench.

If you're in your dormant year on something right now -- you're not behind. You're in the middle.

I wrote some longer notes after the book if anyone wants more - you can find it in the first comment. Honestly it gave me a real boost of energy and I think it might help someone else feeling stuck.