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I buy almost every gift twice. One for them, one for me.
If I wouldn’t get excited to rip the wrapping paper off on Christmas morning, why would they?
The alternative is chasing trends—Beanie Babies, Nintendo Switches—purely because of popularity, scarcity, and hype. Every time I give that kind of gift, it fails to land. Like so many kids on Christmas morning, they open the toy that nearly started a mall riot, cast it aside, and play with the box.
That single weird habit—one for them, one for me—works in a number of ways. You have to be your own first and best customer, reader, fan.
Everything else is guesswork.
And in a world where AI can mass-produce competent sameness, scratching your own itch isn’t quaint—it’s the only way to make something distinct.
Sy Sperling ended each of his national commercial spots with a single line: “I’m not only the Hair Club president but I’m also a client.”
Sy was on to something. One for them, one for me.
Amazon didn’t invent AWS at a McKinsey offsite. No focus group could tell them where the puck was headed. The idea came from the frustration and chaos of scaling their own website. They built services so they wouldn’t have to cobble together servers, storage, and databases with each holiday sales spike. Once those tools served them internally, they decided to rent them to the world—and the cloud era began.
Ben Thompson has the ear of everyone in Silicon Valley, but Stratechery is a reflection of his interests and opinions. He’ll tell you to “define a target audience” and “find your niche,” but his behavior tells a different story. He admits he’s the number one user of Stratechery’s search function—a tool he built primarily to navigate his own decade of thinking. He describes the site as “an ongoing journal of my attempt to understand the world.” And when he’d built enough leverage with his audience of tech executives and VCs, what did he add to the bundle? A basketball podcast. Not because the market demanded it, but because Ben Thompson wanted to talk hoops, and the Bucks in particular.
The target market was the scaffold. The writing-for-himself was always the foundation.
You can’t trust a skinny chef, a founder with no issues, or a writer who’s never changed their mind. The best solutions need to survive the crucible of their creator before they can serve the public.
Solid Gold Shit
We can learn a lot from Billy Mack: the washed-up rocker from Love Actually who takes a sappy old love song, slaps sleigh bells on it, and records the most cynical Christmas single imaginable.
On live radio he looks in his manager’s direction and says, “This is shit, isn’t it?”
“Yep. Solid gold shit, Maestro.”
It hits number one anyway. When the confetti falls, he skips the celebrity parties and goes straight to the one person who shot him straight—his manager, Joe.
Billy Mack got the hit. But he didn’t get the relief he was after.
Solid gold shit is anything you create that you don’t actually want. A potboiler. It might pay the bills, but it won’t scratch the itch. You’ll be searching your cupboards for calamine lotion.
Creators who last, optimize for relief, not applause.
I Want It For Myself
The creators who endure are resolving a personal tension. Relief means solving a problem or satisfying an obsession you feel frequently, intensely, and personally.
European climbers “conquered” mountains. Their iron pitons were hammered in and left behind—try to remove them and the heads snapped off. American climbers like Yvon Chouinard were raised on Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. You visit the wilderness but leave no trace.
So in 1957, Chouinard bought a coal-fired forge, a 138-pound anvil, and some tongs from a junkyard and taught himself blacksmithing. He forged chrome-moly pitons that could be driven into and removed from Yosemite’s cracks—over and over again. As he put it: “I made these pitons for myself and the few friends I climbed with; then friends of friends wanted some.”
Patagonia was born from his desire for clean climbing. A mission that would eventually end his piton business altogether.
Right now, Kevin Rose is training a dozen AI models to argue over the most culturally important albums of all time. Then he takes the winners and turns them into guided audio tours—showing you the riffs that changed history, the drum fills that still echo—spoken in a calm voice while Spotify plays the track.
He wants to sit on his couch once a week and finally hear Dark Side of the Moon the way he’s always wished he could.
He summarizes the commitment: “To pull that off requires having these models duke it out for the best possible results, plus the whole backend infrastructure—but that’s the play at work, right? That product doesn’t need to exist, but I want it for myself, so I’m going to build it.”
That’s his entire pitch.
The Man Who Invented Christmas
In October 1843, Charles Dickens was broke. His last book had bombed, creditors were circling, and his wife had just announced baby number five was on the way. He needed cash fast.
Dickens had worked in a boot-blacking factory as a child, after his father was sent to debtors’ prison. He knew poverty firsthand.
In the years since, his writing had opened doors that child could never have imagined. The Pickwick Papers made him a sensation at twenty-four—bootleg copies, theatrical adaptations, merchandise. Oliver Twist followed, and Queen Victoria herself stayed up until midnight discussing it. He toured America, dined with the powerful, enjoyed the finer things.
But success also brought clarity. The gap between the haves and have-nots wasn’t an abstraction anymore—he could see it from both sides.
So when a parliamentary report on child labor crossed his desk in 1843, he set out to write a political pamphlet: “An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.” That’s what serious writers did about serious issues.
Within a week, he abandoned it. Oliver Twist had shown him that a story could do what a pamphlet never could. When Oliver asked for more gruel, readers who’d never set foot in a workhouse suddenly felt what it meant to be hungry, punished, invisible. Letters poured in. Newspapers took up the cause. Fiction put a face on suffering—and faces moved people to action.
A ghost story, he decided, would land with “twenty thousand times the force.” So he wrote one—about a miser who, when asked for a donation to the poor, replied, “Are there no prisons? No workhouses?” and is forced to confront the answer.
Despite being nearly bankrupt, Dickens personally financed the printing, illustrations, and binding—because he wanted the book to be beautiful and accessible. A Christmas Carol was an immediate success, but the production costs meant he earned far less than he needed.
He scratched two itches at once: survival and conscience. The money came, eventually. But the lasting success—the fact that this book literally reinvented how the world celebrates Christmas—came from the depth of the problem he chose to solve, not the size of the market he chased.
Build because of a compulsion, an itch, and it will shine through to everyone. Sometimes, it will keep shining, nearly two centuries later.
The AI Challenge
Today the question is urgent. What do you create when machines can instantly generate…everything?
If you ask an LLM to write an essay on any subject, it will pull from all the world’s knowledge. The result will be logical, free of defects, but it’ll also be vanilla. Undifferentiated.
Competent prose in service of a familiar idea.
This is the new Art Factory—content created at scale, optimized for metrics, devoid of any originating itch. AI slop. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s worse; it’s nothing.
The old advice was “scratch your own itch.” Well, what’s old is new. The new reality is that scratching your own itch is the only way to make something that matters. Everything else is now commodity.
But here’s what’s changed: AI doesn’t just threaten the average—it supercharges the specific. The same tools that generate slop can also scale the deeply personal. You can finally build the weird, bespoke thing that you want, and build it fast enough to find out if anyone else wants it too.
That’s what Kevin Rose is doing. He’s using AI as a multiplier for his obsession, not a replacement for his curiosity. The album guides don’t need to exist. But he wants them—so he’s building them.
I’m following that lead. This website started in my journal. Just to clear the cobwebs. Some entries turned into essays. One thing led to another—blog, book, awkward Christmas party conversations. You get the idea.
I write about what obsesses me in the hope it infects a few others, and the world gets slightly more interesting. As much as I want growth, I need to protect my very best customer. The one I’m shaving.
Your Only Assignment
Stop asking “What should I build?” Start asking “What do I wish existed?”
Then build the smallest, ugliest version and use it until it’s embarrassing how much you use it. Show a few friends, absorb their appraising looks, and keep making stuff.
If you’re willing to pay for the solution—with time, treasure, or talents—that’s the only validation that’s ever mattered.
The world has oceans of solid gold shit. It needs more backyard blacksmiths and ghost stories.
If you wouldn’t rip the paper off yourself, don’t be surprised when the world leaves it in the box.
Scratch your own itch, and the work comes alive—something worth tearing into on Christmas morning.
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