Just Do It Once, Then Repeat

I'm already becoming pretty decent at Substacking. All it took was writing one issue, and then another. 🔁

Hello, and welcome to week 2 of “Me figuring out this whole newsletter thing.”

The first issue, last week, was too self-deprecating. I apologize. This one won’t be. Not at all. This issue is going to be great. The best newsletter you’ll ever read. It will change your life. The world, even. What are you waiting for? Subscribe now. I guarantee you won’t regret it.

There’s an interesting spectrum between intense insecurity on the one end, and absolute arrogance on the other. The golden middle is what we call confidence.

Where exactly you fall on that spectrum, for a given task, is a function of both your skill and your personality. To approach the middle, you’ll need to change at least one of them.

It’s possible to improve your personality, even though that’s not always straightforward. If you realize you’re constantly under- or overconfident, you can recalibrate.

But it’s far easier to improve your skill. All you need is to do the task.

Every now and then, I remind myself that the difference between “I have absolutely no idea how to do X” and “I’m actually pretty decent at doing X” is often to just do X once.

Just once!

Case in point: I’m already better at writing on Substack than I was last week. With very little effort, I’ve moved away from an extreme on the insecurity-confidence-arrogance axis. I’m not quite in the golden middle yet, but I’m getting there.

So it goes with almost anything. Make your own pizza dough once, and you’re now the kind of person who makes pizza dough. Make it a few more times and you become the local expert in homemade pizza.

And once you’ve reached perfect confidence, if you keep practicing, you become great. In fact, that’s all there is to greatness. Just be good, repeatably.

This is why I’m going to keep writing this newsletter. I want to write at least 100 issues, which, on a weekly basis, means almost two years. You have my permission to yell at me if and when I show signs of weakness — and want to give up — along the way.

Meanwhile, I remain

Self-improvingly yours,

Étienne

---

On Twitter: A Tale of Chickens and Eggs

After my thread on the cultural evolution of cakes became viral last October, I decided to have some more fun and dive into the origins of common baking ingredients.

I did chocolate three weeks ago. And last week, I wrote about the evolution of eggs and the domestication of chickens.

(Did you know that the primary purpose of chicken domestication was neither the eggs nor the meat, but… cockfighting? Yeah, me neither.)

Étienne FD @etiennefd

"Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" isn't a hard question. It's the egg. The dinosaurs were laying eggs millions of years before there were any chickens. 🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚🥚 Come, let's spend this thread looking deeper into eggs and chickens. You know you want to.

Next up: spices.

Don’t hesitate to share this newsletter if you like it!