The Moontower Formula

Friends,

A week ago I did the second installment of the Financial Literacy Series for a group of local kids. It was mostly ad-libbed but you can see the outline here if you want to replicate it in your own community:

🐖Financial Literacy II: Entrepreneurship

In the session, I defined a business as:

a good or service that seeks to make a profit by improving people’s lives

Profit is not a perfect thermometer. This was a reductionist lesson with kids in mind but it holds up well enough. The real key to the statement is “improving people’s lives”. Not everything that does that will make a profit and not everything that makes a profit is improving people’s lives but “improving lives” is the North Star.

Hold that thought.

Today is the 5 year anniversary of 40 people letting me spam them once a week with my “musings”. Moontower was born. Thanks to a loving audience of family and friends willing to indulge me.

In the past month, Moontower sites have gotten over 250,000 views, with over 75% of it coming from this letter. (And saying so is about as much effort I’m going to put into fishing for sponsors).

Before plowing ahead with a Money Angle I’m excited about, here are the principles that have sustained Moontower over the years. They were discovered by trial-and-error, but if you have a hankering to get started on something maybe it can provide some clarity a bit earlier in the process.

1. Serve. It’s the definition of a business — improve people’s lives. In this specific case, with:a) knowledge

   b) perspective (or at least healthy provocation), andc) hopefully enough turns of phrase to have it beat someone else’s summary of a and b

2. My recipe which you are welcome, invited, and encouraged to steal:a) break ideas down into components

   b) be repetitive (ie write 5 posts on how compounding or logs work, but each from a slightly different but overlapping vantage point)

   c) recap

   d) spot concepts in the wild — relate them back to the fundamentals

   e) cadence — keep showing up. The exposure is critical for a reader to consolidate concepts. To serve and not simply be spouting trivia, I need to stock your mental library so you can pull out the relevant volume when the situation calls for it

In equation form:

The key to such an equation of course is the exponent.

The goal I have for you when you read Moontower is the same goal I have for me when I write it — thicken the mental muscles. Every centimeter of hypertrophy must gel into a dense structure of links and callbacks. But even as you climb there’s a familiar, wide foothold just below each new height. You can retreat back to the last checkpoint or post, catch your breath, consolidate.1

You wouldn’t write like this in many high performing contexts because the goal is sometimes to weed people out. To find out who can get the farthest the fastest with minimal assistance. But this isn’t my concern. I write like I like to learn. Slowly. With the space to indulge the side-quests. And my simple bet is I’m not special — many people (enough to fill a basketball arena at least) will relate to learning this way.

It turns out a lot of neat serendipities fall out of pepe-le-pew-clinging to a basic formula. If you go into something like this with no expectations it’s going to be surprisingly rewarding. If, instead, you indulge the whim with an outcome in mind just be aware that there is a see-saw between growth and extraction that balances in proportion to time horizon (said plainly — there’s no payoff for a long time so bake that into your expectations).

My robot friend, in response to me lamenting how hard it was to squeeze sub growth organically, gave me what I need to hear: “MT is a slow burn”. It pays off with consistent reading rather than occasional nibbles. It’s never going to have a mass audience. But as long as it always serves the reader, it’ll get the readers it deserve.2

The principles extend way past writing on the internet. But writing to you every week has made them more apparent to me. So thank you for helping me internalize and feel these principles, not just be intellectually aware of them.

David Senra’s Founders podcast is one of my favorites. In fact, he’s given me much of the language I use to understand the formula (not personally, I don’t know David, but a tribute to his show is that by listening you feel like you do!). He signs off every recording like “that’s 325 episodes down, 1000 more to go”. And the “1000 more to go” never decrements.

221 Sunday Moontowers down, 1000 more to go.