The cure for precious stationery: buy 18 of them

Stop saving the nice things for “someday”

Nice notebooks are so hard to use.

A confession: I love buying them. I love holding them. I love running my hand over the smooth fountain pen-friendly pages and admiring a perfectly spaced dot grid.

What I struggle with is actually writing in them.

A blank notebook contains every possible version of itself. It could become a record of brilliant ideas. A beautiful travel journal. The place where I finally write something worth keeping. The seeds of a magnum opus!

The moment I put pen to paper, all that possibility collapses into reality.

Usually, reality looks like a half-formed thought in rushed handwriting next to a badly placed sticker. So really, the best case scenario is it becomes a Substack essay.

Then I discovered a ridiculous hack: buy a ton of them.

When I found myself feeling precious about my one Field Notes notebook, I bought the entire National Parks series instead.

My rationale: ruining one of one is hard. Ruining one of eighteen is much easier.

The artist Mike Hernandez has a phrase he uses with students: paint like you’re rich.

He paints with thick, generous textures. But there’s a physical resistance to squeezing paint out of the tube when one color can cost more than $20. My instinct is to water it down, stretch it further and save the expensive pigment for some future painting that deserves it.

But paint inside a tube is only potential.

On paper, it becomes something.

Buying 18 Field Notes is not financially responsible advice. But having 18 books to play with made me feel rich enough to stop treating each page like a scarce resource.

The notebooks got ruined. Pages? Stained. Covers? Bent. Staplers? Thankfully still intact.

And now I’m halfway through my stash.

The accompanying YouTube video is here:

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Update log:

• 📹 Started posting AI reels on Instagram.

• 🦷 Got my teeth cleaned. Routine health stuff. Never convenient but important to slot in.

• 🎧 Really enjoyed this conversation between Craig Mod and Dan Shipper.

• ✂️ Did the full edit for this Every video on GPT-5.6 Sol using Descript and animations-by-Codex. It’s so wild what you can do without touching Final Cut Pro or any other video editing software??

• 😮‍💨 Am deep in logistics stuff: terminating my internet contract, changing addresses, etc… Lowkey wanna fast forward to next weekend so it’s all over.

• 😬 Kind of glad that I decided to hold off starting a job full-time until I’m all settled because I’m having a crash out every 2h.

My book: Grab a copy of Bite-Sized Creativity, a 45-min read about how to live a creative life on top of your 9-to-5.

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