Consistency

Hobbies, passion, and time investment.

When I was a kid, my family used to say I was going to be a musician or something creative. I could spend entire hours fully concentrated playing the piano or an electric keyboard. I always believed them. I dreamed of performing in front of massive audiences, imagining myself as some sort of Yann Tiersen or Max Richter, you know, the kind of composer whose music makes you feel like you’re walking through a French film even when you’re just doing laundry.

As a teenager, this turned into spending a relevant amount of time in highschool teenager bands, playing the local circuit, which I genuinely loved. And then, as it goes, being a musician slowly turned into a hobby rather than a profession. By the end of high school, I already knew I wanted to study engineering, and my musician identity became a childhood memory, quietly archived, no fanfare, no funeral.

It is insane to think how something I was so passionate about for nearly 15 years of my life simply vanished by the force of time. Nothing dramatic happened. I didn’t fail. I didn’t get booed off stage. I just stopped being consistent because I lost interest. Something that was once considered a life vocation ended up being a lost hobby I rescued almost by accident, 18 years later. Like finding an old jacket in the back of your closet and thinking, huh, this still fits.

In this series, we’ve been talking about how purpose builds consistency. And I’ve been sitting with that. Because I don’t think I lost my purpose of becoming a musician. I think I was so focused on becoming rich that I never considered music as a vehicle to get there. And there’s really no need to explain why “becoming rich” is not a sustainable purpose in itself, I learned that not that young, but in a bad way. Unless you happen to be kid number N+1 of Elon Musk or Bezos, in which case, congratulations, this newsletter is probably beneath you.

That same obsession with wealth is also how I founded my first startup. And even though it was modestly successful for a couple of years, we crashed and burned the moment we tried to play with real money. We were a great team of bootstrappers , excellent at building simple, friendly MVPs for marketing agencies and non-digitally-savvy stakeholders. But we had branded ourselves as the first data layer for CPG. Big brands took us seriously, and we weren’t ready. We struggled to convert demos into paying customers, and our few paying customers faded out slowly , like a candle consumed by time, right in the middle of a pandemic. It was a very cinematic failure, honestly. Just not the kind you want to be in.

Now. Here’s where it gets interesting.

Have you noticed that most modern AI tools name their entry tier “Hobby”? Go check your $20/month AI subscriptions right now. The tab is probably called “Hobbyist,” “Hobby,” or some variation. And these same tools are also selling you the promise that you can build anything with words , just prompt it into existence and monetize it just as easily. It’s a genuinely seductive pitch. Build like a hobbyist, earn like a founder. The garage-to-unicorn story, but make it conversational.

This is also an ongoing debate in my line of work. If you can replicate almost any product with a well-crafted prompt, what actually creates value? My Substack readers are smart people , I don’t need to overstate the importance of distribution. Even Dario used a SaaS distribution play to outmaneuver Sammy Boy. Distribution is not a footnote. It is the strategy.

In an era where building is cheap and launching is fast, your distribution channel becomes your communication gateway with customers , but also your production engine. You distribute, collect feedback, improve the product, refine the channel, repeat. It’s a system. And it has to run consistently over time. Not just this week, not just when you feel inspired, not just when your calendar is light.

And here’s the thing AI tools genuinely cannot do for you: they cannot sustain that consistency. They can help you build. They can help you launch. They can help you set up the feedback loops. But they cannot care, week after week, about whether the loop closes.

That, I think, is the real line between a hobbyist and a builder.

I want to be clear: there is nothing wrong with being a hobbyist. Hobbies are a natural and necessary outlet for the human mind. I play piano again now , badly, joyfully, with zero professional ambition , and it is genuinely good for me. The hobbyist builds for the pleasure of building. The builder builds because something needs to exist in the world that doesn’t yet, and that gap bothers them until it’s filled.

The builder has a purpose. That purpose drives consistency. And consistency, compounded over time, becomes the engine itself.

The AI tools give you the spark. But the engine? That’s still yours to run.