In June 2015, millions of readers met the self-improvement corner of the internet head-on when Benjamin Hardy’s article “8 Things Every Person Should Do Before 8 A.M.” went viral on Medium. He wasn’t the first person to write about personal growth. But back then the format felt original and the advice seemed new.
At first I read it the way most people did; I ran a quick rubric on my own life and recognized I rarely did any of those eight things right away - let alone at any point in an entire day.
The method
Hardy built an entire livelihood out of that one post. Within a year and a half he had more than 100,000 email subscribers and a book deal. It’s been read over ten million times. While he finished his PhD he generated revenue as an author, a speaker and a coach. I even pursued his coaching for a moment, going so far as having an intro call with him. (He ended it by gently letting me know I wasn’t a good fit.)
My original understanding was that he had written in silence for years before anyone noticed. He didn’t. By his own admission, the post went viral about three months after he started blogging seriously. He even paid for a course on writing viral headlines along the way. He studied what spreads, and it spread.
A seed was planted: maybe I could do the same thing.
“It’s really quite simple.”
Before his list begins, Hardy writes “It may seem like a long list. But in short, it’s really quite simple.” And he proceeds to give “the simple” version - still eight items, distilled to their barest form.
I can boil it down to a three-part framework: get up, get inspired, get moving. The real value was never in his eight behaviors. It was in the principles underneath them. You don’t need to follow the prescription. You need to build your own framework from the principles that hold up in your life.
But that version would have never gone viral.
Why we buy it
Here’s the phenomenon: we would rather trade our attention for someone else’s prescription for our lives than spend the energy figuring out what actually works for ours. We exchange clicks, eyeballs and real money for instructions on how to improve every part of our lives, often from people whose only authority is that they chose to share it.
Erich Fromm wrote about this in 1941, long before Medium existed. In Escape from Freedom, he argued that freedom is heavy and people will hand it to almost any authority willing to tell them what to do. A morning routine is a small version of the same trade. If someone else decides how your day starts, you don’t have to.
How I read it
It didn’t take long for me to recognize that I was not cut out to execute those eight steps. I saw the framework underneath and made some changes to my own routine. But it wasn’t his mornings I tried to mirror. It was his writing.
For the next few years, I tried to copy that style. I wrote on Medium and LinkedIn and Substack, attempting to curate my own iteration of personal growth content. I joined communities, paid for courses, watched YouTube videos on virality. Everything I created was aimed at something fleeting and it showed. The irony was I could read his list and throw it out, but when I saw his method I tried to adopt all of it.
Who wanted this?
The list was easy to refuse - it looked like a prescription so I was able to treat it like one. The other prescription wasn’t as obvious. It looked like ambition and it felt like my own.
Fromm takes escaping freedom one step further. It’s not always as blatant as handing your choices over to authority. It’s something he called automaton conformity: we take on other people’s wants and forget they were ever someone else’s in the first place. We don’t experience it as obedience. We call it a goal.
Hardy built a career around his calling. And every time I sat down to write, I was trying to build a career around his calling too. It’s no surprise it was unsustainable.
Starting over
So now I’m back, on roughly the same platforms, for a different reason.
I have the work that pays me and it can carry that weight. Writing doesn’t have to. In fact, the more my work is driven by AI, the more my life needs to be driven by art. What has been avoidable is now inevitable. I write to understand more than to be understood.
A seed was planted ten years ago. It could only start growing after I pulled up the roots that were not mine.