Hussain Ibarra posted three short paragraphs to Substack Notes recommending that people write a five-hundred-word essay every day, about whatever they happen to care about, with no AI, no templates, and — his words — “without the feeling that you need to go viral.” Ibarra writes under a Substack called Passion & Profit, a name that already contains the tension the note is arguing against. By the time anyone stopped scrolling long enough to count, the note had been restacked more than nine hundred times, replied to more than three hundred times, and liked over fifteen thousand times. An argument against building an audience had, by the platform’s own scoreboard, become one of the better-performing pieces of audience-building content of the month.
What the note actually recommends
The note itself is narrower than the online conversation around it suggests. Ibarra isn’t telling people to quit Substack or stop publishing; he’s recommending a private habit — pick a topic, write about it daily, skip the optimization. “Pick a topic you love and write about it,” he wrote. “Without AI. Without templates. Without the feeling that you need to go viral. Just you, your thoughts, and a piece of paper.” The claim that writing this way “will literally rewire your brain” is the one line in the note that outruns what any neuroscience actually shows, and it is worth separating from the more defensible part of his point: writing without an audience in mind changes what actually ends up on the page.
The research behind why that might be true
That narrower claim has real backing. In a study of 72 people already active in creative writing, psychologist Teresa Amabile had participants write two poems, with a brief questionnaire in between that primed either intrinsic reasons for writing — enjoyment, self-expression, the pleasure of the work itself — or extrinsic ones, such as publication, recognition, or career advantage. There was no difference between groups on the first poem. On the second, the poems written after five minutes ranking extrinsic reasons were rated meaningfully less creative by a panel of twelve poets, several of them published: a mean creativity score of 15.74 out of 40, against 18.78 for the control group and 19.88 for the group primed with intrinsic reasons, a statistically significant drop (F(2,69) = 4.66, p < .013). Amabile herself called the size of the effect “particularly impressive” given that her subjects were already experienced writers with strong existing interest in the craft — this wasn’t a case of talking novices out of a hobby, it was a temporary five-minute reframing measurably dulling the work of people who wrote for hours every week. Amabile’s 1985 paper opens with a line from Sylvia Plath’s journals describing her own writer’s block as a product of wanting “acceptance” from “editors and publishers and critics and the World” — a want she said “corrupts my nunnish labor of work-for-itself-as-its-own-reward.” Ibarra’s note is a compressed, non-academic version of the same argument: bring the audience into the room, and the work changes shape around it, even when the audience is only being imagined.
Why five minutes was enough
What makes Amabile’s result useful here is what it did not require. She didn’t need to impose a deadline, a reward, or an evaluator watching over anyone’s shoulder — the studies that had already shown creativity declining under those conditions. All she did was have subjects spend five minutes reading and ranking a list of extrinsic reasons for writing, making that motivation briefly salient before they picked up a pen. The mechanism wasn’t a constraint on the work; it was a shift in what the writer was thinking about while doing it. A feed that displays a like count, a restack count, and a reply count under every post someone writes is, functionally, a machine for making extrinsic reasons salient on a loop, with no single deadline or reward required to do it. The platform doesn’t have to force anyone to chase an audience. It just has to keep showing them the number.
The mechanism working in the other direction
The friction is that the note exists inside a system built to reward exactly the orientation it argues against. When Substack launched Notes in 2023, its founders wrote that they wanted to build something that “fosters deep connections and quality over shallow engagement and dopamine hacks,” turning away from “the attention economy.” In the same announcement, they described restacking — the exact mechanic that moved Ibarra’s note past nine hundred shares — as giving writers “a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences.” Both descriptions are true of the same feature. A note about writing for no one still travels through a tool explicitly built to convert attention into subscriptions. Nothing about posting the advice to Notes, where it can be restacked, replied to, and counted, sits outside the audience-chasing behavior it describes. The same pattern predates Substack by two decades. Blog platforms have displayed comment counts, subscriber numbers, and page-view stats since the format existed, and the effect Amabile measured in a lab in 1985 does not require a restack button specifically — any dashboard that keeps a running tally of who is paying attention will do the same work of keeping the audience salient, on any format, in the background of every post.
What the replies gave away
The replies underneath the note make the same tension visible from the other side. Naman Gupta wrote that “writing every day is like having a conversation with yourself. Over time, the conversations get a lot more interesting” — a reply that picked up its own likes and its own sub-replies. Ashbi Abraham added that “expressive writing has been shown to reduce stress markers while helping us regulate our emotions,” delivered in the register of a pitch rather than a private observation. One writer, posting under the name Restitched Surgeon, described starting a Substack days earlier and framed the daily-writing habit as something already worth narrating publicly, describing the habit, four days in, as something already unraveling into its own project. None of this is hypocrisy. It is evidence for how hard the audience orientation is to switch off once a platform is watching and counting, even in the specific act of agreeing that it shouldn’t matter.
The interesting finding is not that the advice was right, or that its own popularity undercut it. It is that both are true in the same note, at the same time, without contradiction. Amabile’s writers produced worse poems after five minutes spent thinking about publication and recognition. Ibarra’s readers produced a wave of replies and restacks after reading a note telling them not to think about publication and recognition. The habit the note recommends — writing daily, for its own sake, off the feed — is the one thing none of its engagement metrics can actually measure.
