you don't enjoy the sun on your face right now because of circadian rhythms. not consciously. stop this.

i want to know what it feels like to walk around Shanghai and be that pretty, what does it feel like to get an idea you're excited about, how did you get there, what's your mental process through this, how is the sun on your skin feeling, is the cold refreshing or biting, is it helping...

I'll generalize, but that's what i'm looking for these days, both in my life, and on the internet

I want to feel things, and get excited with and for people. I don't want more tips on how to succeed at life in general, i want to know how you made the tiny steps to get where you are.

primary source is what i'm getting at.

the internet should have more primary sources of people doing stuff for the sake of the stuff, rather than... for what ? Rather : as opposed to secondary source rehashing the same info again and again like it's gospel. there's a bit of fuck format in there. a bit of a following on good learning material part 2.

it's not authenticity per se, although there is certainly something of that there. the good bits are in the personal details, in watching someone truly sharing something fun. in getting to follow along a journey, rather than a business plan.

and if it must be tips, tell me specifics.

more primary sources please.

anyway, this is an editorial rule for myself.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

my goal with the painting is not to recreate it, just to... remember the moment while painting.

that's how i've been treating art these days.

and it's funny because since I started painting again, I get a lot of those visuals moments I want to capture. a picture I think the movement is cool, a dream where the set-up felt important. and it feels random, but it has the same feeling-shape that tells me : "this is an important talisman you want to keep, make something out of it".

the simple fact that I have this new medium i can use makes me more aware of those moments

I get to appreciate shapes and colors and relations and feelings in new dimensions. or rather, in a deeper dimension than I could before.

art making is talisman making after all

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

During the 2010's, the french online business world was ruled by people making a lot of tiny courses, fast and cheap-ish. I LOVED this trend and bought A LOT of courses during that decade. The ones that really stuck with me were the audio-based ones.

I remember specifically one from a French copywriter where he talked about how he was prepping a sale page, what was going through his mind and what kind of info he wanted to put on the page in the end.

It was like being inside his head. The audio format really helped because you could walk around and immerse yourself in the process.

Another big advantage to these courses for clients was that you could download them and keep them, even when their creators disappeared or when you lost your password. I still have most of my audio courses somewhere on my computer.

It really worked well for theory, for stuff you had to understand to be able to DO afterwards. It wouldn't work as well for the history based learning of the books in the first part of this series.

In the same 'short course' category, but visual, I learned plenty from people simply sharing their screens and doing the work live. (it made me totally allergic to presentations that only consist of telling).

AntoineBM's courses had a huge influence over what I felt I was capable of doing.

You could put in this category any video-based tutorial where the person was DOING stuff for real. No walk-through of the interface, but actually posting something or putting together a website or structuring something.

I talked about this here too : zara zhang on code as a medium and in lists are clues, about Sandi Hester.

The recurrent thing here is : showing (again), but in a hands-on way. As close as possible to a craft master and his pupil, with the added bonus of asynchronicity.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

I'm starting tonight with a no-wrong-answer kind of question : what learning materials have really made a difference in my life?

One comes to mind immediately: Le Théâtre raconté aux jeunes, André Degaine (and its adult version : Histoire du Théâtre Dessinée, same author, more content)

It's a FANTASTIC book about the history of drama (tough word to translate, but by drama I mean, drama on stage, Shakespeare and all that). This book made such an impression on me that it's one of the books I first bought back after my Great Breakup in which I lost all my books.

I'll include a few pictures, because it's just so incredible.

The black and white, hand-drawn illustrations, handwritten format, made it FUN to browse. Non-formal. Explaining concepts visually. It made an impression. To this day, I think of the little round dance goat cult drawing when someone mentions the word tragedy.

I've never seen another educational book quite like this one.

And it doesn't use its informal format as an excuse not to be thorough. It has a point of view, it's full of facts and references. It has pictures (why don't A LOT MORE educational and nonfiction books have more pictures?), and it even has a map of all that was covered at the end.

I discuss map-making for creators in my book Organons (still only available in French for now). But essentially, I think making metaphor-maps is really one of the best things you can do for retention, and global understanding.

This river-map here is especially useful.

It's really my gold-standard for learning.

It was the way it treated me as a curious person rather than a student to be lectured. It explains, doesn't assume I have the background, is pleasant without trying too hard to be humorous. It’s made the content the actual story (as opposed to the modern sin of storytelling: trying to fit the content into a story).

Now that I have the book on my laps, I'm also realizing that what keeps me interested to keep on reading is that the layout changes to match what it is teaching.

It makes comparison easy. Which helps both with big-picture understanding and also detail retention.

That's actually my biggest headache with AI HTML-making so far (and with the specific tool I'm trying to build). Ai is either too strict or too random in its layout choices. It will either do the same trick over and over again, or just make something pretty looking. It doesn't automatically ask itself what the material requires.

Oh oh another related learning material waaay way back in my childhood is a series of visual books called L’Imagerie.

Each book had a theme and a series of chapters about specific elements of the themes. Kind of like small specialized encyclopedias.

I credit a lot of my early general knowledge to these. They were such a pleasure to browse. My favorite was the one about fairies and witches. Full of short tales, different kinds of witches around the world and some DIY for Halloween. I felt immersed into a wide world of wonders.

The one about history really helped me visualise French history on a timeline. Something schools don’t do much because they are focused on one chapter at a time rather than the whole book.

Again here this sense of big picture, short contained sections, and specific details. Along a strong visual dimension.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

(and paint)

(and sleep)

(and eat yummy food)

that's all

ai made us builders again

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

Up until now, it very much felt like the internet was populated of people giving advise (me first) and not actually doing much else. Contrarian takes, how-tos and the sorts is fun, yeah, but it can only exist for good if they're based on some real experience.

In other words, you gotta write about something else than writing in order to teach writing well. You have to do videos about something else than making videos in order to be able to teach how to make good videos. And all that jazz.

I'm not throwing rocks at anyone. Pre-AI was EXHAUSTING if you wanted to build any form of expertise-teaching-empire that was worth something (and it often felt like the only way to make a decent living).

so I'm hopeful when I see people talking about how they build stuff again. showing the stuff rather than throwing big concepts about how to do the stuff.

see : zara zhang on code as a medium as a perfect example

I'm giddy excited when I get to spend more time building than explaining how to build.

this morning, I've spent a couple of hours eyes deep into someone's content data, looking at the ideas and the stuff that's behind to build a notebook desk that allows me to understand my favorite creators better.

yesterday, I vibe coded real quick a browser extension that hides my substack feed so i'm not distracted by it when I shouldn't.

Maybe a big part of this is just.. new tech excitement learning. That's possible.

But doesn't it feel amazing ?

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

and one thing jumped out at me : my current content is not how i want my content to feel like. it feels like a performance actually (oh, a performance not performing). when I want i really want my content to feel like is EXCITING.

but as soon as it's about writing an article or a video script, i tense up and it's not fun anymore. especially when it comes to video. it's all about other people understanding (and often about not getting misunderstood), about making the self so little it doesn't get in the way of the education, and i HATE that.

this whole statement doesn't include this blog, which I'm very proud of and actually is doing a lot to reassure me that another way is possible

when I watch myself reading off my script on video, trying hard to only show the advantageous profile, and fiddling with the light settings of my mac... there's no space for excitement left

and indeed, even the PREPPING is telling : I need it to be the right time of the day so the light is alright, but also it cannot be too hot or they will hear the fan, and the neighbor needs to be quiet and my face needs to be done and my hair needs to behave... i'm exhausted by the time I hit record.

no wonder it doesn't inspire anything in others

and so in moments of despair-problem-solving, when I frenetically click on the worst sort of YouTube and articles promising to teach me the secret with a well-oiled formula of slop - i make it worse. this is one of the advantages of getting older i think, i realise much quicker that i'm grossed out. my whole chubby body is repulsed by the idea of fitting myself into the mental equivalent of a low-rise skinny jeans of the 2000.

when the whole reason why I believe in content and in sharing stuff online is because I get all jolly inside when I get to do something I thought was impossible before, when I see i've made some progress, made something actually concrete I wasn't able to do before, when I solve an issue I had for a while, when I discover some hidden secret passage to an easier life.

I want THAT BIT to transpire.

this whole blog started with fuck format, maybe i just need to walk my talk a bit more seriously. to let go even more of the idea of engagement and education that the early creator economy instilled in me. to let it all me messy and scrappy and ugly.

Ok, new alternatives to 'how to make tons of views on youtube' :

• record when excited (don't wait until the conditions are right) - stuff can be edited afterwards
• do more of what I've done for the Zara Zhang presentation (in zara zhang on code as a medium) - analyse the content I like and what makes me like it
• focus on sharing EXCITEMENT

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

I’ve moved my main website off-platform last week. And that was phase 1.

Phase 2 has to do with the more technical and security aspect of selling. I’ve put some stuff for sale off-Podia for testing, and I’m waiting for volume to tell me if I’ve come up with a good system or if it still need some work.

I’m breaking up with Podia over differences of objectives. The platform wants to be a community-first space, and I don’t. (why does everything has to be a social media now?)

But I’m also motivated by a great need to not rely on platforms I don’t control the direction of (kinda left Notion (affiliate link) in the same way, when they turned AI native). We use those tools with all those features we technically pay for but that we never use. And I’m tired of having to wait for other to offer the stuff I really care about.

Luckily for my non-technical ass, I live at the most exciting time to have this need : the AI era !

I see a lot of creators around me experimenting with ai to replace their course provider or their blog, sometimes even their entire selling system. And I’m very inspired by it all.

It’s not all rainbows eh. There are reasons why platforms are still popular :

• ease of use
• no need to know what you want
• other people are in charge of maintenance and repair
• onboarding and stuff
• Security and compliance with global and national internet laws

But my oh my the freedom of doing whatever you want with your platform? Priceless so far.

And I feel like by having to ask yourself the hard questions of how you want to do things, you end up working on the actual good things to work on. Rather than accepting the default pretty looking stuff. A concrete example on : wow is a bad brief

Also you get to really understand how the magic of the web work. I’ve never learned as much about technical stuff as my time building my website. ALL THE WHILE, still having a blast adding the fun layers on top.

Bref. Tis the season to break up with platforms !

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

It's been on my mind for a while to quit Podia (affiliate link), with which I was for years, and build my website from scratch somewhere else. I wanted more freedom, more fun, more experiments. So when they announced they were becoming a community-first kind of platform, I decided it was time. There's too much social media as it is, I don't want to turn my business into one (but that's not the topic here).

I had already dipped my toes a few times into AI-HTML. Mostly to make slides, and then, as a bigger experiment, to make a simple website for my parent's guesthouse. And tha, as an even bigger experiment (yet still modest in its ambitions), with this website.

I was READY to make something better, bigger, bolder for my business. And my objective, as I put it, was to 'wow' visitors. Aligned with my whole argument that creators should aim to delight and enchant people online.

Looking back, I think this is an extremely BAD objective for a website.

First of all, because it's a lot of pressure on a new thing you haven't even build yet. And second, because... that can make you lose sight of what the website is for. Concretely, it made me launch into a several week-long process of creating something I thought was edgy and cool, and then ending up hating the design, the color and the whole concept after a couple of pages had been finished.

I started with something simple : white, with neon. These have been my go-to colors for a while on my business related projects.

Things started well, and I had A LOT OF FUN coming up with ways to make each page feel interesting in its own specific way :

• the audit page had an animated illustration that changed along the visitor's scrolling
• the consultation page had an emoji change easter-egg
• the papier page had a collection of Substack cards
• ...

But things got weird as soon as I tried to make it more accessible and add a dark mode. It felt suddenly very... tech from 5 years ago. And as much as I tried to shift the colors (last iteration had a blue background in dark mode), I was NOT satisfied with the vibes. So I decided to start over.

For this second version, I'd try to add some of my signature style : organic reminders. I played with vintage stationary colors, bristol cards and cork board. And let me tell you : I LOOOOVED working on that. It was fun, I kept some of the effects of the V1, adding some new tricks to my collection of website tricks and really pushed myself in terms of color and dark mode.

It felt a lot more like my vibe.

And looking back, it is stunning (especially in dark mode). BUT it was a nightmare to edit. Everytime I was adding a new page or a new block somewhere, I had to check everything twice. I tried very hard to guide the AI to understand what I needed, going as far as making a whole menu of blocks and how they should behave in light and dark mode.

But after two weeks, I figured : this is way too much work for a website I'm bound to keep adding to. And I was already kind of tired of the colors...

So I took a little break to think things through.

What is it I really need my website to do :

• help people find my offers quickly and understand what they can do for them
• be a place where I can add stuff easily
• and what those weeks of testing and trying out designs told me : be a place that I can evolve in visually too

That last part was important I realised (maybe not as important as the first one short term, but long term? yeah).

So I started to think about the places I never get bored of.

My computer being number 1. It's a good place to try to emulate, because the interface is pretty strict. I can change things around but not too much. So i started to think about how I keep my computer a place I want to come back to :

• switching backgrounds
• changing the main color of the interface
• dark mode / light mode (also a bit fan of the color filter when I'm overstimulated)

Not so long ago, I shared here a website that I really liked that looked like an apple computer (june 2026 online life snapshot - alanagoyal's website ). It really sticked to my mind.

Obsidian is another one of those places where the interface can be pretty stiff and yet, with a couple of edits to its appearance, I'm inspired again.

So I had a new, much better list from which to work from :

• easy to add content to (simple structure that an AI cannot fuck up)
• easy to modify when my mood needs it
• dark and light mode (that was always a thing anyway but, it needed to be more obvious)

And from this list, my V3 was born.

In this version, i can easily :

• change the accent color (it's a global parameter)
• change the background (same principle)
• change the fonts (same)
• add notifications to the homepage without having to add a whole news block (I only have to edit an md file)
• each page is dead simple, and easy for clients to get the info
• yet, I kept some whimsy wow effects with a gallery and the notifications (but they don't get in the way of someone looking for info)
• and it is super convenient on mobile

It's a living thing I can add to easily. Without having to fight with Codex or Claude over every single little details. And the best thing is that it's super light. For now, I'm very into this Kandinsky painting, but who knows, tomorrow it could have a totally different vibe with a vintage picture, an AI pattern or a painting of mine !

I'm very proud of this version. And I don't regret having gone through all the different iterations of design, I've learned plenty of tricks and principles on how to make AI do exactly what you have in mind. And I really upped my accessibility game ! But maybe that's another post.

You can check it out here : mariedrouvin.com

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

Like a divine catch-up. Let’s see where Marie is at today.

I also thought languages were codes I could figure out by rearranging the letters. And I would sing Disney's Aladdin's songs, trying very hard to crack the code so I could be singing them in English (my first language, and therefore, the language of my disney movies is french).

I knew from a very young age that I would never get married.

I was also convinced I once saw Daniel Radcliffe smiling at me in a car on a highway on the way to Brittany. The same day I saw a bear in a forest we were driving fast by.

I thought my bedroom would forever be covered with posters of Lorie.

I was sure the world would one day discover a hidden natural talent in me, and that it would mean moving to New York and singing on stage for a (huge) living.

Every year, I'd knew the next one would be the one I finally got thin.

I miss that feeling of certainty in the magical quality of the future.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

I think my excitement has a lot to do about HOW the presentation was thought about. I'm a lover of the scrappy web, so I like when things are not too formal and when people are ready to share what's really on their screens (as opposed to lovely slides with more embelishment than value).

And that's kind of a weird statement to say because Zhang is showing and talking about slides. She's showing her front-design skills for Claude to make beautiful (and non AI sloppy) slides. And I sensed she was kinda nervous, following a script.

BUT it's the essence of how she shares. She's not trying to overpedagogize everything. Which is a skill I'm trying to learn and I've started to REALLY appreciate.

She's sharing what she does, how she does it, what it looks like and how she thinks when she does it all. Simple as that. I've noted that this is the type of content that I would be SUPER PROUD to share.

Also, what makes this extra relatable is that she's not a coder. Like me.

I've picked a few new tricks from this. Notably, the 'playground' trick of asking an AI to show you a menu of options. But mostly, it reenforced things I was already doing and that I now feel more empowered to use (there's something interesting about my own behaviour here but that's not the point of this post).

The one thing I had already started doing and that I feel more excited to explore is creating tiny tools for myself. Especially tiny tools to modify my experience of the internet. I've written about this before in French (how to take back control over your internet productivity without deleting youtube). I was already a fan of browser extensions that help me curb the addictive or toxic parts of the websites I love (the shorts on youtube, and the 'for you' timeline on twitter).

But now I don't need the tools to exist. I can just make them myself. Just this week, I have made myself a little extension that cuts off substack feed. If it's on, then I can see my notifications, write articles, send notes and everything - but I won't see the feed, where I can get lost and triggered too easily.

Zhang even brushed on a concept I had not considered : replace the stuff you don't want by the stuff you need. Ex : ads with quotes, or your 'new tab' by your to-do....

Also the idea of 'real estate' is not one I had considered this way before. The places you visit online. Where do you have real estate available to push you towards whatever you want (and this doesn't have to be a productivity thing either, just... make the experience fit you).

Anyway, this presentation really inspired me to record more videos of what I do.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

The famous sardine test.

Naturally, I started to question whether I would have failed the marshmallow test as a kid.

I’m pretty gluttonous. It’s been a topic of conflict. But I would not have failed the test. Because rules. I would have known what the expected correct answer was, and would have suppressed my hunger. But these days...

I think I would consciously fail the test. Chose to eat the marshmallow now.

After all, the three marshmallows are not a given. People are forgetful. And they don’t care that you tried not to eat this one because of what they said they would do if you don’t. I will take the sure thing.

Sometimes that’s the actual right answer.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

Plus, other people always have much more interesting things to say than me. Especially to me, since I already know what I’m about to say

I don’t wanna go psychoanalysis on you but that’s how I was brought up too. Family conversations are about the family business. And I’m not part of it, even remotely. I get it. They would shut up if the conversation was about websites and social media. It’s nothing personal. So I’m the one who shuts up.

That’s why it came as a huge surprise when I discovered that I was, in fact, a big yapper.

How did I discover that you’ll ask ? Well, in hindsight, the blogging and singing could have been big clues. The language learning too. But it was AI.

The dictation. Wow. What a revolution that was for me.

I started yapping about everything and anything, everywhere I could ! (and I optimise for solitude so I hang out in a lot yapping-friendly places)

My favorite way to yap is while walking now. That’s another revolution. I was not someone prone to movement in general. (Do I sound fun or what lol)

Yapping walks. Yapping laying on the sofa. Yapping workouts. Yapping cooking. Yapping before bed. Yapping while rolling a spiky ball in my palms.

(I yap with Monologue, by Every, which I already mentioned today in business model detours)

I’ll tell you one weird thing though. Good dictation made me a yapper but it did not make me a transcript reader.

I could yap without the little magic robot turning the audio into a long and windy wall of text that I’ll never read back. But I don’t. I did not. And I probably won’t.

I need the.. something to listen. Not even me, I don’t listen most of the time, I just flow yap for sports.

It does bring me benefits in other ways. I now know I always have something to say. Ive trained myself to not have to always be so literal and serious about what I say. It has improved my conversation skills (finding space to speak in groups is still challenging but I can hold much longer conversations now). I’m more at ease.

Neil deGrasse said : “hardly any sentence comes out of my mouth, unless I’ve written it before”

Well I think I’m like that with yapping. Yapping was my door to say more stuff.

Not that it solved everything. I still would love to :

• make YouTube videos without a full script
• be more articulate when I share something outside my area of expertise
• not say ‘euh’ so much (French “hm”)
• stumble less on my words (especially the language mixing type of stumble, and especially in front of my mother)

Ah well, progress was made. And it shall be made again.

What astonishes me, though, is that I grew up not knowing that about myself ! Imagine that. 34 years not knowing I could enjoy yapping that much.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

That's the question I’m sitting with this afternoon. I've tried to give the job to AI, but meh.

I simply cannot make AI make something that I really want if I don't actually know what it is that I want. It will just be frustrating. Like trying to add the finishing touches to a cake you haven’t baked yet. So I'm gonna try to study a few websites in order to make it interesting. And report here.

I’ve landed on the Every website.

Actually fascinating series of connections here. This is a big detour, but hey it’s my blog ! I saw this gif on Substack of a cool animation for a gallery. Clicked on the creator’s profile and went in snooping mode. Becky Isjwara’s website is awesome, the first one I’ve opened in my afternoon quest. She’s this badass pro as well. Worked with Ali Abdaal, and made an amazing YouTube to instagram carousel tool. Anyway, I saw she was now working for Every. Which is a company I very much admire the design of. Also a biiiiig user (top 100 lifetime, often top 30 of the month, I'm a secret yapper) of their dictation tool : Monologue.

Ok back on track. So I’m in front of Every’s website and I’m analysis their front page :

• beautiful
• clean
• dark mode baked in
• content focussed

Actually suprised they don't lead with some more... big opinions. What you find is mostly the most recent content, and... their tools. Now, I don't know if you know Every, so I'll explain. Every is an AI educational media company. You'll learn a lot about AI and models from their articles, podcasts and videos. They have a stupidly simple subscription model : $30 and you get access to everything.

Where I started to find this analysis interesting (and also where I completely lost interest in my original goal) - is that they also sell tools.

As I mentioned, I'm a user of Monologue. A pretty cool designed dictation tool. The current subscription gives you access to 4 AI-related tools. And I find it interesting for a media to sell products that are INCLUDED with the subscription.

Like it's not the only way to have those tools. You can pay for them individually (at about $10/m usually). So it makes sense to have the subscription so you have access to everything.

Sublime is another company that is going about their business this way as well. Kind of the other way : they are a tool business that also sells media. They do those webinars. If you're a premium member, you get access to those. If you don't, it costs something like $50 to join per webinar. Given that it's about $20 per month in order to be a premium Sublime thing. You just become a subscriber.

So I find that business model really interesting.

Typically, people go about doing business differently. They pick a lane (educational or tool-based). And when they do create several tools, all of them will have their own subscription model, right?

What is especially fascinating about this new business model is that you don't have to justify the price of the subscription on a single tool. All of the tools don't even need to relate to each other in some way. They kind of need to fit the brand generally, but they don't need to be all spreadsheet-related or whatever. Also, gone are the days where you'd be selling a huge tool with lots of functionalities. You're selling lots of little tools.

I like that as the consumer. It gives me a lot of control over what I bring into my world. You don't have to encumber yourself with all those functionalities that you don't need. But it's still all in one subscription.

Thinking about it, you see this business model coming up again and again.

Apple's Creator Studio. You pay one fee and then you can add into your environment whichever tool you want. Reader (affiliate link) and Readwise (affiliate link). Two tools, one subscription. They relate to each other, but they don't have to. Readwise should really become a media company actually.

And none of that tells me what to put on the front page of my website.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

It's a crazy statement coming from me, because I read a lot. One could say text is my oxygen.

More than that, it's part of my identity. I'm the girl with a book in place of a boyfriend. I was the teenager reading 600-page bricks instead of playing makeup with her girlfriends. I'm the nerd with glasses and a commitment to ideas. The serious history student, the one with a big library in the background of her videos. you get the gist.

But I haven't enjoyed reading an actual BOOK in a while.

In fact, when I tried to make a list of the books I truly LOVED, I got as far as 5 or 6. And most of them I read as a teenager. (for context, I turn 34 in a month).

For a second, the realisation dizzied me with even more catastrophical thoughts. Maybe I'm not as smart as I pretend to be, maybe I'm just a fraud, maybe my decication to idea is superficial. Maybe that's why I'm a BAD writer.

Or... Or maybe it doesn't mean anything but that I don't have a good time reading books. Spiral over.

I still read tons of articles, blog posts, newsletters, reports and what not. I also enjoy visual books immensely. There, this has nothing to do with ideas then.

It has everything to do with format (once again, fuck format).

More to the point, it does tell me something more interesting about that one goal of mine always lurking at the back of my mind : "one day, I'll write a novel".

That's the goal I always looked up to. When I'll have that done, I'll look the world in the eye and say 'see, I'm a serious person, I wrote a fucking NOVEL' (of course, in my mind it's always a success).

But my dream never says anything about actually writing the novel.

To be fair, I do have bits of some novels already written. But they were written with a big sense of 'I should be writing that because it's the ultimate creative act'. If I'm totally honest with myself, I did not have fun doing it. Not the way I have fun doing other creative things.

And why would I ? If I don't really enjoy reading novels, it's not a surprise that I don't enjoy writing them either.

So that strange thought this morning, that could have become another blow to my self-esteem, just... freed me. Well, no matter, I'll just stop trying to enjoy something I don't and focus all that energy into something I really enjoy.

Which at the moment happens to be websites, painting, and writing online about what my brain tells me when I wake up.

Something else this realization also tells me is that there is TREMEMDOUS (what a nice word) energy in letting things go.

What was that design quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry ?

"La perfection est atteinte, non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à retirer."

(Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.)

source : Terre des Hommes

Ah yes. Well I think it's also valid for your life. As I grow older I get more joy in taking things OFF my plate than adding them in. More precisely, in deciding I will no longer abide by that or that standard of how my life should be.

Like all that energy I'm going to save by actually following my preferences and stop trying to make myself read books I don't enjoy.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

here is the one of june 2026, in no particular order :

• nabui studio : i spend a good deal of time exploring her website and getting inspired by the hand drawn icons for my own website migration (and my making website manifesto, which I'll share soon)
• alanagoyal : same reasons, this website delights me and it's full of little side quests (which can turn into full on adventures if you're a fellow rabbithole digger)
• sublime : a new kind of bookmarking service, and to be fair, I don't spend a lot of time on there exploring (like I do on Pinterest for ex), but I do use it a lot to make my own collections, that's very enjoyable, and the platform culture forces me a little to find new ways to combine my findings
• artvee : I adoooore adding new paintings to my favorite folder on there, it's pretty addictive, and often, I find artists I knew nothing about
• substack notes : there is a little french community on there and I made a couple of friends, which is very nice. I get a lot of joy from posting little silly notes and my paintings progress. Substack is also the place where my french magazine about the internet lives.
• appartment birds : another website that enchants the internet, it's a dynamic page that shows the types of birds that sang near the creator's window during the last hours and days, I'm going to show this one to my dad this weekend and I can't wait
• the fridge magnet experiment : a place where the internet shares a fridge door to make fridge magnet poems on.
• my blog (this blog you're on) : i keep thinking it's a miracle that I was able to make it and keep finding it very cool to post on
• youtube : I have phases, and my current phase is watching youtube videos (my current rotation is Sandi Hester, Za, Living Big in a Tiny House, and the Yale course on art history)
• Pinterest : I'm a big pinterest user, it's a place of pure wonder for me, I keep collecting and discovering quotes, references, paintings, beautiful objects and stuff I want to paint
• ARTE : keeping in theme with youtube, I often like to end my day with a nice documentary (the one about the Garnier Opera most recently, but also the whole series of 'Est-t-il vrai que...')
• Brilliant : duolingo for maths, I feel like it's clearing my brain a little, and it's become a good source of distraction in moment of despair
• and as always, Reader (affiliate link) - which is the place where I really watcht the documentary and read the substack publications I'm subscribed to (as well as the books and articles and anything I read basically)

I could also mention Codex and Claude, where I spend an enormous amount of time (especially on Claude), but somehow I feel they don't fit the theme of 'space'.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

This instinct of mine is getting encouraged, or even justified, by my use of AI. Having a buttload of references to analyse and use in projects is proving very very useful.

In other words, I'm now making MORE lists.

One flavor of list that's proving extremely useful both creatively and personally is the 'reasons I'm obsessed with...'. They are both an exercise in loving the world a little better, getting to know myself more, and they are great ways to find avenues I would LOVE to explore creatively.

Ideally, I'd like to have a list of reasons I'm obsessed with... for each author I keep coming back to, each tv show I binge, each movie I adore, each book I keep quoting. Maybe even each color I prefer using over all other colors.

But to get this habit back on track, I'd like to start with people's work.

I'll have to come clean, this post was actually motivated directly by Visakan Veerasamy, whom I keep mentioning on this blog. He asked :

my wife just hit me with “I think you don’t really know what people like about your writing”. I’m like ok, what is it? “I don’t know either.” Lol ok. I’ll ask the audience then. Do yall know? 🤨

That prompted my answer in the form of a list (which I also published in his comment).

Why do I come back to visa’s writing all the time’ :

• it feels like I’m in the head of someone with the best intentions - I aspire to this level of kindness and generosity in sharing
• actually bloody good insights - i especially remember your comment on how humans are so very much more diverse than our imagination (more people in the world than seconds in your life), it’s been incredibly helpful for someone like me, who has moments of despair for the world and find it hard to find a place and to relate to people
• i’m impressed by your sheer volume of production
• your writing feels like the right spot of ‘edited’, which is not a lot (although, as they say, making look simple is not easy) - it’s a breath of fresh air in the current landscape of overedited and overthought
• because of this, you surprise me often - I think something is going one way but it’s going another than makes me reflect back and look at things from a different angle
• the sentences and concepts stick in my mind : ‘are you serious’ especially is something I reference often in my journals
• it doesn’t feel like I need to be a certain way or know certain things in order to benefit from your insights - it’s all very human, down to earth, aware of how people actually are
• the references that are not over litterate - the zelda ‘take this with you’ is another one that stays with me
• I get a sense of what it feels like to work on ideas from your drafts and word vomits - it’s a genuine pleasure to dig through it all (I discovered your ongoing google docs the other day, love them)
• oh and it’s never ever negative or blaming someone or something - I guess I went full circle here and I’m back at ‘your kindness just comes through’

This might read a little 'fan-girl'. But I'm trying to get really honest with myself on the reasons. And I DO come back to Visa's writing all the time.

Another person I really love the work of is Sandi Hester. She's a painter, and she does those wonderful vlogs where she just talks about anything related to her practice.

Why I keep coming back to Sandi's work :

• I feel like her paintings are interesting, in the sense that I can look at them for a long time and still finding stuff I find delightful
• colors
• her sharing process is generous, she talks about her supplies, what she really uses, she paints on camera and talk also about the 'little things' of the process that also matter (like how she carries her paints when she paints outside) - it's all-compassing, not just performative
• she does it, it seems to me, as a way to share but also as a way to encourage other people to do art too - not as a performative thing, nor a ideology, just... let's do this thing that I really love doing together, I like that
• this seeps through her work as well, it's not pretending to be whatever, it's just FUN, pure FUN
• I like how she talks about mistakes, and reworking, she is the one person that made me understand the purpose of a notebook for a painter - the concept of 'taking visual notes', it's incredibly freeing, because you don't have to make it perfect EVER, it's just note
• which transformed the way I look at the world - I collect the little bits I like and you'll surely find little bits you like even in places you don't like as a whole
• her freedom of line and color and composition - I want to achieve some of that
• her youtube process reminds me that it doesn't need to be complicated or very edited (even if I still have a hard time putting that intro practice) - her thumbnails change constantly, she is ever editing with fancy titles and such, it's just... sharing, pure sharing, we go back this

That list tells me a lot about my own aspirations, what I should focus on to feel better in my own creative practice. Even outside of painting.

Let's go for a third person : Antoine BM. I have a much more complicated relation to this creator, because I'm a little jealous of him tbh. But I've been following his work for a LONG time, and I agree with him on a lot of things. I'm just jealous of how his practice has translated into a thriving business, and mine has not (well not to same extent; I'm still making a living online).

So why I keep coming back to AntoineBM's work :

• simplicity - it's a hard thing to actually do, but he goes right to the point of things, it's very first principle, and he does APPLY, not just talk about it all
• I think he has a very special view of things that aligns with my own - things should be simple, do the stuff that makes you happy, find a way to make it work
• his approach to systems again with such simplicity, removing the fluff to get to the right parts of the equation is excellent - it's always logical and excellent, even though it's simple
• I admire (and that's the part I'm most jealous of) his ability to connect, and to make a point that's both simple yet resonant. people agree with his view because also of the way he presents them, he's super convincing (which makes him very good at sales)
• he talked recently about his inability to be constant, I disagree, I think he's one of the most constant people in the french solopreneur space. he kept doing his thing, always on first principles as mentioned earlier, always in the same spirit, always with the same desire to present something simple yet powerful, and he never followed the trends in a way that made them feel like the best thing in the world (and if he did, it was his way). and yes, that meant launching a lot of 'small products', but really, it was and still is FANTASTICALLY CONSTANT.
• I feel like he had found a way to make his business and life work around his personality - it felt natural, and not staged natural, there's a big difference. I'm not saying he's always super aligned, because of the business model, but the SYSTEM was aligned with him. And that's something I aspire to very much.

Wow. Ok. I feel better about being jealous now. These are good things to be jealous about.

See, just writing this three lists I feel a lot more in sync with myself, a lot more aware of what I want to pursue and do with my life. It's all clues.

Lists are clues. Good title that.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

I moved my main email there last August (2025), and I am somewhat active on Substack Notes (actually very active to most standards, but with very limited engagement). I was really bullish on it at the time, because the platform is amazing : short notes, but also long articles, you can post images and make pretty carousels, add videos and AUDIO to your emails... It feels like the platform of my dreams.

But 10 months in, I think what I might be enjoying is just the medium. And that makes me reconsider everything.

I wrote very briefly that platforms are medium. Which is part of my broader idea of strategic disloyalty : "I treat my socials, Substack Notes, my YouTube channel, and all the social media circus as second-tier spaces. I can't take them seriously as creative partners. Because they're not. To these platforms, I'm just another account. So to me, they're just interchangeable entry points."

Substack is a nice medium. Very flexible as I mentioned earlier. But Substack is NOT just a medium, it's a social media. So it's a medium that requires a culture.

And I'm not sure I enjoy the culture on Substack.

But you can't take away the culture out of a social media medium. It's not like oil painting or collage, where you can really shape to mean whatever and use in whatever situation. The medium of Substack has to BE on Substack. You can't bring it to another place, unless you build that place, and then it's something else entirely.

social media = medium x culture

if you will indulge me trying to reconnect with basic maths

So what _is_ the culture on Substack? It's soft. Rounding corners and drinking tea. I log onto Substack Notes and I see the thoughts of gentle people on lovely walks. There's little real spontaneity, no mission, no statement, no real business. It's often about writing about writing. To some extent, all platforms do that. But I feel like Substackians are a little blind to this. The format the platform rewards feels to me like it's encumbered by big words and trying hard to be smart.

And it bugs me. I drown in clouds (it's not without reason that one of my first statements here was "fuck format"). My best stuff on Substack has always been in reaction to this culture, never a contribution to it.

And I don't think that's very healthy. That makes me think Substack should not be the place that I actually try to inhabit. Even though I really really really want to enjoy the medium of Substack. And even though I really really really want to make it a place for people like me.

To be fair, I've been active online for 10+ years (in a full-time job kind of way), and the culture fitting has always been the hard part. I swear I'm trying. And I'm not, like, saying, "Oh, culture doesn't accept me." It's just, I understand that I am made in such a way that makes me difficult to read for most people, and that makes most people difficult to read to me. Historically, I try too hard to fit.

"very square peg, very round hole" - as Iris says in The Holiday

Or, in math language :

experience = medium-fit × culture-fit

Which brings me to a perhaps more interesting idea.

When AI came out and people started dreaming about what the world could become (I feel like we don't talk about the effect of hope on people in that way, and we tend to dismiss it as 'hype', but not the point here).

When people started dreaming about what the world could become, I LOVED the idea that AI could free us of format. Or more precisely, that it could allow us to experience stuff through our preferred formats.

Catering to our particularities when it comes to learning and consumption of information. For example, I will enjoy a good video or a documentary sometimes, but I much prefer doing my learning through reading, and if possible with tons of images. As a creator, I prefer writing, and will pull my hair from the roots if I need to edit extended videos again.

AI made me imagine a world where a piece of content could be produced in whichever form the creator prefers, and consumed in whichever form the consumer would prefer.

To some extent, I got my wish. AI made text-to-speech and speech-to-text MUCH more reliable, and I am now using tools such as Reader (affiliate link), which allows me to read YouTube videos and podcasts. And sometimes, when the world has been particularly overwhelming and I need to lay in the dark, I can even listen to some books, without needing a specific audiobook. It's never perfect, often awkward, and sometimes buggy, but it works.

Even without specific tools, 'reader mode' on Safari allows you to read an article in the color scheme of your choice, in the font you prefer... Effectively freeing the content from format.

I CRAVE the same thing for culture.

That's why I'm bullish on making websites at the moment. Because I don't feel like I'm finding my culture fit anywhere else. So, in a way, I use the internet as a huge medium to make a space where MY culture IS the fit.

And here's the long reason why (reasons to have your own website).

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

We've ended up in a digital world that broadly no longer respects us. Platforms, in particular, have become the equivalent of sticky flypaper. They trap us inside algorithms, with hollow visual tactics, and even if they CAN be spaces for learning (with serious curation work), they've mostly become spaces for wasting time. Creators doing honest sharing work are lost in the sea of optimization.

The most radical solution is to stop using them altogether. To stop setting foot on Instagram and the likes. To give up the algorithms. To build in your own corner of the web.

I'm genuinely tempted. But the problem is, you're not in my corner. And if we want to create a world where innovation and the sharing of ideas are possible, where we can make a living from this work, at a sufficient scale, and accessible to everyone… We still need to make ourselves known, and find interesting people to follow.

We could advocate for the return of libraries as space for sharing, to the web of the forum era, to word of mouth. But I don't think that's realistic. At least not yet. And probably not with some SORT of platform use.

The only current solution that actually holds up is to prioritize the mailing list. An email list (with real people reading on the other end), that you can take with you wherever your needs and desires lead. That's why I like Substack (you can export your subscribers and leave the platform at any time.)

I genuinely believe this is the heart of the solution: distribution flexibility. That's why I treat my socials, Substack Notes, my YouTube channel, and all the social media circus as second-tier spaces. I can't take them seriously as creative partners. Because they're not. To these platforms, I'm just another account. So to me, they're just interchangeable entry points.

I call it strategic disloyalty.

And this is a rough list of what it entails :

• not confusing your followers for your audience
• having a way out
• having your own website where you take people regularly (and not just to get their emails and sell stuff)
• actually make your website a cool place to be (see : reasons to have your own website)
• not thinking you NEED to be HYPER consistent on your youtube or whatever
• take breaks to rest
• don't accept shitty new functions because 'they'll boost your visibility'
• use social media to be social before anything else
• don't be shy to recommend your website and other people's website
• actually always link to people's website and NOT their socials
• find ways to post that ENRICH you
• be a hyper curator (this should be a post)
• don't take recommendations as creative rules
• add back your own creative rules / think about the way you WANT to do thing / having standards
• puuuuush back
• sell stuff
• don't rely on ad money

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

1. it's a calling card that you actually own
2. creative practice
3. technical practice
4. marketing practice that's performing in a good way
5. strategic unfaithfulness in practice (see strategic disloyalty)
6. it's cool af
7. signal of seriousness
8. time away from algorithms
9. being actually PART of the WEB
10. you make the rules there
11. you can sell stuff there
12. you can talk about stuff there you wouldn't dare to talk about on social media
13. you don't have to see other people's opinions on there
14. no stupid comments
15. one hub for all your socials
16. you don't have to pick a medium (video, visual AND text as you wish)
17. you can make it look however you want
18. in control of what you show to people (and in which order, and how)
19. no distracting tech and buttons (if you wish so)
20. you really feel like you're building something overtime
21. to be cool and counterculture
22. to be traditional (both can be true)
23. to learn things
24. to be real in the eyes of the robots crawling the web
25. to be referenced easily
26. to be easily checked out (especially if your name is your domain name)
27. to link to your favorite websites

raaah would have been cool to at least get to 30 but nothing else comes to mind, no matter.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

But this week, I came across a post by Kel Rakowski where she lists the STANDARDS of her publication. And YAS, yet another way to write a manifesto!

I think it's brilliant to officially lay out a list of your writing standards.

First, on a human level, it's great to understand the principles behind the publications I read. It answers the question: do we share the same values? And from a creator's perspective, I think it's not a bad idea to take a couple of minutes and reflect on what you're actually doing when you write.

It helps resolve conflicts that make us procrastinate, rekindle the flame through first principles, and make decisions that aren't always easy.

It's also a great MARKETING tool. Yes, I'm putting that word in bold, because it's a word that scares people. But in reality, knowing how to market yourself, how to sell yourself, is mostly about knowing who you are, what you do, and what you do NOT do. So a list of your standards is something you can display on your 'about' page, publish in Notes, or share on other platforms. See the last paragraph about the human benefits of doing this to understand the potential of the virtuous loop.

And it's FUN.

So well, my blog is still too young to make this list totally official, it will probably change A LOT, but... some principles I will follow no matter what, because they are at the core of how I think about writing, especially online.

This is this list :

• make it personal : i've come to realise and appreciate really personal writing, funnily, personal makes it more universal and useful
• don’t format my voice : I think in both languages, I use weird expressions, I make mistakes, and that makes it all more personal (so I guess this is the same principle as the one above)
• fuck format : this is rather new, but yeah, I want to just... write more. and that means being less attached to 'the rules of writing' (hence why this blog is not edited, and lenght-diversed)
• link, link, link : ideally, I would link to one person and at least one of my other pieces of writing everytime I publish, this is the way of the healthy web
• make it interesting for me : if I don't find it interesting, I don't pursue, if I don't find it fun, no more either, I need to get something out of it all (seems so obvious when I write it down now, but I am a high masking autistic woman level of people pleaser, I have done a lot of things I didn't want to do)

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

imagine that, and then hitting your claude limit for the day, just short of one or two (or 10) perfectionist-modifications. if only you had a couple more tokens...

I suspect Anthropic makes a lot of money in situations like these. I was close to buying a $100/m subscription.

luckily, I needed to pee

while going from my living room to the toilets, I go past the painting I started weeks ago. it's full of colors, and possibilities I can't picture.

the heat makes you do things, like taking up the pastels and starting to carve out a cathedral/glasshouse in the top right corner of that painting. and then, while you're at it, a swarm of red butterflies too, on the left. suddenly, you've been painting for 15 minutes, and your hands are full of colors.

when you run out of tokens, it's time for art.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

This was my conclusion after I'd seen more than my fair share of creators spending up to 10K€ on a website that did nothing but... tell people who they were. Sometimes with a little blog. Those websites were overcomplicated, bloated, and my non-technical clients were not capable of changing even a single line somewhere without calling someone for help.

They were blown away when I would show them a platform that they could actually use and understand. So that even if I was the one setting it up for them and making it look the way they wanted it to look like, day-to-day they didn't me to update it. PLUS, the same platform would handle sending newsletters, posting blog posts, and SELLING products for them.

The only downside of platforms like Podia is - even if the team there did a WONDERFUL job making a tool that looks good and has lots of potential - it's still a platform. And so I would sometimes run into tiny annoying limitations, like not being able to add 3 buttons, or make them different colors.

Not a big deal you'll tell me. And yes, that is still my opinion too. The success of a website doesn't rely on the colors of buttons. But it would sometimes be difficult to accept things couldn't be EXACTLY the way we imagined it.

Another, perhaps more serious, limitation is : if you stop paying the platform, your website goes down. Or if you want to change platforms, then your website needs to be redone somewhere else from scratch. With probably a different set of limitations.

I never stop experimenting with platforms and website and design for my own curiosity and to be able to help my clients better. I see the way some platforms are changing, like Podia who is now more of a community platform by default. I see new very cool functionalities, like the MCP on TinyPages (aff link), which allows you to add sales page, emails... directly from your favorite AI.

And I see IA. The way it's getting REALLY good at making HTML files, and how easy, even for a non technical person, to just... ask for things to happen and it will.

So I'm changing my recommendation : I think the most efficient setup should be

• a main website, done in HTML, light, that then sends people to
• a selling platform to buy your products
• a email platform to subscribe to your newsletter (could be the same as your selling platform if need be)

That way you have all the advantages :

• files can be easily moved, transferred, modified with any IA, coder, host... you become very flexible on that front. all your sales pages should be on that website too.
• you are not tied to a platform, you can sell from any and change as you go (the only thing to do is to add your files to the new one)
• and you can go from Substack to any other emailing platform

It's the most FLEXIBLE setup. You can follow the trends if you need to, you can redesign your website on the go with any of the current performing IA...

Also, because I got this comment once or twice: it's secure. What will be on the website you manage with IA has NO personal data. All the emailing and selling, I still recommend you go through a platform, because that's still the easiest way to set up those things.

What you need for this is :

• a domain name (I like Squarespace domain for this)
• a Cloudflare account (free, and that will be your hosting)
• a GitHub account (free, to store and push the files)
• a selling platform (Podia or TinyPages are my recommendations)
• a newsletter (I use Substack and Podia, but MailerLite (aff link) is one too)

And if that sounds difficult, it's not. It's just one thing to set up. Ask your AI or take a consult with me, we'll set it up together and talk about what that can look like.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

I'm in awe of painters. Particularly I'm in awe of the way they share their processes so freely. Truly, they will show you when they are painting, they will show you the notebooks, the failed attempts, the way they corrected themselves, and you can find a lot of them explaining why and how they changed things, what they are trying to do...

You can feel what being in their heads feels like. Which is such an underutilized pedagogical tool. (I could rant here about how the internet is too formal in its pedagogy but I'm trying to keep it to one topic here). Their generosity has been an ENORMOUS help in my own practice.

It's also exacerbated one of my ongoing frustration with writers.

I spend a good deal of time listening to writers talking about their work. Or rather, I'm TRYING to listen to writers talking about their work. And I guess that's the thing with writing, because it's about ideas, writers tend to speak about them rather than processes.

Which is fine and makes for interesting conversations. But it's not a great tool to learn.

In fact, as I'm saying this, I'm thinking (maybe wrongly though because I'm shooting from the hip), that writing has A LOT to learn about freeing itself from the way painters have freed themselves from form and norms.

It's very rare for a writer to share the actual process of writing: what they think about while doing the writing, why they used that word there, what they changed, how they edit... There's hardly any content online that shows that. Rarer still to see it happening live.

Recently, I was ecstatic to see Visakan Veerasamy sharing a bit about how he renamed the subtitles of his substack articles. I spend a good amount of time looking at the picture.

It seems to be the norm for painters. But there still seems to be a sort of 'cloaking' of the writing process. To keep it mysterious? I don't know, it's probably not intentional. But it sucks.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

in fact, it's perhaps what my consultation clients like the most : i see the route that saves everyone time and money.

specific example : I had a client come to me with a whole new system she wanted to organise. she was coming to me because she had a hard time knowing what to start with and getting herself to actually put the technical infrastructure into place for it to work.

the gist was : she wanted to add a free tier to her current community, and this meant :

• planning and modifying the spaces so not everything is open to everyone
• modifying the sale page to add this new free tier
• plan exactly how she was going to animate this new space
• launch and all

this was the first part of her plan, the rest included adding some paid courses on top of it, and a specific tier for consultations as well.

so when someone comes to me with such a plan, my first objective is translation : determine what needs to happen technically in order to execute the essence of what the client wants to happen.

in front of this client, I had three thoughts :

• the obstacle is not technical, she could be doing the stuff easily, she had already mapped out 50% of a plan - I could get her to 100% and maybe even offer to do it for her, but... the obstacle wasn't really the technique
• the obstacle was really overwhelm (too much to do for an uncertain result)
• the essence of what she wants is to show people on the fence why her community is a wonderful place

now I have to say : people come to me also because I'm very well acquainted with digital product selling platforms. I know the features, I understand the structures, and I see quickly what needs to be done.

the platform she is using is Schoolmaker (affiliate link, but that's not the point of this post). I know the platform allows a free tier, but I know they also offer a free trial period for paid tiers.

So I propose to my client to instead of setting everything for a free tier, to get to the essence of her problem, to just add a free trial to her existing community offer. People see the inside of the community for X days, they get a feel for the space, they can even ask questions, but she doesn't have to do any more engagement.

If the free trial is a success, but it gives away too much, then we move on to a free tier. And if it's not a success, then we know a free tier wouldn't work anyway.

Free trial : one click on a button. No need to modify anything on the sale page, just a couple of lines of text. 10 minutes of work.

VS

Free tier : 4H+, a bill from me if she wants me to do it for her, and on-going efforts to keep the free space engagging (don't let anyone tell you having a community is an EASY way to earn money).

3 days after, I had an email from my client saying she had already enrolled new members, and a glowing review.

I went a bit far in the details of this story, it kind of sounds like a brag. I guess it is a little. But what I really want to do is to document the kind of work that I do that has the most impact, and that also is the most satisfying to me.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

(see : the internet is wonderful)

These days, work feels like a constant battle to get taken seriously. I feel like I need to bring back each client by the back of the neck, and I need to deploy extreme measures just to... survive. I’m uncomfortable with this whole situation.

So this project: someone reaching out to me for my specific creative voice. It landed like a clue.

The second big one in a series of clues, actually. Clues that are knocking on a door I was consciously keeping closed.

I’ve always been a creative. I mean, I sing, I write songs, I paint, I write, I played on stage, and even wrote some plays when I was younger... Yeah, I can say I’m a creative person. But I never allowed myself to think I could be a creative person for real, professionally (nuance there is needed, but let’s go with the flow).

This is purely economical. I’ve heard it’s hard being a creative, I’ve heard hardly anyone makes it, I’ve heard it’s a life of scraping by. So I have never entertained the idea fully.

Instead, I’ve mostly made a living as the next best thing : a teacher (and all related titles of consultants, coach, tutor and so on). Obviously getting bored with it all every 3 years or so, and throwing it all back on its head to become another KIND of teacher everytime.

You can’t say either that I’m fully following the script. I mean, making money on the internet is very edgy in my neck of the northern french plains. But it’s not about HOW I make money. It’s about how I ACT about the whole thing.

(see : what i did)

I finally put it into words this week : I’ve been acting like a good student trying to get a diploma, instead of the creative adult that I am.

I’ve been following scripts still. Clicking on too much ‘here are the definite rules of how to be successful’. Thinking things need to be a certain way because... because that’s how other people do it. There’s some good in that, but mostly, I’ve played it like I was going to be graded at the end of the term.

Gotta add a little pixie magic dust into it all. Bring some FUN and PLAY into it. And this ties back to my current obsession about fucking format (fuck format), and how to do more while doing less. It’s tying back with all my past 6-month of ideas about :

• what it means to live a creative life
• leaving the script of analytics and algorithm behind
• even my book Organons is about this

It's all pushing me to just.... stop following what 'you need to do to have success', and just do what feels right. Becoming the creative ADULT that I am.

Now that I think about it, even my song Rubicon is about this. lol

Oh what doofus I am, I've been trying to tell myself this stuff since forever.... Ok I'm listening now.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

I'm not going to talk about the creator herself, I want to talk about the content of the video instead. Because it so typical it made me mad.

the structure makes sense, the arguments are proven with data, the person clearly has done this before - that's not the issue. The issue is : never in any second of that video is the person even mentioning THINKING about what you want to say before you start filming.

In fact, the structure she talks about requires no thinking what so ever, and to just 'do the stuff that's successful on other creator's channels and pages', and 'follow this exact structure'.

and... aren't we past that? as a culture, as a generation, as responsable people?

The submessage of this type of content is : to become successful online (which is always framed as 'getting tons of views', which is not really the same thing but well), you need to BE this exact sort of person, that says this exact sort of thing.

worst part is, this message is coupled with the idea that 'people will tune in because it's you'. but if you're saying the same things as everyone else, and doing the same things as everybody else, and filming the same way as everybody else and... what's the point of having eyes on you if you can't be yourself?

I guess this means I need to tackle the prompt 'if I was to start again....', and make it actually useful. Yeah, this is a better vector of ideas than a rant, let's do that.

If I had to start online again, I'd :

follow my curiosity 450% more

I've been so miserable trying to do stuff for the sake of 'success' or 'money'. My favorite and often most lucrative opportunities came from me being myself fully and talking about thing that genially interested me, in the way I was most comfortable doing it.

make more friends / participate in conversations / send emails to people I admire

My autistic self has got to admit that even though it's extremely draining, it's also the most interesting part of being online. So I don't like social conversations, but commenting on other people's posts, engaging with the content, sending emails to people I admire and telling them specifically what I find cool about them... That's the stuff. i wish I had been more aware of this sooner.

produce volume / be a prolific scrappy creator from the start

This might sound contradictory to what I was saying earlier, but I do believe in volume. I believe the good stuff cannot surface if you don't disturb the waters. you can always delete later, you can always do it again, you can always go back on your words and change your mind. it's cheap, do more of it and don't be precious about what it looks like PLEASE. oh what ideas I could have had and projects I could have launched if I wasn't too precious about what I look like on camera, or if that PDF is professional enough.

develop opinions / theories / ideas

same idea really, but it took me too long to stop playing the game of parrotting people with some success and to start actually writing about what was in my head. and when I did, well, it's a whole new level of confidence and competency baby. it's also 100% more marketable.

stop doing the stuff I don't want to do

I'm riffing off the same theme but it took me sooooo long to consider I didn't have to make videos of my face if I didn't want to make videos of my face. everything else becomes easier once you allow yourself to don't do the stuff you don't want to do. (see : let AI lace your shoes)

I think that's all. I can't guarantee this will give you views, fame, 10K months and what not. But I'll guarantee one thing : you'll get opportunities, pride in yourself and an enormous slice of FUN.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

• “there was no expectation to be a star, no “mama I’ve made it”. There was just a mortgage, kids and I’m in the greatest profession in the world, how do I keep it going?”
• “where I like my career the least is when I feel like i feel like I’m doing something that 100 other actors could do. That’s where I feel I’m wasting my time. When I’m doing my unusual little art (and it may not be good art but it is art because it’s specific) then I’m very happy.”
• watching him trying on character voices for the mad hatter : he’s playing tennis and just plays… testing and he has some ideas and he tried them on in real life. It’s not a “office job” he doesn’t have to be there to work on it.
• “I would say my career has been 80% failure and I think those are pretty good odds” - guess I’m watching this as a way to become an adult artist and less of a good student
• “what Marty does now, he was going back then” - eugene levy about Martin short when he was a kid and a teenager
• “at that time, I did all I could do theatrically” - having a period of time where you say yes to everything that comes your way as a education in your craft and your taste
• he is best friend with Eugene Levy since forever it seems - and he joined a group of creative in Toronto (scenius) - “I don’t think you’re aware you’re in a particular group or a particular time”
• “I wanted to be Sinatra, I wanted to be a singer, an actor. But I was starting to feel like I’m behind on everyone. That I limited myself, that I’m going in a kind of circle. I don’t feel momentum” - before his big break, his friends have all been hired somewhere he did not audition for and his wife has a record deal in the states
• But : inspiration break, he was inspired by some improvisation group and that was like “of course I should be doing this” and went to Second City
• about second city : “it is the best place to learn a lot of information. But once you know it, you got to do something with it. You just can’t stay there.”
• “I think it's insane if someone says, "Oh, I had a horrible time making that movie. I hated making that movie but please let it be successful" Cause if it's only gonna be successful at the box office, that’s very unlikely. The experience you can have in your soul is the experience of doing it. Was it creative? Was it fun? Did you have fun dinners? Was the hang good?”
• organised Christmas parties where people performed. Lots of actors and comedians. Andrea Martin said she hired a vocal coach. Steve Martin spent 6 months learning a song on the banjo. I read this as “this was an occasion to learn and to grow and to have fun at the same time". Silly projects.
• “Loss is something to negotiate. It’s going to happen to all of us and we must celebrate and continue that voice and never let it go.”
• “nothing works, then something works”
• “ I like to think I was the best version of myself on the last day of my life”

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

I've added two entries to it today. which feels like a direct reinsurance from the universe, given I was NOT doing that well on the confidence front yesterday. It's actually rare that I remember this file even exists.

I've set up a reminder to use my monthly review as an opportunity to add to it, but I'm still very blurry on what constitutes a 'proof I know my shit'.

so far, it has :

• compliments from people I trust
• extraordinary feedback (like that one time a blind man told me my Podia course was so clear he was able to follow it without any issues)
• stuff my clients have been able to achieve thanks to my work with them
• positive interactions with people I admire
• projects I was able to put together
• stuff I'm proud of (I realize I'm always proud of what I produce on some level, because I consider it already extraordinary that I'm able to produce anything at all, but there's stuff I'm proud of more than other stuff you know?)
• ways I've reacted or interacted or dealt with something (usually something along the lines of 'I was able to do this things I was not able to do before' or 'I stood my ground')

Looking at this list, I realise my favorite and the rarest category is the last one. I should be more aware of these.

Maybe examples would be a good thing (also might be a good thing to be more open about what I'm proud of in public) :

• Upsold a client mid-consultation: "do you want me to just do it for you?" 350€, yes, done. Spotted the opportunity in real-time and closed it. Would have been too precious to do that even a couple of months ago.
• Invested in myself by buying a walking pad and actually integrated it into my life. It's not sitting in a corner. It's part of my days now.
• C. (client) updated me on the decision I advised her about, and not only it is working but I didn't have to ask : "Encore merci pour la consultation de mercredi : c’était un plaisir de te retrouver humainement et aussi de profiter de ton efficacité pro !! Merci encore."
• Chatted 30mins with a French YouTuber I'm a real fan of (hiiiii, and it FELT fluid and natural)
• Wrote a book (I just finished Organons V1, it's been awesome, and I already have material for a second one)
• Went through a real tough consulting session both because of the environment (construction noise, a big trigger for me), and decisions from the client I wasn't very keen on : 1H, was still efficient and coherent, and we solved the issues, everyone happy now and yeah (but now I need a nap)
• fired a client I didn't want to work with anymore (we really did not understand each other)

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

here is a short history of what I’ve been paid for :

• weighed tractors during the harvest, analysed proteins and humidity levels of wheat samples (countryside first job)
• taught English to : school kids, but also small kids immersion kind of thing (did some baking in English with 5 yo - very fun)
• taught English to adults in private and in businesses (also for a time in a proper language school but they made me teach via phone and a super dated software which is worse than anything)
• started a blog about it and made some pennies with a short book
• taught French, via courses and private lessons online - this was Just French It
• managed groups of teenagers abroad during the summer
• I still make websites (mostly on Podia) for creators who want to sell digital products and generally help these creators with their online ecosystems
• made good tutorials about the tools I was using
• I’m advising people on selling online, content marketing, systems of creation and learning…
• sold courses on anything from marketing to productivity, and journaling.
• wrote books a few more books : Organons and Comment bien vivre son ambition créative (both of which I want to rewrite entirely in english)
• oh I forgot about my profitable Medium era as well : I wrote content in English about anything from having better ideas to living abroad

As I’m making this list, it feels never ending and super varied. Which I like. But it also felt random and aimless to live it all.

One of my goals these days is to become more aware of my strengths. This is prompted by a desire to change paths again. But to, this time, do it in a way that is not strictly “ill become this job title” or “ill default to this thing I can apply for” or I’ll teach what I know. Or basically I’m in a mood for : making my own decisions, and not waiting for stuff to happen to me anymore. (I think the key to this is : the internet is wonderful)

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

oh how difficult it is to make chapters for a 3 minute video… why don’t you let ai lace your shoes as well?

It’s my first mean-ish comment in a while. I had forgotten such people even existed. But well, let’s use it as an opportunity for a clarification.

Yes, it’s difficult for me to go back to rewatch something I have written and recorded to add chapters to it. Why? Because by the time I publish something, I’ve heard all the bad parts dozens of times and I have doubted the utility of my work at least twice (if not my own utility in the process). Yes, even for a 3-minute video (although my videos seldom are 3 minutes long but let’s not be picky).

So doing it again, watching it one more time, just to add chapters is not just “watching 3 minute of video”. It’s giving myself another opportunity to delete it all.

But that’s not even the point.

The point is : if you can even take one little task you don’t like doing off your plate, why wouldn’t you do it ?

Puritans we are not. Pain is NOT the point.

ESPECIALLY when the task in itself is not the core of the stuff you’re publishing. This particular video about how adding chapters to your YouTube videos. Why on earth would people CARE if I do it myself or get help to do it ? Viewers don’t care if I do my taxes myself or get an accountant, do they ?

Arg. It makes me angry. Not this particular meaner, I don’t care what he thinks. It makes me angry because it’s the sort of little comment that stops people from putting stuff out there.

It’s the sort of comment that leads to stupid perfectionism over format and aesthetics and postural-content. When what the web needs is more…. scrappy, fun, direct, real stuff.

EDIT 2026-05-22 - I expanded this into a Papier (in french) : Comment en faire moins et publier plus

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

• wanted to try a simple AI setup that costs me nothing (already had the domain, and the Claude subscription, the hosting is free via cloudflare) - which is why it’s called notes.mariedrouvin.com, a little too much Marie but well, no new domain. (to write : I believe in a scrappy web)
• wanted a place where I could post whatever without it being on social if I didn’t want to - I already had a Substack and a newsletter (more than enough actually, I need to simplify it all a bit) and a blog is the perfect way to fuck format
• wanted to also have a place I can use as a collection practice in the future (link to visakan article on collections). I have published a lot of stuff over the years but it’s all scattered and cannot be retrieve nicely into collections
• also I am heavily influenced by people who have the practice of publishing a lot and regularly. They seem to get a lot of joy, recognition and use out of their blog. so I think it’s a good thing if I at least try to do something similar for myself

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

But I kept stumbling on Sari’s content. So I gave it a try on the premium for a year, mostly because I really liked the idea of the mind map. When I get stuck on something, it always feels fresh to try a less “writey” approach (kind of related to :fuck format).

More specifically I was excited about the ability to plug Readwise highlights and have them “separated” as highlights (as opposed to living in source files, as they do in my notes).

I imagined I would use the mind maps to put together highlights into collections . And that would help me be a better writer (ideation, sourcing, challenging, deepening… my practice).

This was 6 months ago, and none of that happened. Instead, I recently discovered a much better use for the tool (see : platforms are medium).

First off, I cut the Readwise integration. It was blurring things, too much volume (I’m a big highlighter).

Second, I decided I was going to use this tool for more visual stuff. Not another Readwise, but something I can use for examples of visuals, quotes… more like a smart Pinterest.

And third, I decided to always add what I save to a collection. Meaning things don’t just… live in the account, they form something over time.

That’s when it started to become useful.

Example. I had this weird statement in my head for a while : there’s honor in risk. Which, feels (and still is) incomplete. Doesn’t quite say anything yet. Kind of like a suspicion. There might be something there. So I created a collection with this phrase and I added stuff that gave me the same ‘suspicion’. A quote from the hobbit, a lyric from Raye, a citation from Cyrano de Bergerac. I didn’t quite know where I was going with that but those things made me feel something in common.

I could just let it there. That’s already useful in itself. Maybe I’ll resurface this for a later project.

But I clicked on the chat button. Which gives you a prompt to paste in your fav ai with details about each item you added. And I found the answer super interesting !

Let me paste you the Claude answer :

Two things that jump out:

First, there's a through-line about _transformation through difficulty_ — Bilbo becoming someone new after killing the spider alone, Raye's cold that teaches the heart to burn, the cavalry lined up before the unknown. These aren't just "be brave" platitudes — they're about what _happens to you_ when you do the hard thing. You come out different. Named. Forged.

Second, there's a quiet grief underneath the boldness. Théoden mourning what might be lost even in victory. The blogger mourning the lost art of slow, tedious research. Cyrano insisting on _his own lines_ in a world that wants shortcuts. The collection seems to say: yes, take the risk — but don't pretend it costs nothing.

Quick actions you could take:

1. Write a thesis — something like _"risk isn't just courage, it's the willingness to be changed by what you do"_

2. Make it a newsletter or essay — the Cyrano + Bilbo pairing alone could carry a beautiful piece

3. Pull out a visual direction — cavalry + vintage glamour + fantasy maps = a very specific mood board worth naming

4. Use it as a creative brief — for a project, a series, a season of work

5. Sit with the grief angle — there might be something more personal and vulnerable worth writing _from_ this collection, not just _about_ it

Ai is slopping a little, but yeah : the honor is the risk of losing yourself a little, regarless of the outcome. What I think maybe even more interesting are the quick actions (maybe I'll grow tired of them if I do this too much), but the 'visual direction'. noice.

So yeah. I feel like I've truly unlocked a new tool with this approach.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

a few years ago, I was running a small youtube channel for french learners called Just French It, I left that channel 4 years ago, youtube stopped paying me for ads as well, so I had sort of assumed people were not watching anymore. turns out I was wrong.

some of those videos are STILL accumulating views (this month the channel is recording 72H of view time which still feels insane). one of the most popular types is : french readings. I had forgotten all about that. And as much as I didn't enjoy making videos, I remember that readings were a nice kind of performance.

you sit down with a text, and through trying to interpret it different ways, you just learn to say it right. and by that process you learn it deeply (which imo is kind of same thing as love).

anyway, this morning, I was reminded of all of this by a request from a (very cool) musician asking me if I'd be down to record some poems for her next performance.

Isn't it wonderful?

because when people say 'internet is an opportunity', we (well I) tend to think about money and business and services with proper offers and jobs and all the tralala of modern economy. but it's also that.

the internet is a wonderful place of opportunities, and those opportunities are larger than our own imagination

weird stuff you'd never think you would be doing

charming and incredibly uplifting

Makes me want to start a list of cool projects I've been a part of simply because I was active online. For another time.

Actually looking for more stuff like this ! Contact me mariedrouvin.com@gmail.com.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

when you know how to work their algo, you can turn :

• Pinterest into a tool to make peace with your body
• Twitter/X into a space where cool conversations are happenning (and nerds are posting)
• Substack into a language learning space
• or YouTube into a window into a whole different way of living

whatever you are interested in, you can (and imo should) consider the platform as a medium, and absolutely REFUSE the default shitty experience

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

Why? Because I’ve been wrecking my brain on how to come up with a good hook/intro for a post on Les Papiers all day. I know what I want to say, I have a plan and yet…. The intro. It’s usually what gets me. Once I have a good one, I can go on forever but if I don’t… I feel angleless and everything turns to mush. I start to question the whole purpose of the piece, which generally leads me to doubting my own too. I’m kind of dramatic that way about my work.

Actually let me clearer : I thought it was the intro. But now I’ve realised it’s because I’m putting again another set of expectations on my writing : format. I don’t just write, I write an article. And that’s what’s mucking everything up. Because not every idea will fit into an article. Sometimes it just wants to be a Note, or a short tutorial. Or… some kind of format we are not used to. That’s kind of the reason behind this blog.

My most favorite writers have blogs. Oftentimes loose blogs where the articles are short or long or messy or structured. And I never quite understood why they would “hide” their writing up there. Surely, most blog posts are as good as Substack articles. But now I understand the distinction. You CAN make anything into a Substack article. Meaning : you can write a 10000 word essay or 10 lines about a joke. The system won't stop you. That’s actually a thing we forget about platforms, you don’t HAVE to follow the cultural format.

see : platforms are medium

So although we might be able to write a 2-lines substack article, we mostly don't. But that's the thing with blogs : a blog is a place where the cultural medium is determined by your own stupidly personal habits. The cultural norm of your own blog is you.

I’m not sure I’m being clear. Let’s try this way : even though a platform can be used many ways, it still has a preference. And it’s hard not to follow the herd down the cliff. You get influenced against your will. So having your own space is an answer to that. There, you can write however.

Funny how I thought this was going to be a short, couple of lines max, kind of thought. Almost could have been a Substack article. And hey, it can still be !

edit (2026-06-12) : I turned this post into a painting !

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

I don’t believe it’s about writing or drawing. Nor do I think it's about the making of the memory. It's about finding ways to create something tangible out of the experience of your life. It sounds very woowoo. And it’s going to sound even more woowoo when it get to the point about symbols and talismans. But oh well.

What I mean is that by creating something you go beyond just the vague memory in your head. You make something you can actually go back too. It’s partly the act of creating that makes it more real. But the important piece is the stuff that’s created that links you back to what you want to remember from this part of your life.

Maybe an example will be more telling.

I sometimes write songs. My songs are about stuff that's happened to me. Feelings I’ve had, dreams, emotions, actual experiences. I have this one song about this feeling of wanting to be a ghost/spirit. Wanting not to have a body anymore. It’s a talisman of that feeling. When I feel it now, I associate it with the song. And I remember the words and the melody. It’s not just “oh I’ve felt like that before”. The song IS the feeling.

Another one is about a dream I had. It’s telling the story of the dream : "standing on the banks of the Rubicon, holding on so tight, can’t let it slip… I want to be the snake in the river." It’s the dream I had. I remember waking up afterwards and being SO enveloped in the feelings of the dream. I’m not a magic-believing person. Dream analysis no. But I wanted to turn the feeling into a snapshot. Something I could hold on to be reminded of it. A song is the perfect medium for that.

Talismans. That's what writing songs is like for me. Making talismans. I think that’s a good goal when you want to make art or create stuff.

It’s helping me specifically also not to get any ideas of grandeur. I’m only doing it for me. About what I feel and see and experience. As soon as I try to “make a great song”, I don’t have anything to say. Or it’s really crappy. Making talismans is a much better goal.

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.

• Cyrano de Bergerac (english edition here)
• Le mystère de la chambre jaune (english edition here)
• Friendly ambitious nerds — Visakan Veerasamy
• Rest — Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
• Art of being — Erich Fromm
• The man in the brown suit — Agatha Christie

ARTICLES I WISH I HAD WRITTEN

• Are you serious? - Visakan Veerasamy
• A blog post is a very long and complex search query - Henrik Karlsson

PEOPLE THAT INSPIRE ME

• Zara Zhang - vibe coder with really cool first principles
• Becky Isjwara - her whole vibe is amazing, serious pro with (imo) the right attitude
• Visakan Veerasamy - writer, I keep coming back to his work (inspire me to be seriously committed while still having fun)
• Raye - her album This Music May Contain Hope is simply a masterpiece
• Natalie Merchant - Come On Aphrodite is the song that made me understand religion
• Elizabeth Filips
• Nicola Galita
• Joan Westenberg
• Univrsw3th4rt - there is something so pure fun about this girl, her blog is a constant reminder to be personal and to strive for good things

DOCUMENTARY THAT FASCINATED ME

• Let The Canary Sing - Cyndi Lauper
• Ways of Seeing

TOOLS I LOVE

• Reader (Readwise) - my reading and note-taking system, I love it (affiliate link)
• Podia - all-in-one selling platform: email marketing, sales and website (affiliate link)
• TinyPages - French alternative to Podia, lighter and AI-powered (affiliate link)
• MailerLite - dedicated email marketing tool if you don't need a full selling platform yet (affiliate link)
• Fillout - forms and online payments (affiliate link)
• TidyCal - online scheduling, much better than Calendly and cheaper (affiliate link)
• Sublime - a web bookmarking tool that's a lot more actually (see : ive unlocked sublime)

STUFF THAT MAKES MY LIFE EASIER

• real whiteboard roll that's kinda magnetic but more useful to stick on walls or a plank (affiliate link)
• spiky ball for occupying my hands (affiliate link)
• comfortable earplugs in every room (affiliate link)

Read more posts at notes.mariedrouvin.com — or find out more about my work there.