Serendipity Machine
Three Things #171: May 25, 2025
I have a complicated relationship with social media.
I’ve been using it since the very earliest days. I remember when MySpace, Friendster and Facebook were still new and fresh and exciting. I remember ignoring Twitter for the first few years because I thought it was stupid and vapid, and I also remember when it finally clicked for me years later.
I engaged very intensely in social media, particularly Twitter, during the years I was working on Ethereum. It opened a lot of doors—it’s been called a serendipity machine—but also led to an enormous amount of stress. I had some very bad experiences on social media, decided to withdraw for what amounted to a few years, and even resolved to delete all of my social media accounts. (I got as far as deleting my LinkedIn, then ended up creating a new LinkedIn account later.)
Finally, over the past year or so, I’ve slowly begun to reengage, and I now see its benefits as well as the disadvantages and risks. I feel like it took all of these years and all of this practice and experimentation to make it work for me, to be sustainable, and to be able to engage mindfully.
Here’s some things that are working for me, and that just might work for you, too.
Thing #1: Find Your Medium 📢
Every artist has his medium. Some artists work best with oil on canvas. Some are better with watercolor. Some prefer working with stone or clay, and some work with paper or other mediums entirely. Social media is no different.
I think this notion can be difficult for engineers and other non-artists to understand. If you write code, you can probably write confidently and competently in a variety of languages and environments. If you drive cars, you can probably confidently and competently drive cars of many shapes and sizes on many different kinds of roads. If you paint houses, you probably have no problem using a variety of colors and types of paints.
Writing is also an art. I’ve tried all sorts of writing: short form, long form, sporadic, frequent, large audiences, small audiences, personal, professional, serious, fun, and everything in between on a large variety of topics. It took me a while to find the sweet spot, but if you’re reading this you already know what works well for me: medium length, modestly serious, frequent articles on a variety of vaguely related topics.
Social media also isn’t one size fits all, and using it well is an art form. Just as each artist has his medium, each thought leader building a brand for himself has a sweet spot with respect to the kinds of content he posts: where, how often, and what format. To take the most obvious example, X favors loud, controversial hot takes and thoughtful, shortish analysis of current events (note: it wasn’t always be this way, but it’s evolved in this direction). Content on X tends to be timely and tends not to age well, so it really requires engaging in the moment and responding quickly. If you happen to be good at that style of writing and engagement, it probably appeals to you and you’ll do quite well there. If, like me, that’s not your forte, then like me you’ll struggle there.
There are, of course, many other options. Instagram favors people engaged in visual pursuits: artists, designers, people working in branding and marketing, retail sales, etc. TikTok favors sexy, schizoid gen Z girls twerking (not my personal cup of tea). Then there’s also Youtube, Twitch, LinkedIn, Substack, Facebook, and countless others. Each favors a different style of content creation and appeals to a specific audience. You get the idea.
The point is, give some thought to how and where you best express yourself before jumping in. You may need to experiment to find the channel, medium, and style that works best for you. Yes, X is still king in most industries including mine, but you can also do quite well with longer-form subscription-based content like this, with Twitch streaming, with YouTube videos, etc. And, since X is king and is the home of multiple industries including AI, journalism, and crypto, you can still tie content created elsewhere back into AI by posting snippets or summaries of that content in-line in X, as I do with this Substack.
Thing #2: Find Your Voice 🎙️
The best advice I ever read about social media came from Haseeb Qureshi recently. He did an excellent job of crystallizing something I had been thinking about for a long time. To paraphrase, succeeding on social media requires carefully balancing two competing forces: on the one hand, you have to be authentic. It’s immediately obvious when you’re not, and if you aren’t your authentic self on social media you’ll struggle to gain and keep attention. But you also have to play to the audience. You have to know your audience, and you have to give them what they want.
Haseeb described this as playing a character, and I strongly agree with this characterization. That role has to be rooted in who you actually are, i.e., the you that you are in private and with family and close friends (Haseeb: “lean into [your] quirks, … take risks, and say things that only [you] can say.”). Otherwise, you won’t have the authenticity factor. But it also needs to be a focused, exaggerated version of yourself.
Once you’re aware of this, you’ll start seeing it everywhere on social media and you won’t be able to unsee it. Many, probably most popular accounts do exactly this. Here are some random examples:
Donald Trump: dealmaker in chief, shouting into the void, doesn’t care how it’s received, Make America Great Again
Elon Musk: spliff-smoking, laid back chief executive of too many companies, doesn’t take himself seriously and would rather share memes, will eventually take us all to Mars
Erik Vorhees: legendary, OG cypherpunk, constantly reminding us of those cypherpunk values and why they matter so much, calling out “crimes” like KYC, and building AI that addresses these
Brian Armstrong: focused on policy, and on creating a better, more favorable crypto-friendly policy regime for all Americans
Balaji Srinivasan: galaxy brain scientist and entrepreneur, fires off boatloads of fresh ideas and clever takes at a mile a minute
I could go on. You get the idea.
I’ve struggled over the years to find my “character.” I think this is because I’ve done lots of different things and have a lot of different interests. My persona has evolved, from sharing nuggets of MBA wisdom to publicly committing to running my first marathon to speaking about the technical aspects of Ethereum to a focus more on governance to, recently, the intersection of governance and AI.
In brief, I’d describe myself as a rare person who is equally confident and comfortable interfacing with both people and machines. My persona is one who isn’t afraid to tackle extremely deep, complicated technologies, and to break them down and make them relatable and approachable to a larger audience. I’d also describe myself as extremely values-driven, and so part of my role, such as it is, is also to explain why these technologies matter so much and how they connect back to the bigger human perspective.
That’s a mouthful, and as you can probably tell I’m still working on refining it and simplifying it. If you’re anything like me it’ll take some time to find your voice on social media, but if you engage meaningfully for a long enough time, you will eventually find it. It’s a lot like how a founder revises her pitch over time: if you pitch enough times to enough people, and always tweak things a little bit and run a few experiments, eventually you’ll land on the framing and presentation that resonates the most.
Finding your voice feels something like the experience of an actor that’s really, fully able to get into character for the first time, to fully embody their character. You find yourself slipping into a flow state, and engaging suddenly becomes effortless. That’s how you know you’re there.
Don’t assume that your current persona is your last or best persona. I encourage you to experiment, do A/B testing, etc. in order to find that exaggerated-yet-authentic version of yourself.
Thing #3: Work Work Work Work Work ✍︎
Once the building blocks are in place, the hard part is over, and all that’s left is to work. Building a presence, a brand, and a followership on social media is always going to be hard work because consistency is enormously important for two reasons.
The first reason is that your first 100 tweets are going to be terrible. Your first 100 of anything are going to be terrible. It’s just the iron rule of content. If you start a podcast, your first 100 episodes aren’t going to be very good. Heck, the first 100 issues of Three Things weren’t very good, either. It just takes that long—maybe longer in the case of short-form content like X posts—to find your voice, get into character, build confidence, find a rhythm, etc. You can’t rush the process, but the more energy and effort you devote to the process, and the more consistent you are, the faster it will happen.
The second reason consistency matters so much is that you need to relentlessly drive your point home in order for it to stick. Whatever message you’re trying to convey, whatever your goal for engaging in social media, you need to refine it, refine it even further, and then hammer it constantly, in lots of different ways and from lots of different angles. The most successful people, and the most successful brands, products, and companies all have an extremely straightforward narrative and mission at any given point in time, one simple enough that employees, customers, community members, etc. eventually can repeat it organically with zero effort. I wrote about the importance of narrative recently in the context of Ethereum; it’s no less important for your personal brand. It goes back to the initial advice I wrote about above: what is your persona? What’s your character? What do you stand for, and what does your character emphasize?
By the way, I should mention another hint: there’s some reflexivity at work here. If you repeat your message often enough, you’ll eventually start to believe it yourself, too—and that’s also a necessary step in building an authentic brand. Start by convincing yourself, then convince the rest of the world.
There’s no single way to achieve consistency, but whatever approach you take, it’s going to be a lot of work. Some people successfully carve out a few minutes of each day to produce content. Indeed, that’s the strategy I use here and it works well for me. There’s a designated period of each day—it could be the first thing you do when you wake up, or the last thing you do before you go to bed—that’s sacrosanct and inviolable. Put it on your calendar; set a reminder on your phone. Do whatever you need to do to ensure consistency.
It doesn’t have to be a lot of time, especially if you’re producing short-form content like X posts. Obviously, other forms of content are more “chunky” and take more time, such as producing video or podcast episodes. For mediums like this, you might need larger blocks of time, on the order of a few hours, once or perhaps a few times a week. The main point here is to be consistent. Hourly, daily, weekly, whatever tempo works well for you. But don’t go less than weekly. People need regular touchpoints for you to continue to feel timely and relevant.
There are no shortcuts to anything in life worth having, and building a personal brand and a social media presence are no exceptions. We’re all busy people, but in my experience whether we’re talking about exercise or meditation or social media or anything else that requires developing a consistent habit, it’s less about time management and more about prioritization. Consider whether this project is really important to you. If so, carve out the necessary time to do it right. I think you’ll be surprised the dividends it pays, the doors it opens, and the degree of serendipity that it brings to your life.