Episode 148 63 min Why the best ideas start as side projects
Priya Nair on building a 40-person design studio from a weekend hobby — and why she still protects time for projects that might go nowhere.
Season 4 · Episode 145 Creative process
Writing every day for ten years
Novelist Marcus Lee on routine, rejection and the 3,000-word mornings that produced four books and one very large drawer of drafts.
GuestMarcus Lee — Novelist
Episode 145 Writing every day for ten years
0:00 1:07:05
Demo player — no audio file is connected to this episode yet. Add an audioUrl to the episode's frontmatter to enable playback, or listen on one of the platforms below.
Show notes
For ten years, Marcus Lee wrote before work every single morning. The result: four published novels, hundreds of rejections and a drawer full of drafts he will never show anyone.
Jordan and Maya ask Marcus how the routine started, how it survived a demanding day job, and what he has learned about finishing long, uncertain projects.
What we cover
- Starting with a habit too small to fail
- Treating rejection as a metric rather than a verdict
- Why Marcus never edits on writing days
- Leaving a stable job for an unstable art
Key takeaways
- Marcus treats output and quality as separate days of the week.
- He kept a rejection spreadsheet and celebrated every 'no' as proof he was shipping.
- Finishing a bad draft taught him more than polishing a good opening.
- A routine survives when it is small enough to keep on your worst day.
Timestamps
Transcript excerpt
Jordan Three thousand words before breakfast sounds brutal.
Marcus It was three hundred for the first year. The number grew because the habit did, not the other way round.
About the guest
Marcus Lee
Novelist
Marcus Lee is the author of four novels, most recently The Long Way Round. He worked as a copywriter for nine years while writing before work every morning, and now teaches a popular evening class on finishing long projects.
Links & resources
Episode 148 63 min 
Episode 140 50 min Designing with AI without losing your taste
Product designer Nora Lindqvist on how her team uses AI tools day to day — and where they deliberately keep humans in charge.
Episode 139 58 min Building a business around books
Grace Kim turned a reading habit into an independent bookshop, a subscription box and a community of 9,000 readers.
Episode 137 64 min From the kitchen to code at 35
Former head chef Ravi Shah on teaching himself to program, landing his first engineering job and what restaurant kitchens taught him about software teams.
Episode 141 61 min Leaving a job to write full-time
Newsletter writer Lucas Meyer on the spreadsheet, the savings and the subscriber milestone that told him it was time to go independent.
Episode 147 55 min Saying no to funding, twice
Daniel Okafor explains why he bootstrapped his logistics software company to $8M in revenue instead of taking venture capital.
Have a story like this? Be our next guest
We read every pitch and reply within two weeks if it's a fit for an upcoming season.
