Dangerous Little Gods

Stop Feeding Your Mind What Everyone Else Is Eating If you want to stand apart, you need to “eat different”.

Too much sameness. open.substack.com/pub/nickusbo...

This is our backyard this morning. Welcome to winter in Montreal! 🙂

Mushroom biology + origami + climate data. Why not?

The next brilliant invention won’t be the result of a tidy pitch deck. It’ll grow from what it looks like a mess.

Messy combinations are the birthplace of asymmetric discovery.

And late night conversations with AI can help get you there.

That weird hunch that keeps tugging at your sleeve?

Feed it to AI, and see what answers it pulls from the depths.

Professional studios used to require capital.

Now they run on curiosity and a $20 monthly subscription.

Your kitchen table is the lab. The zine. The studio. The launchpad.

Nobody Knows What They're Doing

The trick isn’t to fake expertise.

The trick is to build while you’re still confused.

Some of the greatest breakthroughs in science and art came from people experimenting before the rules were written.

Start creating before you’re constrained by the rules.

Expertise used to have a half-life of decades. Now it spoils like milk.

The Python framework you mastered last year? Already outdated. The marketing plan that worked in 2023? Quaint.

While experts are defending their shrinking kingdoms, amateurs are building new worlds with questions and AI.

The 48-Hour Publishing Rule

Perfectionism is just fear wearing a fancy costume.

Try this instead: Give yourself 48 hours. Make something. Ship it.

Not perfect. Not polished. Just done enough to share.

Every shipped project teaches you more than ten perfect plans sitting in your drafts folder.

The Joy of No Longer Being Graded or Judged We've been trained our entire lives to prepare for exams, assessments, and reviews

Tired of being judged? Read on... nickusborne.substack.com/p/the-joy-of...

Same

Making a new friend on my cycle ride...

Who knew the origins of Dangerous Little Gods went back so far? 😉

You look around and everyone plays it safe. Follows the rules. Waits their turn.

But you don't buy it anymore. And you're not alone.

There are others who see what you see. Who feel what you feel. Who want to create what you want to create.

We're the Dangerous Little Gods.

Join us.

A Reading List For Dangerous Little Gods Books that speak to amateurs, dilettantes and dreamers.

A reading list for amateurs, dilettantes, generalists, and dreamers. nickusborne.substack.com/p/a-reading-...

If you like it, wear it.

Been called "unfocused"? "All over the place"? "Jack of all trades, master of none"?

Good.

The most dangerous ideas live at intersections nobody else is exploring.

You're free to crash worlds together and see what happens.

That's not a limitation. That's your DLG superpower.

Tell me about it. I'm 68 and encounter this more and more frequently. For those who know me and have worked with me, all is good. For strangers, apparently my brain fell out of my head about 20 years ago.

You're a Maker Trapped in Consumer Mode

You scroll. You admire.

But you ache to CREATE something. Not just consume what everyone else made.

AI just handed you the tools to remember who you actually are.

You need to start making.

Even if it's messy. Especially if it's messy.

You don’t need a publisher to print your story.
You don’t need a label to drop your album.
You don’t need a university to start your research.
The studio has shrunk. The gatekeepers have vanished.
All you need is curiosity and your favorite AI model

Paid subscribers to the Dangerous Little Gods newsletter get immediate access to the DLG Playground, a spacial thinking app that stimulates collision-based innovation.

We’ve been trained to organize our thoughts into neat categories. Projects go in project folders. Ideas get sorted by topic. Everything has its place, filed away in hierarchies that make sense but kill creative possibility.

This works fine for retrieval. It’s terrible for discovery and creativity.

Introducing the DLG Playground: Where Surprising Ideas Take Shape The DLG Playground is a New App to Stimulate Dangerous Thinking

A whole new way of thinking and coming up with new ideas... nickusborne.substack.com/p/introducin...

OK… version 1.0 of the DLG Playground app is almost ready to rock and roll.

It’s all about spatial thinking, the “adjacent possible”, and playing around to surface interesting ideas. Yup… our kind of thing.

Exclusively for paid subscribers… and launching on Monday.

Scary and exciting! 🤪

From Burnout to Renewal Through Rebellion Burnout doesn't always look like collapse. Sometimes it looks like Tuesday.

Burnout? Not so much a problem... maybe more like a message to make changes nickusborne.substack.com/p/from-burno...

Badges? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Badges

The amateur used to be mocked.

The dilettante dismissed.

But guess what?

Now we have AI tools that make credentials optional.

We’re not underqualified - we’re uncaged.

When the credentialed blink, we build.

Go through life wearing a big, bright question mark… Art by Niki De Saint Phalle

From Retirement to Rebellion You’ve traded meetings for experiments. And you’re just getting started.

Close to or already retired? You're just getting started...

If that's the measure... I'm an uber-entrepreneur 🙂

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” - George Bernard Shaw

Stop wondering if you're smart enough and start exploring what your outsider status allows you to see.

Your amateur status isn't a bug—it's a feature. You're not disqualified by your lack of credentials. You're liberated by them.