Note: This is a slightly edited (for the web) issue of a previous email newsletter. (If you’re not subscribed, join here, it’s free.)
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The concept of Time Under Tension comes from strength training. It refers to how long a muscle is placed under strain in order to stimulate growth (hypertrophy).
Not how heavy the weight is.
Not how many repetitions you perform.
But how long the effort is sustained.
Time creates resistance.
Resistance creates change.
Cal Newport and Derek Thompson borrowed this idea as a metaphor for thinking. Their argument is simple: depth emerges not from speed, but from endurance. Thinking benefits from staying with difficulty long enough for structures to form.
While writing The Quiet Apocalypse of Attention, something adjacent but distinct began to crystallize for me.
A related idea, but not the same one.
The phrase that emerged: Intentional Constraints.
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This is not a new thought for me.
I have been circling this idea for around two decades using different language:
Create a barrier to entry.
Don’t lower it.
Optimize for better people, not more people.
Motivate the committed. Ignore everyone else.
But for the first time, Intentional Constraints feels like the right container.
Not as a tactic.
As a posture.
Not as a system feature.
As a way of being. An orientation in the world.
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As visual thinker I tend to think spatially.
I sense relationships as shape long before I can explain them with language. Writing, for me, is the act of capturing an intuition once it develops edges.
Sometimes it feels like baking.
You don’t assemble ingredients — you transform them.
The finished thing becomes something different from its parts. It contains the intuition, but also constrains it. Which is exactly the point.
So instead of presenting a single argument, I want to suspend a few ideas (axioms) in space and bring them together slowly.
Three of them.
1. The Selection Principle
There are types of people in the world (a theme from the previous newsletter).
Not personality types.
Orientation types.
Some people seek ease, entertainment, and emotional insulation.
Others are hungry for depth, friction, meaning, and becoming.
You cannot convert one into the other.
Trying to motivate the unmotivated is a waste of breath. Trying to persuade the uncommitted is theatrical.
The right people already exist.
Our work is not to convince them.
It is to be visible to them.
As creators, we choose who we do business with — whether consciously or not. Our standards act as quiet filters.
Every system selects.
Language selects.
Tone selects.
Design selects.
Structure selects.
Even when we pretend it doesn’t.
This is not about exclusion.
It is about recognition.
Keep this axiom in memory…
2. The Gate Effect
There’s a well-worn cultural metaphor that makes this visible.
The trendy nightclub.
The line around the block.
The velvet rope.
The door.
The bouncer.
The waiting.
Outside, uncertainty. Anticipation.
Inside, belonging.
Contrast that with the club down the street:
No line.
No friction.
No atmosphere.
Cheap drinks. Empty room.
Nothing here is accidental.
Value does not emerge from availability.
It emerges from resistance.
Waiting creates anticipation.
Friction creates investment.
Thresholds create meaning.
When access is effortless, attachment is optional.
When access requires effort — when it is earned — it becomes personal.
This is not about artificial scarcity. It’s not about manipulation.
A gate doesn’t create desire. It reveals it.
Keep this axiom in memory…
3. The Law of Thresholds
There is a popular philosophy in modern marketing:
Remove friction.
Shorter forms (name and email collapse to just email).
Fewer steps.
Lower commitment.
Broader messaging to capture more attention.
Remove the hesitation.
Lower the threshold.
Maximize throughput.
Optimization through smoothing.
This makes sense if your goal is volume. It’s a “winning” formula then. The Gold Standard.
But volume formed without friction produces something peculiar:
An audience with no center of gravity.
And when pressure finally arrives — a decision, a price, an invitation to a higher commitment — the system reveals itself.
The people evaporate.
Not because they failed.
Because they were never formed.
Better customers and truer fans do not emerge from convenience.
They emerge from ownership.
And ownership requires:
- Waiting
- Choosing
- Crossing a line
Quantity is easy to measure.
Resonance is not.
One makes great screenshots on X.
The other builds worlds.
Keep this axiom in memory…
Formation in Practice
I’ve watched both sides of this play out. Seen how radically different inputs produce radically different outputs.
Years ago (circa 2017), I was part of a major launch — Todd Brown’s E5 CAMP. Behind the scenes, it started with an opt-in leads contest. Standard playbook.
When the contest ended, one person had won decisively. He drove massive volume. Pocketed the $5K bounty.
I had a small list by comparison. Didn’t even make the leaderboard.
Then the sales content dropped.
The leads winner disappeared. All that volume, but no sales.
All that attention collapsed on contact with reality.
The audience had been assembled, not formed. Traffic gathered without gravity. Leads extracted without identity.
Meanwhile, my list was small. But it had history. Tension. Pressure baked into the relationship.
Different formation produces different physics.
I finished 4th in the launch. Jeff Walker — the creator of Product Launch Formula, who drove 4.3 times as many leads as me (11817 vs. 2762) — finished one spot below me.
The launch didn’t prove I was clever.
It revealed what my systems had created.
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Some years later, circa 2019, I tried to capture this instinct in an essay called Lead Magnet 3.0.
At the time, I didn’t have the language I have now. I wasn’t talking about worlds. I wasn’t using architectural language. But I was circling the same idea.
The core argument wasn’t about email lists.
It was about formation.
That the way you invite determines who arrives.
And who arrives determines what your system becomes.
Most lead generation systems remove friction to increase throughput.
Lead Magnet 3.0 suggested the opposite:
Demonstrate value first.
Create context before inviting a higher-level commitment.
Treat attention as sacred, not as prey.
Let gravity do the work.
The result wasn’t explosive growth.
It was alignment.
Fewer people. Better people. Saner business. Deeper trust.
At the time, it was a pattern — not yet a worldview.
Convergence of Axioms
Seen this way, these ideas are not separate:
Selection determines who enters.
Gates determine how they enter.
Formation determines what they become.
Every system grows the kind of people it rewards.
Optimize for ease, and you produce tourists.
Optimize for commitment, and you produce residents.
This is not marketing.
This is population design.
✨ Intentional Constraints
This is the heart of it.
Intentional Constraints are not obstacles.
They are architecture.
They encode values.
They shape how those who enter behave once inside.
They filter chaos into coherence.
A world without friction becomes noise (X is the poster child).
But a world that asks something of you:
- time,
- attention,
- effort,
- reflection
… becomes a place you carry with you.
Ease makes things consumable.
Resistance makes them formative.
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What I do now — what eventually became Tiny Digital Worlds — is not a departure from earlier ideas.
It is their distillation.
Lead Magnet 3.0 was a pattern. (As was Sphere of Influence, a previous product of mine.)
TDW is the landscape it implied.
Not reinvention.
Refinement.
Not growth.
Crystallization.
What began as instinct became structure, place, territory.
For the past three years, I’ve done little else but live inside this idea — that “invisible marketing” is really a form of world-building.
That writing and building are not tactics, but instruments of friction.
Of shaping.
Of edge meeting edge. Iron sharpening iron.
Not for persuasion, but for formation.
Because thinking, like training, does its work when we stay under the weight long enough for something to change.
If you are building anything you want to last — a practice, a relationship, a body of work, or a (tiny) digital world — the question is not:
“How can I make this easier / cheaper / faster / more convenient?”
It is:
“What is this allowed to cost — in time, in attention, in effort, in becoming?”
~ André