Just Be Good at Something
there's no such think as merit-hacking.
Why do we have to gamify everything?
5 hacks to get ahead!
3 tricks about XYZ nobody tells you!
Here’s how to rig the (whatever platform) algorithm.
and then my personal favorite:
Do THIS to make people like you.
Because nothing says winning friends and influencing people like trying to use YouTube magic tricks to get there.
At some point, we became so obsessed with figuring out the hidden rules that we forgot about the most obvious strategy:
Just be good at something.
I’ve never met a person in my whole life that didn’t have at least one talent.
Writing, singing, dancing, mathematics, unicycling, making a product so good people can’t wait to hand you money, the list goes on.
Everybody has something.
Perhaps you’re just a person people actually enjoy being around.
That’s a tremendous talent, especially now.
There doesn’t always have to be an exploit, or some type of “zero sum gotcha” element involved.
Merit and The Art of War
Look, game theory, strategy, Sun Tzu tactics.
They’ve all got their time and place.
At the end of the day, what’s inside the packaging (no matter how pretty), has to be legit.
Merit trumps all.
Sure, it can be a little discouraging watching some AI slop get serious traffic because whoever put it together understood the meta of the algo that week.
It stings. I’ve been there.
But watch what happens six months later.
The slop gets buried under the next wave of slop.
Nobody reshares it or builds upon it.
It gets clicks for a weekend, sure- the “battle” is won.
But then it disappears into the ether.
Meanwhile the actual good stuff keeps circulating.
People send it to their friends a year later, they quote it in discussions and arguments.
They come back to it.
There’s no hack, tweak, or algo-rigging that can recreate that.
That should make you smile.
(Next time out, we’ll go over 5 ways to smile to signal dominance and status)
See you later this week <3
-John Abbate
7.29.2026