Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet has had a profound impact on me and my creative work.
My university professor, William Hernandez, gave me the book a few years ago.
It’s a series of letters between Rilke and Franz Xaver Kappus, a young aspiring poet who wrote to him seeking guidance.
I return to it occasionally — usually when I’m looking for answers about my own creative path.
And every time, I find something new.
One lesson changed my life:
you should only do the work that truly pulls you toward it.
The work that keeps you up at night.
The kind of work you cannot not do.
The work that calls your name.
That pull — that unmistakable gravitational force — is how the work itself shows you the direction you’re meant to follow.
For me, that pull has always been writing.
Ever since I was seventeen, I’ve written — sometimes inconsistently, sometimes every day for a year.
It’s never really stopped calling. I’ve always felt the urge to translate the ideas and experiences I encounter in my work and life — not because I believe they’re unique, but because writing helps me process them and chase something deeper: wisdom.
Wisdom, simply put, is the desire to find answers to the questions that move you.
And I have many questions.
What’s the point of life?
How can life be meaningful?
How can I do great work?
How can I turn the dreams that whisper to me into something real?
Over the years, I’ve created many things — software, companies, essays, music, videos.
And through all of it, I’ve learned to follow the work that keeps pulling me forward.
That work is writing about the ideas and discoveries that shape me.
Five days ago, I turned twenty-six.
And I don’t want to wait any longer to put my writings and ideas out there fully.
Why?
- Because this is the work I cannot not do.
- Because I want to sharpen my writing and thinking.
- Because doing creative work means finishing it — releasing it into the world.
So this is what Letters to a Young Maker is.
A collection of letters to myself.
A record of what I’m learning as I go.
I’m not writing this for an audience. I’m writing it for me.
As Rick Rubin says, “The audience comes last.”
If it resonates with others — great.
If it doesn’t — great.
I’m here to do the work.
To create something personal.
Something that feels true.
Something that is me.
Let me finish this first letter with a quote from Rilke's first letter to Kappus:
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me that. You have asked others, before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you worry when certain editors turn your efforts down. Now (since you have allowed me to offer you advice) let me ask you to give up all that. You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would die if it should be denied you to write. This above all: ask yourself in your night’s quietest hour: must I write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond to this serious question with a loud and simple ‘I must’, then construct your life according to this necessity; your life right into its most inconsequential and slightest hour must become a sign and witness of this urge.