Realignment.
Less algorithm. More life. Returning to the universe.
🌎📡 [ begin transmission ] :
Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.
This Substack exists as part of a bigger movement.
Be Greater. was never just a newsletter. It’s not just a website. It’s not just a clothing brand. It’s my way of life. My philosophy. My path toward a greater world.
Late in the winter of 2025, I started writing and publishing my work online. I found Substack and loved it immediately. It was actually built around writing.
By nature, the app was slower, calmer, and had an early-internet feeling of community.
But as I got further into it, wrote more, and gained some readers, I started seeing endless content about growing to 1,000 subscribers in a year, making $5k a month from paid subscriptions, and posting three or more notes a day so the algorithm would boost you. Newsletter after newsletter about how to build yourself into an online business and sell it.
There was a genuinely large market here built around something close to a pyramid scheme: many people making careers by selling detailed courses and guides to newer people, on how to make their own career by selling courses and guides to even newer people. It goes on and on.
Over those next few months, I learned a lot about writing, branding, marketing, courses, offerings, growth, algorithms. And I incorporated much of that into what I was building. I spent hours and days honing my philosophy, establishing the topics, creating the right designs to represent the message.
Laying the clear and strong foundation for the movement and getting the ideas out there.
And it worked. A lot of the philosophy is clear now for anyone who arrives and reads the About Page or the Intro piece.
The movement is official and live, and there are lots of ways to join it.
Be Greater currently has:
It’s all up and running. It’s beginning to capture the movement and spread the message. That’s exactly where I wanted to get.
But along the way to reaching this point, I realized I was beginning to lose sight of the purpose.
I was forcing my project, my creation, my idea, to fit into a perfect little box. We have all these validated ideas of what a newsletter should look like, what a brand should look like, what a content creator should look like. Things we understand will help us grow faster: ideal formats, consistent weekly or bi-weekly posting, studying algorithms, posting multiple notes daily.
I was playing the game. Doing what it takes to grow a presence online.
But that was pulling me away from the whole point.
The whole point from the beginning was to be more aligned with myself, with nature, the world around me, the universe. Waste less time. Spend less time online. Less social media. Less mindless consumption. More being. More presence. More mindfulness. More creating. More fun, love, positivity, and interacting with nature and people in the offline world.
I want to read more books, write more, exercise, meditate. Be a better person, a better husband, and make the world a better place.
Staying up past 2am on a Thursday night worrying about polishing my newsletter so it can go out Friday morning is not aligned with any of that.
I don’t want to worry about the ever-changing algorithm. I don’t want to force my idea to fit into some box so it will do well on a specific platform. The idea is the idea, no matter where we say it.
I had already succeeded at reaching these goals and practicing these habits in my offline life. But in creating the movement to share with the world, I was getting sucked back into the mainstream online.
I was doing what everyone else does: comparing, asking how to grow, asking how to turn this into a business.
Mainstream culture makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong by not participating in the rat race.
But it’s ingrained in the Be Greater philosophy that comparing yourself with others and believing you are better than them is wrong. It will not lead to happiness.
You can learn from anyone, but you can only be greater than yourself.
So I’m not going anywhere.
I’m still growing this movement and sharing it with the world.
This is my career. My path. Even if it never pays the bills.
I write, so I am a writer.
I designed and created a brand, so I am a designer. A creator.
Something doesn’t have to directly pay your bills to be real. These things exist whether they go viral or not. Whether they make millions or not.
If someone wants to read my work, they can.
If someone wants to wear the brand, they can.
Even if the only people wearing it are family, friends, and people I meet in person. That’s still me affecting the world around me. It doesn’t need a billboard in Times Square to count. We have to set aside the ego and the desire to be noticed.
Everything we need is already here. It always has been.
This is my way.
Whether it goes viral or not doesn’t change that.
I’m not trying to fix the whole world by posting more. I’m trying to live better, create honestly, and leave the pieces of the world I actually touch a little better than I found them.
What we allow to happen, and what we let ourselves grow comfortable with ignoring, becomes the new normal.
And I’d rather not get too comfortable with everything I’ve been seeing.
“The amount of change possible in the world is proportionate to the amount of change we believe is possible in the world.”
When we have hope, we keep going. We endure. We achieve.
When we don’t have hope, we doubt. We play it safe. We give up.
This piece is going live on The International Day of Hope.
The UN established this day to promote hope as a universal guiding principle — not as something soft or naive, but as a measurable, teachable skill that protects people against violence, addiction, and suicide.
A skill you can practice. A standard you can hold.
I genuinely didn’t plan that timing. But I guess the universe did.
Because hope has always been part of Be Greater.
Not the fake kind of hope where we pretend everything is fine. The real kind. The kind that makes you keep going, take care of your mind, treat people better, and believe the world can still become something greater than this.
And for me, part of protecting that hope means protecting my attention. My peace. My mental health. My actual life in the real world.
So I’ll be offline more.
Still writing. Still creating. Still sharing ideas, shirts, videos, photos, and updates when they are real and worth sharing.
But naturally.
Not chasing an algorithm that doesn’t care about any of us.
And not forcing the work to look like everyone else’s version of success.
In the meantime, maybe the next time you hear from Be Greater it isn’t through a screen at all.
Maybe it’s someone wearing the shirt.
Maybe it’s a park a little bit cleaner than you left it
Maybe it’s just a nice conversation in the real world
That would be pretty sick.
LOG OFF, spread love, be greater.
– [gf]
[ end transmission ] .