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November 2, 2026
Written by Paxton Thompson

I'm the Artist: Seven Substacks From My Year

I signed with the Phillies as an undrafted free agent in August 2023. Two years later, in the fall of 2025, I was rehabbing a shoulder impingement and trying to figure out how I'd gone from pitching the best baseball of my life one year to ending the next with my arm down and the worst version of myself on the mound.

In 2024, I was throwing well because I was throwing like me. Being me. Attacking, getting after it. At the end of that season, the front office told me I needed more velocity. So I spent the winter chasing it. I came back in 2025 slower, worse, and completely internal instead of externally competing. The only external things I cared about were what my velocity was that day and what "they" thought. Trying to be someone else got me injured. Getting injured gave me time to sit with what actually needed to change.

That's where I was when I read my first Substack. It turned into many more, all shared by my good friend and former teammate Josh Hejka.

Josh is one of the smartest and best dudes in my life. He's made me a better person. He has a knack for finding the things you should read and passing them along, and for that I'm grateful.

The year and a half since I met him has been the hardest professional stretch of my life (correlation??? I think not, Josh). A lot of ups and downs. A rehab. An offseason where I got back to my identity on the mound. Released by the Phillies. Three weeks of crazy networking for an opportunity with the Rangers. The best spring training of my career. One bad week in April and released. I've journaled every step of it. And I journaled the Substacks too, seven pieces that gave me perspective when I needed it and kept pushing my growth professionally and personally.

Mimicry: Copying Wholeness

The first idea that grabbed me came from Cate Hall, who writes Useful Fictions on Substack (check out her new book, You Can Just Do Things). Her piece "How to Instantly Be Better at Things: Just Pretend You're Someone Else" is where a lot of this starts. It's also exactly what I've done with every idea that follows.

The premise is that humans are mimicry machines. Babies learn to imitate before they learn grammar. It's easier to copy wholeness than to assemble it from parts. So instead of grinding through every minute detail, you can just copy the whole thing. Often the answer arrives before the reasoning does. Cate says it best: "The improvement comes not from explicit reasoning, but from letting a deeper, more intuitive system take over. It's easier to imitate wholeness than it is to assemble it from parts." I've literally just copied how my Latin teammates speak Spanish, and it goes incredibly well. Intuition flows.

The idea isn't isolated. Mohnish Pabrai talks about the same thing in Richer, Wiser, Happier. Pabrai credits his success to doing what Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have done: relentlessly cloning great investors. Force yourself to adopt smart things, and clone. You don't need explicit reasoning or detail. That's exactly what we've done building Old Logan Capital: adopt the things that are smart, and make them ours. It's what I'm doing now in Banana Ball, thrown into a world of entertainment where I'm learning the ways by mimicking, then making them mine. A simple idea that works really well.

When mimicry extends past the conscious mind into feel, intuition becomes even more powerful. For a pitcher, it works. Some of the best moments I've had on a mound didn't come from thinking. They came from intuition and feel going to work. Actors are a great example. Some of the best have an instinct to improvise when they botch a line, and the botched take becomes one of the best shots in the film. They don't freeze as the seconds tick. They flow with them. That's why mimicry is so powerful. It gets you into your intuition and lets you solve problems you couldn't solve by freezing and thinking through every detail. Improvise, fake it til you make it, and let intuition run.

Cate says, "I hate how well asking myself 'if I had 10x the agency I have, what would I do?' works." Yeah. Just do what someone with 10x the agency would do. Weird.

The Moat

Once you accept that copying wholeness is how you fly, the next problem is that you're going to fail and you won't be good, because like anything, it takes time. Good luck!

Cate's second essay, "Learn to Love the Moat of Low Status," is exactly about this. Anything worth doing requires a stretch of temporarily looking dumb, and most people never do the thing because they can't tolerate the moat. Embarrassment looms so large that we forget the upside on the other side of it. Love the moat. It's supposed to hurt, and that's what makes you better. The world will not end.

It's childlike, and that's the fun part. When we're first learning the world, we're hesitant, scared to even talk to an adult. Sooner or later we get over that moat. Loving the moat means you get to be a kid again: learn, look dumb, and have fun. Quite freeing, really. When I speak Spanish, it feels exactly like that. Like a kid talking to an adult. Awkward. Yes, I'm going to get laughed at. That's the point.

I lived in that moat when I built my website. I had no idea what I was doing. Now paxton-thompson.com exists, it's everything me, and it's still growing. How cool is that. Same story with joining Banana Ball. I'm working on growing my socials and my presence, and it's not a hole in one, but I'm around the pin and increasing my chances. Being in front of 40,000 people when I don't know a lick of dancing is hard, and there's only one way through: mimic and be bad, haha. But I will be good. Keep mimicking.

Whatever it is, assume it can be learned. In my first Trail post I wrote about being a learning theorist, borrowing the phrase from The Art of Learning. No one is born with it. Everyone can learn it. You just have to push past the moat.

Ask

Ask for things.

Cate's "How to Be More Agentic" calls it courting rejection. Ask for things that feel unreasonable but might actually be reasonable. You'll never know unless you ask. Aim to get rejected.

A piece from Ajeya Cotra, "The Stable Marriage Problem," puts a mathematical spine under this. It uses the classic matching algorithm as a metaphor for real life. The algorithm is asker-optimal and askee-pessimal. It strongly rewards agency (the asker) and punishes passivity (the askee). If you ask, you get to pick from the entire universe of options available to you. Ask for what you want.

It's easy to see in a dating pool. Go for the person you actually want. Ask for their number. If they say yes, you got the one you wanted out of the whole universe. If they say no, well, that wasn't available to you, and you're on to the next best option in that same universe. But if you only ever wait to be asked, you're picking from a tiny slice of what's actually out there. The world favors the asker.

I lived this. When the Phillies released me in January, I reached out to every relationship I had and asked if they had contacts. Then I reached out to those contacts asking for an opportunity, looking to get rejected, because rejection was the worst thing that could happen. Three weeks later I had a job with the Texas Rangers. The Luck Field Manual makes a good point here: weak ties beat strong ties for opportunities. Because I didn't burn bridges with the Phils, the weak ties I reached out to were exactly the ones that connected me to the Rangers. No matter the profession, it's about who you know, and it's usually the weak ties that surface opportunities.

It starts with asking.

Creating My Own Art

Cate's "How to Be More Agentic" has a line I keep coming back to: "Grinding kills creativity, and burnout is the ultimate agency killer." A drop in agency is the first sign you're working too hard.

I've burned out. At the end of 2024 I crashed, and I'll never forget that feeling. Grinding harder wasn't the answer. Stepping back was. Living a little gives you the space to rule out the ideas that were never going to work, instead of grinding to find out. Cate says never take instructions on how to work hard from someone who hasn't burned out. Understood.

But working too hard isn't the only way to burn out and kill agency.

In February 2026, Josh sent "From 'Have to' to 'Want to': How Alysa Liu Won Olympic Gold" by Steve Magness. Magness says autonomy is tied directly to well-being. When outside forces start driving us (coaches, accolades, a front office), we over-identify with our craft. Want to becomes need to becomes have to.

That was me in 2025. I cared so much about what others thought of my art that it became their art. The kid who attacked every hitter turned into a guy pitching out of obligation to throw harder. And I didn't even realize I'd done it to myself.

Alysa quit skating. She came back years later because she wanted to, not because anyone told her to, and she won gold. Magness's point is that the shift from obligation to choice is the whole thing. A sense of self that isn't tied to one pursuit is what makes you resilient. I'll say it again: self-complexity, a robust sense of self that isn't solely tied to one pursuit, is what makes us resilient. Alysa is a great example of this.

That's been the biggest blessing of Banana Ball. For years baseball was everything. In 2025 I'd come home from the field and obsess about pitching until I walked back into the clubhouse. Now I get to attack pitching in my psychopathic way and still have a life away from it: time to figure out what else I love, build things I want to build, and be a better son, brother, and friend. The obsession is part of what makes me good. It's also the thing that can grab hold of me. Knowing both sides has made me better on the mound and off it, and it's still a constant battle.

I do care. I care about people, about being successful, about being liked. But there's a point, on the mound and in life, where you have to be yourself, because your intentions are right and the art is yours. Easier said than done.

I've been throwing a ball for 20 years and I'm still painting the canvas. On February 20 I wrote in my journal: "I create for me. I'm the audience and I know what I want to see. I'm the artist."

Now

Here's the thing about tough times, and the reason I'm writing this now: none of those seven Substacks would have kept me from pitching poorly and getting released. That's not what reading does. What they did was give me a set of frames I could reach for when the going gets tough and somethings I can strive for everyday. Mimic wholeness. Love the moat. Ask. I'm the artist.

I don't know exactly what's next. I know I'm going to keep pitching, because I want to, and because the kid who throws the red ball against the window frame is still in there, and he's the whole point. I know the moat is going to be uncomfortable, and that's what makes it work.

And I know I read seven Substacks this year that will stick with me longer than most books I've read. Thanks, Hej.

The reading list

Cate Hall, Useful Fictions:

The Polymath Investor:

Ajeya Cotra:

Steve Magness, The Growth Equation:

Paxton