Before Richard Webster became one of the most prolific writers alive, with well over a hundred books to his name, almost all of them written long before AI was even a rumor, he was something else entirely: a magician and mind reader from New Zealand who wanted to be a writer and had written very little.

Webster admired many authors, but he was especially awed by “Call of the Wild” writer Jack London. Not just London’s stories, but his literary output. London died at forty and, in that short life, produced dozens of books along with hundreds of short stories, essays, and articles. The sheer volume felt almost superhuman.

On an early trip to the United States, Webster made a pilgrimage to London’s home in California. On the wall hung a list of London’s rules of work. One of them was brutally plain: write one thousand words a day.

Webster did the math. Follow that instruction and you could finish a book in a couple of months. Keep going and you could write several books a year. When he returned to New Zealand, though, something noteworthy happened.

Webster had misremembered the rule. Instead of writing a thousand words a day, he began writing two thousand words a day, day after day after day.

When Webster discovered his mistake decades later, it was irrelevant. His misremembered two thousand words a day rule had already turned him into a literary machine.

What made it work was not precision. It was that the instruction was clear enough to obey. It was something Webster could execute even on bad days, when inspiration failed him. Following the instruction didn’t promise greatness. Rather, it gave him direction and forward motion.

That’s also why people love challenges and games. They remove ambiguity. They replace “What should I do?” with “Just do this.”

I’ve run into the same principle in a very different corner of my life. I spend time visiting abandoned buildings, forgotten memorials, and historical oddities, places that often take real effort to reach and offer very little at first glance. On one trip, I drove deep into the New Jersey Pine Barrens to find a small monument marking the crash site of Emilio Carranza.

Carranza died in 1928 at the age of twenty-two. In Mexico, he was already a national hero. That year, he flew nonstop from Mexico City to Washington, D.C., as a symbolic gesture of goodwill between the two countries. After meeting with Calvin Coolidge among others, Carranza began the return flight south. He never made it. His plane was caught in a violent nighttime storm and went down in the Pine Barrens’ dense forest.

After hours of driving and searching, I finally reached the monument site. Yet when I got there, I felt almost nothing emotionally. There was no click. I looked around for a few minutes and was ready to leave. The place seemed quiet and unremarkable.

Then I reminded myself of a rule I use deliberately in moments like this. I say to myself: “Mark, at some point you thought coming here would be worth it. Why did you think that? Assume you were right. What did you know then that you’ve forgotten now?”

So I stayed. I studied the monument and the surrounding trees more closely. I pulled out my phone and began researching details prompted by what I was seeing rather than what I already knew.

I learned that Carranza had taken off from Garden City, that when his body was recovered a flashlight was fused into his hand, suggesting he had been flying low over the treetops, trying to find a place for an emergency landing in an aircraft not designed for night or weather. I learned that schoolchildren in Mexico had pooled their money to help fund the memorial in a remote corner of the New Jersey woods.

Only then did the place begin to feel meaningful.

I think about that moment when I’m tempted to leave too early, whether it’s a place, a piece of writing, or a line of thought. Not everything rewards assiduous attention. But some things do, if you stay just a little longer than feels comfortable.

Webster had an instruction that was clear enough to obey. So did I. Neither instruction was elegant. Both helped us get the job done.