a beginner's guide to mischief
how to make being alive more fun
Four years ago, I decided to make my inner child proud. (My inner child was, however, a mischief-maker that got sent to the principalโs office on a weekly basis.) Since then, my life has exponentially improved. I made wonderful friends, became the most authentic version of myself, went internationally viral various times, and just had a ton of fun.
I believe one should always be mischiefmaxxing. This is a introductory course on what that means and how to do it.1
I define mischief as an amusing endeavor that exists for no purpose but to spark delight. Itโs a defiance against the status quo that everything must be a means to an end, and a resistance to the monotony and passiveness of everyday life.
Welcome to: a beginnerโs guide to mischief.
seeding ideas
Take that off-hand joke you made, and actually make it real.
โWouldnโt it be funny ifโฆโ Do it. Do it. Do it. Donโt just hypothesize. Donโt overthink it.
Wouldnโt it be funny if we made an anti-run club, a โsit club,โ since everyoneโs joining run clubs these days to meet people, but most of them donโt even enjoy running?
Wouldnโt it be funny to throw a party with a hundred Alexes, to help my roommate Alex find friends?
Wouldnโt it be funny to find my friend a girlfriend via flyers on the street, as if heโs a lost dog?
Wouldnโt it be funny to list my house on google maps as a restaurant, because of my roommateโs infamous steak dinners?
โHa ha, good one!โ You could leave it at that. Or you could yank it into reality, and craft a scheme that takes on a life of its own. A joke among your friends could become entertainment for millions of people across the world. It could lead to meeting your now-closest friends. Funnily enough, it could even result in serious business people trying to hire you.
If this sounds preposterous to you, well, it sounds preposterous to everyone else. So most people donโt ever try, and the few that do reap outsized rewards.
start small, and build up (if youโre scared)
Take your joke, and dial it up a notch. And again. And again. And then maybe half a notch down, so you donโt overdo it.
Some starting points:
Subvert expectations. Take a popular social phenomenon and flip it on its head.2
Identify a problem and craft a comically over-engineered solution.
Create a genuinely useful tool then add a bunch of silly, useless features.
Take a subject/solution from one domain and apply it to a very unrelated domain.
Combine two things that should be polar opposites.
Search for loopholes and exploit them.
Take something you hate doing and invent a way to make it fun.
Tech bros in San Francisco always complain about the gender ratio โ everyone says we need more women โ but maybe we just need less men โ I should make men fight โto the deathโ with giant inflatable โweaponsโ โ weโd play songs like โKung Fu Fighting,โ โEye of the Tiger,โ and soundtracks from Super Smash Bros โ the men could be shirtless and get oiled up before they fight
Everyoneโs joining run clubs to meet people, but most of them donโt even like running โ we should stage a counter club โ how about a Sit Club โ instead of running, we just sit in the park in protest of โBig Runโ โ itโll be BYOC (bring your own chair) โ we could do sitting warmups, like they do running warmups โ we could play musical chairs to find the best sitter
Itโd be fun to run an advice line โ hmm, kinda overdone, how about a reverse advice line, where instead of getting advice, callers have to give advice โ my friends could record their silliest problems, and callers could leave a voicemail suggestion โ since itโs already on a phone line, I could add a ridiculously complex phone tree โ people left such incredible voicemails, I should turn them into a song
I previously founded a nonprofit, and now I live near a strip club โ itโd be kinda funny to combine charity and strippers, the epitome of virtue intertwined with the epitome of degeneracy โ letโs call itโฆ Strippers for Charity โ I could get my friends/strangers to strip for a charity of their choosing โ they perform a song and dance themed around that charity โ all money raised is donated to that charity
Bounce ideas off of friends. โYes, andโ your thoughts. Enlisting a friend also makes creation less intimidating, and helps you focus on process over outcome. Because worst case scenario, if youโre the only two that care about your project, that means you had fun creating something with your friend! And that is always worthwhile.
Start in your home. Fabricate some interior design. Throw a silly party. Mail your friends absurd items. Your scheme doesnโt have to be a grand spectacle. Begin in a safe space to get comfortable with play.
form factors
My scheming trifecta is: flyers, websites, and parties.
Flyers (theyโre like shitposting but IRL)
You can tape whatever you want to a pole and nobody can stop you3.
Generally, you should include a call to action (CTA): e.g. a QR code that goes to a survey about oneโs bean habits, a number you text to join an enigmatic quest, or a website to mobilize the people to STOP CLIMBING.
The benefit of a CTA is you can gleefully watch as people engage with your work. But thereโs also a beauty in having absolutely no feedback loop, as it leaves your audience even more puzzled on your abstract and enigmatic intentions.
You will be surprised and delighted by the number of people intrigued by your flyers.
After Iโve amassed enough responses, I like to gift something back to participants. It could be a pseudo-scientific report analyzing data from the survey, a one-way plane ticket to Chicago, or a song made from their voicemails. It closes the loop.4
I design my flyers in Figma, but if youโre a curmudgeon like me who resists learning new tech until youโre convinced of its value, you can literally make a flyer in google slides.5 Just adjust the slide to be letter-sized and you can drag shit in there without having to learn some newfangled tech.
You could also just make flyers from pen and paper. Thatโs what summoned hundreds of Alexes to the Alextravaganza. No excuses! There are zero barriers to entry!
Websites (theyโre like flyers but online)
You can just cast whatever you want into the seas of the open web!

I cannot recommend carrd.co enough for creating no-code websites. Especially for beginners, I wouldnโt recommend using anything more complex. Carrdโs formatting can be a bit rigid, but as much as I desire complete control over every pixel, when site builders allow that, it means you have to manually adjust the design for web, mobile, different device sizes, etc, and itโs a huge bitch to deal with and not worth it 90% of the time. Carrdโs free version is robust, and its premium version is only $19/year.6
For something more complex, you could try vibecoding with Cursor. For something moderately complex, you could add blocks of code into carrd.
The most beautiful quality of sites is the plethora of fun elements you can integrate. Links to other sites! Surveys! Interactivity! Lately I have been very into SMS deep links, where when a user clicks on a button, it pre-loads a text message for them to send to a friend.

When designing sites, I often hop straight into carrd, but for anything complex, Iโll design it in Figma. And I use namecheap to buy domains. (I love buying silly domains, the amount of money I spend on domains is actually absurd.)
Parties (theyโre like websites but for friends)
Parties are the highest echelon of schemes. Youโre not only reaching into the uncharted universe to beckon strangers, but crafting a container in which strangers can interact with each other.

Thereโs so much fun in a partyโs unpredictability. Whenever I host some absurd public spectacle, people always ask me whatโs going to happen. And I reply, I have no idea! Iโm along for the ride as much as anyone else.

Iโve met many friends through my parties. I mean, Iโm literally filtering for people who are down to clown, which is my favorite quality in a person.
The greatest blockers here are 1) where to host it and 2) the fear of no one showing up.
For the former - if youโre hesitant to have people in your home (especially if youโre advertising the party on the street), Iโd recommend scoping out local parks and beaches. Some have more strict park rangers than others, but as long as youโre being reasonable (i.e. no crazy equipment, no excessive drinking, etc), you should be fine. If you live in San Francisco, I highly recommend The SF Nook, which was created by a group of friends as an affordable community/arts space.
For the latter - to mitigate the fear of no one showing up, plan it with a friend or several. Then, worst case scenario, youโre just hanging out with your friends on a beautiful day in the park.
There was a viral Substack essay circling a few months ago, about how everyone wants to be a DJ, but no one wants to dance. I.e. everyone wants to be the creative, the star of the show, but few want to be the audience purely enjoying othersโ work. I believe the arbitrage opportunity here is in event hosting, thatโs an area in which everyone wants to be a participant, but few want to be the host.
doubts to dispel
Stepping outside of the prescribed path, I sometimes feel like a grand pianoโs gonna fall out of the window and bonk me on the head like in a cartoon. But that doesnโt happen, actually.
Itโs surprisingly very easy to do any of this. The hardest part is just fighting the inertia and starting.
Creativity is a muscle. If youโre worried that your idea is too stupid, who cares? Do it, so youโll learn from it and have less stupid ideas in the future. Thatโs part of whatโs freeing about schemes, theyโre not meant to be taken seriously. By nature, theyโre not a reflection of your intelligence or capability. So thereโs no such thing as failure. Iโve learned to say: no matter what happens, itโll be funny.
itโs not that deep bro, but it also is that deep, bro.
Resistance to the status quo is also a muscle. Iโm not saying to be contrarian just for the sake of it, but itโs important to habitually question norms and take agency. Mischief is intrinsically tied to agency: itโs questioning why things are the way they are, even if itโs just to make fun of them. Itโs toeing the line of whatโs permissible, even if itโs just for a joke.
In doing so, youโll learn to bend implicit rules you didnโt even realize you were following. Thereโs many things in life we have a vague sense that weโre โnot allowed to do,โ but we donโt pause to think critically about why that is the case, or if thatโs even true.7
As children, we always asked why. Why does this exist? How does it work? Why should I listen to you? Somewhere, somehow, most people stopped asking questions. I mean, itโs not practical to be curious about every single thing. But itโs a cold and dreary world in which one has no sense of curiosity, of wonder. And itโs a complicit world in which we all just blindly follow rules, especially rules that donโt even exist.
And in a world so focused on the ends justifying the means, where every endeavor is expected to be monetized or awarded, itโs freeing to do something that exists for nothing but itself. Itโs a helpful tool for unconditioning yourself from perfectionist tendencies, as there is no end goal, itโs about the process and living in the moment.
Of course I get some snide remarks from people online, who comment, โYou must have a lot of time on your hands. I wish I had the time to do that.โ And my retort is: if you have an active Netflix account or over two hours of daily screen time, I donโt want to hear it.8
a note on โpranksโ
I donโt really categorize my work as โpranks,โ as that has a negative connotation of being at someoneโs expense, and I firmly believe in doing no harm.9 I scheme within the realm of chaotic good to chaotic neutral. Humor purely based on degrading someone else is not only morally reprehensible, itโs also just lazy and uninspired.
If the target of your scheme wouldnโt find it funny, donโt do it. (Unless perhaps theyโre some notoriously depraved individual.) Letโs all just agree to be cool guys. Use humor for good.
go forth and be mischievous
If you read this far, then you spent ~10 minutes with me. So I challenge you to spend another 10 minutes today scheming a fun little way to break out of the monotony of everyday life. Start small. Write a silly note to a friend. Craft a quick lil poster. Tape something weird to your wall. Create something that exists for no other reason than to spark delight.
Today, your mission is to make yourself giggle. And then report back, because in the universe of mischief, you have at minimum an audience of me.
LinkedIn certification provided upon request.
I once heard this concept described as โflip a sacred cowโ and man do I love that.
Donโt take this as legal advice lol. Itโs probably fine though.
I largely created my Substack to share these project syntheses, actually. And sending them to participants helped me grow an audience offline! My first hundred or so subscribers were largely strangers who participated in one of my IRL schemes, saw the output of them, then subscribed.
Go to File > Page setup > Custom > 8.5โ x 11โ - I know this is unhinged, but I do not care.
This is obviously not sponsored by carrd. They probably canโt sponsor anyone, because theyโre only making $19/year off each paying user. I just really fw them.
One of the few books that had a drastic impact on my worldview is The Four Agreements. Its premise is that most of your misery can be attributed to ingesting implicit rules of how you should behave, punishing yourself when not meeting those rules, and resenting others who seem free of those rules. When people say rude and bitter things, theyโre simply projecting their own miserable inner world onto you. And the more demeaning thoughts you have of others, the more youโll assume others have demeaning thoughts of you. When you can realize all this, itโs easier to train yourself out of getting hurt by the negativity of others, as well as the habits of inflicting punishment upon yourself.
If creative projects drain rather than recharge you, or you just donโt have the desire to do them, thatโs fine, but donโt act like itโs a morally inferior form of entertainment versus consuming content. Letโs all just be cool with each other, okay? Of course, leisure time is a privilege that not everyone has, but having hobbies of creation does not necessarily mean you have more free time than people who have hobbies of consumption.
Unfortunately, a โprankโ is sometimes the most intuitive word to explain my schemes to someone new to my work. There isnโt really a descriptive word for a funny bit that features your friend but isnโt at their expense.









OK, I think I'm a little in love with you.
โAnd in a world so focused on the ends justifying the means, where every endeavor is expected to be monetized or awarded, itโs freeing to do something that exists for nothing but itselfโ. I love this quote so much.