The Wine Glass Technique: How to write profound ideas and still go viral

A practical guide to writing about any topic on the internet

Physicist Richard Feynman used to say that if you look closely enough at a glass of wine, you eventually find the whole universe in it. You see the laws of physics in the liquid evaporating in the wind, the chemistry of enzymes and fermentation, the geology in the minerals distilled from the earth that make up the glass, and even the history of stellar evolution reflected in its atoms.

Nature doesn’t know about labels.

It doesn’t divide reality into “physics,” “chemistry,” “biology,” or “psychology.” Those are artificial divisions humans created for our own convenience, because our minds get overwhelmed by the infinite complexity of the universe.

The same logic applies to writing and creativity for artists on the internet.

Many try to be generalists, trying to cover everything by talking about “marketing,” “business,” or “personal development” because they believe expanding their focus will make them more visible. This, from experience, I see as a mistake. By trying to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one in particular.

Yes, maybe you’ll reach a lot of people…

Of whom not even 1% are highly interested — they were just passing by.

In today’s attention economy era, where AI can already replicate and churn out tons of generic content, the generalist will be replaced. Average has become obsolete, and the solution is to apply Feynman’s wine-glass principle:

See the universe from an ultra-specific point that sets you apart from 99% of others.

The paradox of focus: narrowing to expand

By forcing yourself to look at just one corner of the world with insatiable curiosity, a paradox occurs: the more specific you are, the more infinite you become.

Don’t choose a topic just because it’s trendy — choose a topic only if it generates insatiable curiosity in you and you feel like you can’t stop talking about it. If you decide to study an ultra-specific topic with that voracity — say, the psychology of cognitive biases applied exclusively to investors — you’ve found your glass of wine.

From that depth, you have the foundation to explain everything.

You can connect that micro-detail to philosophy, the neuroscience of attention, monetization models, the sociology of social media, the attention economy, human behavior in the digital world… Your advantage will be overwhelming because you’ll have an instantly recognizable, irreplaceable lens.

AI feeds on the historical average of the internet and huge volumes of data. It’s trained on the surface of what has already been said a million times, and only an expert at your level or higher could reach that depth of insight, even if they used a tool like that. No beginner could.

Your passion is your irreplaceable, recognizable identity.

The challenge for most people is that they don’t yet know where their glass of wine is. They’re carrying it with them, but they’ve never looked at it closely enough to notice that an entire universe fits inside it.

So let’s go find it with this method.

Practical guide: how to find your glass of wine

Let’s dig inward through several phases.

Exercise 1: Excavating your passion

Find what already obsesses you, even if you haven’t named it yet.

1. Inventory phase

Grab paper and pencil and answer these questions:

1. What would you talk about for free, with no one paying you or reading you, over dinner with friends? What topics can you not stop talking about, thinking about, and reading about?
2. What mistake made by others irritates you especially when you see it explained poorly? That irritation is a clue: no one gets angry about something they’re indifferent to.
3. What topic do you research for pleasure in your free time?
4. If you had to teach a two-hour class tomorrow with no prior preparation, what could you talk about without going blank?

Write between eight and twelve answers.

2. Passion-filter phase

Ask yourself, for each topic, “Could I keep writing about this every day for six months without burning out?”

Most of the topics on your list won’t pass this test. Cross out the ones where you answer “I could, but I’d get tired” or “yes, but only if I got paid well.” Keep only the ones that give you a jolt of “yes, and I have more to say than I could ever write” or “I want to know more and more and tell people like me about it.”

That jolt is the signal.

Now, take the topic — or the two topics — that survived the filter and dig into them three times in a row.

Example of progressive excavation:

1. Broad topic: psychology.
2. Excavation 1: the psychology of money.
3. Excavation 2: cognitive biases in financial decisions.
4. Excavation 3: cognitive biases applied exclusively to independent investors who trade on their own.

The more you dig, the more uncomfortable it feels, because it seems like you’re narrowing your audience — but the opposite is true. Your focus becomes sharp, and anyone who comes across you will instantly know whether you’re for them or not. You’ll find exactly the people who connect with you and see the world through your same lens.

Those kindred spirits who resonate with you will, to your surprise, be many.

Exercise 2: The bridge to the universal

A pattern I see is that once someone finds a “niche,” they lock themselves inside it.

They only talk about the technical detail and lose everyone who isn’t already an expert, because of the language barrier, the formal discourse, and the serious tone. So your task now is to build a bridge between your ultra-specific detail and a universal concern. This also happens in phases.

1. Principle-extraction phase

Take your ultra-specific topic and ask yourself: what’s the underlying phenomenon, stripped of technical context?

Following the earlier example (cognitive biases in retail investors), the underlying phenomenon is simple: people want to make money, but financial decisions are complicated.

That principle belongs to any human being, not just finance experts.

That’s the key.

2. Universal-translation phase

Now connect that principle to one of the big themes that matter to any person, without exception: fear, money, time, love, status, death, freedom, identity… There are hundreds.

For our specific case: an investor’s cognitive bias connects directly to the fear of losing and the need to feel in control.

• You don’t write “why we’re afraid of change” in the abstract, the way any generalist would.
• You write: “why an investor who knows perfectly well they should sell doesn’t sell.” Inside that piece, you illustrate it with a concrete story so that a reader who has never bought a single stock in their life sees themselves in it — for example, in not knowing whether to leave a job or move.

That’s the complete formula: you enter through the specific, explain the underlying technical mechanism in a way that’s useful to those interested in the topic and revealing to those who know nothing about it but stumbled upon you by chance.

• The expert stays because you speak their language with precision.
• The curious reader stays because, without realizing it, you were talking about them — and it’s useful to them.

The result of applying both exercises

When you combine the excavation of your passion with the bridge to the universal, you start writing with a unique lens. An angle that only you, with your exact combination of curiosity and experience, can speak about in depth.

That’s what no AI trained on the internet’s average can replicate, and where no other person can resemble you. It’s an equally effective technique whether you’re a “cartographer” or “alchemist” type of creator.