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Practicing in public
There’s a piano inside a bookstore. It’s available for anyone to play, including you. If you do that, you won’t need to buy a piano, but the trade is that everyone hears you play, practice, or perform. They might like it, they might not. They may be waiting their turn. You’ll need to develop a…
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Five lessons for whispering into the Hacker News front page
A couple of years ago, I met a CEO of a series A startup. At the time, I was working as a content strategist on Figma’s marketing team, where I also found an informal role as the in-house Hacker News expert. At the time, Figma was expanding outside of its core design audience, and into new…
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Trust yourself
It’s simple, pithy, and cliche. It’s also something worth reminding yourself of more often than you think. There are two films that convey this message really well, spoiler alerts for both: In Rental Family, the protagonist is an actor whose job is pretending to be people’s family members. For example, a mom hires him to…
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Happy year of the fire horse
A few nights ago, I went to a lunar new year celebration at the Royal Ontario Museum, which was very energizing. Last year, I happened to visit The Met a few days before the lunar new year and saw the AAPI Jazz Collective play. When I realized this, I felt like it was a cosmic…
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Sketch, don’t paint
As I was developing my upcoming speech for CreativeMornings, I received some advice: you’re trying to paint, when all the audience needs is a sketch. There won’t always be a need for you to go through all the details in such high fidelity. Meanwhile, you can also choose from a variety of ways to communicate,…
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Nostalgia and withered technology
The Kodak Charmera digital camera has 1.6 megapixels. With technology comparable to phone cameras from the early 2000s, the pictures turn out horribly, with very low quality. One customer describes it this way, “It’s a crap camera, even under the most relaxed toy camera standards. But I’d buy it again.” They’re not alone. Over 10,000…