A fascinating thread started at Hacker News about Oliver Burkeman’s latest post entitled, “It’s worse than you think.” There are words like, “pessimism,” “nihilism,” and “futility,” floating around in the comments. I commented in there a couple of times (1, 2), feeling confident after my own submitted blog post gained a bit of momentum. I […]
A few weeks ago, I came across one of my favorite diagrams. Sarah Arnold-Hall created it. But I wouldn’t have come across it if Steph didn’t share it through this very viral tweet. The image itself is original, but there’s an endless number of people who have written about showing up every day. Kishore Nallan […]
If you’re a software engineer who has presented a conference talk, it’s definitely worth writing it up into a blog post and sharing it at a relevant Subreddit (like r/programming), DEV.to, and Hacker News. You’ll certainly get your ideas in front of more people—on the Internet, text still travels faster than podcasts or YouTube (on […]
I love Tyler, the Creator’s very matter-of-fact approach to creativity. He’s very candid about removing pretense and mystique from the process. (He hates the word, “Inspiration,” for example.) Even when he was a relatively new artist, he tweets about betting Will.i.am a million bucks that he’d be doing what he loved in a decade, not […]
Most content strategies (if not all!) could use a component where people pursue their own interests and explorations. This is vital to getting luckier and exploring new personal, or team, narratives. Consider Swyx’s after dark Twitter, and Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s interest in writing exploratory essays. This is actually prevalent at YouTube, where many popular creators […]
It really isn’t always your responsibility. Timing won’t always work out right away. It won’t always feel like this. People don’t ignore or reject you, they’re living their own lives. Things will not always turn out as you prefer or expect. It doesn’t always get worse. Things are constantly changing. Just trying is enough. P.S., […]
One of the challenges to getting anything related to creativity done is time and motivation. A solution here is to have an operation that you can do in mere seconds, so you can call your creative work complete for the day. I write in Creative Doing: The goal here is to simplify your creative operation, […]
Willem Dafoe, Leo, Will Smith, Diane Warren, are just the top of a much longer list.
Reality is skewed by perspective. You choose where you look. By accepting reality, and truth—every part of it, the saddest, most empty, hopeless, despairing truths—and not resisting it, you’ll start the journey to finding whatever it is you’re meant to seek.
One of the gripes I’ve heard about people wanting a career as a creator is, it’s pretty much just foolishness. Dancing, attention seeking, and comedy. I can’t say it’s untrue, but it’s also an incredibly surface impression. What’s less obvious is creators that don’t develop their careers come and go; sure, some people experience immense […]