Category: Contentions
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Don’t think to write, write to think
This is one of the lessons that every writer comes to appreciate: writing is thinking. Writing is not the artifact of thinking, it’s the actual thinking process. There’s no shortage of great quotes on this topic, the implications are less clear: Writing is the planning process and the final product: You don’t design a final…
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I’m hiring technical ghostwriters!
Business has been booming, and I’m looking to work with some more people! If you’re literate with technology (e.g., you know what GitHub is!), and enjoy ghostwriting and helping other people unblock their creativity, and are curious to learn from business and technology leaders, this could be a good job for you: Ghostwriter (Technical) Part-time/freelance,…
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The myth of “with zero marketing”
Marketing constantly, and practically inevitably, suffers from attribution problems at all scales. Occasionally, someone I’m considering doing business would tell me more about their business’s momentum, and snarkily add, “Oh, and we did all of this without marketing!” The savvier ones pretend that they’re embarrassed about it. (They’re not. It’s a brag.) The main problem…
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Quality control
When I started Wonder Shuttle, I was uncontrollably obsessive with quality control. I started out as a freelance writer, so the first thing I had to do was let go of control. Still, in my mind, every article had to run through me; I was the last line of defense, the buck stopped with me,…
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The classroom parable
At Twitter, entrepreneur Kevin Lee shares an anecdote about how a family business owner, which worked in electricity, turned extra space in its warehouse into a community-based classroom for immigrant workers to learn electrical engineering. That meant every Saturday, for four hours, immigrant workers could attend this free class to learn electrical engineering skills. Hundreds…
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I was wrong about audiobooks
In my 20s, I refused to listen to audiobooks. For starters, to me, it didn’t count as actual reading. I also loved, and still love, paper books. To experience an audiobook felt like a betrayal to this admiration. On top of all of that, I also thought it’d be incredibly slow, and I wouldn’t be…
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How to find a passed website with the Internet Archive
One special thing about the internet, for better or worse, is that few things ever really die. That’s largely not because websites don’t actually die—they do!—but because the Internet Archive does the really hard work of preserving them. I’ve written at length about digging up lost documents and how preserving them is like giving new…
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Why you should turn your conference talk into a blog post
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…
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Remembering the good stuff that your brain forgets
There’s a narrative floating around on Twitter (Exhibit 1, 2) that we’re meant to forget things that are unimportant to us. Forgetting is an incredibly useful feature of the brain. The brain does also have a knack to boomerang really valuable memories or ideas back—often in an exciting, relevant, way. We have a name for…
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Collecting to build and demonstrate expertise
I’m a big fan of services businesses (so much so that I’d started my own!). I’m an even bigger fan of those services businesses leveraging their teams to expand beyond client services, into building its own products. It’s tough—Metalab founder Andrew Wilkinson lost $10 million doing it!—but it’s not impossible. One great small bet can…