Category: Contentions
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Contentions: They’re asking ChatGPT first
A good friend of mine was waiting for a branding plan from an agency. A few days before the agency was sending it over, and presumably presenting it, he prompted ChatGPT: “What does a good branding plan look like?” If the marketing agency came up with the same plan, he figured he probably wouldn’t need…
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Text generation
It used to be that typing was the only way to generate original text. By extension, you needed to actually know what you wanted to say before you could generate the text. Typing itself isn’t hard; the process of coming up with what you want to say, and then actually saying it, is the challenge.…
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Beef and A24
I just watched Beef this weekend, and it was really great. As much as I appreciate film and culture, I’m also well aware of how easy the experts make it seem to develop an opinion. For now, my eloquent, brilliant, opinion goes as far as this: it was really great. I greatly despise horror and…
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Abundance of comfort
I recently came across Derek Thompson’s piece, “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems,” in which he describes a worthy objective: An abundance agenda needs a target. What should we make more of? One answer that I’ve given you is: essential goods and services where productivity rates are declining. But that’s a bit…
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Contentions: Even release notes are an opportunity
Nobody thinks to write fun release notes. It’s all, “Bug fixes and improvements/enhancements.” Until the team at Slack did it. When you delight people often enough—like Slack does with its writing—you develop a brand that people enjoy spending time with. You learn to say it your way, and nobody can be better than you at…
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You can’t judge creative work by Sales
Or Likes, Hearts, Views, Shares, or any other type of metric. That’s a difficult idea to reconcile, because these metrics can influence how much energy you spend on your work. For example, if your work generate enough Sales, then you can draw a Personal Income from it, which then makes you a Full-Time Artist. (Congratulations!)…
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Contentions: Writing for yourself vs. writing for the reader
A writer at Farnam Street makes the case: Great writing requires you to position your idea in a way that will resonate with the reader. Average writers start with what they want to say without considering how it will land with the reader. Great writers understand the journey starts with what the reader desires. To…
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Marc Eckō, on branding as religion
When I was a teenager, my friends and I were obsessed with the clothing brand, Eckō Unlimited. The brand’s founder, Marc Eckō, wrote a book entitled Unlabel, in which he introduces his perspective of branding: I am a brand, but I am not a label. My brand is Marc Eckō. You too are a brand.…
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Craft, plus
“Fashion is kinda a joke,” Virgil Abloh says to Carl Swanson for New York magazine. “I don’t get too bogged down in the clothes. For me, it’s one big art project, just a canvas to show that fashion should have a brand which has someone behind it who cares about different contexts. Social things.” Jon…
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Declassifying secrets
“Flip your 80:20 rule for keeping secrets. Instead of classifying 80% of your information, aim at classifying only 20%. Most of the secrets you keep no one would bother reading even if you delivered them with the morning newspaper.” via The Cluetrain Todo List