Category: Creativity
-
Making mistakes, with grace
You’re going to make a lot of mistakes. If you didn’t learn how to make mistakes gracefully, here’s one way to do it: Acknowledge the mistake. Apologize to someone if you’ve caused them pain or done something wrong. Make an effort to make things right and to lower the odds of it happening again, and…
-
Two ideas to stand out when you’re applying to jobs
First idea: Email the person who is hiring for the job to introduce yourself. If you’re not sure, make the best guess. For example, if you’re applying for a job as a content marketing manager, email the marketing director. If you’re applying for a job as a security engineer, email the director of security. It…
-
Keep one specific person in mind when you write
I don’t mean a persona. I mean a real person with a first name and last name. Ideally, you’ve met them and spent some time talking with them. If you haven’t, maybe you can attend one of their speeches at a conference or find an interview online somewhere. If you can’t spend time with this…
-
Trust summaries (AI or otherwise) at your own risk
A very specialized, expert, government trial suggests that AI underperforms compared to people at summarizing information. Reading a book summary is not the same as reading a book. In fact, you miss the most important parts of the book when you read the summary. Worse yet, you may even fool yourself into thinking you know…
-
Follow your excitement, try experiments, make more work
When Ryan Holiday writes about creative work, I read. His book Perennial Seller has been super helpful as I’ve been promoting Creative Doing. In one of his recent posts, he explains that his third book, The Obstacle Is the Way (and ensuing series on stoic philosophy), was nowhere near a sure thing when he wrote…
-
Quick notes in case you need to write a book
gwern makes the case for not writing a book. All good stuff to consider, especially ahead of time. While writing a book is unlikely to make you rich, it’s an ambitious endeavor that can take a toll on your mental health and that of the people around you. If you really must write a book—for…
-
Pushing less, pushing lightly
There’s a proverb I learned as a young boy, which roughly translates to, “Bitter first, sweet later.” (“先苦後甜.”) Do the difficult things first, and you’ll have a chance to enjoy yourself later. It conveyed the value of delayed gratification. For the most part, it worked for me—although there are some wrinkles I have needed to…
-
Make the frontlist and backlist work for each other
Seth Godin wrote a post that often comes to my mind, about frontlist and backlist. He coins and defines both these terms: Frontlist means the new releases, the hits, the stuff that fanboys are looking for or paying attention to. Frontlist gets all the attention, all the glory and all the excitement. They write about…
-
Make “good” impossible
When Richard Feynman was learning how to draw, his teachers told him to loosen up. He couldn’t quite figure out what this meant until one teacher told him to draw a person without looking at the paper. Richard quickly realized that it would be impossible to make a good drawing without looking at the paper.…
-
Post-travel integration
Earlier this year, I went to Hawaii for my honeymoon (which was the reason for essentials week). When my partner and I returned, we bought a couple of notebooks from Moleskine and decided to recount our trip through that. For me, it meant writing a page full of words documenting moments from the trip. Sometimes,…