Category: Creativity
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Can’t vs. didn’t
“People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.” — Florence Foster Jenkins PS Mag (via Anthony Iannarino) See Tommy Wiseau in Creative Doing. Go down the Florence Foster Jenkins rabbit hole here:
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Just one tooth
There’s a classic idea that the key to flossing regularly is to floss just one tooth. The key his this: it’s much easier to show up every day if you can reduce the task down to something so small and simple that it requires next to no effort. In Creative Doing, I share a prompt,…
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To succeed in the age of A.I., build your capacity for longcuts
A couple of years ago, my friend Nik Göke wrote a really nice piece at his blog, “Sometimes, the Work Is Easier Than the Workaround.” In the intro, he writes about trying to find a fast, technical, shortcut to scrape a bunch of text online: The tool was pretty technical, so it took a while…
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If you do the thing, then you can keep the job title
When Busayo Olupona was just starting up her fashion label—many years before it was stocked at outlets like Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom—she had quit her job and practically ran out of money. Many stories, sadly, end up that way; Busayo’s didn’t. She says her mentor Mercedes Gonzalez would hold her accountable for making a…
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The consistency edge
Replit runs its own 100 days of code challenge. Recently Paul Graham shared the stats on how many people complete the challenge: What if, simply by committing and showing up 100 times—around 15 mins, sometimes 45 mins, per day—you did something that 99% of people don’t do? This type of daily challenge is a great…
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“You decide”
The world produces waves.Surf or down.You decide.Virgil© 2017 Virgil Abloh’s message is the first entry in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s compilation of notes from artists, Remember to Dream!. (On compiling, on books about people.) It was also a billboard: Via Sole Retriever and Ovrundr
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Authors write
If you set out to be an author, the key part of your job is to write your own opinions, referencing others for confirmation. If you want to write books, the key part of your job is to research and write books. Here are other parts of the job: While the other parts of the…
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When prestige narrows horizons
Patrick Bringley writes about his time working at The New Yorker in All the Beauty in the World: It took me almost three years to grasp an unwelcome paradox. If I were working a less “impressive” job, I would be scribbling my thoughts down in obscurity, free to take big swings at whatever topic inspired…
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Writing is transference of energy
When you’re editing, consider how the order of information can shift the energy of the work. You can do this starting at the most zoomed out: at a section level, then paragraph level, then sentence level, then individual word level. Some sections will need more love than others. You’ll need to cut some turns of…