Category: Creativity
-
3 Lessons I Learned from Virgil Abloh About Saying “Yes”
How does one go from being a recording artist’s trusted, and reliable, creative collaborator to being the menswear designer at Louis Vuitton? Some might say that such a journey would be practically impossible. That’s the journey that the late Virgil Abloh made, accomplishing in years what others take decades to; it all started with screen…
-
Repairs or renovations
A common piece of business advice is to find someone with an urgent, painful, and ideally expensive, problem, and to solve it. You don’t want to be a solution looking for a problem. This is generally good advice; the definition is also far more expansive and flexible than it would seem. Repairs, for example, fit…
-
The Tyranny of the Note Taking Industrial Complex, and Other Notes on Notes
There’s been a lot of critique going on lately about notes. My friend Rick and I talked about it a few months ago, and I’d been copying and pasting the links down in an Airtable record (Haha—not kidding though). I’ve written 1,000+ notecards at this point, at least 200 of which made it into this…
-
The best way to be the best
In a Hot Ones interview, Pusha T says: “I am the Martin Scorsese of street raps. That’s how I want to be seen. Even just creatively, Scorsese gives you The Departed, Goodfellas, and a host of other joints. You never say, “Hey, I want him to make a love story.” That’s how I want you…
-
Web2.0 in a Web3 world
Preamble: Okay so I’m on my final four index cards, living in a place where they’re not as easy to come by (I’m probably going to need a plan for this very outdated tech!), which has made my life hellish. So excuse me while I dive in… 1. There’s this idea, hitting mainstream media last…
-
The marble of the day
I used to be even more obsessed with time than I am now. I had no idea how people made time to do stuff, and I never felt like I had enough of it. And honestly, I still don’t. I don’t even think anyone has a real answer to this. The best thing I’ve seen…
-
5 hook sentences to compress your ideas
Compression is the new creation. These sentence structures enable you to frame your point in a clear, powerful, and interesting way that “hooks” readers in. 1. [X] is the [Y] to [Z]. Example: “Writing is the antidote to confusion.” — James Clear 2. “We [X] our [Y], and then our [Y] [X] us.” Modification: “We…
-
How I write every day
As I’d written before, I’d been chugging along with my blog at the beginning of the year trying a very fixed weekly schedule and style guide. A day after the 100 Day Project started, I decided to try to write every day. When I’m busy, it just takes a couple of minutes and I basically…
-
Quintessentialism
1. The best way to experience unexpected good things (e.g., positive business and personal outcomes) is to allow yourself to be the quintessential version of you. As much you as you can be. By being yourself and finding the intersections of how you can support other people, you will draw in the people who want…
-
Focus on what makes an experience matter, not the experience itself
All the myths, lore, and backstories that you appreciate were crafted carefully and thoughtfully and improved through time, just like products and businesses and relationships. In The Wisdom of Life, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer writes, “The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so…