Category: Creativity
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Getting stuff done sets you apart
Completing and delivering a project, on time, will set you apart. This observation tends to surprise me, although it really shouldn’t. There are so many people who fail to meet this standard test. Scoping goes awry, they don’t communicate enough (out of a lack of skill, fear, or understanding), and projects fall apart. Think about…
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Practicing
1. Everything is a practice. 2. One practitioner I follow, relatively closely, is Vin Verma. Vin documents a lot of his practice at Futureland. 3. For all of the priorities there’ll never be time for, there’s practice. I love watching Paul Ford and Rich Ziade continue their podcast practice at their new company, Aboard. They…
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The work needs to be enough: A creative manifesto
It’s well known that power laws apply to creative work. While the top earners can make an incredible amount of money, the rest of us in the very long tail do not. For every Ryan Kaji who makes tens of millions of dollars every year, there are thousands of kids who are talking to dwindling…
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Why writing is fun for me
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” is a popular quote often attributed to Ernest Hemingway. I don’t mind that Hemingway wrote it; what confuses me is how popular the quote is. From this perspective, creativity is a curse, and the image of the tortured artist…
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A fisherman and banker exchange numbers
I put this together based on the parable of the Mexican fisherman, as made famous by lifestyle design and the internet. (See also the situation where this parable doesn’t work out!)
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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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Donald Glover, on productive gentleness
When Donald Glover asks himself, “What’s a good man to you?” he replies, “Someone who knows themselves. Who loves themselves. My father was really gentle with us. Physically and mentally. It felt radical at the time. I really miss him.” Similarly, when he’s recently asked what advice he’d leave with his kids (emphasis added): The…
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What my personal website and blog have done for me
As often happens, there was a great thread at Hacker News that inspired this post: 1. When I was 15, I started my first blog at Blogspot. (It’s still there!) It became a source of great fun and advertising money as a teenager. Because I wrote enthusiastically about technology, I eventually also met other people…
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Don’t make what you think other people want you to make
“What you really want to do is, when you make your videos, make sure you’re making them for yourself and it’s something you actually believe in—not a video that you’re doing because you think it will do good. Too many people make videos that they think will get views, but it’s not really in their…
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From fliers to billboards
Some conceptual artists work mostly with language and words. This includes Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer. (Lots more here!) Holzer was the most familiar to me; I came across her truisms in books, and also through her collaboration with Virgil Abloh in 2017. I recently found out that Holzer’s work didn’t start off…