Category: Creativity
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Shopify’s Founder Tobias Lütke on Creativity and Constraints
I recently dug up an archive of Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lütke’s old blog, which linked to this interview with Signal v. Noise. Given Shopify’s impact, if you’re an entrepreneur, founder, or programmer, the whole thing is worth the read, particularly how well Shopify—at 28 people in Ottawa—adapted to constraints. For example, Shopify was…
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Without a Word: How Kanye West Launched His Album Donda to His Church
On Thursday, July 22, 2021, Kanye West set up his sanctuary at Mercedes Benz stadium, a listening party for his upcoming album Donda. The event sold out a few days prior, with a capacity of 42,000. Trapital’s Dan Runcie does some napkin math and sums it up well, “Very few artists can pull that off.”…
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How Parasocial Relationships Help Us Learn About Others and Ourselves
I forget the year, but Facebook was only starting to catch up to Myspace, YouTube was shiny new, and I had just started blogging. Sometime around here, my friends and I watched one of Ryan Leslie’s videos—probably this one, with him playing all the instruments he needed to make a song. He had produced the…
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Why the Yeezy Gap collection could be worth $272 million+
In this article, we’ll explore what the Yeezy Gap collection is worth as of July 2021, and the business strategy behind it.
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The Hidden Costs of Deep Processing
In the early days of my career, I worked in communications at Xtreme Labs. A significant part of my job involved interviewing people at ghostwriting blog posts for them. I learned a ton of stuff like this, and it also informed the collaborative writing process at my editorial studio Wonder Shuttle. In one of these…
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8 Lessons from 8 Years of Writing at Medium
On May 27, 2013, I wrote and published my first blog post at Medium. Designed in Toronto by Teehan+Lax, Medium made writing look and feel like it was worth your attention. Especially if a person didn’t blog regularly, Medium gave them a place to tell their stories. A lot of things have changed over the…
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Hope is as hollow as fear
Steve Jobs had no shortage of techniques that made him the leader that started Apple, and reversed its misfortunes in its later years. Still, one has always stood out to me: through a combination of willpower, hope, charm, perseverance, and pressure—and probably some phrases that could fit into a poem about hope (“Real artists ship”…
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Reading Is Reading Is Reading Is Reading
The concept and performance of reading is starting to overshadow the actual activity these days. For example, billionaires read books—therefore, reading makes you rich. Authors are likened to mentors. Reading makes you live a thousand lives. At the end of the day, there are a ton of perks to reading. And I’m all for promoting…