Category: Creativity
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On shrinking, dying, industries
Sometimes, the most rewarding things to do also make little sense on paper. They would be the complete opposite of a smart decision. Two examples come to mind: 1. When graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang started writing comic books, Marvel Comics had just declared bankruptcy. “People were predicting that it was just gonna blink out…
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Playoff mode
In amateur and professional sports, the year is typically structured into a series of games known as a regular season. Not to be confused with a season in nature, a sports season can last the majority of the year. For example, in the NBA, each team plays 82 games from October to April in a…
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It is what it is
For the first time in many years, I started watching the NBA playoffs. I just found out about Cam’ron’s show, It Is What It Is. The latest episode is here: Everything I know about Cam I pretty much know through the big Dipset songs and Eddie Huang’s references (like Cam’s parody rhymebook). There’s a lot…
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Holding back the good stuff
If you’re an artist, you will need to balance between delivering good work that matches your vision, and delivering the work at the level you’re capable of delivering. For example, sometimes there’s just not enough time, energy, and resources to do good work. Other times, timing isn’t right—the world isn’t ready to receive a certain…
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Virgil Abloh’s first website
For me, there are few things more exciting or entertaining than diving into a person’s early work. The more I like the work, the more early work I want to see. I recently came across the term, “nerdsniping,” from Paul Millerd. That sensation sums up what I experience when I’m researching the process of an…
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Participation trophies
In The Art of Possibility, Roz and Ben Zander write, “Enrolling is not about forcing, cajoling, tricking, bargaining, pressuring, or guilt-tripping someone into doing something your way. Enrollment is the art and practice of generating a spark of possibility for others to share.” A generous assumption of why participation trophies exist: it balances the all-consuming…
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Life is a team sport
When I interviewed Annie Duke, we discussed the writing process for her first book, Thinking In Bets. Duke had made writing a team sport, firstly by recruiting a friend with a Juris Doctor degree, who was also a writer, to be her editor—outside of her editor at her publisher. This friend helped serve as a…
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Do more, think less
Gapingvoid recently published a piece entitled, “Do more, think less.” It touches on one of the premises of Creative Doing, which is that new insights emerge from doing, not merely thinking. The phrase was drawn from a phrase I mentioned in an episode of Infinite Loops I did with Jim O’Shaughnessy. Jim introduced the phrase,…
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The 451 day project
I wrote a guest post at #The100DayProject, one of my favorite daily creative challenges. I just plugged the dates into a counter, I’ve published a post every day for 451 days! 🤯
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People make plans, and nature laughs
Resisting nature is not constructive; it’s always best to roll with it. You can plan around nature, too. It’s not going to stop laughing. You can choose to scream at it, worry yourself to death about it, try to make sense of it, laugh with it, or to sit beside it.