Category: Creativity
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As Stupid As This Sounds
Eddie Huang and David Chang dropped a podcast yesterday, and it was as good as I thought it would be. David’s voice kinda sounds like Joe Rogan’s, so it was almost like Eddie was back talking about TED and stuff. There’s a moment in the first year of Eddie’s restaurant Baohaus, when Eddie personally delivered…
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How to Win the Social Media Lottery
Angellist founder Naval Ravikant writes, “Every single tweet costs nothing and has the potential to reach the entire world. “It’s the best lottery ever made.” It’s difficult to predict what will be a hit or not, and luck is a factor, so the metaphor of a lottery works. Artist Pharell Williams calls himself “the Mr.…
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Writing Is Building, Too
Reading Marc Andreessen’s recent article really brought me back. In 2013, when I interviewed eight entrepreneurs for a magazine I was making, this phrase came up almost every time: “Learn to build stuff.” My first thought was that writers, like me, build articles, essays, and blog posts. Sometimes we build entire blogs. At other times,…
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How to Be More Creative
Long before the World Economic Forum and LinkedIn identified creativity as one of the most important skills, people have wanted — needed — to be more creative. The problems we face today are more challenging, complex, and ever-changing. Being more creative is tricky because we’ve made creativity mystical. It’s a force that has only recently,…
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Aim High, but Make Sure You Shoot
Rebranding, “Done Is Better than Perfect” “Worse is better,” is the perfect blend of catchy and counterintuitive. It’s a meme; it captures a trend, its catchiness enables its spread, and bolstered its traction as an idea. The phrase was originally used by Richard Gabriel in his paper, “Lisp: Good News,Bad News, How to Win Big.”…
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What Nobody Told You About the First Draft
“When you get an idea, don’t hold it,” architect Vittorio de Feo said. Recalling his master’s quote in Why Architects Still Draw, Paolo Belardi adds that when you get an idea, not taking action right away risks destroying the idea’s vitality. Sketch the idea immediately; draw impulsively, and transcribe unconscious energy from the brain to…
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Why the “Best” Way Is Your Own Way
Advice from James Cameron, on Not Taking Advice For years, I have been a hoarder and disseminator of advice; and I only found advice worth taking by measuring the success of the giver. It wasn’t the most critical way of thinking, and I figured if I found what successful people did, I’d also be able…
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To Make Better Creative Work, Aim for Acceptable, Not Perfect
Perfection can be a complex, philosophical, topic. My current stance: There is such a thing as 100%. If you’re into films, you know Roger Ebert gave four stars to great movies. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was ranked by the Rolling Stone as the #1 album of the 2010s; just a few years…
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How to stop overthinking and make magic happen
The line between thinking and overthinking is a thin one. It’s hard for anyone to discern where they are relative to it. Err on the side of action, and build momentum. Sometimes, you have to dumb it down. There’s no shortage of sayings, like, “Done is better than perfect,” or, “No time like the present,”…
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How average first drafts become extraordinary
The myth of great art is that it’s created through spurts of inspiration, genius, and epiphanies. This isn’t always the case. Rather, great art can evolve from what seems like very ordinary, average, rough drafts, often created during very ordinary moments. Not unlike an agile sprint or a lean startup, artists will then get feedback,…