Category: Creator Confidential
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Push and Ye, masculinity and maturity
Pusha T and Malice’s GQ interview has been making the rounds on the internet. There has been a lot of noise particularly about Push describing why he can’t work with Ye anymore, “He knows I don’t think he’s a man.” While I found the phrasing surprising, the sentiment was understandable. Push has been one of…
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Aligning process with results
Earlier in my career, I focused on work that gave me energy. Some of my projects made no money (like Prologue, my early writing at Medium, etc.). I took on projects that could subsidize them. I really enjoyed this way of working. I felt free, energized, and curious. In this season of my career, I…
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Drawing a cartoon every day
Before the New Yorker published her first cartoon, Liza Donnelly submitted eight cartoons every week for two years. (Over 800 cartoons!) Drawing must be a practice that dies hard, because Liza still publishes a new one every day at Substack and at Medium. Sometimes she draws live, which is a delight to watch.
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Keeping this blog a main thing
Writing at this blog is a good source of energy for the rest of my life. When I write this blog, I do better at the rest of the stuff—my work and business, my family, etc. Sometimes, I want to promote my writing. I want to make a newsletter, more posts at LinkedIn or Medium,…
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Creative lineage
You and your work are not on an island. You are part of a tradition—the most recent people to join a party that started decades, maybe centuries or millennia ago. Who came before you? What work came before your work? “For me music has always been about lineage,” Philip Glass writes in his memoir, Words…
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Three ways to learn taste
Martin Scorsese approached filmmaking by having one of his archivists record videos of films and live TV with multiple VCRs, and cataloging them into a system. He ended up with thousands of these videos. You will approach your work with the same kind of obsessiveness, though perhaps to a smaller degree. You will research meticulously,…
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Organizing principle
If an album has 12 songs, there are just over 479 million ways to organize them in a sequence (12 songs * 11 songs * 10 songs… all the way until the last 1). Out of all of these possibilities, a recording artist needs to decide which one tracklist represents what they want to say.…