Category: Creator Confidential
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Greatness means avoiding stupid mistakes consistently
Shane Parrish writes at Brain Food, “Moments don’t make legends. Consistency does. And the hardest consistency isn’t in doing brilliant things but avoiding stupid ones. Every mistake puts you in hard mode, forcing you to make up lost ground.” In some lines of work, a person must go through an apprenticeship that takes years—even a…
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The new direction
When you’re exploring a new direction in your career, you are bound to experience confusion. It is a particularly painful, vulnerable, emotion. You may experience an emotional instinct to reach out and fall back into the familiar. All of a sudden, the old, familiar, well-trodden path doesn’t look so bad anymore. At least you have…
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The vessel heuristic
What if, when you made art, you weren’t expressing yourself? What if you were a vessel for something greater to express themselves through? “The human mind is literally an antenna,” Pharrell says. “It picks up waves and transmissions from the ultimate source, from the ether.” “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before…
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Invest in your stories
My friend Peter started posting at LinkedIn a couple of years ago. He noticed that while people who followed him appreciated his advice, what they remembered most were his stories—about how he met his co-founder and started an agency, how they spun out new companies, and his move from Brooklyn to Hudson Valley. It’s with…
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Fast & Furious
The Fast & Furious franchise was inspired by an article on street racing culture by Kenneth Li. The first three movies in this Fast & Furious franchise—Fast & Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—maintained its signature by staying true to this throughline, rotating its cast members, and focusing…
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Confidence vs. trusting the process
“This might not work,” Seth Godin writes in his blog post, “Out on a limb.” (It’s one of my favorites, alongside “Talker’s Block.” ) It’s fascinating to see this idea make it into a key part of his book The Practice, which I recently picked up and find myself liking a lot. If you pick…
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Serious writing
In Impro, Keith Johnstone describes how his teachers taught him to write, “They wanted me to reject and discriminate, believing that the best artist was the one who made the most elegant choices. They analysed poems to show how difficult ‘real’ writing was, and they taught that I should always know where the writing was…
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Incompletion risk
Several years ago, I heard a professor say, “We have to get this done now. Tomorrow means we’re never going to get it done.” What the professor understood was this: when you pause (or get interrupted on) on project (or task), you open it to a chance that you won’t complete it. The less specific…
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Find more ways to win
If you play a game of chess well, with the right position, there is more than one way for you to win. If you play a game poorly, your options are few—there is only one way, perhaps even a miracle, for you to win. For any goal you have, it’s worth considering how many paths…