Category: Creator Confidential
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Find a place where your effort makes an impact
Early in his career, Brian Lee juggled a bunch of projects. This included managing recording artists Dumbfoundead and Breezy Lovejoy. It was Brian who suggested to the latter that he should change his name to something closer to Anderson .Paak. In addition to investing into their two careers, Brian also built a media platform and…
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The leap
In The Dark Knight Rises, a villain defeats Batman and locks him up inside an ancient prison known as the Pit. The Pit bears resemblance to an extremely large well, and all prisoners are free to climb out of the Pit to escape. The only thing standing in the way is a particularly large gap…
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Openness
When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher shared an op-ed she clipped from a newspaper entitled, “Please offend me, and allow me to offend you.” The spirit of the class discussion focused on how important it was for you, me, and everybody else, to be able to say what was on…
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Everything I shipped in 2024
Self-initiated creative projects: I worked at Figma as a content strategist (I wrapped up my gig there in June), here are three projects: I joined FGX as its director of marketing, here are three projects: I didn’t count all of the blog posts that I published here (including my 1000th!), which I’m absolutely delighted by.…
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Creative unattachment
It’s best to attach the value of your work based on something that’s within your control. This could mean a way of doing things, a philosophy, or a set of values—or all three. Championship NFL coach Bill Walsh would call this a Standard of Performance. Here are some things you don’t control: How other people…
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My 2015 interview with MC Jin
In 2002, Jin Auyeung took over hip-hop by winning a weekly freestyle competition for seven consecutive weeks on 106 & Park. His debut song, “Learn Chinese,” was on regular rotation in my elementary school, and my friends would holler out the Cantonese ad-libs. It was a moment that felt similar to Linsanity, Jeremy Lin’s two-week…
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Friends pay full price
Several months ago, I met a new friend and gave them a copy of Creative Doing as a gift. They responded that they would buy another copy, saying, “Friends pay full price.” It was refreshing, the complete flip of the usual friends and family discount. (Or in my case, giving gift copies.) When you reciprocate…
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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…