Category: Creator Confidential
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
A genuine reaction
When you do good work, you need to believe in the work. Put it out there, find a place to publish and promote it (definitely more than once!), and let the people respond. You don’t need to ask them for a five star review, or for applause, or anything like that. If the work is…
-
100% organic
Plants don’t necessarily need gardeners to grow; for many millennia, they have grown on their own. Even if a person wanted to, they don’t control how or when a plant grows—they can only influence the odds of survival by giving it good care. Organic growth just happens. You can do a lot of things to…
-
What are you running away from?
One of the first things I did when I started a business was outsource bookkeeping and accounting. While it was a good move, I also think I handed off the reins far too much and for too long. It wasn’t difficult for me to find other priorities to care about—sales, marketing, operations, HR—but at the…