Category: Creator Confidential
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Picasso, the boilermaker, and expertise
If you want to build a business on your expertise—specialized knowledge—one early key is to break out of the idea that your effort should be directly correlated with your income. Here’s a good, perhaps fictional, example that starts off with a woman asking Picasso to make a sketch for her: Picasso complied and then said,…
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The long, hard, stupid way at Hacker News
A few years ago, I joined Chris Do at The Futur podcast, where I mentioned a story about Momofuku displaying chickens that they weren’t actually serving. I didn’t do a great job explaining the story. After I heard Frank Chimero mention a similar idea six months ago, my brain remembered the idea and I wrote…
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Keep one specific person in mind when you write
I don’t mean a persona. I mean a real person with a first name and last name. Ideally, you’ve met them and spent some time talking with them. If you haven’t, maybe you can attend one of their speeches at a conference or find an interview online somewhere. If you can’t spend time with this…
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Follow your excitement, try experiments, make more work
When Ryan Holiday writes about creative work, I read. His book Perennial Seller has been super helpful as I’ve been promoting Creative Doing. In one of his recent posts, he explains that his third book, The Obstacle Is the Way (and ensuing series on stoic philosophy), was nowhere near a sure thing when he wrote…
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Quick notes in case you need to write a book
gwern makes the case for not writing a book. All good stuff to consider, especially ahead of time. While writing a book is unlikely to make you rich, it’s an ambitious endeavor that can take a toll on your mental health and that of the people around you. If you really must write a book—for…
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Editing a call-to-action
In the middle of a great show, a jazz musician asks us—the audience, “Does anybody still listen to CDs?” Nobody raises their hand. “Of course not,” he laughs. So do we. He tells us the title of his new album, which he made CDs for. He also adds that it is available on Spotify and…
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Pushing less, pushing lightly
There’s a proverb I learned as a young boy, which roughly translates to, “Bitter first, sweet later.” (“先苦後甜.”) Do the difficult things first, and you’ll have a chance to enjoy yourself later. It conveyed the value of delayed gratification. For the most part, it worked for me—although there are some wrinkles I have needed to…
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Make the frontlist and backlist work for each other
Seth Godin wrote a post that often comes to my mind, about frontlist and backlist. He coins and defines both these terms: Frontlist means the new releases, the hits, the stuff that fanboys are looking for or paying attention to. Frontlist gets all the attention, all the glory and all the excitement. They write about…
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Ambition demands sacrifice
In How to Get Rich, Felix Dennis makes the case that unless your demons are driving you to get rich, you should probably not try it. He writes, “Whether the sacrifices involved – not only your own, but those you will ask of your family, present or future – are worth the tyranny that such…
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Make “good” impossible
When Richard Feynman was learning how to draw, his teachers told him to loosen up. He couldn’t quite figure out what this meant until one teacher told him to draw a person without looking at the paper. Richard quickly realized that it would be impossible to make a good drawing without looking at the paper.…