Category: Creator Confidential
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Skateboarding as an infinite game
For over 2,000 years, people survived without skateboarding. That changed sometime in the late 1940s—perhaps the early 1950s—when a group of surfers decided to attach wheels onto their wooden boards. Since then, skateboarding has become a way of life. People risk life and limb to practice this art. And the art form survives by enticing…
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Document the moment
A few days ago, I tried explaining why blogging was great precisely because it reached a smaller audience than social media. The smallest audience is one—and that’s you. Skateboarders bring a video camera to document the moment. They’ve done this since way before social media, so it wasn’t just about going viral. It was an…
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Golden Generation
Growing up, I didn’t know many people who did creative work. While I was very enthusiastic about writing and art, the possibility that a person was paid to make that work happen didn’t even cross my mind—let alone the fact that a person like me could do it. But even if I knew, how would…
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To know vs. to do
The team at Basecamp recently did a six-week sprint to improve the product’s onboarding flow. They did a bunch of stuff and shipped it. The result was a 30% increase in conversion rate. “What happened?!” you might ask them. “How? What’s the best practice?” They don’t know. They don’t care. “The point wasn’t to know,…