Category: Creator Confidential
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What’s your work worth?
Not to everybody else. Not to the marketplace. To you. Does it provide purpose? Does it bring you pride? Does it give you energy for everything else in your life? “Your art is already doing a lot for you,” Beth Pickens writes in Make Your Art No Matter What. “Can you consider the radical proposal…
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Pay to play vs. paid to play
At a conference, one person will pay $20,000 to get on stage and speak. Another person doing the same thing will get paid $20,000. What does the second person have that the first person doesn’t? There are at least three things: In other words, the organizers of the conference recognize the second person as a…
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No optimism, no business
“It is your optimism, your belief, that created the shop and that keeps it alive. Should you lose that, then the business is done,” Peter Miller writes in Shopkeeping. He opened his self-titled bookstore in Seattle in 1979. If you read Peter’s book, you’ll quickly find that shopkeeping is a craft just like any other…
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The two wolves
Nearly a decade ago, I shared a parable at Lifehacker: The native american grandfather tells his grandson that there are two wolves inside of him, fighting for control. One wolf, is the wolf of love, peace, and kindness. The other wolf is a wolf of greed, hatred, and corruption. The grandson asks, “Which wolf will…
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Rejection calibration
If you don’t think you’ll write up a successful application, you might choose to barely show up. You feel like the odds are against you. Why put the effort in if you’re not going to get what you want, anyway? If you think somebody doesn’t like you, you might behave like you don’t like them.…
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Foresight is not essential
James Naismith invented basketball when he was really just trying to keep a bunch of rowdy students busy indoors during a blizzard. One day, he saw a boy in the gym tossing a ball toward the basket, picking it up, and tossing it again. An hour later, he passed by the gym again and saw…
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Luck vs. skill
There are parts of how something turns out that are within your control. This set of knowledge, actions, and beliefs, you can call “skill,” “hard work,” or “effort.” Your judgement of what’s in your control is known as “wisdom” or “reason.” For some people, it’s useful to believe that you can achieve positive outcomes largely…
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Self-belief vs. the odds
Of the 49,000 members of the Actors’ Equity Association, the national union of stage actors, about 17,000 work at a median income of $7,500 in 2013. That’s not considering actors who don’t qualify for or participate in the union, who are likely paid less or working less. The conventional path of an actor is built…
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Ask people to give you what you want
In December 2009, Patrick McKenzie invited Thomas Ptacek out to coffee in Chicago. This was unusual for Patrick, because he wasn’t comfortable writing cold emails at the time. While Patrick’s original intention was to gossip about Hacker News threads—they were the top two users by karma points—the conversation shifted to Thomas asking Patrick about SEO…
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Re-appraising perfection
The story of perfect: Perfect is free of fault, incompletion, and error. Perfect is safety. Perfect is first place, a gold medal, or 100%. It is happily ever after, the peak of excellence, something to remember while also setting and forgetting. This is the imagined reality we live in, a story based on the assumption…