Category: Creator Confidential
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Doing your work your way
John Calhoun joined Apple in the 1990s. He approached his work by making quick prototypes, whereas his coworkers would often carefully plan and design their software, whiteboarding it out before writing even one line of code. He writes: From my approach of diving in rather than planning I began to regard myself at Apple as…
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Retitling
In 2000, Robert Solomon released his book, Brain Surgery for Suits: 56 Things Every Account Person Should Know. In 2016, that piece of work was re-released as the title it’s best known for, The Art of Client Service: The Classic Guide, Updated for Today’s Marketers and Advertisers. Same work, new packaging, with two additional chapters. …
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Typing vs. writing
If you’re a writer, you’re writing 24–7–365. Everything you read, see, and experience is material for your writing. Pay attention and live deeply. Take lots of notes—on index cards, on your phone, on a napkin, wherever. Draw stuff. Make voice memos. Keep it all organized. Some days, you’ll have 15–30 minutes to type it out…
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Rules are made to be rewritten
Tim Ferriss recently took a four month sabbatical from his podcast. He needed to figure out what his plans were for it. He felt his enthusiasm for the show waning. As he told Kevin Rose, “If I get so apathetic or bored that I stop doing the podcast, that’s the end of the income period.”…
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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…