Category: Creator Confidential
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How many doors can you open?
Before Jann Mardenborough became a professional racecar driver, he was obsessively driving in the Gran Turismo simulator on PlayStation. Then, he came across GT Academy, a program that would train PlayStation racing gamers to become professional racing drivers. This tournament was extremely competitive; millions of people would apply to join GT Academy. You can practically…
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What does success mean to you, now?
You’ve probably changed a lot this year. Certainly in the past few. Does your definition of success keep up with where you are now, or where you want to go in the future? If you’re making a professional pivot, or you’re turning a company around—in other words, changing the course of your work or life…
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Playing injured
Professional athletes play in all sorts of conditions. They play when they’re injured. They play when they’re sick with the flu. They play through heartbreak. It’s not ideal, but setbacks happen—and athletes keep playing. This philosophy and practice can apply to all sorts of other fields. (For example, advertisers keep advertising.) When you play through…
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Going direct buys you freedom
A friend of mine works professionally as a keynote speaker. He gets a lot of speaking clients from his agency. His mentor once asked him, “Who’s your boss, you or your agency?” As long as his agency provides him with the majority of his business, he would be working for them. Similarly, if an artist…
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When prestige narrows horizons
Patrick Bringley writes about his time working at The New Yorker in All the Beauty in the World: It took me almost three years to grasp an unwelcome paradox. If I were working a less “impressive” job, I would be scribbling my thoughts down in obscurity, free to take big swings at whatever topic inspired…
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The pinnacle of success
“You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.” Orlando Aloysius Battista, via MoneyZen by Manisha Thakor
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Writing is transference of energy
When you’re editing, consider how the order of information can shift the energy of the work. You can do this starting at the most zoomed out: at a section level, then paragraph level, then sentence level, then individual word level. Some sections will need more love than others. You’ll need to cut some turns of…
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Process leads to purpose
A couple of days ago, Creative Doing was featured in Readwise’s newsletter, Wisereads. It excerpts a passage from the introduction: Finding my creative purpose involved letting go of every impulse and habit that made me successful at my work projects, and shifting my focus away from results into the process. Process is about consistently making…
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Favors balance out
A few years ago, Ryan Holiday shared a lesson he learned from Tim Ferriss: When Tim’s blog was just starting to take off, I emailed him and asked him if he might include a link back to mine. I laid out this clear case as to why — the things I’d done for him in…
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It’s just business
A little over a year ago, I wrote a guest post for Dan Runcie at Trapital unpacking how Pusha T positioned his career for longevity (and I wrote about it again here). The early years of Push’s career had high highs and low lows, particularly when he and his brother No Malice were stuck in…