Category: Creator Confidential
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Books are an organized hobby
Anne Trubek writes: Books are now, I think, and will continue to be more clearly over the next two decades or so, a minor form. Like opera, or theater, or ballet. I adore all of these art forms. I spend money of them, as I do on books. As do millions of others. And we…
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Three things about your competitors
If a tattoo artist does a good job the first time you get a tattoo, you’ll be interested in getting more tattoos. They’ve just created an opportunity for other tattoo artists. If somebody reads a book about creativity, they’re probably actually more likely to read another book about the topic—not less. While competitive energy can…
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Never take offense that you have to negotiate
Here’s something I wish I knew a decade ago (or even just five years ago): This is the other huge mistake people make when they start negotiating. They take offense at what’s being offered because they feel it’s an unfair representation of what they’ve put in. Please understand this: negotiations are not personal. Again, I…
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615 days of blogging for the hell of it
Whiona writes: Why is that the end goal of blogging? Of writing? Just to make money and grow our followers? To increase our traffic so we can expose our visitors to 300 repetitive ads that take up their entire phone screen? To “convert” our readers into our customers, because them reading and enjoying what we…
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Swoopers and bashers
“Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.” Kurt Vonnegut Thomas Basbøll…
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To balance out overthinking, ask yourself, “How hard can it be?”
Recently, Acquired.fm asked Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang what company he would start today. Jensen says: “I wouldn’t do it, and the reason for that is really quite simple (ignoring the company that we would start—first of all, I’m not exactly sure). The reason why I wouldn’t do it—and it goes back to why it’s so…
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Create a lot of value, extract a small part of it
Ryan Holiday writes in his lessons from writing The Daily Stoic for seven years: Give a lot of value away and capture a small percentage. I mentioned that we’ve essentially published seven books for free through the Daily Stoic email. On top of that, over the years, we’ve essentially created the largest Stoic library in…
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Meme as spine (continued)
The strength and weakness in audiobooks is how passive the experience is. For me, it’s easy to forget where and how I heard something; one trick seems to be in remembering the associated time and place where I listened to an interesting point, a scene that I was seeing at the time. In any case,…
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The little poster that Steve Jobs made famous
Millions of people—including me—found out about the Whole Earth Catalog when Steve Jobs closed off his Stanford commencement speech with it. A new archive of it just went online, along with this ad that Steve quotes: Making memorable things. Share it with people. It’ll all be worth it somehow.
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The aspiration capability gap
When you’re one person, practicing creative work, and you’re constantly choosing between a creative factor and a commercial factor (that provides your livelihood), it can feel extremely unfair, and even downright torturous (see Costica Bradatan). One reminder: whether you are one person, or a thousand-person company, at any given point, there will always be a…