Category: Creator Confidential
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Gohar World
Entrepreneurs and artists Laila and Nadia Gohar built a world for their tableware products. Laila tells me that she and Nadia kind of imagine Gohar World, the Cairo-born sisters’ nine-month-old line of cheeky and exquisite host- and tableware, as a planet. Laila is standing in a voluminous white Simone Rocha skirt and snub-nosed Gucci slides…
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A meme can be a spine for your creative work
When you get to know your creative idea better, you need to preserve the core of it to help you focus. That’s what its spine is for. One interesting prompt is to see if you can express your idea through a meme. Kind of like this: Choosing the meme, naming the characters—all of this encourages…
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Why almost everything is actually more difficult than it seems
The fluency illusion is a tendency for people to overestimate their abilities without sufficient evidence. Yale professor Woo-kyoung Ahn demonstrates this by showing students a few seconds of choreography and challenging them to imitate it. (It seems to cover a lot of ground similar to the Dunning–Kruger effect, a tendency for people with limited competence…
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Permission marketing, consistent distribution
“My passengers surprised me,” Gavin says, remembering his early days. “I thought they would be silent or on the phone. But most people wanted to talk. When I mentioned my jewelry, they asked for business cards, but I didn’t have any.” That’s when a light bulb went off in his mind: Why stop at business…
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Philip Glass, on independence
I had an ensemble at the time. I would go out and play for three weeks. We would come back from the tour, and we usually had lost money so I had to make money immediately. I put an ad in the paper. My cousin and I ran the company, and I moved furniture for…
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Future fables
Aesop partnered with Literary Hub to release the second season of a podcast entitled Future Fables, where each episode is a bedtime story for adults in the form of the fable. There’s a lot to like about this, from the creative premise (“What sort of fables might its namesake—Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist—write [today]?”), to…
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“Work on your terms, at your own pace”
Max Alper received a DM from a student who has burned out making a living as a working musician in Brooklyn. For the sake of his mental health, the student told Max he was giving up on music altogether and applying to trade school. Max responds in an excellent letter, which I’m excerpting from: Not…
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Cash for longevity, not capital
If Nintendo was a person, a week ago it would have celebrated its 134th birthday. This type of longevity is rare; as my friend Hamza observes, the vast majority of companies that make it to a public listing stage don’t make it through half that time. In his book Nintendo Magic, Osamu Inoue takes a…
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Kirby and the power of polish
In 1991, Japanese game company HAL Laboratory Inc. was 1.5 billion yen in debt and had to bet its future on one game. It was called Tinkle Popo, featuring a rotund protagonist named Popopo. HAL Laboratory had planned to publish Tinkle Popo independently, and sold 26,000 pre-ordered copies. Nintendo—a HAL Laboratory client and investor—intervened; game…
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Anna Wintour on audiences
The relationship between creator and audience is one of leading and following. If you’re a creator, you may find that you’re best off making things that you wanted to see yourself; that your audience will follow you because they want the same thing. For me, I’m glad I caved into my instinct and found the…