Category: Creator Confidential
-
Pushing less, pushing lightly
There’s a proverb I learned as a young boy, which roughly translates to, “Bitter first, sweet later.” (“先苦後甜.”) Do the difficult things first, and you’ll have a chance to enjoy yourself later. It conveyed the value of delayed gratification. For the most part, it worked for me—although there are some wrinkles I have needed to…
-
Make the frontlist and backlist work for each other
Seth Godin wrote a post that often comes to my mind, about frontlist and backlist. He coins and defines both these terms: Frontlist means the new releases, the hits, the stuff that fanboys are looking for or paying attention to. Frontlist gets all the attention, all the glory and all the excitement. They write about…
-
Ambition demands sacrifice
In How to Get Rich, Felix Dennis makes the case that unless your demons are driving you to get rich, you should probably not try it. He writes, “Whether the sacrifices involved – not only your own, but those you will ask of your family, present or future – are worth the tyranny that such…
-
Make “good” impossible
When Richard Feynman was learning how to draw, his teachers told him to loosen up. He couldn’t quite figure out what this meant until one teacher told him to draw a person without looking at the paper. Richard quickly realized that it would be impossible to make a good drawing without looking at the paper.…
-
“Return on Investment”
One key to surviving in business is to make sure the money you put into it is producing (or going to produce) a larger amount of money. There are a lot of ways to measure this—one simple one is known as “Return on Investment” (ROI for short). The calculation is simple: “Net Return” divided by…
-
Record, rewrite, rehearse
The next time you prepare for a job interview (or sales call, important meeting, etc.), take a few minutes to recall previous job interviews and note the common questions. Anticipate some new upcoming questions and write them down. Record yourself answering each question out loud. Listen to your answers. How does each answer sound? What…
-
Optional prerequisites
On your first few trips to the gym, you’re trying to figure how much weight you can actually lift. (Or how fast you can run, how fast you can swim, how deep you can stretch, etc.) One good principle to adhere to is to lift what you can lift. You start light, and see what…
-
A regular amount of effort
One of the most helpful, and hopefully the earliest, pieces of advice every writer comes across is to aim for a shitty first draft. That’s because sometimes, when you wait too long to do something—or when you only have one opening per week to do it—you feel like it becomes more precious. Your expectations of…
-
Software vs. hardware orientation
Nintendo’s former president Hiroshi Yamauchi divided all of the products in the world in two ways, which he emphasized to the leaders of the company: The first way was what he called a “hardware orientation.” These products were valuable because they were useful. If you’re making appliances like refrigerators, cars, or dishwashers, you’d be best…
-
Categorization, commoditization, and clarity
When you’re growing your business, one of your biggest challenges is market misunderstanding. When you’re working on a business (as an entrepreneur, freelancer, team, artist, author, etc.), your perspective tends to expand in breadth and depth. You develop expertise and see patterns. You come across better opportunities and bigger markets. In order to grow, you…