Category: Creator Confidential
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Your creative work’s right size
In 1971, an English teacher, a writer, and a history teacher—all in their 20s—borrowed $5,000 from a bank and invested $1,350 each to start a coffee shop in Seattle. They named it Starbucks. 16 years later, an entrepreneur named Howard Schultz acquired Starbucks. The company had opened 16 more stores, on average around one per…
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Dealing with failure
What do you do when you’re helming a blossoming ad agency and you lose an account that’s half your billings and three-quarters of your income? You keep advertising. Chiat/Day partner and co-founder Guy Day wrote this one. His son Cameron Day writes, “It was uncharacteristic of my father to revert to low-brow language. That was…
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The failure and the learning
Shane Parrish writes in Clear Thinking: Experts can tell you all the ways they’ve failed. They know and accept that some form of failure is often part of the learning process. Imitators, however, are less likely to own up to mistakes because they’re afraid it will tarnish the image they’re trying to project. Because failure…
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Make a book about a person
There’s a niche that doesn’t often get discussed: books about people. This can come in the form of short, unauthorized biographies like Clayton Geoffreys’s sport series, or Jake Brown’s In the Studio series. (I have bought books from both.) These books aren’t long, Caro-sized, biographies; they can be very short books, effectively long introductions to…
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Out the trunk
In his memoir Lucky Me, Rich Paul shares a motto—a philosophy, an approach, a stance, etc.—that I really like, “Out the trunk.” Rich is a jersey connoisseur; in the early 2000s, he had spent thousands of dollars buying rare jerseys at Distant Replays. He eventually met owner Andy Hyman and offered to invest in Distant…
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Three types of imaginary barriers
In Creative Doing, I write, “After years of learning and applying rules, you might live within these constraints even when they don’t actually apply to you. You’ll feel like you’re bumping into invisible walls.” I call these walls imaginary barriers. (You can read the full prompt here.) Here are three types of imaginary barriers—amongst many…
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Rich Paul on flying private, salary with LeBron, and fronting
I came across Rich Paul’s memoir at a bookstore the other day, so I picked it up and I’m really enjoying it. Naturally, I also started digging into some of his appearances at YouTube. I really liked his panel with Junior Bridgeman and Earn Your Leisure. Junior has a great story too, but some notable…
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“Should I be doing that instead?”
There’s a saying that the best workout plan is the one that you’re actually going to do. It’s a great approach to exercise. As a principle, it can be just as effective when you apply it to other parts of your life as well. What works for somebody else isn’t going to be what works…
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Choose someone else
In case you’ve been waiting to be chosen, there’s plenty of great advice on choosing yourself (or picking yourself). There seems to be much less advice about the natural next step: choosing someone else. These days, you and I and everyone else is a gatekeeper in some way. That means we also have the ability…
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The real thing
If you want to write a book, write the book. Don’t build an audience. Don’t look for an agent. Don’t write a proposal. Don’t look for a more prominent person to ghostwrite for. Write the book. Do the real thing. When you can’t do the real thing—you’re not well-trained or qualified enough—get as close to…