Category: Creator Confidential
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Contextualization
Over a decade ago, researchers ran an experiment, starting by generating hundreds of pieces of art and splitting the art into two groups (source, backup). One group was labelled as being part of a prestigious art gallery, and the other was labelled as computer generated. The researchers recruited fourteen student subjects, scanned their brains with…
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Marketplace of truths
“Language is also clearly crucial for a special kind of abstract thinking that requires what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls ‘scaffolding’—chains of reasoning so complex that we need external placeholders to keep us from forgetting where we are,” writes Edward Slingerland in Trying Not to Try (p. 60). Slingerland continues, “The sum total of these…
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Promote your best work
Ideally, other people know you for your best work, not your worst work. The production value, the thoughtfulness, the collaboration, all makes your best work much more valuable and impressive than your worst work. Given this principle, you want to put your best work forward as much as you can. When someone asks you about…
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On shrinking, dying, industries
Sometimes, the most rewarding things to do also make little sense on paper. They would be the complete opposite of a smart decision. Two examples come to mind: 1. When graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang started writing comic books, Marvel Comics had just declared bankruptcy. “People were predicting that it was just gonna blink out…
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Your future is constrained by…
The direction of your work will be constrained by the people you’re talking to and the projects you’re doing right now. If you’re forecasting your path and don’t like where it’s going, you need to talk to people who have taken a different path, and change the projects you’re participating in. Start building new relationships.…
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What would you do if you were a rich kid?
I really appreciate Donald Glover’s definition of what corruption would mean for his new company: “I guess corruption for Gilga would be when we stop moving like a rich kid.” When interviewer Mark Anthony Green asks him what he means, he elaborates, “Rich kids don’t do shit for money. They do things based on if…
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Brag
If you have a problem bragging for yourself, don’t brag for yourself. Brag for your work. Your work deserves to be bragged about, not because you made it. It’s because it will need other people’s attention and interest to sustain its life and reach its potential. Brag for your team. You work with people who…
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It’s not supposed to go according to plan
Planning is always a good idea. The adage goes, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” There’s another saying, attributed to Peter Thiel, “A bad plan is better than no plan.” Things get weird when our plans create a byproduct: expectations. It’s like we forget that our plans are just guesses; it can…
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Playoff mode
In amateur and professional sports, the year is typically structured into a series of games known as a regular season. Not to be confused with a season in nature, a sports season can last the majority of the year. For example, in the NBA, each team plays 82 games from October to April in a…
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It is what it is
For the first time in many years, I started watching the NBA playoffs. I just found out about Cam’ron’s show, It Is What It Is. The latest episode is here: Everything I know about Cam I pretty much know through the big Dipset songs and Eddie Huang’s references (like Cam’s parody rhymebook). There’s a lot…