Category: Creator Confidential
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Your art doesn’t need more time, your time needs more art
I’ve occasionally written about the experience of writing within small amounts of time. In Big Ideas, Small Papers, I write: One of the most painful things about writing in small amounts of time is the lack of time for re-working. It feels like writing on a scrap of paper that’s way too small. I would…
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POSSE
Platforms can amplify your voice, certainly. However, publishing directly on them as a medium also changes the way you approach writing. A platform incentivizes you to think of what your work can do for you; true creative work requires you to consider what you can do for your work—and for other people. It’s a platform’s…
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Create momentum
50 Cent on his recent Final Lap Tour: I was gonna do four dates internationally, and Live Nation didn’t want to do the four days because they were like, “It’s gonna be COVID, you’re not going to get through the dates,” or whatever. I ended up financing the dates. I paid for the arenas, and…
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Hiring VIPs
Coinbase recently launched a new program to work together with people with extraordinary ability to effectively develop a role within the company. It’s nice to see a formal process for it, especially as there’s evidence that this has generally happened less formally. For example, when professional esports athlete KyeongHyun ‘SeleCT’ Ryoo was looking for an…
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Define yourself outside your life’s task
For the better part of a decade, I wanted to be a writer. It was what Robert Greene would have called my life’s task; any minute spent on anything else seemed to be a waste of my time. I made little bits of momentum, spurting and sputtering while exploring businesses that would help pay the…
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Stick to the whim
In the early 2010s, after watching the film Pariah, fashion designer and lawyer Busayo Olupona felt an inner call to connect with actor Adepero Oduye and introduce her eponymous emerging fashion line, Busayo. Perhaps, Olupona thought, there might be an opportunity to style Oduye for a future work. The two of them connected on Facebook,…
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Advice for considering advice
Advice is a genre that should probably be treated more like fiction than non-fiction. Because so much content that’s packaged as advice is more like entertainment or remixed clichés—with little lived experiences, or introspective reflections, to support it—it’s best to read most advice with the seriousness you would a fictional story or a horoscope. Take…
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Good editing is cutting
If your personality is inclined to optimism, one of the most difficult aspects of the editorial skillset is learning to say no. There’s certainly an opportunity to liken this to the classic business strategy phrase, “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Without trade-offs, there would be no need for choice and…
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Uphill thinking
My team recently posted this piece by John Maeda to Shortcut. When Carly sent the team an initial draft she and John had worked on, I was mind blown—it was the best thing I’d read all week. Here’s an excerpt: Humans are innately driven to take the adventurous, longer route. Our distinct traits of creativity,…