Category: Creator Confidential
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A deliverable is just an artifact
Project deliverables—a final draft, an app in production, a strategy or plan, etc.—are great. They’re not easy to make, and they only exist because a person or group of people gave a ton of emotional energy to breathe life into them. We focus on the project deliverable because we can see and touch it. We’ve…
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Question everything
In Figures of Speech, an essay entitled, Virgil Abloh: A Hundred Percent, Virgil Abloh and Anja Aronowsky Cronberg write: Get this. I was the idiot who believed that all fashion design was deeper than just clothing. I thought each season was about a concept that represented a larger idea. Don’t get me wrong, I know…
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Eating your vegetables
u/MaginusMedia writes, in response to creating a perception: Marketing is eating your vegetables. No more and no less than that. So my advice, for what it’s worth, is learn as much as you can (i.e., find some good “vegetable recipes”); get as much help as you can; and remember that in all this stuff (music…
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Learning to love rejection
A few days ago, I wrote one of my favorite posts: red lights. It reminds me of an opening story in the third chapter of Creative Doing, entitled, “Make Constraints Your Canvas.” I recently came across a quote from Virgil Abloh on rejection. In an interview with the New York Times, the writer mentions a…
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Quit while you’re ahead
1. “As soon as you buy something you lose the power to buy something,” Loftis tells Cooter in Exchange Value by Charles R. Johnson (via Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism). 2. “When we are in the gains, we have a tendency to quit too early in order to avoid the risk of giving those gains…
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Make your work the best practice, and let people copy it
People copy today. Incentives reward derivative work. Sequels, song covers, and newsjacking (including celebrity culture) are all signs of this. The most constructive thing you can do in this environment is to behave the way you want to see more people behave, and then to promote your work and make it a best practice. People…
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Red lights
A red light is not an obstacle getting in the way of your destination; it is the destination. You are constantly arriving at the destination, the place you’re meant to be. Even if it wasn’t the place you had in mind, or the place you want to go, you’re meant to be wherever you are,…
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Getting stuff done sets you apart
Completing and delivering a project, on time, will set you apart. This observation tends to surprise me, although it really shouldn’t. There are so many people who fail to meet this standard test. Scoping goes awry, they don’t communicate enough (out of a lack of skill, fear, or understanding), and projects fall apart. Think about…
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Flexibility cost
Sticking to the plan is usually the least expensive solution. However! Plans are just guesses. Sometimes we guess poorly. Or, circumstances change, and our guess proves to be wrong. For example, you planned to quit our job, and entrepreneurship turns out to be nothing like what you guessed it would be like. Or you started…
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Practicing
1. Everything is a practice. 2. One practitioner I follow, relatively closely, is Vin Verma. Vin documents a lot of his practice at Futureland. 3. For all of the priorities there’ll never be time for, there’s practice. I love watching Paul Ford and Rich Ziade continue their podcast practice at their new company, Aboard. They…