Category: Creator Confidential
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A fisherman and banker exchange numbers
I put this together based on the parable of the Mexican fisherman, as made famous by lifestyle design and the internet. (See also the situation where this parable doesn’t work out!)
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You can’t judge creative work by Sales
Or Likes, Hearts, Views, Shares, or any other type of metric. That’s a difficult idea to reconcile, because these metrics can influence how much energy you spend on your work. For example, if your work generate enough Sales, then you can draw a Personal Income from it, which then makes you a Full-Time Artist. (Congratulations!)…
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Donald Glover, on productive gentleness
When Donald Glover asks himself, “What’s a good man to you?” he replies, “Someone who knows themselves. Who loves themselves. My father was really gentle with us. Physically and mentally. It felt radical at the time. I really miss him.” Similarly, when he’s recently asked what advice he’d leave with his kids (emphasis added): The…
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What my personal website and blog have done for me
As often happens, there was a great thread at Hacker News that inspired this post: 1. When I was 15, I started my first blog at Blogspot. (It’s still there!) It became a source of great fun and advertising money as a teenager. Because I wrote enthusiastically about technology, I eventually also met other people…
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Don’t make what you think other people want you to make
“What you really want to do is, when you make your videos, make sure you’re making them for yourself and it’s something you actually believe in—not a video that you’re doing because you think it will do good. Too many people make videos that they think will get views, but it’s not really in their…
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From fliers to billboards
Some conceptual artists work mostly with language and words. This includes Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer. (Lots more here!) Holzer was the most familiar to me; I came across her truisms in books, and also through her collaboration with Virgil Abloh in 2017. I recently found out that Holzer’s work didn’t start off…
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11 books that started as articles, speeches, or podcasts
For several years, I’ve kept a running tab of articles, speeches, or podcasts that have turned into books. It’s time to start publicizing it. This list is for you if you’ve ever considered—or longed!—to publish a book: start today, start small (by yourself!), and start with what you’ve got. A book is just a snapshot in…
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Extreme affirmations don’t work, compassion does
In “Positive Self-Statements Power for Some, Peril for Others,” authors Joanne V. Wood, W.Q. Elaine Perunovic, and John W. Lee write: When people with low self-esteem repeated the statement, ‘‘I’m a lovable person’’ (Study 2), or focused on ways in which this statement was true of them (Study 3), neither their feelings about themselves nor…
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The joys of illuminating
John Warner wrote a great piece on four categories of people who write for the public. In a separate, preceding, post, he writes: My goal is for my writing to engage readers on a “shared inquiry” level, where whatever I am saying is not viewed as a declaration that demands agreement, but an exploration attempting…
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Icing on the cake
I’ve often written things that I don’t get paid for directly. It’s not that I never got paid directly for my writing. It’s just that I didn’t mind writing, even if I didn’t get paid for that particular piece. Writing and publishing without getting paid often led to opportunities in the long run. For example,…