Category: Creator Confidential
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How to write about failures
People like a winning image. I believe this, and I see examples of it every day. I feel it too. I don’t like pity parties, sadness, or discouragement; I’m drawn to hope, encouragement, and excitement. I used to think that this meant people wouldn’t want to read about anything except the W’s. By extension, that…
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Notes on Axios’s business strategy with Axios HQ
I’ve been following Axios HQ with keen interest from afar for a little over a year now (I’m not associated with it). For the unfamiliar, Axios HQ is one of media company Axios’s big bets to work with enterprise customers on internal communications. The driving through line behind it is the term, “smart brevity,” which…
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Insights from the idiot
A few days ago, I wrote about the four inner beings of a writer. Susan Sontag called these the nut (i.e., the obsédé), the moron, the stylist, and the critic. Professor Betty Flowers called these the madman, the architect, the carpenter, and the judge. I started this blog with the intention that it served as…
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Creative Doing, at Sharpen Your Edge
I recently joined my friend Dr. Greg Wells at his podcast, Sharpen Your Edge. It usually airs at LinkedIn on Thursdays at noon et, you can catch this one at YouTube: One of the themes we talk about is how creativity is innate and every person is creative; indeed, many of us draw in school,…
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Tradeoffs
Annie Duke writes in Thinking in Bets, “The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck.” Indeed, everything is about choices. Often, these choices may appear as A, or B? Should I dedicate my life to what makes me money, or what I feel passionate about? Should I be active at…
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Dan Crowe, on starting Port Magazine
I’m in the middle of developing a speech for Creative Doing right now, and the research process led me to revisit an interview I did with Dan Crowe (who most recently launched INQUE magazine) a few years ago. A few excerpts from Dan that I really loved: “My friends and I that launched [Port], we…
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The mythical secret sauce
“How on earth did they find the time to do that?” To learn the skill while they did their full-time job. To juggle the equivalent to two full-time jobs. To write a blog every day. I can tell you, having written at this blog for 150 days now, that it looks more like this: you…
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Quality control
When I started Wonder Shuttle, I was uncontrollably obsessive with quality control. I started out as a freelance writer, so the first thing I had to do was let go of control. Still, in my mind, every article had to run through me; I was the last line of defense, the buck stopped with me,…
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The elevators start at the tenth floor
I really like what recording artist Burna Boy says to GQ: Unlike a lot of other people, I’ve had to go through never-ending steps to get here, whereas other people have taken the elevator up. I’ve always been too heavy for that kind of elevator, so I had to take the stairs. Now I know…
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Don’t become a content machine
If you browse Twitter frequently, or even occasionally, you’ll probably have become very familiar with threads—when an author connects multiple tweets together by replying to himself or herself. (Old heads like me will still let the term “tweetstorms” slip out.) People write a lot of threads, because people believe that Twitter amplifies threads. And of…