Category: Creator Confidential
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Good is good enough
Doing something well is very different than doing something perfectly. In many cases, good is more than enough to get you started in the direction you want to go. If you need to do something perfectly in order to achieve your goal, your process isn’t tight enough yet. Something’s missing.
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Again, and again, and again
One of the simplest, and most challenging, ways to enlist luck on your side is to try again. I’m not saying to repeat yourself in exactly the same way, or to be nagging and annoying. I’m saying to give it another shot. Do another art show. Write another blog post. Send another email. In Twelve…
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Pay for information
I bought a lot of books in my 20s, and I wish I spent more money on learning. For example, I wish I gained more information through courses, paid for greater access to private groups (and gaining proximity), and went to more conferences. Asking to grab coffee with people is nice, but you really start…
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Exploring vs. exploiting
Specificity and focus are praised in our culture. For good reason, of course—in some cases, specificity helps us get to the finish line, and focus enables us to actually get things done. Sometimes we really are spread too thin, ineffectively juggling between several projects and subsequently making meaningful progress on none of them. Last year,…
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From implementation to strategy
The closer you can help a business get to where it wants to go, the more strategic your work. (Perhaps the most strategic work involves helping business leaders figure out what outcomes they’re trying to achieve with their businesses.) It adds more value to the business, which also means they’re willing to pay you more…
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Pounding the pavement
I’m constantly reminded of how hard successful people work to get their work out there. Last week, I met up with a NYT-bestselling author who took an interview with me, and told me he’d been cold emailing people on TikTok offering to send them copies of his book. Even with over a million copies sold,…
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Practice like an expert, speak like an enthusiast
Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Speak like you’re an enthusiast, not an expert. Expertise positioning is very dangerous for a lot of people because it leads them to imposter syndrome and insecurity. You don’t need to be an expert, you need to be a practitioner.”
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The time it takes
Some of the most dangerous driving happens when a person leaves late and still tries to make it to the destination on time. They figure they’ll save time in traffic. Or, in other words, they rush. Experts do not rush. Experts know how long a process inherently needs to take. They embrace the German word…
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3 life lessons I learned from one of the world’s best executive coaches
Nobody gets to the Olympics without a coach, the saying goes. The concept clearly applies to business leaders and entrepreneurs, whose performance influences dozens, or even thousands, of people. Marshall Goldsmith is among the most prominent of these executive coaches. I knew him through his cleverly titled book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You…
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The decisiveness advantage
David C. Baker writes in The Business of Expertise: “After looking at 1,340 examples of successful experts, the only consistent trait was that they were risk-takers. That means that they were wrong a lot — but that they were usually right about the important things. It also means that they always made decisions. They weren’t…