Category: Creator Confidential
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Value ≠ compensation
Opportunities present themselves in different costumes. Heuristics can be helpful, though only to a certain extent; sometimes good opportunities present themselves as bad ones first. You have to know what you want to get out of a project. Is there something specific that you want to learn? Will it be a case study for a…
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Painkillers, vitamins, and trophies
While I’ve worked with a lot of really great clients, I’ve also had some prospects tell me that my business’s services were way too expensive. In fact, some of them seemed to get offended when they saw Wonder Shuttle’s rate card, or when I told them the price over the phone. I’ll always remember one…
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Direct sales vs. branding
On average a podcast episode probably doesn’t generate that many direct sales of books, products, and sales, especially given the number of people that listen. If you’ve spent a dozen hours pitching or networking, and then another couple of hours preparing, and then finally one hour actually appearing as a guest, you might think that’s…
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Stir the pot
There’s a special type of luck that emerges just from taking enough action; enough shots at bat. You gather a hundred pieces of information. You take notes on a dozen of them, and they find your way into your brain. One of those notes enables you to understand people’s problems. You talk to dozens of…
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Ideas are cheap, good ideas are expensive
There’s a good idea inside you, you just don’t know if it’s the 1st idea or the 100th idea. You need to make 100 ideas in order to find out. You may be able to narrow it down to 10, and then struggle from there. You may need to ask people to help you pick…
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Capacity for change
A person’s capacity for change (i.e., adaptability quotient) will determine how much they can contribute in this century. Capacity for change is a choice: you can choose to roll with it, or you can choose to resist. If you’re willing to adapt to change, or to help move it forward, there has never been a…
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Luxury and imperfection
“If you were to buy some of the famous brands of a luxury watch, you would probably be warned that it loses two minutes every year. The flaw is not only known, it is assumed – one could say that that is both its charm and its guarantee of authenticity. It is the specific and…
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Don’t let Twitter teach you how to write
Social media platforms like Twitter are businesses, and their business models usually do not have your education in mind. Their business models usually involve getting the most reach for their platform and selling advertising. It’s agnostic to what content that is, even if it’s inflammatory, inaccurate, or miseducation. Professor Algorithm really isn’t a professor at…
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Overdue insights on daily blogging
My friend Vin, who appears in my book Creative Doing, and I were tweeting about the possibility of writing every day. I meant to write about this over a month ago, I’m now well over 100 days of writing at this blog every day, so here goes: Here’s how I’ve made it happen so far…
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Time to ship
Time and inspiration expands ideas. Obsession takes over. Most of the time, this is a good thing for creative work itself. The problem is, it becomes very difficult to actually make. The most difficult ideas to write are the ones that have expanded too much. It’s too big to chip away in 15 minute increments;…