Category: Creator Confidential
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Side projects open doors
When I was a student, I had no idea how I was going to get a job. In order to get a job, I needed to have experience; in order to get experience, I needed to have a job. Any internship worth getting also seemed to require working experience. Or so I thought. One of…
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Work isn’t meant to be escaped
Entrepreneur Curtis Jackson, also known as recording artist 50 Cent, writes in Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter: One of the most important realizations I came to early in my business career is that I’m running through an endless tunnel. What I mean by that is I came to understand that there’s no “happily ever after.” No…
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Katsushika Hokusai, drawing on the floor
Yesterday, I visited the Sumida Hokusai Museum. One thing that stood out to me was his rather modest studio; there was a replica in the museum. Hokusai drew on the ground! Creativity is not about the tools, it’s not about breaking through constraints; it’s about working with what you’ve got. I didn’t take a photo…
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Breaking the curse of perspective
It’s so easy to spot other people’s blind spots, and it’s incredibly difficult to spot your own. Sometimes, that’s because we’re effectively blind to it; our perspective of the world doesn’t allow us to see what’s really happening. Other times, it’s because we don’t want to see it; our perspective of the world protects us…
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Sold out
When you know that you’re not able to get something, you want to know why. Even when you had absolutely no interest in the first place. Scarcity is extremely effective. (It’s the fundamental principle of hype culture.) If the seller ran out of a product, that must mean a lot of people bought it, which…
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Replace rankings
The leaderboard is one of the most common diagrams we use to measure the best and the worst. Whether it’s, “Top five, dead or alive,” or “Stack ranking,” we use rankings as a way to make decisions. Unfortunately, with letter grades and awards, we’re also the constant subject of rankings; so much so that we…
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Pulled through the gates
In order to preserve their livelihood, a gatekeeper’s job is to protect the business. They need to filter out real business opportunities, and good people, from all of the other chaos in the world. If you’re a creator, you want to get pulled in through a gate—and corresponding gatekeeper—by someone that the gatekeeper already trusts.…
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A.I.’s impact on yesterday’s creative business models
Interest in A.I. has exploded thanks to OpenAI’s recent release of ChatGPT. If you’re an artist or creator, this is a huge event, and it’s right of you to pay attention. Tyler Cowen writes: ChatGPT excels at producing ordinary, bureaucratic prose, written in an acceptable but non-descript style. In turn, we are likely to better…
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It’s never too late
Ke Huy Quan, on restarting his acting career at 49: “For the longest time, I believed that I didn’t like acting anymore, until I started seeing my fellow Asian actors succeeding. I go: ‘Wow, time has changed. We are getting not just very stereotypical roles but meaningful roles, meaty roles.’ It wasn’t until then that…
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Printing lottery tickets
Here’s something that’s difficult to be honest about: Positive outcomes can’t be entirely designed or engineered. Sometimes they need exploration, discovery, and curiosity. These projects probably won’t have clear payoffs or immediate expected value; in fact, most of the time, they won’t. But with each project and insight, you’re also opening up new possible futures…