Category: Creator Confidential
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Bill Watterson, Picasso, and HN on self promotion
One of the most interesting pieces I’ve come across lately was Hugh Eakin’s piece on the backstory of one of Picasso’s most prominent works, Guernica. During the creative process for Guernica, Picasso created 45 different sketches before settling on the final direction of the painting: Guernica debuted in 1937 at the Paris Expo, which over…
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Most dreams stay dreams
I recently revisited a piece I wrote at the blog in March, “To all the dreams I dreamed before.” It’s a precious piece to me, because it was one of the blocks I’d experienced early in my life; I felt unqualified, unready, and undeserving to even aspire to do the things I wanted to do,…
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Reversing Medium’s brain drain problem
After 10 years of leading Medium, CEO Ev Williams is stepping down. Medium faces a lot of challenges—I am sure Williams will reflect on many—but to me the main one is basically a way worse version of the problem that Substack currently faces: brain drain, a term used to describe “the emigration of highly trained…
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Your work and your friends
A few days ago, Paul Graham tweeted, “Ron Conway just discovered my essays and stayed up late reading them. We’ve been friends for 15 years but apparently he’d never read one. Made my month.” It reminds me of a passage I’d read or heard somewhere (and can’t find) that as a creator, you shouldn’t expect…
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Quantity? Quality?
My latest at Medium. I never would’ve imagined I’d know so much about this topic. It all just kind of happened!
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My story on Pusha T in Trapital
If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know I’m a big fan of Pusha T’s work (exhibit 1, 2, 3). To me, Push is one of the few artists still focused on quality and on developing his category. Push isn’t afraid to sell fewer records; that doesn’t mean he’s making any less money, which is…
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Creative Doing on the Ideas Into Action podcast
I had a great time a few weeks ago recording an interview with my friend Hamza Khan. Hamza’s a global keynote speaker and bestselling author of The Burnout Gamble and Leadership, Reinvented, and he hosts a podcast entitled Ideas Into Action. I actually joined him back in April 2019 for episode 11: And I was…
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How is it priming your brain?
Our brains are easily primed, which then dictates our actions, which then changes how we think. Before we realize this, we’re just swimming in water without knowing what water is. Now that we’re aware of it, we can actively train our brains (we each only have one, so training it in one part can affect…
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Say it your way, say it again (redux)
A few weeks ago, I came across one of my favorite diagrams. Sarah Arnold-Hall created it. But I wouldn’t have come across it if Steph didn’t share it through this very viral tweet. The image itself is original, but there’s an endless number of people who have written about showing up every day. Kishore Nallan…
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Why you should turn your conference talk into a blog post
If you’re a software engineer who has presented a conference talk, it’s definitely worth writing it up into a blog post and sharing it at a relevant Subreddit (like r/programming), DEV.to, and Hacker News. You’ll certainly get your ideas in front of more people—on the Internet, text still travels faster than podcasts or YouTube (on…