Category: Creator Confidential
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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…
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“Make the bike shop and then go to the art shows after”
I love Tyler, the Creator’s very matter-of-fact approach to creativity. He’s very candid about removing pretense and mystique from the process. (He hates the word, “Inspiration,” for example.) Even when he was a relatively new artist, he tweets about betting Will.i.am a million bucks that he’d be doing what he loved in a decade, not…
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After dark, unfiltered, unbranded
Most content strategies (if not all!) could use a component where people pursue their own interests and explorations. This is vital to getting luckier and exploring new personal, or team, narratives. Consider Swyx’s after dark Twitter, and Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s interest in writing exploratory essays. This is actually prevalent at YouTube, where many popular creators…
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Don’t do it for the awards
Willem Dafoe, Leo, Will Smith, Diane Warren, are just the top of a much longer list.
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Come for the creativity, stay for the expertise
One of the gripes I’ve heard about people wanting a career as a creator is, it’s pretty much just foolishness. Dancing, attention seeking, and comedy. I can’t say it’s untrue, but it’s also an incredibly surface impression. What’s less obvious is creators that don’t develop their careers come and go; sure, some people experience immense…
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The energy edge
When you express something, you’re transferring energy (or vibes) to someone else. When you record these expressions—either through writing, music, product features and software, visual art, or film—you are creating media and content. It’s incredibly subtle, and subjective too. So practicing how to accurately communicate what you want to communicate is always worth it, so…
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100 different offers
People don’t reject you, they reject your offer. This applies to pitches, demos, job interviews, and pretty much every other thing that requires collaboration. The solution here is to change the offer. If you’re what you’re offering, change what you bring to the table and learn a new skill. If you don’t think it’s a…
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Less force, more fun
One rainy night, a couple of years ago, I stayed up late playing Pokemon. If you must know, I was grinding and gaining experience points, motivated by a streak of catches and an increasing multiplier. I knew better than that, because the video game was interrupting valuable sleep and sleep hygiene. Still, I felt like…
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Creators as experts
One question that’s fascinated me: How can creators apply their sensibilities and position their expertise to be valuable for businesses? Recording artists and DJs now have an opportunity to apply their expertise and tastes as part of a business bundle, and subsequently to make more money. It might not be as prestigious as doing a…
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Remembering the good stuff that your brain forgets
There’s a narrative floating around on Twitter (Exhibit 1, 2) that we’re meant to forget things that are unimportant to us. Forgetting is an incredibly useful feature of the brain. The brain does also have a knack to boomerang really valuable memories or ideas back—often in an exciting, relevant, way. We have a name for…