Category: Creator Confidential
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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;…
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“I don’t know…”
And I’m going to try something now, because that’s the only way to figure it out. I’ll need to share it with a couple of people, or even release it or publish it to the world, because that’s the easiest way to test the solution to see if it’ll work.
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Off timing
Every hit comes with a lot of misses. The problem is you and I only see people discussing the hits—and we don’t see them discussing the misses so often. Everybody is missing every day. Sometimes, we’re just too early; we build BlackBerry apps instead of iPhone apps, we discovered YouTube before the entertainment industry recognizes…
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When a dollar is not a dollar
One property of money is fungibility: a dollar is a dollar. To the bank, whether you or I make $10,000 working for ourselves, or $10,000 working for the worst boss in the world, it’s the same $10,000. Still, the way you and I make this money is not interchangeable. We know this inherently; for example,…
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The Winners Effect
When I was a teenager, for reasons I will explore in a separate post, almost every week I went shopping at Canadian discount retailer, Winners. Shopping at Winners felt like playing a lottery, because the inventory changed with time, and also varied by location. Every time I walked into a store, I felt a thrill;…