Category: Creator Confidential
-
What I talk about when I talk about doing
I’m still thinking through a piece I read at Strange Loop Canon, in which Rohit Krishnan writes that thinkers do and doers think, but there’s still a macroscopic difference between the results that thinkers and doers actually produce: One place we see this is where there is a ton of conversation around the difference between…
-
The story of Creative Doing, at Human Parts
Creative Doing just launched, which means I’m knee deep in promoting it. I plan to write more about the process—how I’m thinking about it, campaigns and always on, and what the goal really is. My fiancée made a great suggestion, which was to tell the story about why I wrote this new book about creativity. …
-
Permission to ship
It’s one day until I ship something new. 3 things on my mind, in the hopes that each balances the other two out: 1. “For 2 frickin’ years, I thought it’s too early to release my app because it’s clunky, buggy, it’s missing features, blah, blah, blah. No one would ever use it, right? I…
-
Creativity, for fun and profit
There’s a lot of material out there about creativity for profit, and creativity for fun, but less about how to actually combine both. It seems as though everything that makes creativity profitable makes it less fun—and vice versa. So I want to write about this, because making money can be very fun as well. Part…
-
What your work is missing
“A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said,” Amos Tversky says to Don Redelmeier (via The Undoing Project). That’s certainly true; it’s also part of good storytelling. Van Lathan writes in his latest book, Fat, Crazy, and Tired: “I grabbed the…
-
De-risking
There’s a narrative that artists and industries took more creative risks in the past; one possible reason for that was the businesses and industry just was able to cross-subsidize different work. If they made a commercial success, that would fund the critical one. Author and critic William Deresiewicz writes: In the past, one of the…
-
Load management
In 2019, during Kawhi Leonard’s championship run with the Raptors, I learned about the term, “Load management.” The British Journal of Sports Medicine defines the objective in 2016: “The aim of load management is to optimally configure training, competition and other load to maximise adaptation and performance with a minimal risk of injury. Load management…
-
Make twice, sell twice
In November 2020, I independently published my first book at Gumroad. I had spent four months or so full-time deliberately researching, writing, editing, proofreading, and designing a PDF of ~18,000 words. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but you could say I spent most of the 2010s researching it (starting with this piece…
-
Career Oscillations
When we make plans, we think with consistency, regularity, and uniformity as stand-ins for discipline, discernment, and judgment. “I’m going to do this everyday,” or, “My approach is this,” or “I’m going to reach this milestone.” This is helpful in that it helps us get things done. The career ladder is one representation of this;…
-
Help each other
A person goes on vacation and asks their neighbor to watch their pet animals. The neighbor obliges. The neighbor writes a letter after: Good afternoon, This letter is regarding your vacation two weeks ago, and how you let me babysit Smokey, Oreo, and Jennifer. I’d just like to give you a letter of thanks. As…