Category: Creator Confidential
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The joke funnel
I’m reading Springfield Confidential by Mathew Klickstein and Mike Reiss, and it’s gotten me laughing out loud more than any book from my recent memory. It’s also inspiring me to write jokes every other sentence at this blog, which itself was going to be a setup for a joke but just ended up making me…
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If you want (your team) to write better, start with your Google Docs comments
When I worked as an editor-in-chief at QuickBooks, I managed a team of two deputy editors and around a dozen writers. I was usually the last pair of eyes on an article, and whenever I edited one, I would keep a second document open. It had the very exciting title, “First draft standards.” If I…
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Pay attention to the questions
What questions are you asking people? How do you ask the question? What questions do people ask you, and how? You can consider this from a voice and tone perspective—are you speaking monotonously? What emphasis are you putting on each sentence? Are you scripted or flying by the seat of your pants?—but also from a…
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6 points to consider before just shipping it
The current popular heuristic is, “Just ship it.” It leans towards a bias for action, giving people permission to ship something regardless of whether they think they are ready or not. Reid Hoffman’s popular saying goes, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” (I’ll never forget…
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Walking both paths
An important secret to my process as a creator: build a good business from your product. This means developing the ability, infrastructure, and skills to earn money independently from partners, handlers, and other gatekeepers. At his blog, Derek Sivers writes: Make one plan that depends on nobody else. No record deal. No investors. No lucky…
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Spotify inches into the enterprise
I was pleasantly surprised to see an announcement, involving Spotify for Work. Basically, Spotify is launching an initiative in which corporations buy Spotify premium memberships for its employees and offer it as a perk. I’m really bullish on the idea that most companies are well-served by moving into the enterprise; I’d previously written about Headspace…
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“This is probably dumb…”
I’ve now been writing at this blog daily-ish for 100 days now. It’s probably dumb. It certainly would look that way—stupid. Idiotic. Irrelevant. Corny. Cringe. So cringe. (I suspect the youth look at blogs the same way they look at Lin Manuel Miranda.) Blogging is dumb, in a sense. Not only because people just don’t…
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Early rejections
In his paper on Self-Efficacy, psychologist Albert Bandura writes: “In his delightful book, titled, Rejection, John White provides vivid testimony, that the striking characteristic of people who have achieved eminence in their fields is an inextinguishable sense of personal efficacy and a firm belief in the worth of what they are doing. This resilient self-belief…
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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…
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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. …