Category: Creator Confidential
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Fans will always be fans, even if they come and go
During the first year of the pandemic, my wife and I spent a lot of time cooped up in our studio apartment in downtown Toronto. While we knew our travel options were very limited, and we didn’t know if a vaccine would be coming out, we found solace in a Korean variety show called Running…
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Figure out what’s working, and do more of it
When you start a new project, it’s useful to figure out what has worked for the team or company already. Most of this is a form of manual labor: setting meetings, asking questions, reading reports, proposing actual deliverables and completing them. It’s also a humbling exercise, to restrain the impulse to come up with answers…
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Learn about yourself by making something you’ll throw out right away
One useful way to take the pressure off making something—anything!—is to never show it to anyone else. It’s just you and your work. You can say whatever you want to say. Write down your deepest fears. Write down the ambition that’s too unrealistic to even whisper about to anyone else. Write what you’ve wished you…
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Simple questions to sense content marketing ROI
If you’re need a sense of how much ROI you’re getting on the writing and editing activities in your company, ask these simple questions: Does the content communicate how we see the world? What impact does it make if other people also buy into our perspective? Does the content add leverage to a launch moment?…
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Writing tired
In my ideal world, I’d wake up around 8am, eat breakfast and have a matcha latte, and write for 1-2 hours. In this state, the writing just flows out. 60–95%, I don’t write under these ideal conditions. Life is asking me to take care of other things. Instead, I keep my eyes peeled for openings…
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Two ways to increase the value of your work
People get value from your work and experiences when you publish it and they experience it. There are two ways to increase the value of your work: You can improve the experience (e.g., through crafting the story, or telling it in a new and interesting way). You can contextualize it further. Or, you can get…
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Cultivating a life with less deadline pressure
Instead of counting down with a timer, try counting up with a stop watch. This is a lesson I learned from a personal trainer, who was timing me as I rested between sets. In addition to tracking what’s left to do, proactively track what you did. This is the iDoneThis philosophy. Right now, I cross…
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Streaks are fragile, practices are anti fragile
Streaks are useful for keeping a behavior going. When you’re on a streak, the momentum and fear of breaking the streak carries you through to repeating a behavior. If you’ve worked out three times a week for 100 weeks straight, you want to do the same next week to keep the streak going. But what…