Category: Expectations
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Categorization, commoditization, and clarity
When you’re growing your business, one of your biggest challenges is market misunderstanding. When you’re working on a business (as an entrepreneur, freelancer, team, artist, author, etc.), your perspective tends to expand in breadth and depth. You develop expertise and see patterns. You come across better opportunities and bigger markets. In order to grow, you…
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First generation artist
When you’re working as a first generation artist—or author, entrepreneur, etc.—you are doing something really difficult. You are like an immigrant of sorts. It is the complete opposite of the parent-child duo who can perform on stage together, or do an art show together. Your parents practice a different craft and they will have trouble…
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Getting ahead vs. falling behind
If cooking is just a matter of adding heat to food at different intervals of time, then getting ahead is just getting work done earlier rather than later. In spite of the simplicity, it turns out that there are a million ways to prepare, add heat, and serve ingredients. That’s why the culinary arts exist.…
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Strategic desperation
There’s an old story about an army who invades another country. Right before a key battle, the general instructs the army to burn all of their own boats. Without the boats, there would be no way for the army to turn around. The only way back home was winning the battle. In most versions of…
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Confidence scaffolding
Sometimes, it just takes one in-between step (or maybe a few) to set you up from complete doubt to a sense of confidence. It could be a practical, useful, class. Or a light-hearted, well-done, project (which can also serve as a business card). And of course, practice is always great, because you never know when…
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Find and feed expansion
When I write this blog, I feel happy. It’s not that it’s easy, and it can feel frustrating at times; however, I almost always feel a state of expansion at some point. In Bending Reality, Victoria Song defines expansion as a relaxing, trusting, and open state. She prompts her clients to imagine feeling powerful, confident,…
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Go all the way
When you read Charles Bukowski’s, “Roll the Dice,” which opens with the lines: if you’re going to try, go all theway.otherwise, don’t even start. You might be inclined to think that you need to push harder, to the point of desperation and burning the boats, as if what you’re doing is a matter of life…
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Keep the interest alive
One of the favorite passages I’d read recently comes from Anything You Want by Derek Sivers: “If you do this, you’ll encounter a lot of pushback and misunderstanding, but who cares? You can’t just live someone else’s expectation of a traditional business. You have to just do whatever you love the most, or you’ll lose…
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Hype vs. reality
One story is that you and I live in an age of hype, where in order to get the resources we need to make something we need to inflate it full of unrealistic expectations. In this frame, if you don’t hype your work, then people won’t pay attention and someone else—who is hyping their work—will…
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A new story for hobbyist websites
At Twitter, Noah Smith points out that hobbyists aren’t making more websites. The incentives just aren’t there. A website needs a new story for hobbyists: it’s great for organizing and finding your work (try searching a post you wrote at a social media site!), you own the domain name, and you can control other parts…