Category: Expectations
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Derrick White and confidence
I wouldn’t call myself much of a sports fan, and still there is a lot to like about this piece profiling professional basketball player Derrick White. The most outstanding story, to me, is about White’s initial wavering confidence to keep shots up after a couple of misses—perhaps due to a transition moving from San Antonio…
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The work vs. the strategy
The films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have made nearly $30 billion in box office sales. The studio spent around $7 billion of that to make the films. That’s an incredibly successful film franchise—the highest grossing one of all time. Naturally, film studios are trying to copy it. And yet, Marvel’s chief creative officer Kevin…
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Stick around until you find the lightbulb moment
While Marques Brownlee is well-known for his influence in technology now, his first YouTube video wasn’t even about tech. It was a video of his golf swing, and a request for analysis. Marques eventually started filming tech tutorials though, and he saw a lightbulb moment a dozen videos in, when a video of him installing…
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Pecking wood
Long before Kevin Feige became the president of Marvel Studios, he was rejected from USC’s film school program five times in a row. He was accepted with his sixth application. Imagine if you were Kevin, writing the second, third, fourth, and fifth applications. Your family starts to ask you questions, inadvertently turning up the volume…
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Letting go
Unlearning is an incredibly important skill. It’s also often, in my experience, much more difficult than learning. Part of that is probably because we go through decades of learning to acquire facts, lessons, and insights, but there isn’t much of a curriculum on unlearning beliefs and scripts. I’ve had some experience applying and practicing in…
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Three mechanisms of “manifesting”
Matt Webb is pretty sure about manifesting, the idea that you can manifest the goals you imagine into your physical reality, even though he doesn’t have evidence for it. He writes, “I don’t know what the mechanism is. I don’t need to know.” I’ve found this to be a driving force in my life, and…
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Listen to yourself, and do more of what works
You would think that writing a second book would be easier than writing a first one. As I prepare to put my second book together, I haven’t found that to be the case. While there are lots of new things I learned, as I apply them this time around, it’s almost like they’re bumping out…
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Good editing means trusting yourself
While editing certainly involves a lot of hard skills—structuring a piece, making it flow, continuing to draw the eye onward—it equally requires understanding what the author is trying to do. It means listening closely to them, helping them see their options, and advising them on making the best decisions. It doesn’t always look like that,…
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Get rich or die tryin’
It’s good to be willing to take the leap, to step up. Most people won’t. Sometimes though, when you’re willing to take drastic action, you can also get in your own way. Shane Parrish writes in Clear Thinking, “When you are well positioned, there are many paths to victory. If you are poorly positioned, there…
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Effective first
An effective first approach prioritizes getting your work done (feeding your family, achieving your goal, helping a friend, etc.), within the boundaries of your values and ethics. When you work from a stance of effective first, you prioritize doing the real thing. You tell people about what you’re doing. Through this doing, you get the…