Category: Life
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Just one tooth
There’s a classic idea that the key to flossing regularly is to floss just one tooth. The key his this: it’s much easier to show up every day if you can reduce the task down to something so small and simple that it requires next to no effort. In Creative Doing, I share a prompt,…
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To succeed in the age of A.I., build your capacity for longcuts
A couple of years ago, my friend Nik Göke wrote a really nice piece at his blog, “Sometimes, the Work Is Easier Than the Workaround.” In the intro, he writes about trying to find a fast, technical, shortcut to scrape a bunch of text online: The tool was pretty technical, so it took a while…
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“You’re nobody here at $10 million”
Gary Kremen, founder of Match.com with a self-estimated net worth of $10 million in 2007, logs 60- to 80-hour workweeks because he doesn’t think he has enough money. He says to the New York Times: Everyone around here looks at the people above them. It’s just like Wall Street, where there are all these financial…
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How many doors can you open?
Before Jann Mardenborough became a professional racecar driver, he was obsessively driving in the Gran Turismo simulator on PlayStation. Then, he came across GT Academy, a program that would train PlayStation racing gamers to become professional racing drivers. This tournament was extremely competitive; millions of people would apply to join GT Academy. You can practically…
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What does success mean to you, now?
You’ve probably changed a lot this year. Certainly in the past few. Does your definition of success keep up with where you are now, or where you want to go in the future? If you’re making a professional pivot, or you’re turning a company around—in other words, changing the course of your work or life…
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Playing injured
Professional athletes play in all sorts of conditions. They play when they’re injured. They play when they’re sick with the flu. They play through heartbreak. It’s not ideal, but setbacks happen—and athletes keep playing. This philosophy and practice can apply to all sorts of other fields. (For example, advertisers keep advertising.) When you play through…
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The pinnacle of success
“You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.” Orlando Aloysius Battista, via MoneyZen by Manisha Thakor
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Dealing in hope
One can lead a nation only by helping it see a bright outlook. A leader is a dealer in hope. Napoléon Bonaparte (via Prehistoric by Alex Wong)
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Finding echoes of other people in yourself
So I’d say, to the extent I can, that the image came in parts, and congealed when I started writing. For me, creating a character is like acting. I have to imagine being them. Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself. And when I imagined being the boy in this story, these…