Category: Promotion
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Top of mind
My partner, my cat, and I once missed a connecting flight due to a luggage hiccup. The staff got us replacement tickets for another flight 12 hours later. Maybe we could catch an earlier flight if there was space, they said. That was a possibility we were eager to explore. So I walked to the…
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Books and lifestyle
The Starfield Library in Seoul is a beautiful, vast, library. It reminds me of the short visit I had to Singapore’s library@orchard. It fits in with a pattern I notice in Asia, which is the rise of these incredibly glamorous spaces for books. They’re usually bookstores (I mentioned some briefly before here). One possible reason…
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3.15.20
Five years ago, there was precious little to look forward to. And then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Donald Glover released his fourth album as Childish Gambino, 3.15.20. It was surprising, because Donald’s best known for his rollouts. Because the Internet’s rollout was accompanied by listening parties, a nationwide tour, and a short…
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Free lunches
Early in my life, I learned the motto, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The implied lesson is to be careful around somebody offering you something for free—because there’s usually a hidden cost. They must have something to gain from it, and that’s why they’re giving it to you for free. While that…
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When you make a new option, you make the world better
Drake is, by far, the best-selling artist in hip-hop and rap in the past decade. But there’s plenty of space for everyone else. The world is better with other people’s art—Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, Tyler, the Creator. The best part is all of those artists lean into being themselves. They don’t try to pretend to…
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Skateboarding as an infinite game
For over 2,000 years, people survived without skateboarding. That changed sometime in the late 1940s—perhaps the early 1950s—when a group of surfers decided to attach wheels onto their wooden boards. Since then, skateboarding has become a way of life. People risk life and limb to practice this art. And the art form survives by enticing…
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Document the moment
A few days ago, I tried explaining why blogging was great precisely because it reached a smaller audience than social media. The smallest audience is one—and that’s you. Skateboarders bring a video camera to document the moment. They’ve done this since way before social media, so it wasn’t just about going viral. It was an…
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Good Enough
There are enough people who don’t like how software has evolved, don’t need all of the bells and whistles (and don’t want to pay for it), and remember how much simpler software used to be. It’s how I feel about the music app, Doppler. I don’t know the team at Good Enough, but it seems…
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Meeting people with cold emails
An extraordinary professional moment happened to me in a very ordinary finance class. Instead of paying attention to what the teacher was saying, I read an article in HBR and emailed the author asking for advice about how I could find my passion. They graciously responded with valuable advice—essentially, to try a lot of things!—and…