Category: Uncategorized
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What do you need to fire yourself from?
At Shopify, leaders need to re-qualify for their leadership team each year: “Now, obviously, the flip side of that is in order to do that every single person, particularly on the leadership team, has to requalify for their job every single year. And that is difficult in year one and year two, it becomes incredibly…
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Consistency starts with inconsistency
I am obsessed with the creative process, particularly with early work. One of the earliest projects I did was a self-funded one with friends to talk to recording artists about their early work. And even more recently, I wrote a book about the topic. I’ll explain why all of that in another post, but really…
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Start with you
People don’t buy what you think they want, they buy what you want. When David Chang started Momofuku’s Noodle Bar, it nearly fell apart because he let himself get pulled in “every direction but the most important one.” The food. He held back on the direction of the food, trying to meet what the market…
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The Simple Truth Behind Successful Creative Projects: They Start Small
Sometime after the Tiger King frenzy, and long before the Squid Game one, I happily watched two seasons of Fleabag (amongst what feels like dozens of other shows). For me, experiencing art is only one half of the joy. Learning about the creative process is the other. In this case, I was excited to learn…
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A Founder’s Guide to Startup Branding Through Writing
The sun was setting as I wrapped up the workday, taking my final call with a former colleague who had recently raised seed funding and was the CEO of a new startup. We were both based in Toronto, known more for its biting cold winters and less for its booming technology scene. The conversation started…
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Content, Without the Marketing
I’ve kept my studio Wonder Shuttle mostly dormant for the past four months, as I got into the groove of a full-time editorial director assignment at WorkOS. Some more notable projects include launching a podcast, setting up the editorial calendar and hiring a technical editor, and editing and publishing (and even co-writing some) blog posts.…
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Why Unrealistic Expectations May Be Exactly What You Need
In the 1980s, educator Jaime Escalante taught calculus at one of the worst schools in East LA, with a dropout rate as high as 55%. Escalante and his calculus class turned the reputation of the school around, with a high percentage of his students passing the AP calculus exam. When a film based on this…
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The Devil’s in the Details
Practically a decade before I wrote the words you’re reading now, I wrote a series of op-eds for HYPEBEAST. I had pitched a few that didn’t make the cut, my favorite of which was entitled, “God is in the Details.” I wanted to cover how typography could make people think differently. The idea was interesting,…
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My Favorite Warm Up Exercise Before Writing
Sometimes, I’ve found myself writing with very broken chunks of time: at its most aggressive, it’ll be on demand and with probably 20 minutes in between meetings, with hard deadlines. Other times, late at night, not by choice. In these times, there’s every reason not to write—distraction, despair, and time pressure, not exactly Neal Stephenson’s…
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Fake It Till You Make It: When It Works, When It Doesn’t, and Why
When I was 16, I took a high school co-op course that put me in a placement at a local technology holdings company. It was a small family business, employing a few software engineers and a receptionist. The receptionist would tell me about The Secret and the law of attraction, which I realized was a…