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Making a movie
Let’s say you’re working a full-time job and, over the past year, have been inspired by something you learned about your family or your friends, or something that you experienced. You decide you want to make a movie. How would you approach it? Would you brave against the odds of the traditional film system, and…
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Intro to Creative Doing, at Ness Labs
Anne-Laure Le Cunff invited me to discuss Creative Doing with her community, Ness Labs. It was a really fun session: If you want to watch other sessions, check out: Creative Doing, on Infinite Loops Creative Doing, at Sharpen Your Edge Creative Doing, at Ideas Into Action Creative Doing, at Minds and Mics Creative Doing, at…
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Priority vs. energy
At his blog, Will Larson writes (emphasis added): Rigid adherence to any prioritization model, even one that’s conceptually correct like mine that prioritized the company and team first, will often lead to the right list of priorities but a team that’s got too little energy to make forward progress. It’s not only reasonable to violate…
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“Why don’t we also…?”
The extra step sounds simple enough. It’s two words. It’s high leverage. People think it’ll bring a ton more value to the process. And it will! Except, of course, if you can’t make that step happen. “Get published.” “Pitch publications.” “Meet influencers.” Even if there’s an opportunity to work together, things stall. At best, collaborations…
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6 types of posts for corporate engineering blogs
The majority of experienced developers who responded to this thread applied for a job or joined a company after learning more about it at a corporate engineering blog. u/improbablywronghere wrote, “Finding a blog post from a company is like you an interviewer at some company finding a public GitHub repo from a candidate.” Writing a…
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“It’ll just take 5 minutes”
It won’t, because clicking and typing isn’t the hard part or the long part. It’s the thought that comes before the clicking and typing. For example, say you have to reschedule a new event; you’ll look around for a new schedule and time in your calendar, write up an apology, consider if that person really…
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Simple technology and elbow grease
A little bit of personal beats a lot of personalization. I’d be willing to bet that a trained salesperson who built rapport with you will be more effective than an abandoned cart email, even though the latter is most scalable. A salesperson might take photos of the items you told them you liked, and send…
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Good is good enough
Doing something well is very different than doing something perfectly. In many cases, good is more than enough to get you started in the direction you want to go. If you need to do something perfectly in order to achieve your goal, your process isn’t tight enough yet. Something’s missing.
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Again, and again, and again
One of the simplest, and most challenging, ways to enlist luck on your side is to try again. I’m not saying to repeat yourself in exactly the same way, or to be nagging and annoying. I’m saying to give it another shot. Do another art show. Write another blog post. Send another email. In Twelve…
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Contentions: All publications go to purgatory
Insider recently broke the news that Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z’s) much-hyped publication Future will be shutting down. The news sounds surprising because it launched with such hype, and was even active in June: Head of a16z marketing and Outcast Agency co-founder Margit Wennmachers has said, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not…