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Contentions: Article, series, zine, publication
It’s easy for gravitational pull—fear, doubt, uncertainty, lenience, confusion—to draw a project out longer than it needs to take. Especially at a large company, it feels like the more time and money you have, the better it’ll turn out. Of course, that’s not true; I’ve done projects with plenty of time, and some with tighter…
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Contentions: On curation, nostalgia, and people
I recently came across an issue of Wired Magazine in 1997, the issue where James Daly edited a long listicle entitled “101 Ways to Save Apple.” Looking back, there are some truly outlandish ideas in there (the first point is to get out of the hardware game, the second is licensing the user interface out…
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Don’t let Twitter teach you how to write
Social media platforms like Twitter are businesses, and their business models usually do not have your education in mind. Their business models usually involve getting the most reach for their platform and selling advertising. It’s agnostic to what content that is, even if it’s inflammatory, inaccurate, or miseducation. Professor Algorithm really isn’t a professor at…
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Contentions: The editing opportunity
With more people interested in writing with A.I. and A.I. word processing software, there’s probably going to be even more words floating around online. While it solves the problem of actually putting words on the screen—an A.I. can spit out hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of words in a second—some really important problems…
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Your future, one post at a time
“On a very long timescale, the entire future of every business is determined one warm intro, cold LinkedIn-outreach, or engineering blog puzzle solution at a time,” Byrne Hobart closes a recent post, The Counterintuitive Economics of Hiring. Anything you, your company, or your team puts out there can lead to an unexpected butterfly effect and…
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Overdue insights on daily blogging
My friend Vin, who appears in my book Creative Doing, and I were tweeting about the possibility of writing every day. I meant to write about this over a month ago, I’m now well over 100 days of writing at this blog every day, so here goes: Here’s how I’ve made it happen so far…
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A different consistency
You and I, as human beings, are not consistent. Still, our brains tend to think other people are consistent (fundamental attribution error), and our brains have a need for consistency (cognitive dissonance). A very literal application of this: scheduling. To say I appreciate habits and fixed routines would be a huge understatement. (I’m a virgo!).…
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“We should really write a blog post about that”
People don’t have time to write (Exhibit 1, 2). The difference between, “We should really write a blog post about that,” and a blog post actually going live on the internet is, mostly, time. (Consider, how many drafts do you have sitting in your files vs. live on the internet?) One solution is to shorten…