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That’s that heat
For the new version of my book, my partner Bernice Liu (i.e., the artist Spime) blessed me and Holloway with the cover: Here’s an excerpt where I explain more about the cover. (I’m so happy that I can so conveniently link to these, it’s definitely a perk of publishing a digital book with Holloway. Print…
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De-risking
There’s a narrative that artists and industries took more creative risks in the past; one possible reason for that was the businesses and industry just was able to cross-subsidize different work. If they made a commercial success, that would fund the critical one. Author and critic William Deresiewicz writes: In the past, one of the…
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Load management
In 2019, during Kawhi Leonard’s championship run with the Raptors, I learned about the term, “Load management.” The British Journal of Sports Medicine defines the objective in 2016: “The aim of load management is to optimally configure training, competition and other load to maximise adaptation and performance with a minimal risk of injury. Load management…
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Make twice, sell twice
In November 2020, I independently published my first book at Gumroad. I had spent four months or so full-time deliberately researching, writing, editing, proofreading, and designing a PDF of ~18,000 words. That doesn’t sound like a lot of time, but you could say I spent most of the 2010s researching it (starting with this piece…
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Doubt as a driving force of creativity
One of the most difficult emotions to come to terms with is doubt; it’s also one of the most realistic ones. It’s the allure of faking it till you make it: you’re making a promise against your doubt with the hammer of reality, and trying to get more people to believe in you to drown…
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Career Oscillations
When we make plans, we think with consistency, regularity, and uniformity as stand-ins for discipline, discernment, and judgment. “I’m going to do this everyday,” or, “My approach is this,” or “I’m going to reach this milestone.” This is helpful in that it helps us get things done. The career ladder is one representation of this;…
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Fast Company!
I worked with the Fast Company team on a piece about saying no that ended up at the homepage. The key ideas from this piece came from my daily blogging; all it took was stitching them together, editing it, and making it more cohesive. Life is about saying yes, and saying no.
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Help each other
A person goes on vacation and asks their neighbor to watch their pet animals. The neighbor obliges. The neighbor writes a letter after: Good afternoon, This letter is regarding your vacation two weeks ago, and how you let me babysit Smokey, Oreo, and Jennifer. I’d just like to give you a letter of thanks. As…
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Time is not money
You make your time, then your time makes you. One of the biggest misconceptions of time is that it’s spent like money. While it’s customary for us to trade our time for money (e.g., working a job), time itself actually has few properties actually related to money. Unlike money, time is not fungible. Time can…
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“You’re too expensive…”
There’s a saying I’ve heard and lived by, “If 30% of people aren’t telling you you’re too expensive, you’re not charging enough.” Looking back, I realized that I often ended conversations there, when there was so much more to be said. After all, “You’re too expensive,” is a claim; what people actually meant when they…