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Luxury and imperfection
“If you were to buy some of the famous brands of a luxury watch, you would probably be warned that it loses two minutes every year. The flaw is not only known, it is assumed – one could say that that is both its charm and its guarantee of authenticity. It is the specific and…
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Contentions: Services companies vs. full-time employees
Rand Fishkin wrote a really great piece on why companies should hire more services companies (e.g., agencies, studios, consultants, etc.). I’ve worked full-time at a Fortune 500 company and at a series B funded startup, as a fractional marketing leader, and as an outside independent expert or the project owner for my own services company,…
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Contentions: Culture turned outwards is brand, turned inwards is product
If you walk into any of the Din Tai Fung branches in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Australia, amongst dozens of other places, you’ll see the open kitchen through a big window. (Even the bootleg Din Tai Fung in Canada has a big window.) You know how the food is being made; the process and the experience…
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Finding passion, decision making, and shiny object syndrome
When I was growing up, my parents would describe me as a “generalist.” They didn’t mean it in a bad way—they were too!—though it also meant it wasn’t so obvious where my career would go, or what my skills were. I could develop my skills at most things I tried to do, especially with practice. …
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Time is not fungible
When you feel inspired, sometimes it’s actually really worth clearing your schedule out for the day. It’s time you won’t get back. Sometimes, the ideas will just pour out. Ideally, you can scribble them somewhere. On the flip side, those moments are not reliable and don’t come often for many of us; it’s also important…
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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…