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When emotions limit earnings
When I ran an editorial studio, I was often approached by clients to join their companies full-time. I declined these opportunities and conversations, because I enjoyed entrepreneurship and thought it was the best way to learn, until one client approached me with a salary that I found difficult to say no to. While money was…
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“Don’t do that”
I once got this piece of advice from a bestselling author after I told him I wanted to write a memoir. He told me, “Memoirs don’t sell unless you’re famous.” He wasn’t wrong, and I’m glad I listened to his advice at the time. It was also a sign to me: I didn’t really want…
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Doing meta-creativity well
Whisper of the Heart is all about a protagonist chasing her dream of being a writer, with her love interest becoming a violinist. Hacks is all about a protagonist early into her writing career, who gets cancelled for a distasteful joke. Girls5eva is a comedy show about a retired band going viral and getting a…
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A creator’s perspective
From the point of view of one who creates, everything is a gamble, a leap into the unknown. Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net
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“You don’t even know what hard is”
You don’t even know what hard is. You got plucked off the internet at what, 20? You just got lucky!… Good is the minimum. It’s the baseline. You have to be so much more than good. And even if you’re great and lucky, you still have to work really f–king hard! And even that is…
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Medium Day topics
Medium recently announced a call for Medium Day, which takes place August 12. When I wrote my first post for Medium, over a decade ago, I was in between graduating college and my first job at Pivotal Labs (and even tried to make Medium a part of its content strategy). I received an invitation to…
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Changing your context
Everything you experience is filtered through your mind. There’s no way to remove this filter, (nor would you want to). If you want to change your behavior, or how people perceive you, you need to embrace the art of contextualization. Reading a book, writing regularly, and identifying someone you want to be more like and…
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Contextualization
Over a decade ago, researchers ran an experiment, starting by generating hundreds of pieces of art and splitting the art into two groups (source, backup). One group was labelled as being part of a prestigious art gallery, and the other was labelled as computer generated. The researchers recruited fourteen student subjects, scanned their brains with…
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Marketplace of truths
“Language is also clearly crucial for a special kind of abstract thinking that requires what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls ‘scaffolding’—chains of reasoning so complex that we need external placeholders to keep us from forgetting where we are,” writes Edward Slingerland in Trying Not to Try (p. 60). Slingerland continues, “The sum total of these…
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Advice for high performers
If you’ve been recognized as a high performer by someone, you’ll probably need to learn different things than everyone else. For example, while other people can let go of their work very easily, you may have trouble doing that; you can’t stop thinking about it when you get home. This might be fine in your…