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You won’t know until you do it
The trouble with wanting to learn how to do something accurately—knowing how it’ll turn out, knowing how much effort you need to put in, even knowing the purpose and reasons you need to do it, sometimes—is that you need to do it first. It’s a paradox. Some experiences you can only get firsthand. It’s expensive…
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The elevators start at the tenth floor
I really like what recording artist Burna Boy says to GQ: Unlike a lot of other people, I’ve had to go through never-ending steps to get here, whereas other people have taken the elevator up. I’ve always been too heavy for that kind of elevator, so I had to take the stairs. Now I know…
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Don’t become a content machine
If you browse Twitter frequently, or even occasionally, you’ll probably have become very familiar with threads—when an author connects multiple tweets together by replying to himself or herself. (Old heads like me will still let the term “tweetstorms” slip out.) People write a lot of threads, because people believe that Twitter amplifies threads. And of…
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“As soon as they like you, make them unlike you…”
“A lot of people you see on the internet HAVE to be on the internet.” Donald Glover, Interview Magazine Recently, Rolling Loud festival announced that headliner artist Ye has dropped out of their festival. A lot of Ye fans are, rightfully, righteously indignant—this is the second time this year he has dropped out, last minute,…
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Lloyd Banks, on inspiration from magazines
Obviously 50 is my favorite member of G-Unit, but Banks comes in at a close second. At GQ, he talks about how he found departure points for his songs from print magazines: [At home] I had probably somewhere between 600 and 700 rap magazines. That was my process: I would flip through them while I…
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Bill Watterson, Picasso, and HN on self promotion
One of the most interesting pieces I’ve come across lately was Hugh Eakin’s piece on the backstory of one of Picasso’s most prominent works, Guernica. During the creative process for Guernica, Picasso created 45 different sketches before settling on the final direction of the painting: Guernica debuted in 1937 at the Paris Expo, which over…
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Pricing, in magnitudes
I recently came across a speech by the son of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, Alexandre Arnault, who describes the very classic brand Tiffany and Co., where he now works as an EVP: We try to be super accessible. We want to be a place where everybody can get in the store and find something for…
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Most dreams stay dreams
I recently revisited a piece I wrote at the blog in March, “To all the dreams I dreamed before.” It’s a precious piece to me, because it was one of the blocks I’d experienced early in my life; I felt unqualified, unready, and undeserving to even aspire to do the things I wanted to do,…
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The classroom parable
At Twitter, entrepreneur Kevin Lee shares an anecdote about how a family business owner, which worked in electricity, turned extra space in its warehouse into a community-based classroom for immigrant workers to learn electrical engineering. That meant every Saturday, for four hours, immigrant workers could attend this free class to learn electrical engineering skills. Hundreds…
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Reversing Medium’s brain drain problem
After 10 years of leading Medium, CEO Ev Williams is stepping down. Medium faces a lot of challenges—I am sure Williams will reflect on many—but to me the main one is basically a way worse version of the problem that Substack currently faces: brain drain, a term used to describe “the emigration of highly trained…