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Abundance of comfort
I recently came across Derek Thompson’s piece, “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems,” in which he describes a worthy objective: An abundance agenda needs a target. What should we make more of? One answer that I’ve given you is: essential goods and services where productivity rates are declining. But that’s a bit…
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“What do you write about?”
My uncle asked me this last night, I’m over 16 years into writing and I still struggle to answer this question precisely. Sure, I can put the highlights all in one place. Here’s an attempt to catalogue everything that’s caught my interest right now: Creative Doing is a compendium of exercises to unblock your creativity.…
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Decisiveness has an expiry date
For years, I’ve wanted to buy an external monitor for my laptop. I’ve worked with a dual monitor setup pretty much up till 2018. Working from a laptop screen was suboptimal. I’ve been meaning to buy one this whole time, and I didn’t until last Friday. Here’s what happened: As I started my search, I…
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Validation addiction
This is the latest in a series on theTV show Ted Lasso. Here was the first. Spoiler alert! One of the best gifts a person can receive is validation. The more underestimated a person is—bullied, treated cruelly, or just not being seen or respected—the greater the hunger for this validation. Nate’s storyline in Ted Lasso…
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Bad dads
In an interview with Vulture, James Lance (who plays Trent Crimm in Ted Lasso) discusses a three-minute conversation he had with Jason Sudeikis: I said to him that I felt the reason Trent was the way he was has to do with his father. He had a dad who really wanted him to be a…
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Why writing is fun for me
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” is a popular quote often attributed to Ernest Hemingway. I don’t mind that Hemingway wrote it; what confuses me is how popular the quote is. From this perspective, creativity is a curse, and the image of the tortured artist…
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Sour yell
There’s a scene in the latest episode of Ted Lasso (season 3, episode 2) in which AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Welton is watching her ex-husband Rupert Mannion (who owns a rival team, West Ham United) persuade a superstar soccer player, Zava, on the verge of signing a deal with Chelsea, to join his team instead. …
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10 questions to help you decide between career options
What do you want to be doing in a decade? What will your ideal day look like? (How can you make it feel like Saturday, every day?) Which game do you want to be over? Which game do you want to keep playing? What do you need to to keep playing the game, and how…
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Contentions: Even release notes are an opportunity
Nobody thinks to write fun release notes. It’s all, “Bug fixes and improvements/enhancements.” Until the team at Slack did it. When you delight people often enough—like Slack does with its writing—you develop a brand that people enjoy spending time with. You learn to say it your way, and nobody can be better than you at…
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A fisherman and banker exchange numbers
I put this together based on the parable of the Mexican fisherman, as made famous by lifestyle design and the internet. (See also the situation where this parable doesn’t work out!)