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Find a ladder
Structure is great for giving people things to focus on and to channel their creative energy through. Structure is bad for constraining people and sucking away their motivation. It’s easy to either become too rigid with your structure, or to embody a swirl of chaotic energy. You need to know when to do what. One…
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“What if grinding is bad?”
A coach asked me this question in my late 20s. It was mind-blowing. At the time, I’d already read Trying Not to Try, and I was still soaking things in and slowly shifting my worldview. This question really accelerated the process. Some questions that counter-grinding question provoked: Wasn’t everything supposed to be a grind? If…
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Make a habit of sharing other people’s work
One of the scariest things about promoting your own work is the fundamental reality that nobody else cares. It’s not a personal attack on the worth of you or your work; it’s just that people are living their own lives. They experience their own thoughts, curiosities, and challenges. You may know this in theory, but…
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How Adidas Yeezy’s placement strategy works
In tenth grade, I learned about the 4 P’s of Marketing in business class: product, placement, price, and promotion. I’ve long considered product and promotion the most important pieces; in recent years, I’ve come to appreciate the power of price. Today, I want to write about placement and why it’s fascinating: There’s a tension that…
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Marketing as the sector of the future
Excerpted from Average is Over by Tyler Cowen: “Despite all the talk about STEM fields, I see marketing as the seminal sector for our future economy…. “It sounds a little silly, but making high earners feel better in just about every part of their lives will be a major source of job growth in the…
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Self-worth and dreams
It’s easy to buy into the idea that you can’t be happy until you’ve achieved your goal. Your dream, your personal calling, whatever you want to call it. The reality is, that we don’t control how things turn out after we do something. We only control our effort. Most dreams stay dreams, and we often…
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So, you want to start an engineering blog?
If your company really could start an engineering blog on its own, it would have one already. (A blog with three posts and one of them being “Hello World!” saddens me and does not count.) An engineer on the team would’ve made it part of their job, or the company would’ve hired an editor, or…
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Punctual gratification
Be happy today. Be happy now. Don’t put it off, because you’re not going to do it. Pay yourself first with your time, with your happiness, with your energy. If you said you were going to treat or reward yourself, keep your promise. Sometimes, it feels sad to actually try to be happy, excited, or…
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A job is a job
If you’ve committed to a new project, congratulations! You’ve just started a new job. You can call this an informal apprenticeship, an internship, or whatever. It’s a job. Even if it doesn’t pay you every two weeks. Even if you need to work on weekends. Even if it feels risky and unstable. Even if it’s…
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Don’t think to write, write to think
This is one of the lessons that every writer comes to appreciate: writing is thinking. Writing is not the artifact of thinking, it’s the actual thinking process. There’s no shortage of great quotes on this topic, the implications are less clear: Writing is the planning process and the final product: You don’t design a final…