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How to find a passed website with the Internet Archive
One special thing about the internet, for better or worse, is that few things ever really die. That’s largely not because websites don’t actually die—they do!—but because the Internet Archive does the really hard work of preserving them. I’ve written at length about digging up lost documents and how preserving them is like giving new…
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Aesop (the business), on lists
In their excellent hardcover book titled after their company, Aesop authors Jennifer Down and Dennis Paphitis write about the power of lists in an essay entitled “An Inventory of All Things”: At Aesop, there are lists on how we open and close a store or office each day, lists detailing laboratory processes, lists describing how…
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Make lists
Lots of them. List the moments and experiences that gave you energy, brought you confidence, and made you do what you do now. List the things you’ve done with your life. List the things you want to do with your life, and how you can do them (Can you do a smaller version of it?…
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For productivity geeks, futility is a relief and a starting point
A fascinating thread started at Hacker News about Oliver Burkeman’s latest post entitled, “It’s worse than you think.” There are words like, “pessimism,” “nihilism,” and “futility,” floating around in the comments. I commented in there a couple of times (1, 2), feeling confident after my own submitted blog post gained a bit of momentum. I…
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Say it your way, say it again (redux)
A few weeks ago, I came across one of my favorite diagrams. Sarah Arnold-Hall created it. But I wouldn’t have come across it if Steph didn’t share it through this very viral tweet. The image itself is original, but there’s an endless number of people who have written about showing up every day. Kishore Nallan…
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Why you should turn your conference talk into a blog post
If you’re a software engineer who has presented a conference talk, it’s definitely worth writing it up into a blog post and sharing it at a relevant Subreddit (like r/programming), DEV.to, and Hacker News. You’ll certainly get your ideas in front of more people—on the Internet, text still travels faster than podcasts or YouTube (on…
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“Make the bike shop and then go to the art shows after”
I love Tyler, the Creator’s very matter-of-fact approach to creativity. He’s very candid about removing pretense and mystique from the process. (He hates the word, “Inspiration,” for example.) Even when he was a relatively new artist, he tweets about betting Will.i.am a million bucks that he’d be doing what he loved in a decade, not…
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After dark, unfiltered, unbranded
Most content strategies (if not all!) could use a component where people pursue their own interests and explorations. This is vital to getting luckier and exploring new personal, or team, narratives. Consider Swyx’s after dark Twitter, and Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s interest in writing exploratory essays. This is actually prevalent at YouTube, where many popular creators…
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Overidentification
It really isn’t always your responsibility. Timing won’t always work out right away. It won’t always feel like this. People don’t ignore or reject you, they’re living their own lives. Things will not always turn out as you prefer or expect. It doesn’t always get worse. Things are constantly changing. Just trying is enough. P.S.,…
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A trick to consistency…
One of the challenges to getting anything related to creativity done is time and motivation. A solution here is to have an operation that you can do in mere seconds, so you can call your creative work complete for the day. I write in Creative Doing: The goal here is to simplify your creative operation,…