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Pay attention to the questions
What questions are you asking people? How do you ask the question? What questions do people ask you, and how? You can consider this from a voice and tone perspective—are you speaking monotonously? What emphasis are you putting on each sentence? Are you scripted or flying by the seat of your pants?—but also from a…
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“I wish I did this earlier”
True progress can be measured by the number of times the words, “I wish I did this earlier,” tumble out of your mouth. Sometimes, these words come with a sense of regret at the time lost not having this in your life, or perhaps even stupidity at how easy this other way is. If only…
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The power of the rubber duck
There’s a lot of power in talking through a problem, sometimes even if no one is around to hear it. You may be thinking out loud. This is known as rubber duck problem solving, because people often talk to rubber ducks. You make progress by talking to an inanimate object, or yourself; you either solve…
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6 points to consider before just shipping it
The current popular heuristic is, “Just ship it.” It leans towards a bias for action, giving people permission to ship something regardless of whether they think they are ready or not. Reid Hoffman’s popular saying goes, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” (I’ll never forget…
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Once, or every day
In the words of Andy Warhol, “Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.”
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Appreciating obscurity
“93% say that being a creator has introduced stresses that have ‘negatively impacted their lives,’ with 45% saying they’ve experienced ‘big emotional lows,’” report the authors of this paper which surveyed 1,624 respondents. There’s no surprise to me here. As I’d covered in Marker before, making money as a creator is tough. The creator economy…
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Walking both paths
An important secret to my process as a creator: build a good business from your product. This means developing the ability, infrastructure, and skills to earn money independently from partners, handlers, and other gatekeepers. At his blog, Derek Sivers writes: Make one plan that depends on nobody else. No record deal. No investors. No lucky…
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Clear the wastewater
There’s a metaphor: creativity flows, like water through a pipe. Julian Shapiro calls this the Creativity faucet. He writes: Visualize your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The first mile of piping is packed with wastewater. This wastewater must be emptied before the clear water arrives. From the perspective of this metaphor, the wastewater…
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Spotify inches into the enterprise
I was pleasantly surprised to see an announcement, involving Spotify for Work. Basically, Spotify is launching an initiative in which corporations buy Spotify premium memberships for its employees and offer it as a perk. I’m really bullish on the idea that most companies are well-served by moving into the enterprise; I’d previously written about Headspace…
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“This is probably dumb…”
I’ve now been writing at this blog daily-ish for 100 days now. It’s probably dumb. It certainly would look that way—stupid. Idiotic. Irrelevant. Corny. Cringe. So cringe. (I suspect the youth look at blogs the same way they look at Lin Manuel Miranda.) Blogging is dumb, in a sense. Not only because people just don’t…