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Career patterns
It’s great to have role models or benchmarks of what success looks like. It also makes sense to study their career trajectories, strategies, and tactics. What doesn’t make sense is limiting your work and options based on you think the person you’re modeling after would or wouldn’t do. For starters, unless you know your role…
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Emily in Paris
I watched more Emily in Paris than I’d like to admit, so this piece taking it on tickled my brain. There are so many departure points for responses I don’t even know where to start; the signature of an exploratory, curious, piece. Lots of implications for creators (in the social media occupation sense of the…
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Contentions: Defending the turf
It used to be marketing 101 that you shouldn’t be too honest. You either had the best product in the market, or you weren’t doing marketing right. When people brought up alternatives or innovative solutions to you, you should shut them down and attack these “objections.” Of course, that’s not the best way to do…
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Creative Doing, at Pitch’s Presentation Gallery
When I was making a presentation for Ness Labs, I wanted to really step up the visual component, so I used Pitch. Some of the people who joined actually commented on how great the presentation looked during the Q&A. (Here’s how the team makes them… I love behind the scenes.) Pitch recently featured an abbreviated…
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Too big, too fast
I’ve got a draft of a post with a working title, “Better than SEO.” It involves what a venture capitalist named the “reversal of funnel” trend, where people start searching at platforms outside of Google. It started happening a few years ago with Amazon, and now it’s happening at TikTok and YouTube, and in groups…
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On the go
Discipline, routine, and stability are critical to creative work. The philosophical opposite—the ability to work quickly, on the go, and with whatever is in front of you—is just as valuable. Hugh MacLeod illustrates on small business cards for this reason; he can carry them anywhere, quickly whip them out when he gets an idea, and…
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Instinct
Instinct is an incredible tool for entrepreneurs and artists. If you’re in the early stages of doing something that’s heading in the direction you intended, you’ll feel the momentum. Maybe you tell your friends about it, and they approach you with an opportunity to do business together. Or you’re tapping into a new source of…
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“Will it work?”
There’s really no certainty that anything you actually want to do is going to work. The only way to really find out—to get a real answer that matters—is to do it. Whatever you’re trying out, treat it like a pilot project. You’re just investigating to see if it’ll work. I like to move fast on…
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Teaching yourself
The ability (and confidence) to teach yourself something is a wonderful thing. Depending on the subject, though, it’s often a very time-intense process. Once you can afford to, walk both paths; take the class, and teach yourself. Two teachers are better than one.
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When the Mexican fisherman parable breaks
I’ve seen this parable everywhere for years, most recently in Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks (great book!), and I’ve usually appreciated it: A vacationing New York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in…