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“Rules for the temple”
Excerpted from Donald Glover’s behind the scenes look at Atlanta seasons 3–4 writer’s room: 1. No shoes 2. No smoking inside 3. No tweeting, instagramming or blogging about where we are/ what we’re doing 4. Do not bring others in without asking for the invite beforehand 5. Work begins at 10 am Create a safe…
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Improve the interface
The best social media sites have incredible network potential, but none of them enable a really good creative process. It’s the same upload process, or just typing or pasting words into a field. What sites like Unum, Buffer, and Hypefury—and even Linktree (to the tune of $45 million!)—have done incredibly well is identify parts in…
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Blogs are a longcut
“Blogs are dead.” I know what people who write that with the headline mean, which is mainly that the vibe has shifted away from blogs. It makes sense to me; social platforms are incentivized to keep people in the platform, so any content linking outwards—to, say, a blog—will not be boosted organically by the algorithm.…
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3 Lessons I Learned from Virgil Abloh About Saying “Yes”
How does one go from being a recording artist’s trusted, and reliable, creative collaborator to being the menswear designer at Louis Vuitton? Some might say that such a journey would be practically impossible. That’s the journey that the late Virgil Abloh made, accomplishing in years what others take decades to; it all started with screen…
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Advice for yourself
Somehow, it always feels easier to solve other people’s problems. The answer is so loud, it practically hits us in the face. It’s so easy to give advice. Yet when it comes to our own… not so much. It’s difficult to come up with a plan, to see our own weaknesses, to get outside of…
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Returning the favor
Over a decade ago, Craig Miller was recruited to work at Shopify as its VP of Marketing. The problem: he had just bought a home in Toronto and his life was there, and Shopify was Ottawa-based. They were not flexible with the location, and neither was he. So he passed on the job offer. In…
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“Exaggeration with a purpose”
One of my favorite passages in The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene (recommended in this month’s Best of Books): “What we must understand about the attitude is not only how it colors our perceptions but also how it actively determines what happens to us in life—our health, our relations with people, and our…
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Repairs or renovations
A common piece of business advice is to find someone with an urgent, painful, and ideally expensive, problem, and to solve it. You don’t want to be a solution looking for a problem. This is generally good advice; the definition is also far more expansive and flexible than it would seem. Repairs, for example, fit…
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The Tyranny of the Note Taking Industrial Complex, and Other Notes on Notes
There’s been a lot of critique going on lately about notes. My friend Rick and I talked about it a few months ago, and I’d been copying and pasting the links down in an Airtable record (Haha—not kidding though). I’ve written 1,000+ notecards at this point, at least 200 of which made it into this…
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Focus involves quitting
Quitting sucks. We’re taught not to quit it. We’re also taught to do more, all the time; to always grow. This is a tension that often gets in the way of us being the best at what we do. The Dip isn’t just a book about quitting, it’s a book about focus; “The way you…