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“Quarter million a year, and that don’t bounce”
That’s from “Untouchable,” when Pusha T talks about working as the president of Ye’s record label GOOD Music. His boast was in the salary he’d be earning working in a powerful role at a cutting edge record label, and not relying on the fickle income of music and the struggle of staying relevant in an…
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3 Ways to Change Your Attitude to Change Your Circumstances
Phrases like “Visualize success,” or the importance of having a “Winning attitude,” have been thrown around so much that they’ve almost become parodies for team building office culture. Because they are so cliché, and often used as an excuse for unfair situations (corporations like to distribute the book, “Who Moved My Cheese?” whenever they lay…
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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…