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If You’re Starting to Write, Here’s the #1 Thing to Focus On
When the writing process met the theory of constraints Image: Damir Spanic/Unsplash “Should I write at my own blog, or at Medium?” Of course, the question is worth considering if you’re a new writer. But a more pressing question you need to focus on is: “How do I write something I’m proud of?” Writing is…
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Hard Decisions Become Easy When You Do This
4 Ways to Gain Clarity When Opportunity Knocks Last week, a friend had a job offer come up. It was a stable job opportunity in a chaotic time. It would be a step up in his field of work, it promised good money, and it could open up very interesting doors. He also experienced high…
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The Power of the 10% Read
Remember, 10% Is Better than 0% “I wish I knew about this 10 years ago!” I exclaimed this after I started organizing my notes and writing with them. And I only did that because after I read parts of How to Take Smart Notes. The book had been on my shelf for years; I’d even…
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Respond, Don’t Create
For many of us writing online, finding something worth saying is half the battle. And yet, this problem runs counter to one strategy to making ourselves heard: speak loudly and frequently. VaynerMedia CEO Gary Vaynerchuk, a successful user of such a strategy, has talked about how he was releasing 40+ pieces of content per day,…
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How to Learn, and Earn, like Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson
6 simple lessons, for a complex world, that will change your life You may know Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson for selling 30 million records, for his hit TV show Power, or his lollapalooza business successes (including owning Vitamin Water, which sold to Coca-Cola for $4.2 billion). What you may not know is Curtis Jackson writes…
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The Creative Failure that Led to Sigmund Freud’s Success
Why Even a Dead Page can have Purpose In 1895, Sigmund Freud started Project for a Scientific Psychology, a monograph where he tried to explain all neuroses under a single framework. The ambition and expectation of the task brought trouble of equal magnitude. In Creating Minds, Howard Gardner writes that Freud “reveals his own despair…
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As Stupid As This Sounds
Eddie Huang and David Chang dropped a podcast yesterday, and it was as good as I thought it would be. David’s voice kinda sounds like Joe Rogan’s, so it was almost like Eddie was back talking about TED and stuff. There’s a moment in the first year of Eddie’s restaurant Baohaus, when Eddie personally delivered…
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Doing Something Interesting Is the Best Way to Promote Yourself
I’ve advised a lot of companies, leaders, and friends on how to promote their work through writing. But as I was thinking about it, combing through Eddie Huang’s The Pop Chef archives and having seen one too many aphorisms on Twitter, I thank God for granting me this moment of clarity: If you’re not a…
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The Rise of Personal Infrastructure
The company person is dead; long live the entrepreneur. There are plenty of people who have written extensively about reasons this change is happening; the gig economy, neoliberalism, the winner-take-all system being just a few of many factors. I’ll leave it to the experts to talk about macroscopic changes. One very clear factor is, each…
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When You Can’t Outspend, You Need to Outteach
Showing Your Process Is the Best Promotion One tried-and-true formula to promoting your work requires you accomplish something, draw people’s interest (and sometimes money), by showing them how they can do the same thing. I’ll paraphrase what Kathy Sierra writes: When you can’t outspend, you’ve got to outteach. CEOs, creatives, and marketers all approach me…