I joined a podcast recently, and referenced this post I once wrote: don’t make “Bad” the enemy of “Good.” The editors at Fast Company picked it up a couple of weeks after I first published it. The gist of the post: Many times, “Good” things start out “Bad.” Thinking about it, getting feedback, looking for […]
You and I constantly deal with promises. We make promises to ourselves, we make promises with other people, and other people make promises with us. It’s easy to believe promises that are very near to the present, especially if the person has constantly kept their promises. Correspondence: “Let me get back to you by the […]
One of the prompts in Creative Doing is, “Focus on Connection.” There’s something special about making something for a few, specific, people you know. It helps make things specific: will this person like this? What would make them appreciate it? What problems are they facing, or what are they interested in? What do I want […]
I really liked Edward Slingerland’s coverage of how he wrote his book, mainly reading (for 18 months!), typing up note-sized cut outs in Microsoft Word and printing them out and pasting them on index cards, and then arranging and re-arranging the ideas until it makes sense. This always sounded like a ton of unnecessary work […]
Adam Mastroianni wrote a really cool piece, “Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs.” Mastroianni is referring to the analogy likening eating a frog to doing something that feels difficult every day. In this sense, I’m a frog eater myself. I started frog eating in the early 2010s in college, because I […]
You’ll know it when you feel it; too many meetings, too much management overhead, and hiring more people isn’t really producing as much output as it should be. This is caused by a debt of documentation; when the people on the team have spent too much time working in the business, and not enough time […]
I can’t believe I pitched this piece covering print magazines over a decade ago to Hypebeast. People showed love too—Hypebeast comments used to be friendly! It was really fun getting to do this, and it undoubtedly made me a better writer. Hypebeast also covered my work with Prologue and The World According to Kanye.
When I was writing Creative Doing, I noticed a pattern: in order to develop your creative process, you need to get comfortable with oscillating; constantly swinging back and forth between opposites and extremes. For example, one prompt was, “Obsess over Details,” and another was, “Stop Obsessing.” In order to develop your creative practice, you need […]
A year ago, I appeared as a guest on Nick Wignall’s Minds and Mics podcast to discuss my work with the book that would become Creative Doing. Our conversation was focused on practical creativity, and about halfway through we stumbled across an interesting topic: social comparison and creativity. In particular, we discussed the benefits and […]
A few weeks ago, I started a discussion at r/experienceddevs with the question, “Has a corporate engineering blog made you want to join the company?” I wanted to share some key findings: The majority of experienced developers who responded to the thread applied for a job or joined a company after learning more about it […]