One of the most important parts of hesitancy is that it compounds. When you notice other people making progress, and you feel caught in inertia, it’s important not to let your own expectations get away from you; you’re not going to catch up by aiming to catch up. Let’s say you and your friend had […]
Marginal Revolution should be how every person or company measures success with its content marketing efforts. Let’s evaluate it from a marketing perspective: It has made authors Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok undeniable leading thinkers (i.e., thought leaders) It has become an incredibly effective launchpad for their projects (like Emergent Ventures, or acquiring PhD students […]
When I first independently published Creative Doing, the initial manuscript was 10,000 words (⅓ of its current length), published under a different title, as a PDF digital download on Gumroad. A few months later, I would connect with Holloway—as a cold submission—and sign a publishing deal with them. A year after that, after much editing […]
At The Knowledge Project 169, Dr. Julie Gurner says to Shane Parrish: I think that there is a very strong link—more than we think—with hesitancy and self-esteem. For example, I think the more you hesitate, you see other people doing things. You watch, right? If you don’t take the chance, and you watch other people […]
Legacy intermediaries (e.g., middlemen such as traditional publishers, record labels, agents, etc.) are incentivized to make you think that you need them. This belief gives their businesses the best chance of continued survival and better advantages. The key is: whether you actually need them or not is entirely another matter; they only need you to […]
Because there’s so much noise on the internet, it takes an extremely loud one to stand out. In marketing, there’s a heuristic known as effective frequency, also less formally as the Rule of 7; in order for a person to commit to trying your product, they need to hear it at least 7 times. Given […]
For whatever reason, while I’ve known the power of collaboration in my head, my heart generally inclined itself to stay hush on my works in progress (WIP). Some reasons: I don’t mind telling friends or people, I just also don’t want to tell everyone; there’s the paper suggesting that publicly announcing your goals could make […]
In the past couple of years, I’ve done most of my reading on an ebook reader (an Amazon Kindle). I love paper books, and I’d sworn by them through most of my 20s; then I moved across the world and couldn’t bring them with me. I’m slowly donating them to the library. As you can […]
Seth Godin describes The Dip as, “The long slog between starting and mastery.” Two excerpts from Seth Godin’s The Dip stood out to me: “The brave thing to do is to tough it out and end up on the other side—getting all the benefits that come from scarcity. The mature thing is not even to […]
While many marketers, journalists, and writers gather up their year-end round ups and campaigns—each largely only differing in the assortment of inventory—a decade ago, the Bloomberg Businessweek team found a moment of truth within the structure: the jealousy list. It describes the premise as, “All the stories we wish we wrote this year.” It’s a […]