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If you’re embarrassed by your early work, that means you did it right
Anybody who does anything worth doing knows how difficult it is to get through the early work. While you have great taste, your skills aren’t at the level you need to match it yet—so you make work that falls short of your vision. It feels mildly embarrassing at the time, but as the years go…
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You won’t think your way out of overthinking
Overthinking—making and updating plans, gathering information, talking to people—is only useful for protecting you from the pain of reality and the hard work it takes to learn. It is not useful if you actually want to achieve your goal. What is useful is doing. Because you’ve already thought so much about it, you probably aren’t…
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Who you are vs. how you appear
I recently came across The Luddite Club co-founder Logan Lane’s speech at MoMA R&D Salon 48 entitled, “No More Likes” (via Alex Vadukul). Her closing message really resonated with me: There’s a certain vulnerability unique to younger generations, having grown up digital natives. For the youth of today, the developmental experience has been polluted. It’s…
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When you make a new option, you make the world better
Drake is, by far, the best-selling artist in hip-hop and rap in the past decade. But there’s plenty of space for everyone else. The world is better with other people’s art—Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino, Tyler, the Creator. The best part is all of those artists lean into being themselves. They don’t try to pretend to…
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Three quotes on routine living
Living a heavily structured life, always by the rules, also drains it of vitality. “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead,” Aldous Huxley writes. That’s part of the drawbacks of relying too heavily on habits; the action becomes practically mechanical. “The beauty of an action comes…
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Skateboarding as an infinite game
For over 2,000 years, people survived without skateboarding. That changed sometime in the late 1940s—perhaps the early 1950s—when a group of surfers decided to attach wheels onto their wooden boards. Since then, skateboarding has become a way of life. People risk life and limb to practice this art. And the art form survives by enticing…
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Document the moment
A few days ago, I tried explaining why blogging was great precisely because it reached a smaller audience than social media. The smallest audience is one—and that’s you. Skateboarders bring a video camera to document the moment. They’ve done this since way before social media, so it wasn’t just about going viral. It was an…
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Golden Generation
Growing up, I didn’t know many people who did creative work. While I was very enthusiastic about writing and art, the possibility that a person was paid to make that work happen didn’t even cross my mind—let alone the fact that a person like me could do it. But even if I knew, how would…