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“What if I’m no good?”
Let’s say you want to do something creative. You’re not sure about how good you really are, or how much money you’ll make, or whether or not you’ll “go somewhere” with it. Would you do it anyway? The answer needs to be a resounding yes. That’s the level of drive and sacrifice that it takes…
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This is a bad sign
I was once asked to talk at a comedy class. I went in front of the class, and I said, “The fact that you’re even here is a very bad sign.” Jerry Seinfeld Most mornings I woke up early and took a walk around the neighborhood listening to an audiobook about confidence. Because that’s what…
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Preparation is not an excuse for procrastination
This post will be most useful for people who experience a tendency to overthink. In The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh writes that luck would decide 20% of the final score of the average football game. While that 20% was out of his control, he could still prepare and plan for the other…
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A second opinion, before giving up
A schoolteacher writes the first three pages of a short story on a typewriter. When he’s done, he’s disgusted with it. It was getting too long, he didn’t know how to market it, he didn’t like the character, he couldn’t relate to the story, the list goes on… He throws it out. His wife finds…
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Professional karaoke
While karaoke is incredibly fun, you won’t have much luck finding a job as a professional karaoke singer. You may have better luck selling your work as a cover artist or cover band, but even that’s different from karaoke. You need to practice. Learn a catalog of songs well. Find gigs and take requests from…
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“I saw your latest project…”
“Can you do that for us, too?” If you’re struggling with sales, figure out which part of the process you’re stuck at.
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Martin Scorsese’s longcut
Martin Scorsese recently donated 50 storage boxes of tapes to the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library. Long before the internet and streaming, Martin hired a full-time video archivist in his New York office to record films and television programs from multiple VCRs and monitors, label the video tapes, and catalog them using a card…
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“Intellectual concentration as entertainment”
Over a decade ago, Nassim Taleb wrote at Facebook: LEARNING TO DO NOTHING (Idleness as a BS detector/cleaner) – At the start of this year I resolved to do “nothing except if it felt like a hobby” i.e., “satisfy interests while providing entertainment value with zero pressure, no schedule and no feeling of duty”. The…
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Monthly hackathons, but for writing
A couple of years ago, I asked a group of experienced developers if engineering blogs had ever made them want to join a company. I received an interesting response from someone who worked at Incident.io, “We see so much ROI that we run monthly content days for the entire company, getting everyone to draft posts…
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Believe it
Donny Deutsch writes in Often Wrong, Never in Doubt: There are 20,000 advertising copywriters in New York City right now. If I polled them, I’m absolutely positive that 19,990 would say they deserve to be a creative director. “I’m working for them, I’m smarter than they are, I do all the work…” Every one of…