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Just do the real thing (again)
If you want to get good at something, just start by doing it. Today. Sam Altman writes an important reminder on this: don’t outsmart yourself and spend precious time and energy working on fake prerequisites. Here’s an example, from my life, that I write about in Creative Doing: I felt like I needed to have…
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The vessel heuristic
What if, when you made art, you weren’t expressing yourself? What if you were a vessel for something greater to express themselves through? “The human mind is literally an antenna,” Pharrell says. “It picks up waves and transmissions from the ultimate source, from the ether.” “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before…
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A place and its magic
When my partner and I were on our honeymoon in Hawaii earlier this year, a driver told us about how the island had lost its magic to him. After he spent a couple of years there, he naturally stopped noticing the beauty of the island. He felt wistful about this, and while his intention was…
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Invest in your stories
My friend Peter started posting at LinkedIn a couple of years ago. He noticed that while people who followed him appreciated his advice, what they remembered most were his stories—about how he met his co-founder and started an agency, how they spun out new companies, and his move from Brooklyn to Hudson Valley. It’s with…
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Fast & Furious
The Fast & Furious franchise was inspired by an article on street racing culture by Kenneth Li. The first three movies in this Fast & Furious franchise—Fast & Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—maintained its signature by staying true to this throughline, rotating its cast members, and focusing…
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Confidence vs. trusting the process
“This might not work,” Seth Godin writes in his blog post, “Out on a limb.” (It’s one of my favorites, alongside “Talker’s Block.” ) It’s fascinating to see this idea make it into a key part of his book The Practice, which I recently picked up and find myself liking a lot. If you pick…
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Serious writing
In Impro, Keith Johnstone describes how his teachers taught him to write, “They wanted me to reject and discriminate, believing that the best artist was the one who made the most elegant choices. They analysed poems to show how difficult ‘real’ writing was, and they taught that I should always know where the writing was…
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Some notes on a return visit to Hong Kong
In late 2021, I moved to Hong Kong for six months. My partner and I enjoyed it so much that we ended up staying nearly a year and a half. We moved to New York City shortly after that, and I started my job at Figma. I always thought I’d document the trip some other…