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It’s still hard
A few weeks ago, a friend—a fellow author who also blogs every day—said something to the effect of, “I can’t believe you blog every day while you work a full-time job.” I shrugged it off. My memory of the experience mostly involves having a lot of fun, the writing feeling easy, and a deep sense…
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Serve tomorrow’s lucky 10,000
Every day, many people will learn something for the first time that you had taken for granted for years. For some of these people, the thing they learned could change their life. (Here’s a fun thread illustrating this possibility.) Randall Munroe makes this point with this comic at xkcd: There are some important implications here:
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The curse of knowledge
“The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” — Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century Via Asimov Press
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Can’t vs. didn’t
“People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.” — Florence Foster Jenkins PS Mag (via Anthony Iannarino) See Tommy Wiseau in Creative Doing. Go down the Florence Foster Jenkins rabbit hole here:
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Two questions for choosing a company to work with
Seth Godin suggests two great questions for choosing a college: Are the people this place attracts the sort of people I want to spend time with and become more like? Is the system that is in place here one that pushes and cajoles and processes people to become more like the kind of person I’d…
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Just one tooth
There’s a classic idea that the key to flossing regularly is to floss just one tooth. The key his this: it’s much easier to show up every day if you can reduce the task down to something so small and simple that it requires next to no effort. In Creative Doing, I share a prompt,…
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To succeed in the age of A.I., build your capacity for longcuts
A couple of years ago, my friend Nik Göke wrote a really nice piece at his blog, “Sometimes, the Work Is Easier Than the Workaround.” In the intro, he writes about trying to find a fast, technical, shortcut to scrape a bunch of text online: The tool was pretty technical, so it took a while…
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If you do the thing, then you can keep the job title
When Busayo Olupona was just starting up her fashion label—many years before it was stocked at outlets like Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom—she had quit her job and practically ran out of money. Many stories, sadly, end up that way; Busayo’s didn’t. She says her mentor Mercedes Gonzalez would hold her accountable for making a…
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The consistency edge
Replit runs its own 100 days of code challenge. Recently Paul Graham shared the stats on how many people complete the challenge: What if, simply by committing and showing up 100 times—around 15 mins, sometimes 45 mins, per day—you did something that 99% of people don’t do? This type of daily challenge is a great…