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A meme can be a spine for your creative work
When you get to know your creative idea better, you need to preserve the core of it to help you focus. That’s what its spine is for. One interesting prompt is to see if you can express your idea through a meme. Kind of like this: Choosing the meme, naming the characters—all of this encourages…
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You are traffic
I got bored with people saying, like, “This world is shit.” It’s kind of like when people say, “Oh, this traffic is so bad.” I’m like, “You are traffic.” You can’t sit there and be like, “Oh man, the traffic was horrible. I’m sorry, I was late.” You are traffic. You’re in it. Without you,…
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Why almost everything is actually more difficult than it seems
The fluency illusion is a tendency for people to overestimate their abilities without sufficient evidence. Yale professor Woo-kyoung Ahn demonstrates this by showing students a few seconds of choreography and challenging them to imitate it. (It seems to cover a lot of ground similar to the Dunning–Kruger effect, a tendency for people with limited competence…
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Contentions: Poor Charlie’s Almanack, Stripe Press, and why it all works
A good friend of mine recently showed me Stripe’s new book, Poor Charlie’s Almanack. One of Stripe Press’s tactics is to republish old works with new packaging, and this one was a great choice. The original book was made nearly two decades ago by Peter Kaufman, who compiled quotes from Charlie Munger’s speeches, and put…
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For better video calls, play a soundtrack
Ali Abdaal writes in his newsletter: Whenever I’m on a Zoom call, I put my headphones or AirPods in. I then open up YouTube, and find an ambient soundtrack that I play at 5% volume (eg: Lord of the Rings ambience, Harry Potter ambience etc). This way, as I’m taking the call, there’s a soft,…
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Permission marketing, consistent distribution
“My passengers surprised me,” Gavin says, remembering his early days. “I thought they would be silent or on the phone. But most people wanted to talk. When I mentioned my jewelry, they asked for business cards, but I didn’t have any.” That’s when a light bulb went off in his mind: Why stop at business…
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Philip Glass, on independence
I had an ensemble at the time. I would go out and play for three weeks. We would come back from the tour, and we usually had lost money so I had to make money immediately. I put an ad in the paper. My cousin and I ran the company, and I moved furniture for…
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Appliances vs. toys
Nonfiction writing is like making appliances. Fiction writing is like making toys. While each craft has similarities—an understanding of electronics and electrical engineering, industrial design, etc.—they have fundamentally different goals. Nonfiction writing needs to be of service to someone, whereas fiction needs to engage and amuse them. A fridge with a TV screen is great,…
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Future fables
Aesop partnered with Literary Hub to release the second season of a podcast entitled Future Fables, where each episode is a bedtime story for adults in the form of the fable. There’s a lot to like about this, from the creative premise (“What sort of fables might its namesake—Aesop, the ancient Greek fabulist—write [today]?”), to…
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Fun is fun, compromised or otherwise
The reality is nobody loves your baby (or pet) as much as you do. We were ceding our sacred Saturday night to something — to age, to a lifestyle we weren’t ready for, to an identity we didn’t claim, to having to be less drunk than we wanted to be because the children were watching…