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Flexibility cost
Sticking to the plan is usually the least expensive solution. However! Plans are just guesses. Sometimes we guess poorly. Or, circumstances change, and our guess proves to be wrong. For example, you planned to quit our job, and entrepreneurship turns out to be nothing like what you guessed it would be like. Or you started…
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Text generation
It used to be that typing was the only way to generate original text. By extension, you needed to actually know what you wanted to say before you could generate the text. Typing itself isn’t hard; the process of coming up with what you want to say, and then actually saying it, is the challenge.…
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Beef and A24
I just watched Beef this weekend, and it was really great. As much as I appreciate film and culture, I’m also well aware of how easy the experts make it seem to develop an opinion. For now, my eloquent, brilliant, opinion goes as far as this: it was really great. I greatly despise horror and…
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“You can do anything…”
With the implication that if you don’t, that was your choice. Your responsibility. Or if you’re being hard on yourself, it’s your fault you are stuck in the circumstances you’re in. As I wrote the other day, there’s a sense of cruelty to this, not only because it’s not a gentle idea; it’s also simply…
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Maps, masks, and models
“Never confuse your mask with your face. You are so much more,” Frederik Gieschen writes. “The map is not the territory,” is a phrase coined by Alfred Korzybski. “All models are wrong, some are useful,” George Box writes. By default, every analysis, heuristic, and principle omits something. They’re useful because they generally omit the right…
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Practicing
1. Everything is a practice. 2. One practitioner I follow, relatively closely, is Vin Verma. Vin documents a lot of his practice at Futureland. 3. For all of the priorities there’ll never be time for, there’s practice. I love watching Paul Ford and Rich Ziade continue their podcast practice at their new company, Aboard. They…
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The work needs to be enough: A creative manifesto
It’s well known that power laws apply to creative work. While the top earners can make an incredible amount of money, the rest of us in the very long tail do not. For every Ryan Kaji who makes tens of millions of dollars every year, there are thousands of kids who are talking to dwindling…
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Oops
This is the ideal way to respond if you make a mistake by accident. As in: “Oops, I made a mistake, please let me find a way to make this right.” “Oops, I made a mistake, please let me try to figure out why and fix it.” “Oops, I’m sorry I made a mistake. Please…
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A table for your thoughts
I once had a colleague who said he wasn’t able to stop snoozing his alarm clock. There was no way for me to talk him out of it. It was a fact of life to him: the sky was blue, the table was holding his laptop, and he couldn’t stop snoozing his alarm clock. Things…
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Creating a perception
Media—social, traditional, or otherwise—is not the ideal place to seek honesty, vulnerability, and genuine connection. It’s not a place to understand reality. It’s a place to create and interpret perceptions. If you’re doing creative work, your image and brand are an inherent part of the art. There’s a notion that work should be appreciated for…