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Separate Bedrooms
Eddie and Natashia Huang just launched a new podcast at YouTube, Separate Bedrooms: Eddie’s blog and career has been an inspiration to me for over a decade. (See self-worth and dreams, outspending vs. outteaching.) He’s done a really great job starting with himself and opening up a window into his life. I appreciate the free-flowing…
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Switch lanes to expand your perspective
Once you get into a good groove in your work, independently or at a company, you may feel reluctant to switch sides. Sometimes, exploring an adjacent or opposing lane is the best way to better understand the lane you want to be in. For example: If you’re an artist, try gaining experience managing or selling…
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Betrayals
My father has a saying in Cantonese, which roughly translates into, “You can’t trust people, you can only trust God.” This saying came to mind in last night’s episode of Ted Lasso. Betrayal is one of the most painful emotions. We’ve seen Ted Lasso deal with it, in different orders of magnitude, each season. I…
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Abundance of comfort
I recently came across Derek Thompson’s piece, “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems,” in which he describes a worthy objective: An abundance agenda needs a target. What should we make more of? One answer that I’ve given you is: essential goods and services where productivity rates are declining. But that’s a bit…
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“What do you write about?”
My uncle asked me this last night, I’m over 16 years into writing and I still struggle to answer this question precisely. Sure, I can put the highlights all in one place. Here’s an attempt to catalogue everything that’s caught my interest right now: Creative Doing is a compendium of exercises to unblock your creativity.…
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Decisiveness has an expiry date
For years, I’ve wanted to buy an external monitor for my laptop. I’ve worked with a dual monitor setup pretty much up till 2018. Working from a laptop screen was suboptimal. I’ve been meaning to buy one this whole time, and I didn’t until last Friday. Here’s what happened: As I started my search, I…
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Validation addiction
This is the latest in a series on theTV show Ted Lasso. Here was the first. Spoiler alert! One of the best gifts a person can receive is validation. The more underestimated a person is—bullied, treated cruelly, or just not being seen or respected—the greater the hunger for this validation. Nate’s storyline in Ted Lasso…
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Bad dads
In an interview with Vulture, James Lance (who plays Trent Crimm in Ted Lasso) discusses a three-minute conversation he had with Jason Sudeikis: I said to him that I felt the reason Trent was the way he was has to do with his father. He had a dad who really wanted him to be a…
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Why writing is fun for me
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” is a popular quote often attributed to Ernest Hemingway. I don’t mind that Hemingway wrote it; what confuses me is how popular the quote is. From this perspective, creativity is a curse, and the image of the tortured artist…
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Sour yell
There’s a scene in the latest episode of Ted Lasso (season 3, episode 2) in which AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Welton is watching her ex-husband Rupert Mannion (who owns a rival team, West Ham United) persuade a superstar soccer player, Zava, on the verge of signing a deal with Chelsea, to join his team instead. …