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10 questions to help you decide between career options
What do you want to be doing in a decade? What will your ideal day look like? (How can you make it feel like Saturday, every day?) Which game do you want to be over? Which game do you want to keep playing? What do you need to to keep playing the game, and how…
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Contentions: Even release notes are an opportunity
Nobody thinks to write fun release notes. It’s all, “Bug fixes and improvements/enhancements.” Until the team at Slack did it. When you delight people often enough—like Slack does with its writing—you develop a brand that people enjoy spending time with. You learn to say it your way, and nobody can be better than you at…
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A fisherman and banker exchange numbers
I put this together based on the parable of the Mexican fisherman, as made famous by lifestyle design and the internet. (See also the situation where this parable doesn’t work out!)
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You can’t judge creative work by Sales
Or Likes, Hearts, Views, Shares, or any other type of metric. That’s a difficult idea to reconcile, because these metrics can influence how much energy you spend on your work. For example, if your work generate enough Sales, then you can draw a Personal Income from it, which then makes you a Full-Time Artist. (Congratulations!)…
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“This will do”
“This is because we do not make objects to entice responses of strong affinity, like, “This is what I really want” or, “I must have this.” MUJI’s goal is to give customers a rational satisfaction, expressed not with, “This is what I really want” but with “This will do.” “This is what I really want”…
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Donald Glover, on productive gentleness
When Donald Glover asks himself, “What’s a good man to you?” he replies, “Someone who knows themselves. Who loves themselves. My father was really gentle with us. Physically and mentally. It felt radical at the time. I really miss him.” Similarly, when he’s recently asked what advice he’d leave with his kids (emphasis added): The…
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What my personal website and blog have done for me
As often happens, there was a great thread at Hacker News that inspired this post: 1. When I was 15, I started my first blog at Blogspot. (It’s still there!) It became a source of great fun and advertising money as a teenager. Because I wrote enthusiastically about technology, I eventually also met other people…
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“Luck” covers the outcomes we can’t explain
Peter Thiel defines luck: What I do think is that as a society we attribute too much to luck. Luck is like an atheistic word for God: we ascribe things to it that we don’t understand or don’t want to understand. As a venture capitalist, I think one of the most toxic things to do…
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Don’t make what you think other people want you to make
“What you really want to do is, when you make your videos, make sure you’re making them for yourself and it’s something you actually believe in—not a video that you’re doing because you think it will do good. Too many people make videos that they think will get views, but it’s not really in their…
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From fliers to billboards
Some conceptual artists work mostly with language and words. This includes Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer. (Lots more here!) Holzer was the most familiar to me; I came across her truisms in books, and also through her collaboration with Virgil Abloh in 2017. I recently found out that Holzer’s work didn’t start off…