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Don’t be precious about promoting your work
You will promote your work, and nothing happens. Someone else will promote your work, and nothing happens. Someone else will promote your work, and nothing happens. Someone else will promote your work, and it’ll go completely viral. Someone else will promote your work, and nothing happens. I’ve seen this happen over, and over, and over…
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Boredom feeds creativity
Sit in any waiting room. A doctor, dentist, or car inspection garage where you have absolutely nothing to do for about an hour. Or take a flight with no Wi-fi, and no leg room. Get stuck in traffic. Make sketches on a very small lined pad (even a napkin will do) with a good pen.…
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Making it happen
If you want something to happen, don’t be ashamed or embarrassed to go make it happen. In the case of creativity, if you want people to pay attention, don’t let reluctance or a fear of embarrassment or shame get in the way of you putting your work and yourself out there. 50 Cent writes in…
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Creative Doing, at Figma
During Config, I visited the Figma office in San Francisco. My book was on the book wall! Please give me a shout if you want a few copies for your office.
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A ladder of independence
Almost a year ago, I wrote about the importance of finding ladders to help structure your work. I just found a good one, “The Spectrum of Financial Dependence and Independence,” by Morgan Housel. There are 16 levels of independence, with clear definitions. I appreciate it because it’s much more flexible than what the typical label…
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Serious possibilism
People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naïve. I’m a very serious “possibilist.” That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly…
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Quantity and the long tail
A small amount of what you do is like to deliver most of the returns. When visualized in a graph, this phenomenon is known as the power law or the long tail. The problem is, you don’t know which amount it is; it’s impossible to predict, because the world is so complicated. Instead, the better…
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Ronald Read
One of my favorite recent discoveries is Ronald Read. Wikipedia describes him as an “American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant,” which you certainly don’t see very often. He amassed a small fortune simply by buying stocks, reinvesting the dividends, and sticking with his picks for many years. As the Wall Street Journal reports:…
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A quick spine prompt
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how you can stay focused on a creative project with a spine. 50 Cent writes a good example in his book, Hustle Harder, Hustle Smarter: Whenever I’m about to hit the studio, I try to think about all the great musical moments I’ve experienced from different artists. I…
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Fingerprints
In The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis writes of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s collaborative writing: By the time they were finished with the paper, in early 1970, they had lost any clear sense of their individual contributions. It was nearly impossible to say, of any given passage, whether more of some idea had come from…