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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…
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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.…