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Your noise, my song
97-109-107 writes at Hacker News: “Do any of you share the impression that the threshold for what is passing for articles and opinion pieces barely warrants being written down? The proliferation of blogging, posting and social media seems to have left me with a feeling with slight resentment towards most written content (as it’s just…
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Ship it anyway
There’s a story Nahnatchka Khan tells about recruiting Ali Wong as a writer for Fresh Off the Boat; Khan asked Wong’s manager for samples and a spec script, and receives a nine page script—a fraction of what she was expecting. Still, Khan had seen Wong’s standup and familiar with her work, and she was interested…
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On book promotion
Anne Trubek, founder and publisher of Belt Publishing, wrote a really cool piece about book promotion at her Substack, Notes from a Small Press. I’d excerpt it, but the whole piece is concise and worth a read: A brief portrait of Phoebe Mogharei, Belt’s marketing and publicity director, at work The randomness and necessity of…
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Shipping early as self-sabotage
Once you’ve shipped a lot of work, you start chasing it. You no longer fear shipping or releasing work; in fact, you might be hooked on it. Ship early, ship often, you think. The challenge changes. Anyone can ship early, even amateurs. People use shipping to phone in bad work all the time; that’s how…
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Need vs. Want
You can fail at things you love, you can fail at things you hate. One implication is: duh, do the things you love, because you could fail either way. You might as well fail at something you love. That’s only one dimension to life though. Doing what you love—or think you love—certainly can be a…
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What’s it’s name?
If you’ve noticed something interesting, do it justice. Point it out, and give it a name. You can call it whatever you like. The fewer people who have figured out how to put it into words, the better. For example, someone decided to take the idea of naming, apply it to business branding, and name…
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Career patterns
It’s great to have role models or benchmarks of what success looks like. It also makes sense to study their career trajectories, strategies, and tactics. What doesn’t make sense is limiting your work and options based on you think the person you’re modeling after would or wouldn’t do. For starters, unless you know your role…
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Emily in Paris
I watched more Emily in Paris than I’d like to admit, so this piece taking it on tickled my brain. There are so many departure points for responses I don’t even know where to start; the signature of an exploratory, curious, piece. Lots of implications for creators (in the social media occupation sense of the…
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Contentions: Defending the turf
It used to be marketing 101 that you shouldn’t be too honest. You either had the best product in the market, or you weren’t doing marketing right. When people brought up alternatives or innovative solutions to you, you should shut them down and attack these “objections.” Of course, that’s not the best way to do…
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Creative Doing, at Pitch’s Presentation Gallery
When I was making a presentation for Ness Labs, I wanted to really step up the visual component, so I used Pitch. Some of the people who joined actually commented on how great the presentation looked during the Q&A. (Here’s how the team makes them… I love behind the scenes.) Pitch recently featured an abbreviated…