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Contentions: Describing your work
The way you describe your work is incredibly important. Not only is it how other people know what it is you do; it’s also a chance to show what you believe in, and to make the case they should believe it too. For example, Debbie Millman distinguishes between the image of “personal brand,” and the…
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The smart thing vs. the right thing
The internet is riddled with so many posts on how to do things the smart way. You’ll see it in other words—“more efficiently,” “optimize,” “pareto principle,” “shortcut,” “insight”—etc. Effectively, it’s an acceptable way of suggesting, “Here’s a secret.” You may also have been trained to keep a radar up for these things; to always try…
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Solomon’s Paradox
“Solomon’s paradox of wise reasoning, in which performance of wisdom differs when reasoning on an issue in one’s own life vs. another’s life, has been supported by robust evidence,” write Wentao Xu, Kaili Zhang, and Fengyan Wang in Frontiers in Psychology. Sometimes, we’re too close to the problem; maybe it’s directly in our blind spot.…
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Don’t live the someday life
In spite of the seasons in life, some things are too important to save for, “Someday.” Like, happiness. For those deferring happiness: bad news. The next promotion won’t make you happy. Quitting your job won’t make you happy. Learning a skill won’t make you happy. Dr. Hannah Rose wrote a great post on the proper…
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Perceptions vs. the truth
“One of the attractions of newsletters and podcasts for me is that the best ones throw off the artifice of knowing The Truth and instead are journeys of figuring it out. This is pretty much what being a human is about. We’ve always been trying to figure things out. I believe that’s what the attraction…
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Jeitinho
Mark Manson writes, “Jeitinho refers to the ability to find ways to cut corners or “hack” the system in some way. So if I figure out a way to renew my driver’s license without having to wait in line for three hours, that’s jeitinho. If I manage to find a way into the soccer game…
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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…