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Katsushika Hokusai, drawing on the floor
Yesterday, I visited the Sumida Hokusai Museum. One thing that stood out to me was his rather modest studio; there was a replica in the museum. Hokusai drew on the ground! Creativity is not about the tools, it’s not about breaking through constraints; it’s about working with what you’ve got. I didn’t take a photo…
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Contentions: Stop querying searches, and get out there
Search isn’t great for discovery—for helping to answer unknown unknowns. In other words, you’re not going to find things you didn’t even know you were looking for. Sometimes, the best way—the only way—to discover what you’re looking for is to actually go into the physical world. Get out of your chair. Open books and magazines.…
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Breaking the curse of perspective
It’s so easy to spot other people’s blind spots, and it’s incredibly difficult to spot your own. Sometimes, that’s because we’re effectively blind to it; our perspective of the world doesn’t allow us to see what’s really happening. Other times, it’s because we don’t want to see it; our perspective of the world protects us…
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Sold out
When you know that you’re not able to get something, you want to know why. Even when you had absolutely no interest in the first place. Scarcity is extremely effective. (It’s the fundamental principle of hype culture.) If the seller ran out of a product, that must mean a lot of people bought it, which…
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Replace rankings
The leaderboard is one of the most common diagrams we use to measure the best and the worst. Whether it’s, “Top five, dead or alive,” or “Stack ranking,” we use rankings as a way to make decisions. Unfortunately, with letter grades and awards, we’re also the constant subject of rankings; so much so that we…
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Pulled through the gates
In order to preserve their livelihood, a gatekeeper’s job is to protect the business. They need to filter out real business opportunities, and good people, from all of the other chaos in the world. If you’re a creator, you want to get pulled in through a gate—and corresponding gatekeeper—by someone that the gatekeeper already trusts.…
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Less is a practice
Throughout life, we’re taught to pick up more stuff. I mean this not only in the literal sense of buying products, but also in the sense of work. Exploring and picking up more opportunities. Exploiting current opportunities more. Meeting more people. It’s easy to say that you’re going to do less, which seems to be…
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A.I.’s impact on yesterday’s creative business models
Interest in A.I. has exploded thanks to OpenAI’s recent release of ChatGPT. If you’re an artist or creator, this is a huge event, and it’s right of you to pay attention. Tyler Cowen writes: ChatGPT excels at producing ordinary, bureaucratic prose, written in an acceptable but non-descript style. In turn, we are likely to better…
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Let the ideas do the work
Companies that open a window into the process and culture are able to draw in much more marketing and recruiting than they should be able to. If you want to bolster your recruiting efforts, corporate handbooks are a simple way to start doing this: see Posthog’s, Airbyte’s, Basecamp’s, Valve’s, and GitLab’s. Less clicking send, more…
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It’s never too late
Ke Huy Quan, on restarting his acting career at 49: “For the longest time, I believed that I didn’t like acting anymore, until I started seeing my fellow Asian actors succeeding. I go: ‘Wow, time has changed. We are getting not just very stereotypical roles but meaningful roles, meaty roles.’ It wasn’t until then that…