2016–2022
438 posts
2022 322
December 2022
- What’s your signature?
- 72 seasons
- Each work is a gamble
- Side projects open doors
- Departure eyes
- The Brilliance and branding
- Work isn’t meant to be escaped
- Katsushika Hokusai, drawing on the floor
- Contentions: Stop querying searches, and get out there
- Breaking the curse of perspective
- Sold out
- Replace rankings
- Pulled through the gates
- Less is a practice
- A.I.’s impact on yesterday’s creative business models
- Let the ideas do the work
- It’s never too late
- Printing lottery tickets
- Acceptance mindset
- Contentions: Spaghetti at the wall
- While you can afford to be bad at it…
- Unblocking creativity with motivation and incentives
- Making a movie
- Intro to Creative Doing, at Ness Labs
- Priority vs. energy
- “Why don’t we also…?”
- 6 types of posts for corporate engineering blogs
- “It’ll just take 5 minutes”
- Simple technology and elbow grease
- Good is good enough
- Again, and again, and again
November 2022
- Contentions: All publications go to purgatory
- Pay for information
- Exploring vs. exploiting
- From implementation to strategy
- Easy businesses
- Experimentation, junk, and excellence
- Language builds culture
- Don’t beat them, don’t join them
- Pounding the pavement
- Practice like an expert, speak like an enthusiast
- The time it takes
- 3 life lessons I learned from one of the world’s best executive coaches
- Contentions: Less marketing, more teaching
- The decisiveness advantage
- “It depends”
- Seasons
- Stone soup
- Value ≠ compensation
- Writing culture
- Painkillers, vitamins, and trophies
- Direct sales vs. branding
- Stir the pot
- Ideas are cheap, good ideas are expensive
- Contentions: Help people write what they know
- Do it
- Capacity for change
- Forgetting and updating
- Wrecking the forgetting curve
- Strengthening brain connections
October 2022
- Preciousness vs. practicality
- Contentions: Publish, don’t send
- Luxury and imperfection
- Contentions: Services companies vs. full-time employees
- Contentions: Culture turned outwards is brand, turned inwards is product
- Finding passion, decision making, and shiny object syndrome
- Time is not fungible
- Contentions: Article, series, zine, publication
- Contentions: On curation, nostalgia, and people
- Don’t let Twitter teach you how to write
- Contentions: The editing opportunity
- Creative Doing, on Infinite Loops
- Your future, one post at a time
- Overdue insights on daily blogging
- A different consistency
- Creative Doing giveaway with Infinite Loops
- “We should really write a blog post about that”
- Time to ship
- “I don’t know…”
- Off timing
- Moving on from straight A’s
- Creative oscillations (the third)
- My butt’s in the seat. Now what?
- When a dollar is not a dollar
- The Winners Effect
- A business model example blending creativity and expertise
- Contentions: On Non-Coercive Marketing
- “Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.”
- Where’s the opening?
- Contentions: What does a vision for your company’s media operation look like?
- Complaining vs. caring
September 2022
- Creative Doing infographic
- “But I haven’t been able to force myself to…”
- Same word, different meanings
- Show up early, leave late
- “If I were actually smart, then I would…”
- Ivy League creative exercises
- Contentions: Viewer discretion is advised
- Contentions: “People don’t actually know that…”
- From 49% to 51%
- The present-promise gap
- Make something for very few people
- Writing a book with index cards
- Confessions of another recovering frog eater
- Documentation debt
- A decade since Hypebeast
- Creative oscillations (redux)
- Comparing vs. referencing
- How experienced developers use corporate engineering blogs
- Apple’s first store was awesome
- Generation vs. practice vs. performance
- Contentions: Stop wasting your money, nobody wants your content marketing
- Start smaller, cheaper, faster
- What I discussed at Interintellect
- Outer scorecard, or inner scorecard
- 1.5 hours with In the Air, on the Ground, under the Sea
- The Doing Thinking Flywheel
- “A luxury brand is a real and living person”
- 100+ days of writing every day
- I’m visiting Interintellect!
- Grass is greener syndrome
- Cultivating honesty
August 2022
- Recent discussions of my work
- Awesome ASCII art
- Treat promoting your work as its own craft
- Flexible habits are stickier habits
- “Financials are your best marketing tools”
- Knocking on doors
- Seek truth
- Build the team
- On developing a taste for problems
- Monkey barring
- Find a ladder
- “What if grinding is bad?”
- Make a habit of sharing other people’s work
- How Adidas Yeezy’s placement strategy works
- Marketing as the sector of the future
- Self-worth and dreams
- So, you want to start an engineering blog?
- Punctual gratification
- A job is a job
- Don’t think to write, write to think
- Confusion as a starting point
- I’m hiring technical ghostwriters!
- Patience is power
- Focus on the work
- How to write about failures
- Amazon gets Creative Doing
- Embracing average
- Creative oscillations (on discipline vs. play)
- Hastening gratification
- Notes on Axios’s business strategy with Axios HQ
- Insights from the idiot
- Creative Doing, at Sharpen Your Edge
- Tradeoffs
July 2022
- The four inner beings of a writer
- Dan Crowe, on starting Port Magazine
- The myth of “with zero marketing”
- Make a map
- What the heck took Yeezy Gap so long?
- The mythical secret sauce
- Yeezy video game history in three snapshots
- Quality control
- You won’t know until you do it
- The elevators start at the tenth floor
- Don’t become a content machine
- “As soon as they like you, make them unlike you…”
- Lloyd Banks, on inspiration from magazines
- Bill Watterson, Picasso, and HN on self promotion
- Pricing, in magnitudes
- Most dreams stay dreams
- The classroom parable
- Reversing Medium’s brain drain problem
- Yeezy as a turnkey luxury brand
- Instrumentalizing creativity
- Creativity as an infinite game
- Your work and your friends
- I was wrong about audiobooks
- Quantity? Quality?
- My story on Pusha T in Trapital
- Creative Doing on the Ideas Into Action podcast
- How is it priming your brain?
- How to find a passed website with the Internet Archive
- Aesop (the business), on lists
- Make lists
June 2022
- For productivity geeks, futility is a relief and a starting point
- Say it your way, say it again (redux)
- Why you should turn your conference talk into a blog post
- “Make the bike shop and then go to the art shows after”
- After dark, unfiltered, unbranded
- Overidentification
- A trick to consistency…
- Don’t do it for the awards
- Two sides of the same coin
- Come for the creativity, stay for the expertise
- Creative hangovers
- The energy edge
- Quantity as an unblocking and organizing force
- 100 different offers
- Less force, more fun
- Creators as experts
- Hotel playlists
- Remembering the good stuff that your brain forgets
- The rolodex
- What showing up every day actually means
- How to legally access an academic paper for free
- Optionality cost
- You’ll never know when you go viral
- Collecting to build and demonstrate expertise
- Since you’re here, you might as well…
- The joke funnel
- If you want (your team) to write better, start with your Google Docs comments
- Pay attention to the questions
- “I wish I did this earlier”
- The power of the rubber duck
May 2022
- 6 points to consider before just shipping it
- Once, or every day
- Appreciating obscurity
- Walking both paths
- Clear the wastewater
- Spotify inches into the enterprise
- “This is probably dumb…”
- Early rejections
- The cost of a free lunch
- What I talk about when I talk about doing
- The story of Creative Doing, at Human Parts
- Permission to ship
- You choose your game, then your game chooses you
- The trap and the truth
- Creativity, for fun and profit
- A new pair of glasses
- The non-essentials
- Helping feels better when you want to help
- The creativity-productivity relationship
- Rebuilding year
- What your work is missing
- Either way, it’s gonna be difficult…
- That’s that heat
- De-risking
April 2022
- Load management
- Make twice, sell twice
- Doubt as a driving force of creativity
- Career Oscillations
- Fast Company!
- Help each other
- Time is not money
- “You’re too expensive…”
- Half a match
- You shouldn’t write a book unless…
- It works for you
- 30 productivity hacks
- Wiz ships
- Good Writing Money, Bad Writing Money
- The “no skip” intro
- Obscurity is a gift
- Stop stopping
- Throw out the instruction manual
- How to present your work so it gets the results it deserves
- Inbounding
- Not actual gameplay
- “Quarter million a year, and that don’t bounce”
- 3 Ways to Change Your Attitude to Change Your Circumstances
- “Rules for the temple”
- Improve the interface
- Blogs are a longcut
- 3 Lessons I Learned from Virgil Abloh About Saying “Yes”
- Advice for yourself
- Returning the favor
March 2022
- “Exaggeration with a purpose”
- Repairs or renovations
- The Tyranny of the Note Taking Industrial Complex, and Other Notes on Notes
- Focus involves quitting
- The best way to be the best
- Web2.0 in a Web3 world
- It’s right in front of you
- The marble of the day
- 5 hook sentences to compress your ideas
- To all the dreams I dreamed before
- How I write every day
- 5 sentences on Ye speaking things into existence
- Quintessentialism
- Positioning Ye
- Why Ye should not start his own social media platform
- To bolster your confidence, work on your positioning
- 5 Sentences about Ye on Failing
- How to distribute your writing
- Focus on what makes an experience matter, not the experience itself
- The rise of celebrity-based courses
- Executives who can execute
- Scripted, or unscripted?
- When idea becomes solution
- Why I stopped calling myself a “freelance writer”
- How a daily writing habit sparked my creativity
- The other half
- Hire yourself
- Slowing inspiration down
- Do Less, Little By Little
- Don’t make “Bad” the enemy of “Good”
- Audiences in the arenas
- Hard Work, Plus
February 2022
- Reiterate
- The Museum of You
- Fans stick together
- Lighthouses
- Permission to Wonder
- 5 Sentences on Jeen-Yuhs Act 2
- Business trust over business size
- Why your backstory is a key to referrals and word of mouth marketing
- The Overlap
- 5 More Sentences on Ye Releasing Donda 2 on the Stem Player
- 5 Sentences on Ye Releasing Donda 2 on the Stem Player
- Two Reactions to Jeen-Yuhs
- Apophenia
- What do you need to fire yourself from?
- Consistency starts with inconsistency
- Start with you
January 2022
- What to Do When Your Work Won’t Sell Itself
- What I Wish I Knew About Quoting Other People In My Writing
- Don’t Just Learn from the Past. Learn from the Future, too
- The Ultimate Guide to the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
- The Simple Truth Behind Successful Creative Projects: They Start Small
- Unlearning Is an Underrated Skill
2021 76
December 2021
November 2021
- Digital’s quieter half has been doing its work this whole time
- A Founder’s Guide to Startup Branding Through Writing
- Content, Without the Marketing
- Great Writing Is an Extension of the Product
October 2021
- Big Ideas, Small Papers
- Why Unrealistic Expectations May Be Exactly What You Need
- The Devil’s in the Details
September 2021
- How to Write Faster
- My Favorite Warm Up Exercise Before Writing
- The Limits of Personal Productivity
- Fake It Till You Make It: When It Works, When It Doesn’t, and Why
- On Education as Investment
- On Earliness
August 2021
- You’ll Never Have Enough Time. Start Your Creative Work Today
- Work on the Weekends Only If You’re Learning Something Useful
- How to Stop Overcommitting at Work: A Summary of Unplanned Work in The Phoenix Project
- How to Break a Creative Block in 24 Hours
- What It’s Like to Write Articles with Artificial Intelligence
- When Stress Is the Problem, This Is the Solution: A Summary of Slack by Tom DeMarco
- A Bias for Action: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos on How to Stop Overthinking
- The Discipline of Joy
- How to Make Art Without Worrying About Money
July 2021
- Shopify’s Founder Tobias Lütke on Creativity and Constraints
- Without a Word: How Kanye West Launched His Album Donda to His Church
- How Parasocial Relationships Help Us Learn About Others and Ourselves
- Dify
- How to Navigate an Unconventional Career Path (with 7 Examples)
- On Self Promotion
- Why the Yeezy Gap collection could be worth $272 million+
June 2021
- The Hidden Costs of Deep Processing
- Bill Gates Gifted 4 Million Copies of This Book. Here’s Why and What It’s About
- How to Ease Brain Overload without Trying Harder
- What a Multi-Hyphenate Career Actually Looks Like
- The Soothe of Creative Wellness
- 8 Lessons from 8 Years of Writing at Medium
- Hope is as hollow as fear
May 2021
- Reading Is Reading Is Reading Is Reading
- The Right Way Fallacy
- Want to Find Your Passion? Start with the Objects You Love
- What Does It Mean to Be a Creative Person?
- After 100 Days…
- A Book Is a Decision to Change
April 2021
- 3 Keys to Get Out of Feeling like There’s Never Enough Time and Get Creative Projects Done
- Spark Your Creativity Activity with these 25 Daily Creative Challenges
- Creativity Advice, According to GPT-3
- How to Decide What to Do with Your Creativity
- The 20 Second Creative Challenge
- This Four Stage Creative Process Shows You How to Unlock Your Creativity
- 3 Fun Ways to Get More Creative in 60 Seconds
- Say It Your Way
- Steal these 3 easy ways to cultivate creativity from a Grammy winner
- 8 Lessons from 800 Note Cards in the Zettelkasten
March 2021
- 8 Lessons on Creativity from the Artist Who Sold a $69 Million Collage
- The Rise of Personal Infrastructure (Redux)
- A Portrait of Information and Luck
- Experimentation Is Key to Opportunity. Here Are 3 Ways to Build It Into Your Daily Routine
- 3 creative strategies that can make you as prolific as Edison, Mozart, and Picasso
- 7 Goals to Give Up to Be More Creative
- 3 Lessons I Stole from the Book Bill Gates Recommended to Satya Nadella
- Why Keanu Reeves Practiced Holding a Diamond with Tweezers for Weeks
- 4 ways to read more books this year
February 2021
- I used to be a staff writer for Lifehacker. Here is my most important insight about productivity
- The Business of Blockheads
- Why People Pay $10,000 per Month to Work with These Editors
- 10 Question Commandments
- The Lifetime Value of an Idea
- In Praise of Software Scribes
- Let’s Get It: Author Motivation 101
- Process Your By-products
- Story-Driven Pitching: 6 Steps for Better Pitches
January 2021
2020 26
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
June 2020
- The Agile Writer
- Your Success Does Not Depend on Productivity Rules
- An Alternative to College this Fall
- Keep Your Expectations Small
May 2020
- If You’re Starting to Write, Here’s the #1 Thing to Focus On
- Hard Decisions Become Easy When You Do This
- The Power of the 10% Read
- Respond, Don’t Create
- How to Learn, and Earn, like Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson
April 2020
- The Creative Failure that Led to Sigmund Freud’s Success
- As Stupid As This Sounds
- Doing Something Interesting Is the Best Way to Promote Yourself
- The Rise of Personal Infrastructure
- When You Can’t Outspend, You Need to Outteach
- How to Win the Social Media Lottery
- Rethinking Content Marketing Incentives
- Writing Is Building, Too
- How to Be More Creative
- Aim High, but Make Sure You Shoot
- What Nobody Told You About the First Draft
March 2020
2016 14
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
- How the U.S.A.’s first billionaire destroyed the myth of hard work (i.e., “hustle”)
- Don’t wait until you feel more confident. Action comes first
July 2016
May 2016
- Creative excess leads to creative success
- Choose or others will choose for you
- How music taps into your creative gold mine
- The Case for Working Relaxed