Creativity is an infinite game — Writing a book was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. The next-best decision was to write something I wanted to make. That may sound dead simple to you, but to me, it wasn’t. I experienced what my friend Hamza Khan calls “marketing brain”, which he describes as, “We…

A fascinating thread started at Hacker News about Oliver Burkeman’s latest post entitled, “It’s worse than you think.” There are words like, “pessimism,” “nihilism,” and “futility,” floating around in the comments. I commented in there a couple of times (1, 2), feeling confident after my own submitted blog post gained…

In my 20s, I refused to listen to audiobooks. For starters, to me, it didn’t count as actual reading. I also loved, and still love, paper books. To experience an audiobook felt like a betrayal to this admiration. On top of all of that, I also thought it’d be incredibly…

Notes from 9 years of writing at Medium — After 10 years of leading Medium, founder and CEO Ev Williams is stepping down. I’ve written there for 9 years (Ev actually hearted my first post!), and I’ve made some observations. First, an analogy that serves as the spine of this piece: Former TikTok chief executive Alex Zhu likens building…

Inspiration can show up at any time—don’t waste it — There’s a narrative floating around on Twitter (Exhibit 1, 2) that we’re meant to forget things that are unimportant to us. We know that’s not true. How many times after a meeting or conversation have you wished, “Wow, I wish I said that instead.” Just extend the meeting analogy…

Why good things happen when you make a lot of work that you’re proud of — One of the things I’ve learned over the years is to pay close attention to choices; in particular, false choices. Barbara Sher describes this as the Either/Or fallacy. Jim Collins describes this as the Tyranny of the OR, and instead challenges readers to find the Genius of the AND. In…

“93% say that being a creator has introduced stresses that have ‘negatively impacted their lives,’ with 45% saying they’ve experienced ‘big emotional lows,’” report the authors of this paper which surveyed 1,624 respondents. There’s no surprise to me here. As I’d covered in Marker before, making money as a creator…

There’s a narrative that artists and industries took more creative risks in the past; one possible reason for that was the businesses and industry just was able to cross-subsidize different work. If they made a commercial success, that would fund the critical one. Author and critic William Deresiewicz writes: In…

An important secret to my process as a creator: build a good business from your product. This means developing the ability, infrastructure, and skills to earn money independently from partners, handlers, and other gatekeepers. At his blog, Derek Sivers writes: Make one plan that depends on nobody else. No record…