The Point of Playing isn’t to Win
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 think about the product, we think about the design, we think about the reception, and then we try to create something that will meet that moment.” In fact, you could say I was trained to experience it; as an entrepreneur and marketer, I could only stay in business and grow it by focusing on making things that other people wanted.
I happened upon the decision to write a book on creativity; to be clear, there was some evidence in favor of it (“creativity books” are a relatively clearly defined category, and over 200,000+ people read this article I wrote), but my marketing brain was telling me that, “strategically speaking,” I was probably better off writing a book about content marketing and re-envisioning what it could look like. I’d find more clients for my editorial studio, I’d establish my reputation in the space, and it’d fit into the my overall business ecosystem a lot better.
The main problem was, I didn’t want to do it! To be clear, I didn’t hate content marketing — in fact, I actually…
