Archive of posts from June 2022

Do you have great taste?

Here’s what great taste means, and how to get it:

Great taste is seeing what people want, before they want it.

Seeing what people want requires understanding those people really, really well.

Understanding them that well requires caring enough about them to want what’s best for them, all of the time. Care is the only way you’ll stick with them for long enough.

Caring for others requires a decision. To say “Yes!” to those people,...

Last year, my wife Kezi and I lost someone.

It was one of the most painful experiences we’ve been through.

And following a bunch of complications, we almost lost her in the process.

During this time, we took a break.

Did some soul searching.

And we’re going to make some profound changes to our business because of it.

Why?

Because life is short. Too short. Far too short.

Don’t wait for loss as an indicator to stop wasting time on...

A smart investor has rules for their investing.

But what about the rest of life?

Dollar cost average your skills: If you don’t continue to ritually invest in your skills, those skill investments may lose value. The more skills you want to have, the more you need to practice all of them.

Dollar cost average your relationships: If you only invest in relationships while they’re good, you’ll sell out every time one gets tough. Relationships that matter to you deserve...

I don’t like being called talented.

And neither should you.

Here’s why:

Talented means you came out of the box with skills you didn’t have to work for.

Skilled means you came out of the box like the rest of us, and worked for those skills.

Talented is also restricted to things people can see, like copywriting or animation.

But there are so many more skills worthy of our attention:

The skill of showing honour: appreciating others even when you...

When I sit down to write, I usually don’t know what I’ll write about.

But the act of sitting in the studio, opening Apple Notes, staring at the river and asking my mind for topical lessons to share with subscribers, is where the writing comes from.

The discipline of showing up: Same chair, same keyboard, same ambient music. Creating the habits that facilitate new ideas is more important than the ideas themselves. With the discipline, more ideas are always available...

What’s healthy creative passion?

The ‘healthy’ part comes from identifying the things that cause unhealthy behaviour… and destroying them:

For me, it can be the fear that someone will let me down at the last minute (it happened enough times over the years!) which has led me to be slower to deploy teams at activities in case it happened. But this led to healthy habits: creating SOPs for everything. Because ‘luck’ hadn’t been on my side, I hardened the process...

If you’re a creative in 2022, you probably use a lot of tech.

Your strategies, ideas, plans, sketches and writing are probably on a machine.

I write all my blog posts are in Apple Notes. My art is all on local hard drives.

But you know what isn’t on a machine?

The memories:

When I’m exploring new characters, I do it on paper. My paper memories of how personalities were born are priceless, and old avenues sometimes birth new ideas...

Peace and Possibility go together.

From a real sense of peace comes the ability to let creative energy thrive, revealing possibilities and opportunities that were previously either invisible or out of reach. The bigger the peace, the bigger the possibility.

Impatience and Impossibility go together.

From a place of impatience, all we see is what’s in our way as we work to displace what lies ahead. The thought of making a great body of work or deeply investing into your...

Yesterday we touched on how creative energy is 99% waste, in pursuit of the 1%.

I’ve been pondering those numbers since writing it, being reminded of Sahil Lavingia’s remark (paraphrasing from a video I don’t have a link to) that 99% of work on developing entrepreneurial projects is waste, too.

A number reflecting perhaps the number of ideas that will amount to little or nothing. Or the tests that will fail. Or the false-starts. Or the setbacks. Or the betrayals.

Creativity and productivity are opposites.

When you’re focusing on creativity, you’re exploring divergent ideas, many of which will not work, in order to find new paths and opportunities previously unseen. It’s “unproductive” –99% of this time is wasted.

When you’re focusing on productivity, you’re optimising for utilisation and efficiency, which improves output but leaves little room for divergent thinking,

Both are good. Both are useful. Both are opposites.

To be creative, we need to be at peace with effectiveness exceeding...

Does saying “Yes” more often help us achieve more things?

Too many yesses to conversation make a no to thoughtful reflection.Saying no to the occasional walk alone to learn more about yourself is a choice.

Too many yesses to smartphone distractions make a no to picking up that book. Saying no to learning far more and growing from it is a choice.

Too many yesses to email make a no to writing a blog post. Saying no to creating and...

I like asking hard questions. Especially on weekends.

Your mind germinates on them, then gifts you with a plan of attack on Monday.

Consider challenging your creative pursuits with some hard questions this weekend:

What’s the point in doing this work?

Does the work matter?

Is the journey toward making it work worth it?

Would those you serve with this work miss you if you stopped the work?

What one thing could you change that would double the effectiveness?

What...

What could you achieve if you could bend time?

Can you change the past?

Yes… by reworking your habits of today, you change the story others tell themselves about who you are and who you must have been in order to be that way.

Can you change the present?

Yes… we can transform ourselves and our creative pursuits in an instant, with a decision, coupled with the resolve to keep it.

Can you change the future?

Yes… by keeping the promises made in...

Old too, not too old:

In 2013, Slack launched with the desire to replace email (which began in the 70s). Now, they exist together. Email’s decentralised, open nature may have seemed old-hat to some, but its resilience makes it a lifeline of connection. Proprietary platforms have come and gone, yet email remains. Old too, not too old.

In 1996, “Three Dirty Dwarves” and “Tomb Raider” were both released. One with beautiful 2D sprites, the other with low-poly 3D graphics. At...

Keep building.

When the markets are down, many people quit. But not you. These are the times to prepare for what comes next, to be considered ‘lucky’ when spring follows winter.

When it’s not cool anymore, many people move on. But not you. You weren’t riding on the coat-tails of passing trends anyway, you were building something that stands on its own feet.

When it’s hard to build, people stop building. But not you. Competition not being fierce is not...

Some ideas are great. But without great people working on them, they never become reality as envisioned. The market is full of good ideas with terrible execution.

Some people are great. But the market isn’t full of people both eager and prepared to do what it takes to produce great work, making executing on great ideas even harder.

But when you bring great ideas and great people together, sparks fly.

These are the bodies of work that matter.

These are...

Are you pulled forward by your obsession?

Many don’t understand why Zuck is going all-in on the metaverse. He understands that technology doesn’t need to have its use cases all figured out for it to have potential, and his obsession with connecting people with technology pulls him there.

Many don’t understand why Budnitz moved from a successful toy-making business to NFT toys too. He understands that art has a new medium, and that his obsession with elevating the work of...

We all have access to information, so little-known tricks and memorisation skills aren’t what define our creative potential.

We all have access to technology, so special equipment and tooling aren’t what define our creative potential.

We’re all connected to the great connector that is the Internet, so proximity to select networks or individuals aren’t what define our creative potential.

So what does?

Us.

Our ability to focus, to decide, to commit, to care.

We all have access these abilities.

We...

Have you mastered your tools?

Awesome.

Try another.

We learn more than we realise when we try new ones:

A writer that uses Google Docs thinks in documents, one that uses Scrivener thinks in manuscripts.

An animator that uses Flash thinks in symbols, one that uses Harmony thinks in nodes.

A developer that uses VIM thinks in documents, one that uses VSC thinks in trees.

A designer that uses Photoshop thinks in slices, one that uses Figma thinks in artboards.

A mentor once said to me, “If you don’t do it, someone half as good and half as nice will.”

I think he’s right.

If you don’t take the principled stance of protecting your customers from market opportunists, a great pretender will do a fine job of assuming that role instead. The benefit-corp world is full of countless examples of this, to the detriment of market trust.

If you don’t create with a fiduciary responsibility to bring maximum ethical freedom...

Home runs aren’t special because they happen all the time.

They’re special because they don’t.

Which leads us to want more of them.

The problem starts when we expect every project we produce, every tweet we write or every sales call we attend to result in a special outcome.

It breeds the hesitancy to step up to the plate that holds us back from hitting a home run at all.

The only way to hit more home runs is to...

Know what’s a hugely underrated soft skill?

Survivability:

Survivability means everyone else on the team may drop the ball… but not you. Not because you have the most skills or the best memory, but because you don’t allow them to drop on your watch.

Survivability means a dozen curve-balls may come at once… but you deal. Not by yielding to unfair demands, but by stepping up to lead a path forward when nobody has a map.

Survivability means markets may...

How’s that project you’re working on going?

We’ve heard people say (or say ourselves) that things always take twice as long as we expect them to, and cost twice as much.

What are these ‘things’ and why does it happen?

1: Things we didn’t dignify with the time and investment they deserved in the first place in order to ensure their success. Important things deserve more of our protection than our best-case estimates can provide.

2: Things we didn’t dignify...

Why are you creating what you’re creating?

We think we know the answer…

…Let’s test that:

If a life goal changed today, what does that change in your work? Most of us don’t check our goals or their composition as often as we should. It affects what we make.

If a family loss would occur next week, what does that change in your work? We check how we spend our time when faced with things like mortality. It affects what...

Overwhelm hits ambitious creatives.

It strikes when we have many messes, but no order.

And how we deal with it matters, whether it’s at work or at home:

If control isn’t present, bring order. Building our understanding of what we control (our minds) and what we cannot (everything else) allows us to focus our affections on things that truly matter, protecting them from the rest.

If control isn’t present, bring order. Order allows us to focus on one thing at...

Progress is slow. That’s why we don’t really notice it. It could be progress in a skill we’re developing, but the slowness puts us off. It could be progress toward a bigger guy, but the slowness doesn’t give us a milestone event at which we should choose change.

Setbacks are fast. That’s why we always notice them. It could be failing at a course, or discovering you’ve been doing something incorrectly in your skill development. It’s a minor thing, really,...

What makes a brand… a web3 brand?

Is it when there’s an NFT? No. Solana is a web3 brand and has no NFT. Plus, plenty of NFT projects are insular, non-collaborative, and ‘web2 brands in web3 clothing’.

Is it when it has any kind of on-chain asset? No. The Matrix made an NFT (remember?) and The Matrix is not a web3 brand.

Is it when it collaborates with / builds on other brands? Close! But no. OpenSea is a platform…...

When everything is good and getting better, doing well is par for the course.

Employers employ to keep up with demand. Employees need not be great, just present. Optimism is in the air, and buying decisions are easier.

When everything is bad and getting worse, you have to be strong to survive.

…Like like a bear.

Employers learn who really have their backs. Employees need to be (or become) valuable. Pessimism is in the air, leaving the bears to generate...

How do you make hard things work out for you?

Give them a cool minute longer:

Hard projects are hard in the short-term. People don’t do hard projects, or avoid them, because of this. But for those who can give it a cool minute longer, they realise progress becomes geometric.

New skills can be tough to learn, especially without a guide. People don’t develop new skills because of this. But for those who can give it a cool minute longer,...

5 billion people use the internet today.

0.0002% of 5 billion is 10,000 people.

Most business owners and creative people would be afraid to niche down to 0.0002%.

“Think of all the people we would turn away!”

“How could I run a business on such a small number of people?”

What if you had 10,000 people who loved your work, bought your works, and shared with their friends? 0.0002% is all it takes.

What if you only need 1,000? That’s...