Parenthood reminds me on a daily basis: there’s a big difference between intellectual and experiential knowledge. Lessons from a book or teacher pass easily. Experiencing something firsthand–that is, getting your body involved–is how you absorb information into your bones.
No matter how often I tell my kid what I know, she won’t fully learn until she does things herself, often the opposite things I advise. Hard to watch! But this is attendance in the school of life, where her experience will always be a more effective teacher than me.
(via) Kevin Kelly’s excellent essay about publishing today is that it’s all about self-publishing. These points jumped out at me:
The traditional approach to publishing a book–write a proposal, get an agent, get a publisher, get an advance, write the book, do a tour, collect royalty checks–is over. (This related piece on the dire economics of traditional book publishing concurs.)
Even with an agent and publisher, it’s up to you to supply your audience and market to them. (This was my experience with the Lifehacker book 15 years ago.)
On-demand printing software and services are better than they’ve ever been for self-publishers. I especially like Kelly’s flow chart of platform recommendations depending on your goals and content. First question: “Have an audience?”
The audience for text is stagnant and skews older, while the audience for video continues to expand while getting younger.
Being a book author has a lot more cachet attached to it than being a blogger. I’ve been both, and for me, blogging and engaging with an audience online is way more fun and fulfilling than having a book with my name on it sitting on a shelf.
When your self-worth is linked to your productivity, you see every activity in your day as either valuable (productive) or not. I have this disease. At some point, the ability to check items off a todo-list stops moving you forward, and instead holds you back. Rick Foerster argues for the value of “unproductive” time without metrics.
What did you figure out on sabbatical? What was the takeaway from the 10-day? When you give yourself time and space to ask big questions, you expect to have an epiphany. But there are no lightning bolts. Instead, you get a whisper or a notion, wisps of ideas and longings. Some pass quickly, others tug your sleeve. Some dissipate given attention, others take root with nurturing. Stop looking at your watch and wondering when the revelation will arrive, and listen for the whispers instead them all.
Confusing intensity and passion is a common mistake. Intensity is external; passion invokes something inside you. Passion is a call-and-response with your soul. It’s not just adrenaline.
– Po Bronson makes a useful distinction in his book What Should I Do with My Life? (my review). It’s easy to look back at intense, adrenaline-driven times in your career and feel nostalgia for the clarity of focus, but it doesn’t necessarily mean what you were doing was your passion.
Jenn Schiffer shares a useful list of websites where you can get beautiful, free images licensed for use in your creative projects.
I enjoy a few blogs and newsletters that obviously use gen AI to make header images. Those images do the writing zero favors. As I writer, I understand the impulse to outsource image generation to an AI tool where you can describe what you want with words. But just because you can, does not mean you should. Imagery that’s obviously generated by AI has a who cares smell about it, and I don’t use it here.
Years ago I was at Disneyland in California with my family, taking a lunch break between rides. As I sipped my drink and watched the crowd passing by, I spotted someone I recognized: Ron Moore, creator of the TV series Battlestar Galactica. I was a huge BSG fan who was sad the series had ended. Starstruck, I abandoned all vestige of a chill New Yorker who sees and ignores celebrities, and I ran up to him to thank him for the show. He was kind and gracious–and said something I never forgot.
(via) Steve Krouse nails the difference between vibe coding and programming with AI assistance: “Vibe coding is on a spectrum of how much you understand the code. The more you understand, the less you are vibing.”
His graph is a useful check to plot your own AI-assisted coding projects. Rapid prototypes, hobby apps, and low-stakes, low-maintenance projects are great candidates to be high on vibes, while the serious stuff you intend to expand and maintain should land further on understanding.
How does anyone achieve notable success? The answer is always, “They worked hard and got lucky.”
Most people emphasize how hard they worked to achieve a goal. Others looking at them think they got lucky. It’s never one or the other. It’s both/and. Lots of people work hard and never get lucky. Some people get lucky but don’t put in the work. Those are the folks you don’t hear about.
When you get sucked into our collective fascination with the heroes, champions, geniuses, and creators who have achieved a level of success, be sure to perceive both the hard work and good luck involved.
Not long ago my writing group was discussing how to process criticism of your work, and I shared Ann Friedman’s classic Disapproval Matrix. First, know where the criticism is coming from. Feedback from folks in the top two quadrants are the ones that matter.
One way I’m breaking my Amazon habit is by patronizing independent bookstores through Bookshop. Check out my favorite books on creativity, making stuff, and living well at my Bookshop.
What would happen if you surrendered your computer, phone, tablet, journal, books, and pens and went silent–no contact with anyone–for 10 full days? I wanted to find out the answer to this question for myself.
I spend a lot of time at a keyboard in front of a screen, so I live in my head. It’s comfortable there. I rely on facts and logic to form my understanding of the world. My body doesn’t get involved, at least consciously. And that served me just fine–until it didn’t.
Just sent the first installment of the newsletter. When I confirmed it arrived in my inbox, I noticed a typo.
The key difference between an email and a web page: once it’s been sent, you can’t fix typos in an email. This typo is forever cemented in my inbox, right smack dab in issue #1.
The typo could haunt me for the rest of my days. Or, I could view it as a personal monument to practice over perfection.
The trick to being truly creative, I’ve always maintained, is to be completely unselfconscious. To resist the urge to self-censor. To not-give-a-shit what anybody thinks. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Louis Vuitton luggage are not.
– Art director Linds Redding in a classic viral essay about his 30 years in advertising. Following his cancer diagnosis, Redding passed away at the age of 52.
Writer Ann Patchett describes the idea she has for her next project as a beautiful, wild butterfly fluttering about her mind, a three dimensional miracle of color and movement she enjoys for as long as she can.
When it’s time to put pen to paper, she plucks the butterfly from her mind, smashes it onto her desk, and pins it down. What’s left is her book: a flat, one-dimensional, “dismantled, and poorly reassembled” version of her butterfly.
No one wants to smash the butterfly, but it’s the only way to turn an idea into something tangible.
Your true self is intensely interested in your real life’s work—but it could give a rat’s ass about anything else. When you pursue a career that pulls you away from your true self, your talent and enthusiasm will quit on you like a bored intern.
– Martha Beck with a signature delightful turn of phrase. I’ll forever think about my talent, enthusiasm, and energy like interns I can give interesting work they’ll enjoy and grow doing, or anything else that will make them quit on me.
When you focus on maximizing productivity, you inhibit creativity. In many ways, productivity and creativity are at odds.
Productivity is all about getting stuff done more efficiently: completing tasks and projects to meet your obligations and be successful. Capitalism relies on ever-increasing levels of human productivity. It always asks: What is the most value you can bring with the least amount of time and effort?
Good personal finance software is worth the expense. When Intuit shut down Mint, I got Monarch Money and it’s way better. When you use my referral link you get 50% off Monarch’s yearly cost (and I get a gift card). Give Monarch a try.
I had the chance to see artist Jo Hay’s huge portraits of iconic women in person last week. They are stunning. Looking at any one of them feels like making eye contact with a wise old friend telling you: you got this. Prints, posters, and pins are for sale here—the bigger the format, the more striking they are.
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
– Dr. Katie Mack with a wakeup call to any of us lulled into a sense of trust that the machine’s giving us the right answer.
I started lifting weights about 6 months ago as a complete beginner. Once a week I meet my trainer for a strength workout. On a few occasions I’ve had to miss a week or two, for different reasons. Every time I walked into the gym after weeks off, I was sure I lost all my progress and was starting again from scratch.
In reality, the opposite was true. Every workout I do after time off, I break personal records for weight lifted. My trainer tells me that unlike cardio, that’s how strength training works. When your muscles get time to fully recuperate, you come back stronger.
This is counterintuitive to a cardio type, so it surprises me every time. But rest precedes leaps in certain creative and professional endeavors, too. You come back stronger after a break.
Blogging is fun, so I’ve started again. Winnie the Pooh said, “I always get to where I am going by walking away from where I have been.” What I’m doing here now on this site has a lot to do with where I have been.
