Category: Art

No One Is Coming to Save You Cover

No One Is Coming to Save You

Nik

Your parents aren’t coming to save you. They’ve done that often enough. Or maybe never at all. Either way, they’re not coming now. You’re all grown. Maybe not grown up, but grown. They’ve got their own stuff to take care of.

Your best friend isn’t coming to save you. He’ll always love you, but he’s knee deep in the same shit you’re in. Work. Love. Health. Staying sane. You know, the usual. You should check in with him some time. But don’t expect him to save you.

Your boss is not coming to save you. Your boss is trying to cover her ass right now. She’s afraid she might get fired. She’s fighting hard to keep everyone on the team. She’s worried about you, but she has no time to save you.

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What’s the Point of Online Courses? Cover

What’s the Point of Online Courses?

Nik

There are two schools of thought on teaching: One is that, “If you’re good at something, never do it for free.” The other is, “Teach everything you know.”

As impressively as the Joker demonstrated the first in The Dark Knight, burning his $6 billion reward seemed a little excessive.

Meanwhile, Nathan Barry can think of 89,697 reasons to share your knowledge freely — that’s the amount of dollars collected by his friend Chris in a Kickstarter after teaching CSS for five years.

Both philosophies come with their own set of benefits and problems. If you always hold back a little, you’ll never find out how good you actually are, but if you teach everything you learn in real-time, your expertise will build slowly and can never quite ripen in your mind.

Today, we’re facing an epidemic of fake teachers. For every time I go, “I wish this person gave a class,” there are a hundred where I think, “I wish this person didn’t.”

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The 4 Kinds of Well-Earning Writers Cover

The 4 Kinds of Well-Earning Writers

Nik

In the 21st century, there is no such thing as “a writer.” Everyone is a writer. Everyone knows how to write — but that doesn’t make them a professional.

It’s easy to lump word jugglers together under the generic, catch-all term — and, often, we do — but it makes it hard to answer what should be a simple question: How do writers make money?

Professional writers use their skills to achieve certain outcomes, outcomes desired by others, and that’s why they get paid.

It could be creating a feeling, making a sale, providing information, or one of a million other things, but it’s always a specific activity. Therefore, the term “writer” always breaks down into a more exact description.

There are, however, many of those descriptions, and we usually have to look hard at any one person’s profile in order to come up with it.

Blogger, author, journalist, creator, reporter, essayist, freelancer, marketer, artist, copywriter, the list goes on and on. Where should you begin?

You begin by doing what humans do best when facing the chaos of the world: You look for patterns.

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The #1 Pattern All Writers Must Break Cover

The #1 Pattern All Writers Must Break

Nik

If you design a cockpit based on the average pilot body, not a single pilot will fit in it. Just ask the US Air Force.

In 1950, they measured 4,063 pilots on over 140 dimensions. Then, they took just the top ten (like height, sleeve length, etc.), and designed a cockpit that’d fit anyone who lands in the middle 30% on each of those dimensions.

Unfortunately, no pilot did. In The End of Average, Todd Rose tells the story. Even when they reduced the number of dimensions to just three, less than 3.5% of all pilots would fit in the resulting cockpit. The conclusion? “There was no such thing as an average pilot.”

That’s the problem with average: It’s calculated, not real.

How long is an average blog post? Five minutes? Three? Seven? It doesn’t matter. “Long isn’t the problem. Boring is,” Seth says.

You don’t always talk for exactly one minute. Sometimes, you talk for five. Sometimes for 20. Why should writing be any different?

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4 Ways To Not Write an Introduction Cover

4 Ways To Not Write an Introduction

Nik

The number one thing stopping people from reading your article is its title. If they don’t open the wrapper, all the effort you put into the gift is lost.

The number two thing is your introduction. In the cruel obstacle course of “hurdles to jump over so people will read my writing,” the introduction is one of the most neglected, most easily dismissed elements.

In turn, a lot of articles are dismissed by readers, leaving authors scratching their heads, wondering what they did wrong. “My title scored 78 in the analyzer! I picked a relevant image! Why aren’t people reading?!”

They’re not reading because you wasted their time. You just waited to do it in the intro, and it made them even angrier than a bad title. Now, they clicked on it for nothing. They unwrapped the gift, and it sucked.

It’s easy to let clutter sneak into your introductions. It happens to all writers, and we don’t always catch it before it’s too late.

Most of the time, bad introductions are the result of laziness rather than lack of skill or imagination. The mistake would have been easy to spot, if only we’d made the time to look for it. We chose to ignore it. We were in a hurry. So we tossed our bird out the window, hoping it could fly with a broken wing.

Sometimes, a miracle happens. But if we don’t want to spend our lives scraping dead birds off the street, we better learn to respect our readers’ time.

Below are four instructive examples of how to not start an introduction.

These before-and-afters show how we try to fight clutter at Better Marketing. All authors agreed to be listed as examples in advance. We’re grateful they write for us, and we hope this study will serve them and others well.

Let’s do away with bad introductions.

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How to Not Waste Your Life Cover

How To Not Waste Your Life

Nik

If you’ve wasted your whole life, can you make up for it in a single moment?

This is the question at the heart of Extraction, Netflix’s latest blockbuster and, at 90 million viewers in the first month, biggest film premiere ever.

Following Chris Hemsworth as a black market mercenary trying to rescue the kidnapped son of India’s biggest drug lord, the movie is full of car chases, gun fights, and a whopping 183 bodies dropping at the hands of Thor himself.

At the end of the day, however, it is about none of those things. It’s a movie about redemption.

After freeing his target, 15-year-old Ovi, from the hands of a rival Bangladeshi drug lord, Hemsworth’ character Tyler shows true vulnerability in a brief moment of shelter.

When Ovi asks him if he’s always been brave, Tyler claims he’s “just the opposite,” having left his wife and six-year-old son, right before the latter died of lymphoma.

Sharing the kind of wisdom only children tend to possess, Ovi replies with a Paulo Coelho quote he’s read in school:

“You drown not by falling into the river, but by staying submerged in it.”

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The 10 Paradoxical Commandments Cover

The 10 Paradoxical Commandments

Nik

“Even when the world is difficult, even when things seem really crazy, we can still find personal meaning and deep happiness — and we do that by facing the worst in the world with the best in ourselves. That’s the idea.”

Today, Kent Keith talks about his “Paradoxical Commandments” with the ease of a Michelin chef whipping up some eggs Benedict, but when he wrote them down in 1968, he wasn’t sure if the words would form the right message.

The world was different back then, but neither less crazy nor less difficult. “It was the 60s. That was a provocative time. A lot of conflict and confrontation but also idealism and hope.” Keith was only 19, a sophomore at Harvard, but he had already witnessed his fair share of said provocative time.

He’d seen Kennedy get elected, celebrated for the moon program, and then shot. He’d observed the Civil Rights Act, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, and the bloody protests at Columbia. In essence, he saw a young generation unable to cause change without violence, unable to find meaning in anything that wasn’t a big symbolic act, “like seizing a building or something,” and it troubled him.

Keith decided to write something that would address these issues and, in the process, he discovered that the answer to better leadership was also the answer to lasting, personal happiness. “If you go out and do what you think is right and good and true, then you’re going to get a lot of meaning and satisfaction. You’ve got that no matter what.”

Today, more than 50 years after Keith published his little set of rules as part of a book on student leadership, he calls them “guidelines for finding personal meaning in the face of adversity.” Millions around the world have read, shared, and put Keith’s commandments on their refrigerator doors. Some say they’re a “no excuses policy.” Others, “a personal declaration of independence from all that stuff we can’t control.” Keith explains:

As individuals, we can’t control the world economy, world population growth, natural disasters, fires and floods, when a terrorist might attack, when a war might break out, which companies are going to succeed, which jobs will be created, which jobs will be eliminated.

What we can control is our inner lives, our spiritual lives. You and I get to decide who we’re gonna be and how we’re gonna live. The good news is that’s where people have been finding a lot of meaning for thousands of years. Even better news: Finding personal meaning is actually a key to being deeply happy.

Here are Dr. Kent Keith’s Paradoxical Commandments.

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Don’t Remind Us of the Crisis in Every Article Cover

Don’t Remind Us of the Crisis in Every Article

Nik

Last week, my friend Brian asked for advice on a title. Two of his options were:

  1. How to Stay Focused During Lockdown
  2. The Granny Rule of Motivation

I told him to go with the second. After nearly a month of nothing but news related to the crisis, I have, quite frankly, grown sick of hearing about it. I can’t imagine I’m the only one.

Yes, we get it. The world has changed. We live in a new paradigm. We have to follow new rules. And we’re all stuck at home more than we’d like. As much as we wish it would, none of this will disappear as quickly as it has burst into our lives — and it’s about time we acknowledge it and move on.

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Why Everyone Should Write Cover

Why Everyone Should Write

Nik

If you’re reading this, you know how to write. And even though you picked up both in elementary school, right now, you’re likely doing too much of the former and too little of the latter.

You might write sales reports, shopping lists, and birthday cards, but none of those are really productive, are they? They’re just necessary. Ironically, all the most productive forms of writing aren’t necessary at all — but that doesn’t make them less important.

Everyone should write.

Why? So you can get rich and famous and build a personal brand and attract millions of readers? No. Everyone should write because writing imposes discipline on your thoughts and emotions.

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