Category: Daily Blog

One of the downsides of being a creator is that you’ll leave behind a trail of dead bodies — bodies of failed projects. There’ll be projects that took too long to ship, projects that grew too much in scope, and projects you didn’t care about all that much. There’ll be projects you thought were awesome but the market didn’t, projects that became outdated and never received an update, and projects you had to shut down because one of your collaborators pulled the plug.

One of the greatest services you can do for your audience is to actually keep all those skeletons in your closet. That’s impossible, of course. Sometimes, your failures will be very public. But that’s no reason to not try in the first place. Sadly, this is what most creators now default to. They ship and ship and ship — and then they abandon, abandon, abandon. Actually, all of their “shipping” was just thrashing.

In his book Linchpin, Seth Godin explains thrashing as “the apparently productive brainstorming and tweaking we do for a project as it develops.” Features get added. Little tweaks are made. Sometimes, the whole thing is rebooted from scratch.

The trick, Seth says, is to “thrash at the beginning,” then hold people accountable to those decisions. No more changing the color two days before the launch. No more, “But our competitor just showed this new feature we should also add!” You decide, you build, and you ship — and if it becomes one of those fatalities that makes the 7 o’clock news in your world, then so be it. But at least you did it right.

“What you do for a living is not be creative,” Seth says. “Everyone is creative. What you do for a living is ship.” Many creators no longer know the difference. I know someone who started with an email course about marketing. Then, they wrote a book about sex. Next, some articles on their blog, a column with a magazine, an SEO agency, a course about note-taking, the list goes on. I was happy when they returned to weekly articles, but of course, that, too, only lasted a year. The one thing I can count on is that they’ll be on another platform, doing some other random thing, in a year’s time.

It’s easy to be a hot-footed creator. To launch things and promise, “This is it! This is the one guys!” then leave your audience hanging 90 days later. Focus applies to work as much as dating. You can always jump ship, but new is just different — and will rarely make you any happier. Unlike finding love, however, when it comes to projects, you can thrash in private. You don’t have to throw everything out there. You can keep ideas on your shelf until you’re sure of them. Sometimes, finding that confidence takes years.

I have concepts for some ten or more books, and I’ve started working on at least half of them. But I stopped announcing which book I’m working on when. Only when I’m in the final 30% stretch will I start piping up. When I can see the thing rolling across the finish line. I don’t like to make promises I can’t keep.

In a TikTok world where the algorithm expects you to throw out new bait at least once a day, it’s easy to thrash entirely in public. The pressure of “more output faster” makes you release nothing but half-assed work. But whereas that pressure isn’t real, our disappointment in you when you inevitably abandon us will be.

Think harder about what you put out there. “Is this thing actually finished? Is this a logo I really want on my résumé?” If you change your mind three weeks after release, just because you shipped it doesn’t mean it wasn’t thrashing. “Oh crap! That was more soul-searching than service, wasn’t it?” This realization can come at a heavy price: the trust of your fans.

Do us a favor, and thrash in private. We can forgive the occasional change of heart, but if change is all you do, you’re not helping us. You’re using us — and that’s not what being a creator is about.

I once had a consulting call with a marketer in the magic space. He helped popular magicians sell prop cards, card decks, and other gadgets.

He was good at what he did, but he had recently discovered Medium and found some success on it. A few of his articles did well, and he was earning a few hundred bucks per month. Looking for a job that allowed him to fully embrace his creativity, he asked me: “I’m making around $80,000 per year now. How long do you think it’ll take me to make the same money on Medium? Should I quit and go all-in?”

I gave him the honest answer: “Absolutely not. You will most likely never make that kind of money on Medium, and if you do, it’ll take several years at least.” That year, I actually did make around that amount on the platform — but I did so after six years of writing, four years of writing for Medium’s Partner Program specifically, and it would also not happen again.

The next year, the algorithm changed, and so did the payouts. My lifetime earnings would go on to look like a perfect bell curve, and while I didn’t know that yet, I did know my client likely wouldn’t be able to replicate my best year quickly, let alone indefinitely.

Entrepreneurship teaches you a wonderful lesson most employees will forever miss: how hard it is to make a dollar. If a company pays you a fixed yearly amount to sell magic gadgets, that money seems to indeed appear out of nowhere. What’s more, you don’t care where it comes from. You only care that it ends up in your account.

But how many card decks do you have to sell to justify your $80,000 paycheck? Let’s say the cards are $20 a pop. That’s 4,000 card decks, just for your salary. Do you know where to find 4,000 people who’ll fork over that kind of money for some paper? What story will you tell them? How would you sell 4,000 sets of playing cards without incurring any additional expenses?

My client had an intuitive understanding of this. Given his experience, devising a campaign to sell that number of card decks was easy for him. At his company, he could easily justify his cost. Convincing strangers to read your work and then get paid based on a black-box algorithm? That was an entirely different task. Thankfully, he stuck to his firm — and later became the CEO! Phew. I’m glad I didn’t tell him to quit.

If you work at Microsoft and get paid $100,000 per year, Microsoft has to sell 1,000 licenses of their Office package at $100 a piece to keep you on. If you work in automotive, it might be just one car, but cars are not something we buy every day, nor very easily.

Companies are efficient because some folks bring in the money, and others focus on making the product. As an entrepreneur or a freelancer, you have to do both. How much harder would it be to make your salary if you also had to sell every dollar worth of product that funds it? Chances are, you couldn’t do it on your own — at least not at first, and not to the scale of payment you are used to.

Remember that every dollar you make is a dollar that someone had to convince someone else to spend. Just because you didn’t do that convincing doesn’t mean you didn’t earn it, but it sure puts money into perspective. Making the big bucks gets a lot harder when you’re the sales team, and whether we are on it or not, the magic of making a sale sure is worth appreciating.

Problems are like Pokémon: They disappear out of nowhere and challenge you to a fight. Sometimes, the problem is actually shy. It’ll run away at the first sign that you intend to fight back. Sometimes, it’ll be like an aggressive stray animal. It’ll move in with you and stay for weeks, uninvited. And sometimes, it’ll make you put up the fight of your life.

Back when I started playing Pokémon, it took forever to catch all 151 of them. Today, with over 1,000? Good luck. You can’t solve all your problems in a day, but every day, you can solve a problem. Sure, apples will boost your health, but it’s a problem a day that, ironically, keeps unhappiness at bay.

Often, the harder the problem you choose, the happier you’ll be. Why? If you’re a seasoned Pokémon trainer, you’ll know the toughest fights — trying to catch a legendary bird, for example — feel the most rewarding when you finally win. Humans made to solve problems, and the more complex the creative solution we get to build, the prouder we’ll be once it works.

At other times, it’ll be you fleeing from the fight. Trainers, too, can run away. Just because apples are healthy doesn’t mean you’ll want to eat one every day. Problems, too, are something we can take breaks from, if only for a little while.

On most days, however, you won’t live in either of these extremes, and that’s as it should be: A Pokémon trainer roaming the world, encountering a few new monsters a day, fighting some, fleeing from others, and perhaps catching no more than one a day. It’s the spirit of journeying that matters more so than the result: Can you stay excited for the next challenge? Are you able to balance struggle and recovery?

Just like Pokémon inhabit the whole world, everyone has problems. Perhaps, like the little monsters many of us love so much, they’re not something we must seek to eliminate altogether. Maybe, it is just about getting along. Live in harmony with your problems, not against them, and life will be more fun than any game could ever be.

Yesterday, I told a man 13 years my senior that I was proud of him. He’s also the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. Meanwhile, I run a one-man writing show. Awkward much? Maybe. But I thought I’d risk it. After all, I have known him for nine years. And though we don’t talk much, a compliment you feel strongly about is always worth making, isn’t it? Only one way to find out…

“You are one of the only people that can truly understand,” he responded a few minutes later. Phew! Not only am I not crazy, he actually appreciated my comment. What a relief! He even had some nice words about my book.

Sometimes, you must risk the awkward to uncover the amazing. The best things in life are usually behind doors we’re not 100% comfortable opening. You’ll have to trust first and hope for the best. The best won’t always happen, but whenever it does, it provides double the reassurance you longed for before you took the leap.

That’s the tradeoff we make when life asks us to be courageous: There’s no comfort up front, only twice the reward if we win.

Be courageous. Risk the awkward for the amazing. You won’t always land in Wonderland, but even when you don’t, there’s always another step to be taken, another compliment to be made.

Life is not a casino. The house doesn’t always win. Sooner or later, the balance will shift in your favor — and the treasure you’ll find will be worth more than gold.

In 2015, Shia LaBeouf broke the internet. Green screen clips of him giving an exaggerated, Nike-style motivational speech, originally recorded for a London art school’s student projects, were just too good fodder to pass up. Within days, Shia was everywhere — and every-how.

There was auto-tune Shia with explosions, Shia multiplying every three seconds, Shia motivating Batman, and, you guessed it, more auto-tune Shia. But the best jokes are usually the best because, somewhere inside, there is a truth we can’t deny.

Eight years later, people still regularly leave comments under the original video — only a fraction seems to be there just for the laughs. The line that gets them? The very last one: “If you’re tired of starting over, stop giving up.”

When we’re at a true dead end, giving up can be an act of kindness. But life is not a neighborhood full of cul-de-sacs. There’s almost always a way to go on, and even if we proclaim otherwise, deep down, we know we’re just bolting.

It’s easy enough to forget in the moment. We’re not quitting! We’re starting! This new job, new platform, new partner is sure to be everything we’ve ever wanted — until we realize nothing on this earth can fill a void we ourselves created, and the cycle repeats.

In the beginning, all new ventures are fun. But the quick learning and novelty never last. Such are the rules of “the Dip.” The slog is where the wheat separates from the chaff, and even if we only feel chafed after many rounds of dipping and running, the realization will stay the same: We took a long time to tire because starting over is thrilling where persisting is not, but in the end, we still gave up.

We return to Shia because, in his literally evergreen one-minute speech, he reminds us: On a long enough timeline, flitting around and staying in place are equally hard — but only one allows you to water your plants and still be there when you can harvest their fruits.

Compound interest works almost anywhere, but it only works if you stay put. It’s okay to burn out, to need rest, to stop posting videos for a month and then return. But return to the same channel, the same team, the same partner you must, because where perseverance might one day lead to a dead-end, jumping ship is failure admitted before it has happened.

Shia LaBeouf has had a rough couple of years. He, too, gave up some of the right things too early, too often. Almost exactly seven years after his meme moment, he resurfaced in a two-hour interview, seemingly a reformed man on the right track. Time will tell if he can “just do it.” In the meantime, perhaps even for him, his words will stay worth revisiting: “If you’re tired of starting over, stop giving up.”

This year, for our elementary school friends’ annual city festival gathering, we had a special guest: a friend from Bavaria came to visit. Let’s call him Ken. Spending time with Ken is always both fun and enlightening. The guy loves to party, but he also wears his heart on his sleeve.

After a few beers, he’ll tell you about his complicated family history. They are operating a car parts business in the fourth generation, and Ken and his brother now supposedly run the show. Their dad, however, a patriarch par excellence, won’t let go of the reins, and family relationships are strained at best as a result.

Talking about one of their difficult interactions, Ken used a phrase that would repeat all throughout the weekend: “Everybody sees through their own eyes.” Whenever there were differing opinions, “Well, everyone sees it through their own eyes.” When we were talking about some crazy event that was hard to believe, “Everyone must see it through their own eyes.” If he was telling us to “wait until we get there,” “You can only see it through your own eyes.”

That last one really captures life, doesn’t it? It’s an experience you make entirely from your own perspective. That perspective is both limiting and liberating. It’s our capped little worldview that makes us prone to bias and misinterpretation. At the same time, our unique take on things is a singular source of creativity and insight.

Sure, your perspective is not limited to visuals. You have ears, a mouth, and a nose and skin, too. But it’s all filtered through your perception. Sometimes, that leads to irreconcilable differences. Unlike any other animal, however, we do have a sixth sense that allows us to, at times, transcend our perceptional limitations: imagination.

We don’t know what’s around the next bend while driving, but we can assume different options, from a truck to a car to a bicycle, and slow down accordingly. We can’t fly like birds, but we can picture a bird’s-eye view of the landscape that surrounds us. And while Ken can’t know what life feels like for his father, he sure can imagine it.

Using our imagination won’t always change an outcome. Sometimes, we’ll arrive at the same conclusion after showing empathy. We’re still seeing the world through our own eyes, after all. But it’s almost always an effort worth making. The balancing yin to our ego-driven yang.

Often, of course, we’ll forget to use our most powerful sense altogether. That, too, is part of life — and that, too, is okay. In the end, we can only be free by accepting the very limits that make us feel we are not.

Your perspective may only be one of billions, but that’s exactly what makes it valuable. Don’t worry about right and wrong so much. Share. Tell people how you feel, and work with them and their limited perspectives instead of against them. Like that one friend I’m lucky to have, who keeps reminding me that “everyone sees life through their own eyes.”

When you drop Alkali metals — elements like lithium, sodium, or potassium — in water, they immediately start fizzing and whizzing around. The reaction is instant, and it creates a hydroxide of the metal as well as hydrogen gas, which sometimes even ignites on its own.

Unfortunately, life rarely works that way. You can’t just throw a nickel on the floor and expect it to spontaneously self-multiply. Like many other chemical reactions, from lighting a match to starting a gas engine car, life requires “activation energy.”

Activation energy is the minimum of input momentum a mix of components will accept in order to start reacting with one another. It could be heat, motion, or electricity. Without the spark you generate by turning your key inside your car, the engine can’t light the fuel that’ll produce the fire turning shafts and rods and, ultimately, the wheels. If you throw noodles and veggies in cold water, everything will get soft but nothing will taste nice. A soup requires heat, and that heat must be maintained until the desired effect is achieved.

But life is bigger than chemistry. For me, morning showers are activation energy. Unlike potassium, I won’t self-combust once thrown into water, but the water itself does raise my energy levels. It allows me to keep reacting, functioning, for the rest of the day. I can skip the shower and see how far I’ll make it, but I can only blame myself if, at 7 PM in the evening, I haven’t done much because I never invested that first bit of energy.

When it comes to humans and habits, activation energy is more psychological than chemical. Sure, a bit of sugar helps if you don’t eat until lunch, but most empowering rituals work in other, more obscure ways. Why does stepping outside for 2 minutes make you happy? I don’t know, but I know you should keep doing it.

Activation energy rituals are the pluses on top of absent minuses: They don’t absolve us from taking care of the basics — good sleep, enough food, some downtime — but without them, we can’t go far beyond that baseline.

Your activation energy rituals might be quirkier than turning on the shower, but even if they are, embrace them. Work to find them, perfect them, and take pride in knowing your needs.

You are not a lump of metal, and there’s no single button you can push to blast yourself right to your destination, but there are buttons you can press. Even if the right combination is as complex as a rocket launch sequence, it’s worth learning and remembering it. After all, we have a lifetime to figure out what activates us — but only one life to do everything we want to feel active for.

“So there’s this guy who does this weird thing.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s from Guntersberg.”

“Is he the son of the mayor?”

“No.”

“Is his last name Möller?”

“No.”

“Who is he then?”

“He’s the best friend of the girl with a twin sister who’s friends with our cousin.”

“The Lanken sisters?”

“No.”

“The sisters in our dance group?”

“No.”

“Who are they then?”

This is a common exchange at one of my family gatherings. A colorful “who’s who” of the locale — except half the people at the table, including me, have no idea who’s being talked about. Not just the person in question, but anyone who might even remotely serve as a clue to who they are.

Quizzes are fun for those who know enough to play, but if you conclude you’re ineligible, you’ll zone out. I know the satisfaction of finally finding a piece in your inner archive you know was there, and I’m happy for my family to get that feeling. Meanwhile, the rest of us, however, sit there chomping at the bit: “What’s the weird thing the guy is doing, for Pete’s sake?!”

Names are smoke and mirrors — especially the ones you don’t know. Sometimes, a 10-minute discussion is worth the effort to reveal someone important to everyone at the table. Most of the time, however, it’s okay to just get on with the story.

Don’t get lost in the margins of life. There’s a big book to be written, and you’ve got pages to fill. Keep going, and if a detail eludes you for too long, it’s probably one you can very well do without.

There’s an isolated patch of grass on the side of our house. I can see it from my bedroom window. Yesterday morning, I looked down without glasses, and I spotted three blurry yet distinct areas: one dark, lush green, one bright, almost neon, and what seemed to be the outline of five salad-colored propellers.

After I regained my vision, the puzzle pieces took shape: Only a third of the surface was covered in proper grass. Another third was moss, and the propellers? A quickly spreading group of weeds.

For a moment, I was sad our little patch of nature seemed to be succumbing to a common domestic invader, but then I realized: Weeds are just a different plant. We aren’t trading forest for plastic. We’re witnessing nature evolve.

If left entirely to its own devices, would the plot soon be covered in weeds? Maybe. Or maybe not. Perhaps the moss is stronger in winter. What if it holds off the weeds until spring, when the grass is back in full bloom? And if the weeds took over, that might be a win too. May the best-suited plant for the soil win! It might even look beautiful. A large display of differently sized propellers.

We spend a great deal of time worrying about changes we can not only barely control but which are, on closer inspection, not such big changes at all. So your favorite pants are full of holes, and your new ones won’t look the same. That’s nothing to mope about. Neither is your shifting bus schedule or switching coffee brands at work. All life is part of nature, and nature is constant change.

Some change must be fought, some fought hard for to bring it about in the right way. Reserve your energy for those big transformations. When a beloved coworker is leaving or your landlord wants to kick you out, those are times to speak up.

Your garden, on the other hand, shifts a tiny bit beneath your feet every day. Sit back and enjoy the show. Weeds are just a different plant, and most change only deserves our observation, not our interference.

Jeremy Vaught was an early renter of the Twitter theater. In 2007, he created the @music handle. Over the next 16 years, he grew it to over half a million followers. He didn’t monetize his following a lot. He just enjoyed sharing music. Until, on a random Friday in August, Twitter took it away.

“You can have @musicmusic, @musiclover, or @music123,” they said. “But not @music.” That’s the problem with renting. It might feel like ownership for 20 years, but when the landlord wants her land back, the sudden realization that it never was will sting.

Moving house sucks, but moving brand might be impossible. When your livelihood is tied to intellectual property, losing some of that property could be catastrophic. Vaught was angry, but he’ll live. “16 years is a long time to invest in something and then just have it ripped out from underneath you,” he said.

But what about other people who worked hard or even paid top dollar for an @-handle that pops? Can the operators of @art, @books, and @business say the same? That last one is Bloomberg, by the way. Not sure how happy they’d be to get a call from their landlord. Or, you know, an email in the style of a customer support ticket. Is that still “just business?”

It’s not only Twitter, by the way. Instagram accounts get suspended all the time. Right now, the land grab on Threads is in full swing — but will the swinging be worth it? When it’s yours until it’s not, it’s never yours in the first place. “What we do not own, we do not have sovereignty over,” Paul Jarvis once wrote. “Our freedoms are held hostage by those who we rent or borrow from.”

It’s near-impossible to get through life without renting, but that doesn’t mean we should accept renting by default. Technically, everything can be taken away. Realistically, many things won’t once you make the effort to own them. Whether it’s your home, your patent, or the name of your brand: Pick yourself, and don’t let just anyone climb your hill.